In Part 1 of this exploration of Westerns I looked at two of what I called "genre-definers:" Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars. For part 2 I'm going to take a dive into High Plains Drifter (1973), the first of two "genre-subverters" I watched recently. Part 3 will be about Unforgiven (1992), also directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
Both Drifter and Unforgiven are to some extent anti-Westerns. They weaponize the genre expectations to explore the social implications of the settings and they wrestle with weightier ideas than something like A Fistful of Dollars does.
Neither one is a "fun" movie. High Plains Drifter is a very angry film and Unforgiven a deeply depressing one. Both are extremely bleak in their outlook.
A Caveat and a Content Warning
I think High Plains Drifter is very good and I would recommend it with a caveat:
It has some awful sexual violence at the beginning, by the protagonist no less. There's no getting around this, and I'll be talking about it a good bit here. So if you do not feel up to engaging with some pretty nasty stuff, probably best to skip the movie and sit this post out.
Background
High Plains Drifter was the second film (and the first Western) that Clint Eastwood directed. It was written by Ernest Tidyman who won an Oscar for The French Connection two years earlier. (Tidyman also created Shaft, writing the novels and at least contributing to two of the movie adaptations, Shaft (1971) and Shaft's Big Score! (1972). That's not relevant to anything here but it surprised me.)
Drifter is a movie that at times feels very mean and nihilistic. (Intentionally) The frontier townsfolk and the exploitative corporate mining company running it do not come off well in this at all. By and large they're selfish, opportunistic cowards who don't mind violence as long as it's done by someone else to someone else. The film hates these people.
Drifter was generally well received, though John Wayne didn't like it. To quote him: "That isn't what the West was all about. That isn't the American people who settled this country." I find his objection kind of funny given the iconoclastic nature of Drifter regarding American mythologizing. Wayne also said in a Playboy interview in 1971 that “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from [Native Americans]. … There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” So maybe John Wayne shouldn't be the authority on what the West was like and I'm not surprised he missed some of the point.
A Quick Summary
Note: High Plains Drifter has a rather large and surprising twist in the middle that I'm going to spoil very shortly. Fair warning.
High Plains Drifter begins with the Stranger (Eastwood) riding into the lakeside mining town of Lago. He is hired by the powers that be to defend the town against three outlaws, former mining company employees that the company screwed over and imprisoned, who are about to be released and are intent on revenge. The Stranger is given the authority to do anything he wants in defense of Lago. He proceeds to mess with everyone and waste the town's time and resources.
Though there's some ambiguity, it's slowly revealed that the Stranger is likely the spirit of Jim Duncan, a Marshal whipped to death by the outlaws while the whole town watched in silence. This explains his, and the film's, contempt for the town and why he's spending so much time screwing with them. When the outlaws arrive near the end, the Stranger just abandons Lago to their revenge. He returns that night and kills the three outlaws while the town burns behind him. The next morning he leaves and while riding into the distance he seems to vanish into a heat mirage.
I was not expecting Drifter's supernatural element but I very much appreciated it and, like all good twists, it re-contextualized and informed all the preceding action. It's absolutely integral to the film and doesn't feel like something tacked on just to surprise the audience.
The Stranger's Arrival
The opening of High Plains Drifter seems to adhere to the standard Western trope where a stranger wanders into a troubled town. It's immediately obvious though, that something here is...off. The opening shot of the film is a long distance landscape shot distorted by a shimmering mirage. In the distance a rider materializes, seemingly out of nowhere.
The score is more akin to a horror score, with a lot of keening synth drones and dissonance, It's unsettling, evoking the wails of restless spirits in a ghost story.
The filmic rhythms of the Stranger riding into town are superficially similar to A Fistful of Dollars but there's a far more sinister cast as the camera goes to great lengths to avoid giving the viewer a good look at his face. He's seen mostly from behind, unlike in Dollars where you see Joe's face in close up almost immediately. Both films have shots of townsfolk looking warily out their windows at him as he rides by, but in Dollars they are intercut with shots of Joe reacting and they come after he has had a conversation of sorts with the bell ringer. He's already a person we "know." Drifter lacks all of this visual humanization and the Stranger feels more like an unknowable and ominous force the townsfolk are reacting in fear to. There's a menace to it that is closer to what I'd expect for a villain introduction.
