Eastwood's "Unforgiven" (Reprint)

Negotiating the loner [Critique of Western movies] Queen's Quarterly; Kingston Vol. 105, Iss. 4,  (Winter 1998): 543-555

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Perhaps the basic paradox in American culture is the tension between its rhetoric of individualism and its practise of conformity. Certainly this lies behind Will Rogers' observation that "Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches." That note is far likelier to emerge from America than from, say, France, where the good citizens, leaders, and thinkers are better known to take liberty as -- and liberties with -- a basic convention of conduct. Compare, for example, the public acceptance of President Mitterrand's mistress with the brouhaha-ha when President Clinton made the presumably dyslexic discovery that you can get sex even from protected aides. 

The paradox is most clearly caught in how America treats its favourite myth -- the solitary hero. Across the American film landscape -- in the Western, the musical, the gangster film, the political thriller, the comedy -- the star is a loner trapped between conflicting necessities of individualism and community. In fact, that tension lies even at the core of Hollywood itself, given its historical basis on the star system. The American film industry -- and hence its rhetoric -- has paradoxically based this most collaborative of artforms upon the allure -- and inflected signification -- of an individual star. The "lone star" theme is so powerful and pervasive that it provides the cultural pulse at any point in time. You can read a period by the stars that emerge to emblematize it: resourceful tramps (Chaplin, Groucho) during the Depression; reticent, valorous soldiers (Van Johnson, John Wayne) during WWII; sombre or wisecracking gangsters (Robinson, Cagney) in the shadows of postwar reconstruction; affluent lovers (Cary Grant, Rock Hudson) in the somnolent '50s ... and so it goes. There's a lone star or two for every thesis. 

Although the loner theme may vary with its genre, there is one constant: the tension between liberty and restraint. The comic film, for example, affirms the validity and fertility of an idiosyncratic hero's deviation from conventional forms and values. We license our clowns -- like Lear's Fool -- to violate decorum and to run athwart conventions, but we expect them to be reined back into conformism at the end. Hence the mock-heroic persona in Woody Allen's films (i.e., the early ones -- you know, the funny ones), the anti-sentimentality from Where's Poppa? (1970) to There's Something About Mary (1998), the irreverent parodies of Mel Brooks and the Airplane! crew, and the sentimentalized mania of Jerry Lewis (and his spawn: Pee Wee Herman, John Candy, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, etc.). Deviators if not deviants all. 

The comedy of unaccustomed candour provided two scathing political comedies this year: Dustin Hoffman's caricature of Washington/Hollywood hubris in the famously prophetic Wag the Dog and the exuberant but doomed liberation of Warren Beatty's politician by self-marginalization in his undervalued Bulworth. The comic genre flirts with chaos before re-establishing social order, classically in the form of a marriage but in these two films by the rather more drastic technique for subduing a disruptive energy: assassination. 

Even as the classic musical typically celebrates the energy and egotism of an erupting individual talent, lip service is paid to the overriding values of the collective. It's not enough for Fred Astaire to dance alone: he must have a Ginger Rogers to validate his genius within the classical conventions of romance. (Of course, as Ms Rogers rightly has pointed out, she had to do everything he did -- backwards and on high heels -- but Astaire remains the senior partner, the founding owner, and the logo of the firm.) The team-player and selfless performer is valued over the selfish star. Hence the showgirl-next-door's (Debbie Reynolds') triumph over the shrill shrike (Jean Hagen) in Singin' in the Rain (1952) and the innumerable elevations of the stand-in or chorus-line hoofer to stardom. In the cognate melodrama All About Eve (1950) the glamorous star's attendant (Anne Baxter) stands in for the stand-in who steps forward into the limelight. Because Eve betrays an unrespectable ambition, the selfish new star's triumph is villainous. In contrast, in Singin' in the Rain Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor work together in their generous support of Debbie Reynolds and then reveal her selfless role as the voice behind the narcissistic shrike's success; their generosity excuses Reynolds' success. In the case of the current animated fable Antz, the whole film promotes individualism, in the nebbish-voiced hero's anti-conformity (the nebbish voice provided by Woody Allen), but at the end it reaffirms the community's well-being. Classically, individualism is allowed only insofar as it serves the interests of the community. 

