Day: June 6, 2025

After almost five years of on-and-off production and an extensive trial by tabloid, Alec Baldwin’s infamous Western epic Rust finally premiered this month. It’s the story of a tragic death, where a faulty gun kills an innocent bystander, setting off a saga of sin, grief, and atonement as the culprit—the murderer?—plays out his shoddy hand in a high-profile clash with the law. This isn’t just the plot of the film, however, but the real-world tragedy that happened behind the scenes. 

If you know one thing about this film, it’s that cinematographer Halyna Hutchins—a wife, a mother, and by all accounts a dedicated and earnest artist—was shot and killed when Baldwin’s prop revolver misfired on October 21, 2021. That’s about the most definitive thing one can say about the events of that day: Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter charges were quickly dropped after a late filing in 2023; a subsequent grand jury indictment was dismissed with prejudice in 2024; and while Hutchins’ family settled an (undisclosed) wrongful death claim in 2022, civil cases between the family, Baldwin, and other members of the crew who interacted with the gun that day remain ongoing. In a case where intent is obviously absent and where all parties are reluctant to either cast or accept blame, the full truth of legal culpability, if it exists, will likely remain a mystery. 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t speak confidently on morality. 

Rust stands firmly in the tradition of the great American Western, a genre in which the actions of morally grey antiheroes come together in a firm moral code. From The Searchers to Unforgiven, every iconic hero, vigilante, or outlaw teaches us that no matter your intent, killing leaves an indelible mark on a man. Yet it’s often a brutal world or an unjust law that forces him to reconcile his dark nature with his good conscience in the first place. As Baldwin’s own tale plays out in an undignified opera in the press, it’s poetically tragic that this film should offer a path of conscience, so that all parties involved may have a chance at peace. 

Rust takes place in the waning days of the Wild West. It’s 1882, the law has finally come to the burgeoning frontier town of Hayesville, Wyoming, where thirteen-year-old Lucas (Patrick McDermott) is raising his younger brother Jacob alone after their mother succumbed to illness and their father killed himself from grief. Still grieving himself, Lucas is nevertheless saddled with adult responsibilities—tending the farm, serving as both caregiver and provider—but when another boy bullies his brother, his wilful youth wins out. He beats the boy to a pulp and makes an enemy of his victim’s surly father. 

Since the father is now out a farmhand, he plans to take Lucas back to his ranch to work off the debt, indifferent to what that means for Jacob. “I’ll come collect you in the morning,” he says, though Lucas has no intention of going. So when Lucas takes his faulty gun and crests a steep hill the next morning to fire a shot at a wolf seen stalking their livestock, we’re left wondering whether he missed or hit his target. The beaten boy’s father drops from his horse. 

The law quickly and callously finds Lucas guilty of premeditated murder, sentencing him to hang despite his “age and circumstances.” He believes it’s morally abhorrent to flee and leave his brother behind, but he reluctantly runs when his estranged grandfather, legendary outlaw Harland Rust (Baldwin), comes to spring him from the slammer. The story unfolds as the reluctant duo rebuild a relationship from the ashes of their shattered family, outrunning a villainous bounty hunter, and a brooding US Marshal on their way to freedom in Mexico. 

Hutchins’ cinematography carries much of the film, capturing the desaturated landscape of a dying Western frontier and the shadowy silhouettes of the even shadier characters within it. Even so, Rust is not a stand-out Western, mostly due to lazy writing, as character dynamics go largely unexplored. 

From this point forward, there will be spoilers. 

Why is Rust so feared and revered in the West? We learn that he burnt down the banks that took his farm and that he abandoned his daughter (Lucas’ mother) after the rest of his family died. But beyond a vague sense of regret, we’re told very little about the moral transformation that led him back to Lucas. Why frame the story around a suspensefully open-ended murder/accident only to abandon that storyline, never folding it back into the plot? We’re told to presume it was an accident, but we never really find out whether Lucas is a murderer or a victim of a cold, utilitarian system. With a schmaltzy happy ending that sees Lucas and Jacob reunited, we’re not even expected to thoughtfully speculate. At the end, Rust, who is an admitted murderer, gives himself up to the marshal on condition that Lucas be permitted to cross the border. But why is a supposed man of the law so easily convinced to let the boy walk free? He’s gruff and talks in morally ambivalent platitudes—so we’re just expected to believe he’s painfully disillusioned with his role as a faceless enforcer of heartless laws. 

