In my paper, presented at The Constellations Conference, I utilized Angelo Restivo’s compelling work on Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets, to argue that Sam Fuller’s first film I Shot Jesse James (1949) follow a similar aesthetic trajectory based on a refusal to acknowledge castration. This paper is a section of my dissertation under Angelo’s advisement. A key factor in this paper was a focus on a series of gunshots that stagnate or disrupt the visual flow and aim of the film’s formal narrative properties. What follows here is the conclusion of that work. Earlier gunshots insert an anxiety into the structure of the film, creating a shiftless and aimless figuration in the primary character Robert Ford (John Ireland). However, there is a final gunshot that provides us with the reinsertion of narrative drive, and also explains why, despite this film being about Robert Ford more than Jesse James, it is Jesse who remains in what I call the Aesthetics of Melancholy—a nexus of generic historical, cinematic, ideological factors that forecloses the figures within the film, drawing the only inward in a gravity well of immobility. (Think Ethan Edwards in the finale of The Searchers). Despite Bob claiming to kill Jesse to free himself to marry his unrequited sweetheart Cynthy, we have a repetition, a more emphatic refusal of his advances by her. Bob’s murder of Jesse, shooting him in the openly displayed back (with all the queer connotations of shooting a man in the back), serves as an attempt at severing the libidinal flow of energy between Bob and Jesse in order to redirect the flow to Cynthy. However, here we can point to a key passage in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud says that in melancholia “the free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in an unspecified way, but served to establish an identification with the abandoned object. Thus, the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object.”^[i] In this formulation, we can argue that Jesse, as a mythic figuration, and imago, is an object here, with no outlet for motion or revision. For Bob, he is a blockage that must be excised in order to fulfill his own aesthetic necessity of coupling within the Hollywood and American subjective positioning. The gunshot that kills Jesse creates an absence, that refusal of castration in Bob that was discussed here. Bob becomes aimless, wandering and the camera in close-up repeatedly cuts him off from a sustained visual progression. He is collapsing inward, and over him is the shadow of the object: Jesse. Bob’s ego becomes infused with the imperative object drawn inward, a pure interiority that refuses abandonment. Bob, in the wake of Jesse’s murder, is perpetually under the shadow of the object, crushed by it. No matter how he tries to reform his existence, through material gains, through attempts at friendship, or failed romance, the shadow is immediate. This becomes visually apparent in the final sequence of the film.

                  Bob is once more refused by Cynthy, who is clear that she cannot love a man who did what Bob has done to Jesse. The heterosexual coupling can only exist within the confines of the acceptance of castration. As Bob stalks behind John Kelley, the rival for Cynthy’s affection, he is cloaked almost entirely in shadow. This is not a full close-up, rather a medium shot, but the sides of the frame crush inward, pure blackness. Bob wears a black coat, unbuttoned, so his face and chest seem to be desperately trying to escape the enfolding darkness of shadow. Kelley, in competing shots keeps his back to Bob, and Bob, as though beginning to acknowledge what he couldn’t with Jesse, won’t shoot him, but calls repeatedly, wantonly, for him to turn and face him. Bob is subsumed almost entirely by the shadow, which functions as the off-screen of the close-up, and moreover as Jesse-as-object. After a long build-up of tension, there is a burst, and Kelley is forced to shoot the greatly diminished Bob, who collapses as Cynthy rushes out and holds him; a last affectionate gesture for a man she cannot love. This gunshot is part of a correction of the anxiety inserted into the narrative by the previous two gunshots. Removing Bob, provides a tract in which the coupling of Kelley and Cynthy can occur. Kelley’s killing of Bob is a sign that Kelley exists within the castrated function that provides safe aesthetic existence in the symbolic order of the genre (or all genres in Hollywood perhaps). The castration anxiety is allayed and As Restivo argues in his essay on Mean Streets, “it is precisely because of the presence of the woman that this can happen. In the universe of Mean Streets, the woman serves to perpetuate the illusion that the man’s phallus is intact.”^[ii]While Kelley may have acknowledged his castrated position, and covered it over with the fantasy of intactness via his burgeoning relationship with Cynthy, Bob is still in refusal, but the gunshot that kills him creates a vent for the melancholy and anxiety that the earlier gunshots inserted, and he finally accepts his castrated position as well. With his final breaths, Bob at last, offers his acknowledgement of his own castration and, in a weak voice, whimpers to Cynthy as Kelley looks on, “I want to tell you something I never told anyone… I loved Jesse.” Restivo describes this well in a different context in Mean Streets, discussing the fake finger gunshot (accompanied by a sonic “real” shot), suggesting that “the new shooting echoes the earlier one, and corrects it. The phallus now situated ‘where it belongs…’ the castration has been effectively displaced. The anxiety created by the initial gunshot is now bound. The Narrative can resume.”^[iii] Here, the narrative escapes the story of Robert Ford and Jesse, or even Robert Ford and his failed romance of Cynthy, but rather opens up on the proper writ-large narrative of hetero coupling that is so insisted upon in the Hollywood model, a potentiality of breaking the aesthetic of melancholy through a proper romantic object relation, between Cynthy and her new beau John Kelly. Jesse, however, is preserved in cinematic amber, forever in melancholy, a deep celluloid prison.