On the contingency of ownership / Reflections on First Cow
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is a sustained reflection on the contingency of ownership at the unfolding edge of a colonizing ‘new world.’
The film opens with a woman in a forest, who, together with her dog, uncovers two bodies buried together.
The film jumps back to the 1800s, as a roving band of prospectors move through the forest. The first depicted subject forages through the woods for edible mushrooms, rights a flipped salamander, and gives heavy Walt Whitman vibes. A hypersensitive character, somehow out of alignment with his band.
Out foraging one night he happens upon a naked and, though restrained, desperate man. The stranger shares his story--he’s fleeing a band of murderous Russians--and persuades the forager to take him in.
So begins their friendship and adventure.
What was so moving in the film?
Two images: in our modern time frame the film shows a container ship floating down river.
The next instance, a cow floating down-river. This is a sort of temporal anchor, the concentrated juxtaposition of a time of superabundance and a time of, not scarcity, but un-territorialized newness.
There is a latent utopianism in the 19th century US, which is heavily drawn on here.
The first cow is literally that—the first cow shipped to the Factor. Brought to the Factor to supply milk and cream to the Chief Factor for tea.
One of the protagonists, Cookie, once worked as an indentured baker. He mentions the world of new things he could make with a little bit of milk--buttermilk biscuits, cookies. King-Lu persuades him to take milk from the cow.
I originally wrote “persuades Cookie to steal milk from the Factor Chief” but that isn’t it really. They’re taking milk from the cow that is there in the world with them. It’s not until later on, once their milking is discovered, that the cow is fenced off, that the crime is worlded.
What a stark image for the cow! Before the erection of the fence, her world is open. In the territorialization of the crime, in the fencing of the cow, there’s a little peek at the modern industrial logic that underpins the whole world of containerized shipping, of hyper-abundance, of hyper division, of unending subdivision and optioned ownership.
It’s a film about worlding. How do we demarcate what is owned by who? There’s a wild contingency to it, and all these ownership structures are supported by the utterly improvised and arbitrary formations.
The cow arrives on the ship, and from there it passes through town. It’s bound by a collar and leash. All along its journey from the ferry to the meadow it submits to the coercion and discipline of the trader. On arrival in the meadow, she’s said to belong to the Factor Chief, but it’s not inside of him. The ownership isn’t enforceable, and until discovered doesn't really exist. The cow is wild and in the world.
It’s only on discovery, through the erection of a fence, through the rallied network of power and enforcement of soldiers with guns, that the cow seems to belong to the Factor Chief.
But then we see her in her meadow, surrounded by her little fence (such a meager space to graze!), and we see the whole camp, a little feeble and shivering outpost in the vast Oregon wilderness. Still on the razor’s edge of time, altogether unclear whether things will fall into decay, vanish into the wilderness, or ascend to the glory of Saint Francesco.
From the vast container ship, it’s clear that the land was territorialized. That’s not to say conquered, but maybe fenced and partitioned in places.
The film opens with Blake’s formulation “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Reichardt might just have well opened with Wallace Steven’s “Anecdote of the Jar:”
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.