Pale Rider
After its near-death experience during the early 1970s, the Western was kept alive pretty much personally by Clint Eastwood for more than 15 years. It’s not that nobody else was making Westerns—though as a matter of fact very few were. In fact even Eastwood only made three Westerns between 1975 and the present. But what a threesome: The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976, tonight’s movie Pale Rider in 1985, and of course the Oscar-winning Unforgiven in 1991. Josey Wales is a big, even an epic, Western; and of course Unforgiven is a masterpiece. Pale Rider is certainly the least of the three, and I would say it’s a movie that has some serious problems. But it also has a kind of weight and stature, a real presence, part of which comes simply from the spectacle of the Father of all still-active Western heroes on the screen again.
As an actor, Eastwood had his movie origins in the Western, specifically in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns of the late 1960s—and the character he played there had a terrific impact and historical influence at a crucial, very weak and vulnerable, stage of the genre. The Man With No Name, as he came to be called, was mysterious, unknowable, harsh, and above all invincibly violent. This represented a substantial change from earlier generations of cowboy hero, although (as you can see from a movie like The Searchers) the straightforwardly good cowboy hero was already on the way out before 1960. Nobody, though, had dared to be as physically dirty, as morally ruthless, and as casually violent as the Man With No Name. These qualities, in fact, allowed Eastwood to survive in Westerns right through a period of tremendous disbelief in good guys, and on into a period when it was possible to re-introduce them.
The most dominant Eastwood screen persona is that of the killer—whether he wears a badge like Dirty Harry or a cowboy hat like the heroes of his Westerns. Where does his killing-power come from? In his case it’s absolutely not a case of being a master of the craft of violence. No, Eastwood’s power is too big and too mysterious to be the result of lots of practise or professional skill or even personal bravery and intelligence. It comes from somewhere transcendental. This is exactly the point that Eastwood immediately seized on when he began to direct his own Westerns. In High Plains Drifter, from 1971, he plays an invincible avenging spirit literally returned from the grave—though the movie is careful never to spell things out too carefully.
And the same is true of Pale Rider, whose Eastwood-hero, known as The Preacher, rides out of an empty landscape in answer to a young girl’s prayer for a miracle. He arrives in town on a dappled white horse exactly at the moment when this girl is reading from the Book of Revelations: “And behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Two other qualities quickly emerge: this guy is wearing a clerical collar, and he has across his torso the scars of six bullet-hole that absolutely must have been fatal. The Preacher has a killer’s look that’s totally chilling and he really is invincible and deadly. This is the Clint we know, all right.
But here’s a really interesting thing. The hero apparently comes as the answer of a prayer to God and defends a helpless community of citizens from a predatory capitalist, so he must be the good hero. But then why does he have has such collection of dark and even demonic qualities? You see this not just in his lethal look, but in all the stuff surrounding him--desolate landscapes, whistling cold winds and portentous music on the soundtrack, The movie really raises the question of violence exactly through this picture of a devilish-killer good guy. The question is of course, How can the Eastwood hero be so murderously scary and still be a hero? And again, where does his power come from--power over the bad guys, and also power over the audience--and is it good or bad? I want to talk about these questions some more after the movie.
[screen movie]
Pale Rider is a really strange movie in a bunch of ways. The character of The Preacher is just a jumble of irreconcilable contradictions. Does he really come as a miracle from God? Did God let him out of heaven or out of hell? He sure doesn’t seem a likely candidate for the heavenly choir. It’s more like he came from the source of his scriptural quotation, the delirious and creepy Book of Revelations, the least Christian of all Christian texts. At the same time he appears as a minister—why? One minute he’s smiting the evildoers and the next he’s passing out sensitive family-counseling-type advice. He won’t sleep with Megan but he will sleep with Sarah—just after she’s announced she’s going to marry Hull Barrett. Then there’s the whole question of his personal vendetta. If he’s here to revenge himself on the men who killed him previously, how does that make him an instrument of divine justice? Is he here on his own account or Providence’s?
You can’t answer any of these questions, the movie simply won’t let you. It sails happily past all contradictions. And you could even say it does that successfully, because Eastwood the filmmaker has, I’d say, a kind of instinct about what’s important to the viewer. Viewers only think they want plots that make sense. What they really want is to be gripped and caught up and transported—and if they’re gripped enough, plausibility simply isn’t an issue. The Preacher acts in one scene as the selfless defender of the community and in the next scene as carrying out a personal act of vengeance. What registers with viewers here is not the contradiction but the satisfaction of getting to watch personal resentments and hatreds acted out combined with the satisfaction of defending the weak and innocent.
Actually this kind of double standard is a very common feature of violent movies. The violence is almost always “grounded” and justified by some terrible injury done to the community or the hero or both. In the classic case you’ll have an atrocity committed by vicious bad guys right near the beginning of the movie, followed by an hour and a half of systematic violent revenge. Obviously the primary element is the violence, and the injury is just an alibi that allows you to enjoy the violence without losing that all-important self-righteous feeling.
Pale Rider of course does exactly this. But the unusual thing about Pale Rider—and at the same time it’s quite typical of Clint Eastwood’s cinema—is that the movie not only fails to cover up its inconsistencies, it even apparently underlines them. So, as I said, there’s no attempt to be plausible or even coherent about The Preacher’s godliness or devilishness. In fact all of Eastwood’s violent heroes are somehow both good guys and scary monsters at the same time. This fact has become more and more visible as Eastwood’s filmmaking career has advanced, and you can say that Unforgiven is exactly a story about the schizophrenia of an Eastwood hero who’s both good and bad. In comparison to Unforgiven, Pale Rider is full of holes and not at all well thought out. But it does have its strengths. For example, I really like the way the movie consistently stages The Preacher against a harsh and hostile environment. He is first seen riding a dirty white horse against a dirty white background—snow and rock and leafless trees, an overcast sky and a chill wind blowing. He arrives with winter, and in fact he is winter, a harbinger of death to malefactors. When you get a closer look you register the severe drabness of his dull brown coat, his black hat and his dark unshaven face. Most of the violence in this film is surrounded by cold. The next time you see the movie just make a note of all the times you notice there’s snow, or a cold wind, or a dark sky. Every time it’ll be a warning somebody’s going to get killed or hurt. But in particular, whenever the Eastwood character starts to inflict violence, the sky clouds over and the temperature goes down.
One of the things I haven’t mentioned about Pale Rider is how it’s a remake of the classic 1953 Western Shane. There are a lot of close similarities, but what I find most interesting is the nature of some of the changes. Shane, of course, is a buckskinned blond played by Alan Ladd, who first emerges against a verdant natural backdrop featuring a mountain. The Preacher might be called an anti-blond guy, who materializes out of, and dematerializes back into, a harsh and desolate backdrop featuring a mountain. The community Shane helps are good sodbusting agriculturalists, and it’s quite striking how these farmers are converted into rockbusting miners, not tilling the earth to make it fruitful but digging for the useless material wealth of gold. One benefit of this very odd change is to allow Eastwood the director to make the whole movie environment colorless, stripped-down, and inhospitable.
When Megan runs after The Preacher at the end of the movie, just like the boy does at the end of Shane, and shouts after him “we all love you,” it’s a very strange feeling. Do we really love this wintry killer? Only part of us does. Eastwood may not have intended the movie to leave exactly such a indigestible aftertaste, but as I said before, it’s highly characteristic of his work--and it’s one of the things that makes him one of the most interesting Hollywood filmmakers of the last 25 years.