When you do finally see his face, though he's superficially similar to the stoic Joe, he doesn't seem to be observing and trying to figure out the town the way Joe was in his opening. The only moment where he has a remotely human reaction is when a whip cracks near him and he gets visibly startled. On first viewing, I took this as the film showing his gunfighter instincts in his quick reaction to an unexpected noise, but it becomes clear later when he dreams of being whipped and begging for help, that he was reacting to that memory. It's good planting and payoff.
The Stranger's whip crack reaction is one of the "Weaponization of expectations" things I mentioned earlier. The film sets you up to think you're just seeing a trope in action, in this case the badass gunfighter with lightning reflexes primed for violence, but eventually recontextualizes it to be something else. It's not a preview of skill, it's a crack in his armor.
Callie Travers, Sarah Belding, and Sexual Violence
The Stranger's villain-adjacent introduction transforms into full on villainy when he rapes Callie Travers shortly after arriving in Lago. Callie bumps the Stranger in the street and then insults him. He responds by dragging her into the stable and raping her. It's shocking and ugly and after it's over, the Stranger leaves and tells a man to stable his horse. It's one more callous dehumanization and humiliation for Callie; the stable is just a place for dumb animals. The Stranger's gruff "My horse" is the next spoken line of dialog after Callie begs him to let her go. It's gross.
I was really concerned about the framing, like "Please God, movie, don't do the James Bond / Pussy Galore thing where it turns out to be fine because she liked it." The film does not. Callie explicitly calls it rape, later saying to the Sheriff "You're gonna let him get away with this? Isn't forcible rape in broad daylight a misdemeanor in this town?"
The text of a horrible line by the sheriff to the Stranger after Callie tries to shoot him could, out of context, be read as a case of the type of framing I was worried about:
The Stranger
I wonder why it took her so long to get mad?
Sheriff
Because maybe you didn't go back for more.
But, given that this is spoken by the ineffectual Sheriff of a town that is explicitly shown to be deserving of punishment for their callousness and apathy, I read it as yet another example of why a reckoning is deserved rather than as a case of the film trying to absolve the Stranger.
The Stranger terrorizes Callie again later after he, using his newfound fiat powers, clears everyone out of the hotel he has commandeered and arranges a dinner with Callie so he can have sex with her. Again, I was a little worried about the framing at first. She protests but then goes to meet him, but it becomes clear that she did it to set him up. She sneaks out of the room after he falls asleep and some men go in to kill him. The Stranger anticipates this so it doesn't work, but still it was a deliberate gambit by Callie.
I think Callie is the most tragic character in Drifter. She's assaulted almost immediately and she has no real recourse, as the town chooses to protect and empower the Stranger. And as seen when she sleeps with him to keep him occupied until her associates can kill him, she doesn't have a whole lot of options. There's definitely an implication that she's been "passed around" as it were, and given how crappy everyone in town is, it comes across as a woman doing whatever she can to survive. Like she's just an object to the men in town and she's having to debase herself to get out of bad situations. And the male characters frame it all as her fault, as exemplified in the following exchange:
Callie
You're an animal.
The Stranger
You have a way of bringing that out.
...Jesus. It's horrible.
While Drifter handles Callie's rape about as well as it could have, there's a scene with the other female character, Sarah, that I think fumbles pretty hard. After the Stranger blows up part of the hotel while evading Callie's trap, he talks to Sarah, the wife of the hotel owner. She says "I don't know where you're going to sleep now. Bodies everywhere. All the rooms are ruined except for our room." She realizes what she just said and the Stranger grabs her and drags her to the room while she says "Stop, let go of me!" She grabs a pair of scissors to defend herself because "It's no secret what you did to Callie Travers."
But then they have sex and the next morning she likes him just fine, so we're back to him forcing himself on someone but it's ok because she liked it. The Stranger and Sarah barely interact before this scene, too. If I were to squint really hard and be way too charitable, there was maybe something in her delivery of the line "our room" that almost made it sound like she meant her and the Stranger's room, rather than her and her husband's, so perhaps there's an implication that she and Jim Duncan had something going on and that's why she reversed course on the Stranger on a dime? Like part of her realizes who he really is? That could parse, as she was the only one who made even the slightest attempt to stop Duncan's murder. (She got about two feet before being grabbed and taken inside by her husband.)