Obviously, the genre that most clearly enunciates the loner theme is the Western. As that genre depicts America's transition from frontier to civilization, the lone hero stands in stark relief against the skeleton of the nascent modern society. The Western seems America's most telling myth and its most influential genre. Indeed, some historians contend that in the early years of this century, when America was isolationist in its external affairs, it was the popularity of the Western film that preserved the nation's potential for militarism. Of course, the cowboy fantasy of the Reagan presidency goes without saying. But the Western is not simply jingoistic. At the end of Stagecoach (1939) John Ford chooses to save his outcast-hero couple from "the blessings of civilization." In the Western myth, civilization is a mixed bag. The purity and integrity of an independent, self-sufficient champion give way to the hypocrisies and corruptions of the modern world, as embodied on the coach by the thieving banker, whose wife leads the pack that drives the good-hearted whore and the marinated medic out of town. 

Indeed, the culture's ambivalent attitude toward the "progress" that now afflicts us extends the Western motifs into two new arenas of gunmanship. In the crime film, the outlaw builds a personal urban empire instead of settling an arid wilderness. But it's still an individual striving against his class or mob for his bad eminence of fame, fortune, and a stylish suit. In the historical epic views of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy (1971-90) and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1983), the criminal world is a microcosm of America itself, as normalized and self-respecting as corporate law. The other offshoot is the space film, where the cowboys ride the collaborative future sciences into a new frontier, against mutant savages. George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) is an avowed grandson of Ford's The Searchers (1956) -- with Chewbacca as Gabby Hayes. Although the Western per se may by its numbers seem to have lost its hold on the imagination, its spirit rides new ranges in these later sagas. Sagebrush to the stars. 

F. Gary Gray's recent thriller, The Negotiator, explicitly draws upon the American tradition of the Western. When the Chicago police force's star hostage negotiator, Danny Roman (Samuel L. Jackson), finds himself framed for the murder of his partner and for stealing from the force's disability fund, he stumbles into taking his own hostages. Roman demands to deal with another star negotiator, Chris Sabien (Kevin Spacey). In their first discussion Sabien and Roman argue over the implications of the last scene in Shane (1953). The more naive Roman maintains that Shane is only wounded when he rides out of the frame; his hero can't die. The more pragmatic Sabien contends that in the last image Shane slumps over dead. (For the record, Shane does slump, but the image remains ambiguous. His death is suggested not so much by a deeper slump than by the fact that his horse takes him upward, past the top left corner of the screen, as if the saint were returning to heaven.) Sabien prefers sagas where the hero survives, like Rio Bravo (1959), the classic siege/hostage Western, and Red River (1948). It is apt that the more scholarly Sabien favours these two films by Howard Hawks, whose theme of men bonding through an ethic of professionalism propels The Negotiator. When Sabien later shoots Roman, in order to entrap the chief villain, he uncharacteristically professes fondness for Shane because the film kills off its hero. Both men are characterized by how they read the film -- and how they pattern their behaviour after it, such as Roman's bravado when he stands at the window ledge daring the helicopter police to shoot him. The Shane allusion also prompts us to read The Negotiator in the context of the Western. 

Shane is the most idealistic of the classic Westerns, presented with a tone as pastoral as its setting. Its hero, played by the blond, (very) short, soft-spoken Alan Ladd, is viewed through the worshipful perspective of the settler's young son, Joey (Brandon de Wilde, before he knocked up Carol Lynley in Blue Denim). Shane is the wandering gunman who craves domestic roots, but such roots are precluded by his bloody past. Call him Citizen Cain. He is doomed to this paradox: although the domestic folk depend upon a gunman to stabilize their social order -- in this case, to oppose the professional blackguard (Jack Palance) hired by the big rancher family to drive off the small home-steaders -- the community cannot accommodate the gunman. If he stayed he would disrupt the very order he has secured for them. In some exercises of this theme (e.g., The Gunfighter, The Shootist, I Shot Jesse James, Unforgiven) the gunman is disruptive because his presence attracts killers who wish to wrest away his glory. But Shane is too powerful in his own virtue to stay. Christ-like, he has to ride away. Whether he dies or not, his sacrifice for the settlers must include his departure. Little Joey expresses more truth than he realizes when he calls after Shane, "My mother wants you. I know she does." (The mountains shrewdly echo back the words "wants you" and "I know," as if speaking Shane's saintly and abstemious awareness.) Shane would pose as big a threat to the emotional balance in his hosts' marriage as to the peace of the town. 