Rust is filled with so many nods to cowboy classics, however, it’s clear what filmmakers were trying to do, even if the execution was less than stellar. Baldwin, who co-wrote the script, said he found inspiration in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven, the story of a retired outlaw trying to live a peaceful life before his conscience, violent proclivities, and a merciless world pull him back to his old ways. We see implicit nods to The Searchers, not just in the vengeance-turned-redemption arc of an ex-Confederate trying to save his niece from her Comanche kidnappers, but in the iconic cinematography where darkened interiors open to vibrant outdoor backdrops, drawing a stark contrast between wilderness and civilization, and our own dark natures lurking subtly within the frame. Naturally, we also see echoes of Shane, in which the most classic line of the genre captures an ethos that has defined nearly every Western in the 75 years since: “There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks.” In the vein of these films, it’s possible to fill in the blanks. 

At the end of the day, Rust and Lucas are both killers—directly or indirectly, “right or wrong”—grappling with the pain they’ve both received and inflicted in an unforgiving world. Rust knows it, he accepts it, and to his shame, knows nothing can change it. He craves forgiveness, but doesn’t believe he deserves it; he doesn’t even know of whom he might ask it. The only absolution a man like Rust can have is to sacrifice himself to the hangman so that Lucas may have a chance to lead a good life. None of this depth is clearly articulated, but two solid performances between Baldwin and McDermott in Hutchins’ moodily lit fireside chat scenes are enough to bring the sentiment through. 

The other great theme of the Western genre—the tension between unjust laws and true justice in a brutal world—comes through in Lucas. The boy can’t run from whatever feelings of shame and culpability may materialize as they eventually did for his grandfather. He may have escaped the noose, but he is still a killer; he will have to live with it, alienated from his home as an outlaw in Mexico. Though Lucas can’t run from his conscience forever, he can and must run from the law. And he simply doesn’t have the luxury to process his shame in real time. 

In an earlier time in the West, his case would have likely been handled differently. We hear fond talk of these times throughout the film: how earlier generations lived more rugged, how they necessarily had to impose a stricter code on themselves, and thus personally uphold it against others—a rudimentary, but in many ways more noble, form of civilization. “The only order that exists in this world is the order we impose,” the marshal says early on about his role as a lawman, yet to realize his eventual compassion towards Lucas is the true hallmark of man-made order in a system of far-removed laws.

In Rust’s generation, perhaps this feud would have been carried on by Lucas and his victim’s son, fading into frontier lore. Perhaps a local elder would have seen the folly of an eye for an eye and told them to squash it. Or perhaps, with no authority to appeal to on the unsettled plains, it would simply have been forgotten as the way of the world. But for better or worse, with the railroad comes the cold, exacting, and impersonal force of the law. Is it right, given the circumstances, that the boy should hang? Or does the law, failing to grasp the ways of the world and people it governs, only perpetuate injustice? 

The film seems to suggest the latter, a nostalgia for a moral code superior to pure law. It’s this which allows man to fully unchain his conscience from his desperate circumstances, as Rust apparently discovered as an outlaw. But it’s this theme that goes sadly unexplored for Lucas. Free in Mexico, he ought to reflect on his sins, the boy he himself left without a father; no one will ever really have a happy ending. 

It’s the hallmark of any great Western to show that while the law may enact justice by its own standard, it cannot induce feelings of shame, it cannot offer absolution, and it most certainly cannot offer the most deeply personal interaction of all: forgiveness. These are what truly define a man’s life, and a good law conforms to a man’s own impulses here. But when the standards of law are off from the nature they should conform to, then he has no choice but to flee, even when his conscience bristles. 