That's reading into things pretty deeply / wildly speculating though. I very much don't like this filmmaking choice and am hard pressed to see what purpose it even serves. In the morning Sarah does say these pretty important lines:
Have you ever heard the name Jim Duncan? He was town marshal here. He's lying out there in an unmarked grave. They say the dead don't rest without a marker of some kind.
...but there's no reason they need to be post coital. And even if that context were important, all of this trouble would go away completely by just having Sarah want the Stranger from the start and cutting the line confirming she knows he raped Callie. Sarah clearly does not like Lago or her husband, so she could appreciate the Stranger as an outsider who is really monkeying up the works of this crappy callous town.
All of this dents the way the film sided with Callie earlier. In isolation, Callie's rape is framed appropriately, but having Sarah's interaction play out this way means that stuff like the Stranger saying of Callie "As I recall, she enjoyed that quite a bit" goes from being absolutely wrong in principle, to something wrong only in that specific case. It injects ambiguity on how the film frames sexual violence in general.
Media should always tread lightly with this stuff. I don't think Callie's rape scene was necessary in the first place, but then to have the scene with Sarah retroactively affirm the incel read of Callie's rape, i.e. that she secretly wanted it and/or liked it so it's fine, is unfortunate (to put it incredibly mildly.)
Artifice and Truth
Both the town of Lago and the Stranger hide their true natures under a veneer of familiarity. Lago is, on the surface, a God-fearing and hardworking frontier town beset by troublemakers and targeted by outlaws. The Stranger seems to be another Man With No Name available for hire who will no doubt turn out to have a heart of gold. These are the facades they present to each other but they are just facades. Lago is a corrupt town, a place of banal and bureaucratic evil in the service of profit and the Stranger is a spirit of vengeance.
Lago
The two scenes of a man being whipped to death show the two aspects of Lago that make it worthy of punishment. The first, occurring early, is the Stranger's dream and the second, happening much later, shows the same event in a different light and appears to maybe be Mordecai's memory. The former happens before the viewer has even heard of Jim Duncan and, importantly, you don't see him die so it appears to be a flashback to something that happened to the Stranger. The latter scene happens after the details of Duncan's fate are revealed, so the viewer becomes aware that the man in both scenes was him.
The Stranger's dream highlights callousness and apathy. The faces of the men doing the whipping and the faces of all the onlookers are completely hidden in deep shadows. No one makes any effort to stop the beating, even as Duncan begs. They're just ominous, uncaring spectators. It's not clear when this happened and there's no obvious indication that it occurred in Lago. Since the viewer doesn't yet know that the victim is literally Duncan, later when the Sheriff tells the Stranger about the man it seems like it's a parallel situation. Like the Stranger sees in Lago the same callousness and apathy he experienced when he was beaten, a connection only strengthened by the Sheriff's causal attitude to the Stranger killing three men almost as soon as he arrived and then raping Callie.
The later scene, which I'll call "Mordecai's dream," recontextualizes the earlier scene. It does show everyone's faces and it emphasizes the mercenary evil of the town. The three men whipping Duncan, Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers, are the same "troubleshooters" the Lago Mining Company hired and then had framed and arrested. The Company had them murder Duncan to protect its interests. All of the onlookers are people we've met in the film and though many of the people watching look disturbed, in the end they do nothing, signaling they ultimately agree with the mining executive Drake's earlier assessment that, regarding Duncan's murder, "We had no choice in that matter and you know it." They all knew the mine might be shut down unless Duncan went away.
(This attitude is also present in the town's handling of Callie. Sheriff Shaw clearly knew what the Stranger did to her, but chose to ignore it because the town wanted the Stranger to kill Bridges and the Carlins.)
During Duncan's murder, only Sarah made any attempt to intervene but she was immediately restrained by her husband and taken inside. At the end of the day, the town will not only passively allow a murder, but also actively prevent anyone from stopping one. To quote Sarah's husband Lewis, "This whole town had a hand in what happened." It's not that they didn't care, they just cared about their mine more.
The town preacher's feeble protest to hiring the Stranger at a council meeting is pretty emblematic of all the "God-fearin' people" (as the Sheriff called them) of Lago:
Preacher
Nevertheless, my conscience will not allow me to be a party to the hiring of a professional gunfighter.