The American Western valorizes the gunman but is compelled to banish him. This points to the essential clash in the culture between idealism and pragmatism. The culture espouses law, order, peace, individualism, but continually calls upon the outlaw, the chaos of war, and suppressive restraints, all for the communal good. In this respect the popular culture seems at one with the international politic. The nation pleads lofty values but has been known to stoop from them to conquer hostile nations, radically departing from these ideals in order to enforce them, whether at Hiroshima or in the theoretically smart bombs of the Gulf War. Glorious, high-speaking America has pocked the globe with Wounded Knees. Its films reveal the problematic nature of that American self-assertion. Either the culture is hypocritically glossing over its murdering ways or it is regretfully acknowledging the need for war to maintain peace. In any case, this tension pervades the culture. 

Perhaps the most brilliant dramatization of this point is John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The earnest young lawyer, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), builds a national political career and a happy marriage upon the legend that he killed (in self-defence, of course) the vile libertine of the title (Lee Marvin). But the real hero is the lonely rancher, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who from the shadows gunned Liberty down when he was about to finish off the wounded lawyer. As Stoddard unwittingly stole the good gunman's glory, he also won his girl, his hopes, his fame, his future. The film is framed by the lawyer's return to honour the forgotten rancher at his funeral. Over Doniphon's coffin, Senator Stoddard reveals for the first time how all his success and renown are owed to his old protector. 

As the villain's name suggests, the film is about the ambivalence of liberty. The film is based on two opposing triumvirates. Evil is represented by the wild Valance and his two scrupulously delineated hench-people: Strother Martin as a percolating sadist and Lee van Cleef as a vulpine killer. The side of good consists of the man of words (Stewart), the man of deeds (Wayne), and the drunken journalist (Edmond O'Brien) whom Valance tortures because of the effective power of Iris words. As a gunman, Doniphon's selflessness and control contrast to Valance's unbridled lust. Stoddard's eclipse of Doniphon represents the passage of the Old West into modern civilization, with this specific corollary: the primacy of the new word of law over the old rule of the gun. But at the heart of this film persists the American paradox: behind the law must stand the gun. It is only a politically convenient illusion that the lawyer gunned down the outlaw. In reality, idealism is helpless without a militant pragmatist. The gun remains mightier than the word, even if it is doomed to the shadows. 

This Western theme continues into The Negotiator. As independents whose maverick methods and professionalism set them apart from -- and even alienate -- their colleagues, the two cop heroes are cowboy types. As they stand alone at the front, what distinguishes them is that they are primarily men of words. Roman chooses Sabien because he knows they both believe in holstering the gun until all possible words have been exhausted. Sabien famously negotiated for 55 hours once to ensure the safe release of hostages. Both have infuriated their superiors by over-extending the negotiation. Sabien's last words to the wounded Roman are the weighted "Nice talkin' to you, Lieutenant." This film values talking, words, to an extent unique among American cop films. We're talking negotiation here, not Magnum Force (to recall a less garrulous flick of 1973). So we're suspicious of the cops whose disrespect for talking makes them impatient to attack, especially the antagonistic Beck (David Morse). 

Even here, however, the words do not replace the gun. Instead, they prepare for its most efficient use. The value of negotiation and patient psychology is theoretically espoused, but in both the opening and final scenes it's the gun that gets things done. Thus Sabien's wife jocularly explains why his negotiations are less effective at home than on the mean streets outside: "That's because no one is standing behind you with a big gun." So, too, in the heroes' parallel bluffs. Where innocent Roman only pretends to shoot a policeman hostage, worldly Sabien actually does shoot Roman. He backs his strategic words with the film's most dramatic strategic gunshot, then shoots the arch-villain -- to prevent his killing himself! For all his gunplay, our Sabien keeps an eye out for symbolism. In short, The Negotiator perpetuates the American dependence upon the gun. In focusing on negotiation the film pretends to the more civilized value of talking; but its faith and primacy still reside in the gun. 

The black, violent world glossed over in Shane is exposed in what seems to be an explicit remake, Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985). Standing as Songs of Innocence and Experience respectively, the plots parallel too closely to be either accident or homage. Eastwood recasts Shane for the grit of more modern realism. The Big Rancher versus Little Homesteaders battle becomes an even more uneven fight of independent pan-miners against a corporation that destroys the land with its hydraulic mining techniques. The hero helps his host break down a huge rock, in place of the large tree-stump the hero-host team uproots in the first film. In parallel scenes, the good gunman and the bought gunman appraise each other. There are the same tensions in and around the general store, though Eastwood's merchant is meaner spirited. That is the defining tonal difference. In the later film, the child's dog gets killed in the first scene and buried in the second. More important is sexualization of the innocent; Joey is replaced by a budding 15-year-old girl, Megan (Sydney Penny), who offers herself to our hero and is barely saved from a gang-rape. Like Joey, Megan briefly rejects her hero but ends up running after him, calling "We all love you, Preacher." 

