5786: The Cavalry

we've been on the road for eighteen hours

My all-time favorite story beat goes like this: our protagonists — bloody, beaten, and tired — are surrounded on all sides. They’ve fought hard, but they’re outnumbered and outgunned. The enemy is closing in. Determined to make a last stand, the good guys pick up their weapons, take a breath, get ready to charge back in, when… what’s this? A massive army of their allies, quietly gathered offscreen, usually by a side character we haven’t seen in a while? And they’re ready to fight.

This trope is often called “The Cavalry” and it was first made famous by the 2012 blockbuster Tinker Bell: Secret of the Wings. No, I’m kidding, it was already very famous by then, Secret of the Wings just perfected it. It’s better known from The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars #9, and about a dozen Marvel movies, most notably that Avengers: Endgame scene with all the floating circles, which is certainly the all-time most-viewed example of this. When The Cavalry is done poorly, it can render the entire story lifeless. Any growth that the main characters may have had over the course of the journey — growth that may have taught them how to win in the final battle — becomes a waste of time, because someone else is doing it for them. But when it’s done well, when it’s been seeded and makes sense, I get this kind of overwhelmed high, full-bodied and warm and light, that I don’t know how to recreate on my own. It’s about how people want to help, they want to show up. It’s about how though there are a lot of bad guys in the world, “there are more of us,” or so says Lando in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in a moment that makes me well up with tears, despite nearly every second of the movie before and after being kind of nauseating.

I had already been thinking about The Cavalry a lot recently, the complexities of it, when it showed up at the end of the third season of Boardwalk Empire, which I’ve been watching the last few weeks. Boardwalk, if you haven’t seen it, tells the partially-true story of Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, a corrupt city official and crime boss in Atlantic City during Prohibition, with appearances from many of the other real-life mobsters from New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago who were active during that time. Steve Buscemi, who plays Nucky, and someone I knew so little about that I had no idea he’d been the lead in anything, puts on an incredible performance that is both neutered and chaotic. A wild, spinning ball of crazy tightly locked in a bomb-proof safe. He’s surrounded by a huge cast of characters and storylines — so huge that very important characters will often disappear for three or four episodes at a time, just to make time for everybody else — that are all so well-written and well-acted, funny and scary and hopeful and sad, that I couldn’t stop myself from quickly devouring the entire show, despite there not being a single alien, robot, or spaceship at any point in the runtime, which often dampens my enthusiasm. I begrudgingly admit that good stories can be told without those elements, though I have found it to be quite rare.

[Spoilers through season three of Boardwalk Empire.]

The main plotline of the third season of Boardwalk shakes out like this: Nucky, a violent and money-hungry criminal, is in hiding after a far more violent and unhinged mobster takes control of Atlantic City. Most of Nucky’s former allies have declared mob-war neutrality. His girlfriend’s been vaporized. He’s been shot at extensively. Various lower-level goons are roaming the streets hunting him, knowing full well that their insane boss will kill them for speaking out of turn, let alone if they fail to find Nucky. Taking cover in the lumber yard where his nephew works, he is stuck with his one remaining friend, Chalky White (played by Michael Kenneth Williams), who is not all that pleased with him at the moment. We haven’t seen or heard from Nucky’s unreliable brother Eli in ages — he was sent to Chicago earlier but no one’s been able to contact him.

You know what’s coming. When a load of cars pulls into the yard, Nucky’s got his last gun out, expecting that someone has sold him out to the enemy. But when the crowd of huge, shotgun-wielding men clears, it’s his missing brother who appears, back to tell Nucky that he made a deal. But not with — as one would expect — aging Chicago crime boss Joe Torrio.

That’s right: it’s goddamn Al Capone, another violent lunatic, and one of my favorite characters on the show.

I love this scene. I cheered the first time I saw it, and since then I’ve seen it roughly sixty more times. How can you not be moved by that? Al’s here! Everything’s gonna be okay!