You can say the charges against Baldwin were dropped because he’s Hollywood royalty, and a liberal elite in good standing with America’s cultural arbiters. Or, you can say that’s the only reason the charges were brought in the first place. It doesn’t matter—Baldwin is a killer, and nothing can change that. But has this saga of never-ending court cases, where Baldwin has degraded himself on a press tour of deflection, frenzied self-defense, and shameless victim posturing, helped anyone find justice, let alone peace? 

The normal human reaction to killing, even among the outlaws of the West, is to feel a deep sense of shame, to grieve those whom you’ve harmed along with the piece of the soul you’ve lost, and to seek atonement and forgiveness. One ought to give Baldwin the grace, as a human being, to assume that he does feel this way. But in his own way, he was forced to flee the law in just as undignified a manner as Lucas. 

In our litigious world, where the law is often far from impartial, and the media hunts for every misstep publicly and in real time, Baldwin, too, lacked the luxury of speaking with the dignified shame of a human being who took the life of another. Earnest grief is an implication, shame a confession—anything not carefully filtered through lawyers and PR consultants is a potentially life-ending liability. After all, Baldwin, too, has a family to care for. 

That’s not to defend what he did. But despite legal technicalities, there is no punishment the law can provide that would remedy this tragic accident. Can we accept and atone for our gravest sins? Can we recognize the atonement of others and forgive them for the sins inflicted upon us? These are the only questions that matter, not a hair-width’s difference of finger placement on the trigger of a gun that should have never been loaded in the first place. 

In many ways, the world today is just as cruel as it was in the West. After all, the brutality of the frontier is but a metaphorical complement to human nature, a timeless fixture of the world anywhere humans inhabit it. There can be no happy ending for anyone involved: Baldwin will never get a fair shake in the public eye, and the Hutchins family certainly can never be made whole, no matter the legal or civil outcome. The only path forward is to accept that sin is sin, no matter the intent, and that it is a perpetually sinful world we live in. It’s a deeply personal journey of reflection that should not and cannot play out in public. But it’s the only way anyone has a chance at ever finding peace.

In early 2022, from the safety of my office in academia’s ivory tower, I periodically tuned in to the scenes of Canadian truckers gathering outside Canada’s Parliament. I also saw the disgust with which these protestors were greeted by elites in government and the media across North America. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so this narrative went, was being harried by a band of white nationalist truckers. But in the end, so their narrative went, Trudeau deftly used emergency powers and the police to suppress the conspiracy.

The political furor over the trucker protests has died down, Trudeau has left the political scene in Canada, and the passage of time has left room for reflection. As a member of the elite myself, a tenured professor, I, of course, turned to the works of William Shakespeare.

The clash between the elite and the common people that played out in Canada reminded me again and again of Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The play not only provides political insights into this episode in Canadian politics, but also exposes some of the sources of the uniquely broken relationship between elites and the common people in today’s technologically advanced democracies. The divide between the elites and the common people has been present since the first chieftain led a raid on his stone-age neighbors. Political communities need leadership. For almost as long, this divide has been exploited by political movements from populists in the Roman Republic to international communists in the twentieth century. In the information age, however, this divide has become starker than ever. Elites can wrap themselves in social media echo chambers that flatter their pride and cut them off from almost any contact with those they lead, upon whom the elite depend for their privileged lifestyles.

Unsurprisingly, William Shakespeare was no stranger to this class divide, and it is a constant theme in his plays. Perhaps ironically, through a play set in the pagan Greek world, Shakespeare reminds us of the Christian perspective on political authority, one based in servant leadership that today’s elites need to recapture. Of course, that task is made more difficult by ubiquitous social media and its distortion of reality. But perhaps the Bard’s enduring wisdom can show us how to achieve it in our own time.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is one of Shakespeare’s least known plays. Rarely performed or discussed today, it was, however, his most popular play in his lifetime. Something in this play resonated with the people of England. It was an exciting adventure story, of course, but audiences also saw in it some reflections of their common experience. And even now, centuries after it was first staged, the kind of humble virtues Shakespeare extols in the play are necessary for good government in a free society.