That Preacher is Clint Eastwood's large, dark, violent, but still soft-spoken refashioning of Shane. When he's not wearing his guns, he wears his white collar, which more than anything he says or does leads to his being called Preacher. Otherwise Clint is still playing The Man with No Name. As he drinks, fights, kills, and beds his host's fiancee (Carrie Snodgrass), he's a shade less saintly than Shane. Burying her dog, Megan recites "The Lord's Prayer," but with marginal comments that express more doubt than faith. Eastwood's hero seems to materialize out of the mists of her prayer for a miracle, his pale bay horse emerging from the snow and birch. 

In sum, Eastwood's film is a grittier retake on the Shane myth. It exposes the violence and venality that are glossed over in the pastoralism of Shane. In fact, there's even a curious reflection upon the ambiguity around Shane's death. The good host miner (Michael Moriarty) has taken note of the five bullet wounds on Preacher's back. In the climactic shootout, Preacher kills his old nemesis with the same number and pattern of bullets. Unlike Shane, there's no question about whether Preacher lives or dies at the end. The implication is that he came back from the dead, then drifted into the campaign that would enable his revenge. The virtuous gunman doesn't die, then, but is recycled, recast for every new age, as an archetype to validate the use of the gun. Eastwood amplifies both the gunman hero's humanity and his mythopoetic abstraction. 

From our delicate little Ladd to our earnest Eastwood, then, the heroic loner dominates American cinema. Even when these figures are at the top of the Establishment, like President Harrison Ford in Air Force One and the anti-Clintonic bomber president of Independence Day, they are accorded the rugged individualism and martial prowess of the cowboy. Hollywood has backed away from Stanley Kubrick's comic take on the nuclear cowboy -- Slim Pickens yahooing into eternity astride the eponymous instrument in How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963; a.k.a. Dr. Strangelove). But now it's fashionable for the president to be a cowboy again, a skilled, murdering individualist, who operates free of his guards and societal restraints. 

If The Negotiator looks to the Western, John Frankenheimer's Ronin (1998) looks to the East. The film is a heist thriller set in the contemporary landscape of a world that has lost its traditional values. Here are heroes without even a subordinate cause. The mixed band of criminal specialists is explicitly compared to the ex-samurai "ronin" who, when their liege was betrayed and murdered, wandered the world as hired swords, killers, and thieves until they could avenge their master. Then they showed their guts by killing themselves (seppuku). 

Again, the film exploits the glamour of the independent, self-sufficient loner, but two provisions negate that. First, the individualist is valued by how much he serves his team of individualists. That is, in an age without traditional values we have to serve our colleagues. As well, the film ultimately puts its faith in the institution, in this case the duelling acronyms, the IRA and the CIA, who -- once the evil is defeated -- make their way to peace. The arch-villain (Jonathan Pryce) turns out to be a self-serving killer who was disowned even by the outlaw IRA. That makes him the rogue's rogue. The arch-hero (Robert de Niro) pretends to be a rogue ex-CIA agent, but as he cryptically explains to the obligatory love-interest, "I never left." Again, the outlaw is revealed to be a company man after all. In context, the film's two centrepiece car chases -- much admired by the audience and maligned by the reviewers -- assume thematic point. In the first the modern cars speed through narrow streets and sidewalks, as if the old ethical battle is waged in an anachronistic setting. The second chase is a long, disastrous rush against the flow of heavy one-way traffic. This motif dramatizes the characters' dangerous thrust against the social currents of their time. Both chases suggest the massive destruction and the death of innocents that result when maverick armies clash by their dubious rights. 

Since Watergate the lone hero has assumed a new function: he blows the whistle on corruption in high places. From the savvy Washington journalists of All the President's Men (1976) to Nicolas Cage's seedy, on-the-take cop/hustler in Snake Eyes (1998), heroism awaits the outsider who exposes the plague in the system. These are the modern maverick cowboys. Maintaining the integrity, ingenuity, and strength of the outsider, their effect inheres not in settling the desert but in expunging the infestation in the garden. 

A more complex alternative is provided by novelist-director John Sayles Lone Star (1996). In contemporary Texas, this loner hero is a sheriff who -- like Oedipus -- explores his own past to uncover the source of the corruption that afflicts his town. In Sayles's next film, Men with Guns (1998), an uncompromising drama about political suppression in Latin America, one line explains both Cortez's conquest of an empire with but a handful of men and the current citizenry's submission to their oppressors: "The men had guns and we did not." Not surprisingly, then, his Western does not value the gun in the usual manner of the genre. In fact, Lone Star has only three scenes of gunfire: an off-camera shooting in a bar, and flashbacks to the two key murders. The bulk of the film is made up of words -- questions, good ol' boy evasions and warnings, political ire, and reminiscences. 