Drake (I think)
Maybe you'd like to go out there and stand them off yourself, Preacher.
Preacher
... I'm just a simple man of God.
Drake (I think)
It's time we unsimplified you, Reverend. Borders, Morris and Short were professional gunfighters on the payroll of the Lago Mining Company to protect our interests and the interests of this town, which are identical. They stood around drinking beer and looking snotty for a full year. Then one day before we actually needed the bastards they managed to get themselves killed. So if you've got a suggestion, we'd be delighted to hear it. Otherwise, take your conscience elsewhere while we think about saving your ass.
Preacher (after a pause)
Land sakes! Where's time gone to? Miss Peekins' eldest is feeling poorly. I promised-- If you gentlemen will excuse me.
High Plains Drifter really tears at the mythologized view of the frontier West and as the film goes on, the Romantic veneer gives way to the realities of weakness, apathy, proxy violence, and greed. This is reflected in the appearance of the town itself. Lago is, unusually for the genre, rather strikingly set against a bright blue lake. (It was filmed in Mono Lake, California.) The town looks quaint and idyllic, a humble frontier town. By the end, at the command of the Stranger, it has been painted blood red and re-christened "Hell." A not insignificant part of it has burned down.
(This is no doubt a coincidence, but Mono Lake itself is extremely alkaline and more than twice as salty as seawater. So it looks pretty, but if you drink it you'll die. An accidental metaphor for Lago.)
The Drifter's Intentions
The Stranger is a spirit of vengeance, both metaphorically and literally, in the guise of a mercenary gunslinger. After the Sheriff approaches him about killing the three returning outlaws, he demurs with "I have nothing against these men." The Sheriff, and likely the audience, assumes this is a bargaining tactic to get more money but after Mordecai's dream it's revealed to just be a lie.
Mordecai's dream recontextualizes all of the Stranger's seemingly random actions in "defense" of the town. He's not playing 3 dimensional chess the way Joe or Sanjuro were in A Fistful of Dollars / Yojimbo; he's f*cking with the townsfolk. He's trying to humiliate them and see how much of their time and resources he can get them to knowingly waste. This waste is particularly pointed, given the greed at the heart of the town, a greed that led to his death.
The town could end all of this waste at any time by choosing to defend themselves. They are armed, and there are only three men coming for them. But they still want someone else to do their dirty work and they think proxy violence means the blood is not on their hands. Like with Duncan's murder, the townsfolk are ok with violence in defense of their interests, as long as some hired outsider is doing it for them.
The Stranger sets the townsfolk at each other's throats and then breaks their spirit in a surprising and climactic anti-climax. The town has been painted red, renamed Hell, and a sign saying "Welcome Home Boys" has been hung on the road in. Bridges and the Carlins are on their way. It seems to be setting up for a big set piece showdown between the Stranger and the men who murdered him.
And then he abandons the town.
The scene parallels the opening, with him silently riding away as people look on him with a different kind of fear: the fear of abandonment. They still have the guns and his training. They could still fight even without him. But they don't, and the outlaws wreak havoc.
Early in the film, after the Stranger's dream, when Belding asks if him if he is staying another night, he responds with "I'll let you know." Is this a hint that there was an off ramp for Lago? That if they had chosen to own the consequences of their actions and defend themselves, the Stranger would have let them be? I have my doubts, but the town's choices mean we'll never know for sure.
The Drifter's Nature
It's not just the strangers intentions that are obscured at the start of the film, but also his nature. In Callie's first interaction with him, she unwittingly foreshadows the film's twist, insulting him with "At a distance, you'd almost pass for a man."
The Stranger is never really under physical threat. Even in the final confrontation with Stacey Bridges, the way it's framed makes it clear Bridges has absolutely no chance. He barely raises his gun arm before the Stranger shoots him.
The closest the Stranger comes to being in danger is near the beginning when Callie tries to shoot him in the bathtub and at the very end when, after he has killed the outlaws, Belding sneaks up on him with a rifle.
When Callie bursts in on the Stranger, he ducks under the water while she fires into the tub from only a few feet away before the Sheriff restrains her. At the time, I thought maybe the movie had overplayed it's hand in the way you see action movies do when a character survives something that's juuuuust a bit outside of the established reality of the film and it breaks the suspension of disbelief a little. Like, how the f*ck did she miss him from that close?