In the play, Shakespeare’s protagonist, the good Prince Pericles, is chased into exile by a powerful, evil king who wants the prince’s head. During his escape, Pericles is shipwrecked and washes ashore in a strange land. Though a prince, he is now without possessions, bereft even of the shirt on his back. As he wanders the desolate shore in search of aid, he comes upon a group of fishermen mending their nets and asks for their assistance. They offer to share their fire and food. Many of those who visited with the protesters outside of the Canadian Parliament reported a similar hospitality on display, as they welcomed those who joined them to ask questions and shared warm refreshments in the midst of a frigid Ottawa winter. This, of course, belied the picture painted by the media of the truckers and their supporters as a band of violent extremists.

The fishmen provide this same simple hospitality to the incognito Prince Pericles. As the small group converses by the fire, a nearby fisherman exclaims that he’s hauling in a huge catch that threatens to burst his nets, and the interlocutors rush to his aid. Instead of a great catch of fish, however, the net has plucked Pericles’s armor from the depths. As this unlikely story proceeds, Pericles dons the armor and uses it in a jousting tournament to earn the hand in marriage of a noble maiden. This is followed by the birth of their royal daughter, her near-death at sea, her kidnapping by pirates, her life in captivity, and her final tearful reunion with her mother and father. All’s well that ends well.

From my first reading of the play, I was captivated by the image of the fishmen catching Pericles’s armor. In many ways, this scene illustrates some permanent truths about politics, truths with which our political elites must become reacquainted. By virtue of their authority, leaders stand over ordinary people within the political community. This hierarchy, however, obscures the reality that those leaders cannot stand without the support of ordinary people. It is only through the labor of the common people that rulers and the political community are sustained with the necessities of life.

This is one of the truths that communism exploited so successfully in the twentieth century, when its ideologues promised a world in which the worker would no longer be exploited by the elites. Instead, communist revolutionaries used the popular power of this truth and the propaganda of equality to establish regimes dominated by an even narrower and brutal, unaccountable elite. The horrors of the resulting political systems, which fell disproportionately on ordinary people, are unmatched in modern history. Despite the nefarious purposes to which the communists have exploited this truth, it remains true. As the naked Pericles discovers on the seashore, the few elites cannot survive without the labor of the many.

On a spiritual level, Shakespeare’s audience watching this scene—a collection of both the elite and the common people—would have caught the reference to the first disciples, mending their nets by the Sea of Galilee when Jesus calls them to follow Him. And as the excited fisherman hauled up his weighty catch, the audience would have caught the reference to Peter incredulously “putt[ing] out into the deep” at Christ’s behest and the miraculous catch, by which Peter knew he was in the presence of the Son of God. That presence called him to humility and contrition: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Oh Lord.” Jesus replies with that most common of all divine preambles: “Do not be afraid.” In a play on these biblical images, Shakespeare’s fishermen catch Pericles’s armor and set him on the path to the redemption of his honor and elite station. The prince’s return to power would have been impossible without the hospitality and honest labor of these simple fishermen; here, Shakespeare brings to our minds the model of servant leadership based in humility and a recognition of our common dependence on one another.

In many ways, the truckers who protested against Covid-era restrictions are much like Shakespeare’s humble fishermen—through their labors, these workers make all of our endeavors possible. Since the trucker protests, when I travel the interstates of the US, commuting to campus to teach and research political science, I’ve started to notice trucks and truckers more. Is there a class of laborers that is more overlooked and more essential than truckers? As we, the laptop class, the elite of our communities, rush to work, we’re annoyed by the delays they cause us. Though how often have we stopped to think that every piece of food we pluck from the grocery store shelf or piece of clothing we pluck from the rack was delivered by those same people? Without these bleary-eyed blue-collar workers, the shelves at the grocery store, and our stomachs, would be empty. Yet we overlook them so easily and see them as an inconvenience. Covid made this divide even starker, as the elites isolated in the comfort of their homes and worked remotely, while those who live from paycheck to paycheck continued to work to provide the goods that made our splendid isolation possible.