The hero who launches all these words is paradoxically named Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of the legendary sheriff hero and friend to all, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey). Decades before, as a deputy, Buddy had the moral temerity to face down the murderous, corrupt sheriff Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson) and apparently make him flee. Now, as the town prepares to unveil a monument to Buddy, Wade's skeleton is found in the desert. Sam sifts through the evidence and finally uncovers the truth behind Wade's murder, but as in Liberty Valance, it is decided that the greater public good will be served best by "printing the legend" instead. Sam decides not to correct the community's assumption that it was Buddy who killed the evil Wade. In fact, Buddy is a rarity, a sheriff whose primary courage was expressed in words. We don't see him shoot anyone. Sam saves the honourable killer's reputation by letting Buddy be thought of as the more conventional hero, who kills as well as talks. 

But there's much more to Lone Star. In one key scene, a repatriated Mexican draws a line in the dust with his Coke bottle. When Sam crosses that line he abandons any legal authority he might have had. The Mexican's point is that the various borders and boundaries man defines are absurdly trivial and arbitrary. Making that point with a Coke bottle neatly summarizes the political context: Americans' vicious paranoia about illegal Mexican immigrants (a paranoia shared even by erstwhile wetbacks), the varieties of class and economic snobbery, and the lingering remnants of segregation. As the redneck barkeep complains, "the lines of demarcation are getting fuzzy." In Lone Star Sayles uses the loner figure to dramatize the need to transcend societal borders. As his narrative seamlessly drifts between the present and the past Sayles provides a formalist equivalent to flying over borders. 

That's also the unifying theme of the various subplots. In one, a hard-case black army colonel, Delmore Payne (Joe Morton), breaks down his own borders when he softens his stance towards errant soldiers, his alienated father, and his own stifled son, providing less pain for all. In another, a successful Mexican bar owner overcomes her prejudice against the current generation of striving wetbacks, still trying to transcend the Mexican-American Coke-line in the sand. In the background there is an uneasy tension in the new and shifting racial mix in the schools, the bars, the civic elections, and the romantic couplings. 

The major crossing of a border is Sheriff Sam's resumption of an old love affair with a Mexican teacher, Pilar (Elizabeth Pena). Years before, Buddy literally ripped the couple apart when he caught the highschoolers necking at a drive-in. AS adults rekindling their romance, Pilar and Sam dance to the lyrics "My love is a deep blue sea," in effect denying the shallow sand-lines that have separated them. Their resumed love crosses the line of their parents' opposition. More dramatically, however, it crosses the incest taboo, for Sam discovers that Pilar is his half-sister. Where Oedipus's discovery of his incest maddens him to the extent that he blinds himself, Sam's discovery enables him to see beyond his community's borders/prejudices, and to agree with Pilar that they should continue their affair. As she cannot have children, there is no reason not to -- except for the societal convention. In arguing against borders, Sayles presents a case that challenges our most universal border, that of incest. For once the loner reasonably and responsibly refuses to be reined in. 

Sam Deeds finally lives up to his legendary father's courage but achieves a superior moral position by transcending the reflex values and assumptions that fragment his community. Ironically, in preserving both his personal secret and that of the sheriff-killer, Sam might be considered morally compromised and as self-serving as his father. But he is absolved by his moral and romantic motivation. As a weary army man observes, "It's always heart-warming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice"; it's even more gratifying to see an ambivalent film genre heightened by an exemplar that is humane, humanistic, and courageous enough to challenge its culture's conventions and expectations. The star loner is the one who brings wider understanding and courage to the reflexes in which his community is locked. That's when the loner star lights the night. The film's last line of dialogue is Pilar's "Forget the Alamo." That is, the new Lone Star State has to define itself and its values realistically, by its present composition, situation, and needs. As the closing song promises, the example of this "cowboy's sweetheart" can bridge "the great divide." 

Sad to say, Lone Star hasn't had the box office, exposure, or influence accorded The Negotiator. Hollywood and its symptomatic Western continue their assuring compromises, double-think, and faith in the gun. That's another way in which the boundary between entertainment and politics has long since fuzzed over. Dwight Eisenhower wrote that to people in a democracy the outbreak of war always comes as a shocking surprise. If you read the subtexts of popular culture, you may despair, but perhaps you won't be so surprised.