Of course, this Cavalry looks a lot different from the Tolkien or superhero versions. Capone isn’t a long-lost friend with an altruistic desire to help, he’s an erratic murderer who loves using submachine guns. He doesn’t particularly care about any of these East Coast people, but it’s in his best interest to have Atlantic City and its port run by a reliable criminal like Nucky, rather than this new guy, who enjoys setting bystanders on fire. He’s greedy, and he’s selfish. He and his men are also all virulent racists, which causes multiple brawls between them and Chalky White’s men, and between Chalky and Al personally. Capone doesn’t play well with others, is easily offended, ambitious, and altogether not that smart.

But he’s who they’ve got. And they certainly needed someone.

Progressives have a hard time forming coalitions these days. “They eat their own” is a sentiment thrown around a lot, and I agree. I hear these people all the time, people that call themselves activists, but tear down anyone who wants to work with them that doesn’t fit their arbitrary standards. They love to purity test, but not just about the topic of the day — about everything. Every issue. They don’t have one cause, they have a thousand, and they’re immanentizing the eschaton through the sheer power of their perfectly pure thoughts and rigorously vetted and tested companions.

And I’m not singling out the younger, Gen Z groups (the kind that go through your high school tweets to check if you said anything sketchy) as having a monopoly on this mindset — I see plenty of older, center Democrats doing the same thing. The kind of people who think the only path to heaven is to get out the vote, but will ignore your existence if you bring up slashing police budgets.

I find this type of person to be extremely bothersome, and difficult to talk to. Their plans are often vague and undetailed, don’t involve much wider context, and rarely seem to focus on anything other than the initial stages of their grand design. Doesn’t seem very effective.

But also, if this is your MO, I don’t believe you actually want to accomplish anything in the first place! People who get things done work with whoever shows up, partly because you can’t really tell the scope of a person’s beliefs by looking, but mostly because if they’re there, then at least for today, you want the same things. These people, the grand design, perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good-and-we’re-on-the-side-of-perfect people, would rather just pontificate, I think. Doing things takes work. Ugh. What a drag. It’s easier to write your-fav-is-problematic type posts.

Again, these people annoy me. If your back is actually pressed to the wall of the lumber yard, and you’re nearly out of bullets, you’ll take help from anyone.

Luckily, I’m pretty confident that most of the purity-test attitude is confined to the internet, like so much else in this world. It’s a fairly good litmus test to suss out who spends a lot of time talking online, but does nothing on their block. The kind of people who fill the comments section of famous actors’ Instagram posts, demanding they make a satisfactory statement on some world crisis. The kind of people who try to dox a middle school teacher for saying on a private Facebook page that they didn’t like Charlie Kirk. You know, modern activism.

Of course, the people who do this kind of stuff don’t do jack in the real world, and are therefore fairly pointless entities. If you can avoid someone’s entire existence and impact by just not going to their social media page, then they are not making an impression on the world in which you live. Very, very occasionally one of these people breaks containment and develops enough of a following to start a podcast, but that’s a fraction of a fraction of one percent of them, and I still don’t think they move any needles.

The people who do move the needle are willing to work with who’s there. Imperfect allies, maybe not on everything, but on today’s thing. On today’s biggest threat. And maybe they think those people are despicable in every other way, but on this they’ll stand beside each other. No one’s signing any deals with any devils; you’re just in the same place at the same time, doing the same thing. Because you can’t overhaul every rotten part of the world at once: you’ve gotta go piece-by-piece, fixing whatever corner you’re currently standing in, with whoever is there.

I understand that it’s not fair. Nothing about it is fair. It’s not fair that we have to work with people who, in other contexts, hate us. It’s not fair that Chalky White’s men, already beaten down by a system and by people who treat them like animals, have to fight alongside — and possibly die for — men who don’t think they’re people. It’s not right. I agree. I agree with you.

But they do win, you know? They won the war. And their enemy, the fire-loving newcomer who stabs his own men if they look at him wrong, dies alone, literally because no one is there to watch his back.

If you, like me, think the world might be falling apart at the seams, then you have to start being okay with cooperating with extremely imperfect people. In better times, in easier times, when the threats are more minor, maybe you can have the luxury of choice. But right now we’re scraping by, folks. You can’t fight alone. You need numbers.

And if your back’s against the wall today, and bullets are flying, but you’re unwilling to fight next to Capone, because maybe you’ll have to go up against him tomorrow, then you’re not really smart enough to run Atlantic City, are you?