Speaking to an old friend I met on Hive via Whatsapp on Sunday, he sends me a link to his location and the place he may move to, in rural Washington state. My visualisation of American landscapes is all from television, movies and literature, and seeing his blue dot flashing on a map is astounding to me. What wonders of modern technology that I can zoom in and out on the contours of world so foreign to my own. Yet it is not so foreign - on the edges of the screen I see the first people reservations and my friend and I talk about the similiarities between my country and his, both founded on violence, disposession and brutality, with systemic and institutionalised racism still affected people to this day.

^{Image Source}

It's this history that informs 'The English', a new Western mini series by Hugo Blick and starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer. As I write the ending of the series is still raw in my heart, not least because of the poignant drama of it, but of the real histories it hints at - the ghosts of the dead symbolically and literally buried under American towns, the blood in that soil, like Australia's, a fertiliser for the societies which still stand to this day.

There is much in this series that reminds me of Cormac Mc Carthy's Blood Meridian, a violent telling of the founding of America. There is evil in men that rape and slaughter to found a country.

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” - Cormac McCarthy

It is upon this landscape of violence and bloodlust that Emily Blunt's character Cornelia finds herself - she is from a well do to estate in Devon and her would be fiance had travelled to make his fortune there as a cattle rancher. However she is not particularly chasing him, some 15 years later, but the man who sired her dead son and who she says forgot he existed. Cleary there is no love lost between the two - and without giving too much away, the evil within this man is made clear from the first episode where Cornelia eats testicles - or prairie oysters, the prettier name - in a bright red dress with her captor and the employee of this man.

^{Image Source}

But it is not just her story, but Eli's too - a Pawnee man who worked for the US Army but had left at the end of the war to travel north to stake a claim of land. Everyone, after all, wants land - and the Indians have very little, if any, claim to it at all, theirs being stolen from it and being given only the most infertile of country. It's a land where he has seen people shot, stabbed, raped and indeed massacred - again, just like this country, a story forgotton under the larger patriotic myth of hard work and industry that created some kind of greatness at the tragic expense of it's first people.

It's the job of the modern film maker and those left alive to tell the truth and unearth the hidden histories that strikes me hear. You can build on top of the dead but they have a way of making themselves known and working their way to the surface. The skies are full of them.

Eli and Cornelia's story is tragic and exhultant at the same time - both having experienced tragedy and thrown together on the same path, they have much to learn from each other and the tenderness between them is palpable, and one knows it cannot end well, given the past. Whilst both are warned that survival depends on leaving the past behind, they are still searching for home, which seems to have been stolen from them yet still exists in their hearts.

Of course, it's also a western and the familiar tropes of this genre are to be expected. However, it feels fresh under this director, perhaps because it has a more modern sensibility through the guileness Englishwoman whose sympathies lie with the Indians. She cannot stand by whilst woman are forced into servitude, children's lives are in danger or men do evil, and certainly not when the man she holds such affection for might be threatened. And she's an active heroine too - deft with a bow as she is with a gun. My kind of hero. In fact, all the woman in this story shine - brutalised, yes, but also active in their own fates.

^{Image Source}

I loved 'The English' - my heart is still hurting a little as I write, so don't expect an entirely happy ending. If you love Westerns and history - oh, and Emily Blunt :P - you'll love The English.