All of Canada, and the world, stood up and took notice, however, when the convoy of truckers began its ponderous journey to Ottawa, to the seat of Canadian government, where Justin Trudeau, author of the vaccine mandate, sat secure in his political echo chamber. As the convoy crossed through the country in the dead of winter, Canadians came out to the highway by the thousands to stand in the bitter cold and cheer them on. The fact that so many came out in weather that would freeze exposed skin in a few minutes was a testament to their enthusiasm for the truckers’ cause. No doubt it galled Trudeau to see the opponents of his mandate mobilizing Canadians to an extent he could only dream.

I was shocked and pleasantly surprised by the spirit that the truckers inspired in ordinary Canadians. In fact, as I watched the Canadian lockdowns and vaccine mandates broaden and deepen from my home in Texas, I began to suspect that, against all odds, Canadians still had the instincts of a free people. Historically, Canadians are a proud people. They are a people who sent thousands of their young men across the Atlantic to fight in both world wars, years before American boys would make the same journey. Their fighting prowess in both those wars made them a boon to their friends and a scourge to their enemies. They were, as one author expressed it, the “shock army of the British Empire.” In fact, may consider World War I as the beginning of the Canadian nation, when a Canadian army that fought as one showed the world that it was one people. It was this fighting spirit that I thought had been blunted by decades of peace and ease. Then Canada’s truckers showed me that even the quiet, polite Canadians could only be pushed so far before fighting back.

When the truckers surrounded the Parliament buildings and began their protest, the Prime Minister refused to meet with them. The truckers had dared to break into the bubble that the elites had made for themselves. They dared to remind them that their positions were granted by the will of the people, and the people set limits on their powers. The lockdowns had thickened the walls of the echo chambers that elites inhabit on social media in the information age, as algorithms flatter them into self-satisfaction and isolate them from criticism.

In a scene between Pericles and the lords of his court, Shakespeare provides an image of the kind of councel that elites should seek. All Pericles’s court wish him peace and comfort, save Lord Helicanus, who is determined to speak his mind to the Prince:

They do abuse the king that flatter him,
For flattery is the bellows blows up sin;
The thing the which is flatter’d but a spark,
To which that blast gives heat and stronger glowing;
Whereas reproof, obedient and in order,
Fits kings, as they are men, for they may err.

Helicanus concludes that the one who flatters “makes war upon your life.”

After the counselor finishes his invective against the flattery of the other lords, Pericles sends away most of the lordly companions, but bids Helicanus stay behind; the other lords no doubt presuming the prince will dress down the insubordinate Helicanus in private. Helicanus thinks as much too when Pericles opens their private conversation by echoing the infamous words of Pontius Pilate: “Thou know’st I have power to take thy life from thee.” The brave Helicanus replies: “I have ground the axe myself; do but you strike the blow.” Seeing that the noble’s loyalty is as firm as his honesty, Pericles bids him:

Rise, prithee, rise;
Sit down, thou art no flatterer;
I thank thee for’t; and heaven forbid
That kings should let their ears hear their faults hid!
Fit counsellor and servant for a prince,
Who by thy wisdom makes a prince thy servant,
What would’st thou have me do?

The algorithms that curate our social media feeds are bottomless fonts of flattery. The elite class can draw all their information about the outside world and their standing in it from these whitewashed platforms. The continuous stream of affirmation can make them incredulous of those who disagree with their decisions, labeling them radicals on the fringe of society, as Trudeau and his inner circle did with the truckers. We isolated elites are much less likely to see our errors, learn from them, and grow in humility if we don’t seek out the voices of those with whom we disagree.

Unfortunately, to borrow an analogy from the pandemic, today, with the help of social media, our political elites and their supporters have immunized themselves against those lessons. One way to break this cycle of flattery is a return to the wisdom of writers like Shakespeare, who provide timeless truths that can humble our egos and provide a north star to help us navigate even the treacherous currents of the information age.