Of Men and Morals

Bugtussle and Steinbeck analysis

I loved almost all the required-reading books in school; there were some exceptions—A Clockwork Orange, Of Mice and Men come to mind most easily. I like Steinbeck, I just didn't particularly enjoy that one. (I guess I’m more of an East of Eden girl, if I really think about it, and it probably isn’t only because of James Dean, but that’s a topic for another article.) Lennie really pissed me off. All my sympathy was for George and all the animals who died in Lennie’s hands, although when I really delve into it, George rubs the wrong way too. I don’t remember any of us in that English class liking the novel much, and truthfully, I can’t even remember which grade I was in. Was it Mrs. Margolies in 10th grade or Ms. Miller in 11th grade? Who knows? All I know for sure is, it wasn’t my cup of tea, that book, nor the movie. Long, descriptive cargo train rides up or down poor-as-heck, middle-of-nowhere, 1920s-or-30s-or-whatever California? Yeah, no thanks. And the ending? WTF? I don’t know, though, somehow even then I (kinda sorta) got Steinbeck’s point. It was about losers, small men and big men, courage and cowardice, or something like that, right?

Writer/director/actor Derek Sitter says he wanted to do a sort of modern twist on Steinbeck’s 1937 novella. I think Sitter had the right idea by putting the story into a short film. 21 minutes is really all you need to convey the sad story of two broken men bound together by utterly irreparable circumstances. A “tussle between two dirt bugs”¹ is how one review characterized the critically acclaimed Bugtussle (2022). Most reviews of Bugtussle find a way to weave in the Steinbeck comparisons. My initial review of it was no exception there. Two things prompted me to begin to ponder the differences more than the similarities: The director’s note on the Bugtussle website and the movie Of Mice and Men (1992) itself.

Sitter confides that he did not initially set out to do any sort of Steinbeck retelling at all. He wanted to do, I guess, what most writers want to do—somehow express the unique in a way that’s relatable? We want to be relevant and “universal” with our stories, but we want to do it our own way. Steinbeck wrote from firsthand experience about migrant workers in the Depression era. Sitter’s characters, Crow and Coyote, live in what to us feels like the more convoluted present day. Most of the 21st century so far has been a horrible roller coaster, economically speaking. Things like gentrification and globalization have wreaked havoc on small-town America, at the same time that these policies have swelled the yacht sizes of hedge fund CEOs and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. For all the differences, though, for all its modern tempo, Bugtussle probably cannot escape the shadow of Of Mice and Men. Crow and Coyote are too white boys from Nowhere—vague, nondescript, seeming to belong to no place and no time at all. As Sitter puts it, they are “simple, trapped, traumatized and poverty-stricken men with dreams of a better life.”² Sitter himself is from Middle America—Oklahoma, to be precise—and there is a marked sense of “Okie County” in his film. But like George and Lennie, Crow and Coyote are running in the “Okie County” of California. The title of the film itself represents that curious blend of “flyover state” and West Coast. Bugtussle is an actual town in Sitter’s home state. It’s also the name of the fictional place from whence the Clampetts “loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.”³ Crow and Coyote are stuck in nowhere land. They run and they dream of better things, but they don’t get anywhere. They are stuck in an unwanted life of crime. All they want is to achieve that big steal so they never have to do it again, so they can be free. “There are no bad men, just bad dirt,” says the opening quote in the movie. Bugtussle gives us three characters: Crow, Coyote, and the farmer. Crow is more or less the Gary Sinise character, but rougher. (He has a beard and you can tell he hasn’t had a shower in awhile.) By themselves, these names are quite interesting. These two brothers from another father are named after the wild. “Crow” wants nothing more than to have wings and fly away, forced time and again to eat crow and keep running. “Coyote” is a rabid dog, unpredictable, poisonous. Then there is the farmer. He represents humility, an honest day’s work; his name is “Chuckles,” but there’s nothing funny about his part in the film. He is all that Steinbeck’s George aspired to. But who wants to be a farmer in 2022? Like the internet, even the American Dream went viral. Nothing is what it seems. Americans headed west with lofty ideas of a “manifest destiny,” and somehow we still move that way with fantasies of better weather and sunnier pastures. Even Grace Kelly threw off the shackles of snooty old Philadelphia in favor of rocking it for MGM. Then even that grew stale and she married a prince and went to live in Monaco. We can’t outrun our problems. Ennui will intrude anywhere, at anytime. Who is to say that George would have been better off without Lennie, or Crow without Coyote? They may have been freer, but does freer necessarily equate to happier, in other words, better and more loved or loving? Even in the case of George, I have to wonder if the real monster was not within. He moves on, trying to forget, while Lennie kills a thousand mice, for what’s a thousand mice compared to one man or one woman? Where do you draw the line? At what point is enough enough and you begin to question your own choices, even the one you make while professing to have no choice?

1. Awards of Merit for script, score, and acting in the Accolade Global Film Competition, August 2022

2. Five Stars from me⁴

3. Four Stars from Nate Raven (Take2IndieReview)⁵

4. 4.5 Stars from Indie Shorts Mag⁶

5. Official Selection, Oregon Short Film Festival, 2021

6. Best Screenplay, Nevada Short Film Festival, 2021

1. Review by Eddie Jemison, writer/director of King of Herrings. @BugtussleMovie Facebook Page. 7 January 2022.

2. Sitter, Derek. Director’s Note. Bugtussle (2022). https://www.volcanictheatre.com/pages/bugtussle. (Archived)

3. Wikipedia contributors, "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Ballad_of_Jed_Clampett&oldid=1067236239 (accessed September 7, 2022).

4. Bugtussle

5. Raven, Nick. “"A FUN ROMP, HIGH STAKES ROBBERY..." 13 March 2022. https://take2indiereview.net/2022/03/bugtussle/.

6. Indie Shorts Mag Team. “Bugtussle: A Doomed Dash For A Better Life.” 6 March 2022. https://www.indieshortsmag.com/reviews/2022/03/bugtussle-a-doomed-dash-for-a-better-life/.