As it turns out, maybe she didn't.
This is yet another case of the filmmakers taking advantage of audience assumptions. You assume he survived because he's got stoic-badass / protagonist plot armor, but then another possible explanation is revealed. It's a small moment, but it reveals how tightly woven the central twist is with the entire film.
(And I guess we'll never find out what would have happened at the end if Mordecai hadn't shot Belding before he had a chance to pull the trigger.)
God's Scourge and Minister
For this same lord, I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister.
- Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
After watching Drifter I couldn't stop thinking about a Teaching Company lecture I listened to on Shakespeare's Hamlet, where Dartmouth Professor Peter Saccio described what he called the Prophetic Theory of Tragedy. (That's Prophetic as "of the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible," particularly Isaiah) To quote Saccio:
"Now this is a new, a different view of tragedy. A view that tragedy is part of God's plan, God's way of coping with evil in the world. God intervenes in human affairs to see that justice is done. In some cases he intervenes by means of a human agent that is he picks a particular man to punish others for their crimes. Using one human being to bring another justifiably from prosperity to misery.
Now such a divine agent could be described with one of two nouns: either a scourge or a minister, depending on his own ethical status. A scourge is usually a man who is already so wicked himself that he is beyond salvation. The wickedness he does in punishing other miscreants adds no more to his crimes. God can use him as an agent, it doesn't corrupt him anymore, indeed his function in the divine plan is part of his own punishment. "He punishes me with this."
That is what Richard III is in the play of Richard III. He is God's agent upon the Yorkists and the Lancastrians to punish them for all their sins in the Wars of the Roses. And he's the worst of them all and he can go to Hell having done all that.
A minister is also an agent of God, but his ethical status is different. A minister punishes "to punish this with me," but he does not merely punish he also sets up a new situation that is good. Where a scourge merely wreaks the wrath of God, a minister purges the whole guilty condition and circumstances are so arranged that his infliction of punishment on others is not in itself a further crime but an act of public justice. ... [Hamlet] sees that it is hard to be a scourge without being a minister and hard to be a minister without being a scourge. Things are messy here. It is difficult to get into this business of divine vengeance without getting guilty yourself. This execution of divine commands is physically messy and morally risky."
High Plains Drifter ends with the Stranger riding out of a Lago left in chaos. Buildings are burned, livelihoods destroyed, people are dead, and no one except perhaps Mordecai has any idea why the Stranger did any of it. When the drifter vanished into the mirage, I thought that he felt a lot like Saccio's scourge.
We don't know anything about Jim Duncan's "ethical status" while he was alive. He's only seen being killed and the only things we know about him are that he was a former US Marshall, he was hired by the Lago Mining Company, and he discovered the mine was on government land. To be honest, given the types of troubleshooters we've seen in the Company employ and the Company's track record of leaving disgruntled outlaws, I'd say the odds aren't great that Duncan was a moral paragon. Drake says that Duncan "Was determined to turn them in" and "Wouldn't listen to reason," but that absolutely could be post facto rationalization for the murder. Hell, Duncan could have been blackmailing them for money and they would have killed him just the same.
Duncan, in any case is dead. The Stranger is all we see. His ethical status is not in doubt, given one of the first things he does is rape a woman.
The Stranger does, in a sense, hold a mirror to the town and lets the same faults that led to the town's corruption and his own death be the mechanism of their punishment. (With one glaring exception, that you can probably guess). This is explicit in the film. In response to Sarah telling him that people are afraid of him, he says "It's what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid."
His punishments are not quite indiscriminate. He shows kindness to the Mexican and the Native American characters who are treated poorly by the townsfolk, and Mordecai, the town's put upon little person.
But then there's Callie, the glaring exception I just mentioned, and the only person I feel like was punished extremely disproportionately. The Stranger does malicious and direct harm to only four of the townsfolk in this film: the three men who literally killed him, and Callie. (The three gunslingers at the beginning and the three men at the hotel were killed in self-defense.) The Stranger does a lot of direct pecuniary damage to Lago, but the other people who get hurt by the end are hurt by the outlaws when the Stranger abandons the town.
Mordecai, the Mexicans, and the Native Americans were not, and had never been, in the room when the decisions leading to this whole mess were made. But Callie wasn't either, and she didn't do less to stop Duncan's murder than Mordecai did, and she couldn't have stopped it any more than Mordecai or Sarah could. But she didn't look upset enough, I guess?
I may have put my thumb on the scale even implying there is a component of divinity in the Stranger's reckoning. Is God here at all? This may be a film of Old Testament style wrath and supernatural vengeance but God feels pretty absent.
We get faux religiosity from the one explicitly Christian character but no counter example, no moral paragon, no "true" representative. There's just a mess of weakness, corruption, and revenge. When the Stranger commands the town to paint all the buildings red, the pastor says "You can't possibly mean the church?" and the Stranger replies "I mean especially the church." It all contributes to the iconoclastic bleakness of the film.
I'm not sure you've served as God's minister when the people ministered to have no idea what happened or why, and His presence never even came up. So, if we apply Saccio's Prophetic Theory of Tragedy, my money is emphatically on "scourge."
A Figure of Terror
The final confrontation with Stacey Bridges and Dan and Cole Carlin is played like a slasher horror scene, with the Stranger in the role of the slasher. The Stranger kills them all with no difficulty, first Cole, then Dan, and then Stacey. When Cole, inside the tavern with Dan, Stacey, and all the cowering townsfolk, gets too close to the doors, the whip that comes from the darkness to wrap around his neck and drag him outside feels almost supernatural. The keening wails of the score begin as soon as it comes in and the whip enters the scene from a point in space far higher than the Stranger could have been standing. This may be just the kind of minor continuity error that happens when blocking a complicated scene, but combined with the score it gives a sort of unearthly vibe.
This sort of physics and geography breaking unreality happens again soon after when the Stranger's rope slings down from... somewhere and hangs Dan Carlin. We don't even see the Stranger this time. Probably the thing these whips and ropes from nowhere reminded me of the most was how Spawn's chains grabbed people out of the darkness from impossible angles in the Spawn animated HBO miniseries. (That's a good series, btw, though apparently the live action movie and the comic it's based on both suck.)
Throughout this end sequence, when the Stranger is on screen he's obscured by darkness and backlit by fire. When he beats Cole to death, the camera is firmly in Cole's point of view and the scene plainly mirrors the murder of Jim Duncan even down to reaction shots of the same disturbed townsfolk. There is a palpable fear from all the onlookers, even Stacey and Dan.
The final moments of Bridges, the leader and last man standing, are also shot from his perspective. The camera biases towards him, with the Stranger again backlit by flames and standing either in the middle distance or the far distance while Stacey is visible in the foreground. The Stranger's face is not visible, but Bridges gets frequent close-up reaction shots.
The focus on the outlaws's terror makes the scene feel less triumphant that it could have been and there's no cathartic moment where they realize why this is happening. The last thing Stacey Bridges says is "Who are you?" The Stranger does not answer.
Another Echo of Hamlet
One more Shakespeare inspired idea occurred to me when thinking about High Plains Drifter. In Hamlet, the prince meets a ghost on the castle battlements who tells of how Hamlet's uncle Claudius murdered him. The ghost has been released from the fires of Purgatory to walk the earth at night, and ask Hamlet to seek vengeance for his murder. It says it's his father, but... is it? As Hamlet says:
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.
- Act II, scene ii
Four hundred years later, the audience of course already knows the ghost is telling the truth. But Hamlet doesn't. He doesn't know for sure that this isn't a demonic ploy to ensnare him and this is why he concocts an elaborate plan to verify what the ghost told him.
At the end of High Plains Drifter Mordecai, painting a headstone, says "I never did know your name." The Stranger replies with "Yes, you do" and rides off while we see the headstone is for Marshal Jim Duncan, calling back to Sarah telling the Stranger "He's lying out there in an unmarked grave. They say the dead don't rest without a marker of some kind."
This is read as a confirmation that the Stranger was Jim Duncan, which it probably is. But I like to entertain a little bit of Hamlet's doubt, and consider whether the Stranger might have been a devil in a Godless West, tempting the viewers to think he was right while he draws everyone into destruction.
Buddy Van Horn
One other subtle point of interesting ambiguity in the film is that the man we see in the two whipping scenes isn't actually Clint Eastwood. It's Buddy Van Horn, who was Eastwood's stunt double. I absolutely didn't notice it wasn't Eastwood when I watched it, and neither did James despite this being his second viewing. I only found out when I saw Van Horn credited as Duncan in the cast list and then went back to check. The way it's shot makes it hard to tell, even when I knew it wasn't Eastwood, as it's dark and his face is beaten and bloody.
I wonder how many people noticed it wasn't Eastwood. This could potentially have clued them in to the supernatural aspect way earlier, because how would the Stranger have remembered this thing that happened to someone else? It's also possible that subconsciously I did register it wasn't him, but that was overridden by filmic language: it's framed as a flashback, and the guy looks and sounds very much like Eastwood so maybe my brain just edited it to be him.
It's a nice touch in a movie where the identity of the protagonist is a little up in the air.
Against Corporations - The Lago Mining Company
One last thread of High Plains Drifter that I think is interesting is the anti-corporatist undercurrent. The prime mover of the town is the ultra capitalist Lago Mining Company. The company is what lies under the town. As Drake said, its interests and the town's are identical.
The Sheriff uses the term "troubleshooters" to describe the people Lago has had to hire, which begs the question: hire to do what? Defend the town from outlaws? Break up unions? Press gang laborers? Who is actually working in the mine? The townsfolk we see, clean, comfortable, and calling the shots, don't seem like they're clocking in with pickaxes. I don't think the actual miners even come up in conversation. Is it a stretch to think making sure quotas get met is probably in the troubleshooter brief? There is real life historical (and current) precedent for these kind of frontier style corporate tactics.
We see six current or former troubleshooters in the film, the three men the Stranger kills at the beginning, Stacey Bridges and the Carlins, and they are all the unsavory gunslinger types, which doesn't bode well to what the Company needs them for. Given what happened to Duncan, it seems the mandate of "protect our interests" covers quite a lot.
There's a throwaway line between Drake and Belding that is pretty revealing. Belding says
"Hell, Dave, maybe we don't even have a problem. Every man that ever got sent up went away saying he'd come back and get even, right? But can you actually remember anyone ever comin' back and doin' anything? I can't think of one. Can you?"
So this has all happened before. Bridges and the Carlins aren't outliers; the Company hires outlaw types, uses them, and then "sends them up." When you've got a whole string of former employees swearing revenge, maybe you're the problem.
The powers that be also openly discuss double crossing the Stranger and killing him rather than paying him.
This all ties into the bureaucratic evil I mentioned earlier. The town notables aren't mustache twirling villains that gleefully murder people because it's fun. They have built in plausible deniability and the distancing mechanisms that allow them to justify whatever they need to for profit. Duncan was killed, yes, but the outlaws did that, not them, and anyway it needed to be done, and its not like they were happy about it.
High Plains Drifter has a cynical view of corporatist / capitalist profit motives. The Stranger got his revenge, but at the end of the day, will any of this matter to the Lago Mining Company? Won't they just send another executive? The underlying power structures and incentives at the heart of the town are still there, Lago is just down a few citizens and a few buildings. The Stranger might have humbled the operators, but he didn't damage the machine.
Give it a month and the cycle will just start again.
A Gallimaufry of Small things
- I like the odd banquet the Stranger sets up right before the outlaws arrive. He has Belding tear down his own barn to provide wood for picnic tables and commandeers a lot of food from the tavern to have this weird feast of fools, almost like it's setup up Lord of the Flies style "kill the pig scene." It doesn't end up mattering to the plot very much but it was a strangely ominous setup that wasted a lot of Lago's resources.
- The Stranger makes the shopkeepers not be crappy to the Native Americans. Maybe John Wayne was right and this film wasn't the real West.
- Anthony James who plays the outlaw Cole Carlin is also an important minor character in Unforgiven. (And The Naked Gun 2 1/2, which I watched all the time as a kid.)
- There's a funny and ironic line right after Sarah wonders if the dead can rest if their graves are unmarked. In the next scene, the first line is they Sheriff saying they shouldn't bother marking the graves of the men the Stranger just killed in the hotel. Lago never learns, I guess.
- I saw a youtube comment that mentions that in the German dub the commenter watched as a kid the Stranger was said to be Jim Duncan's brother, which...sucks. I also heard that Clint Eastwood may have said that in an interview, but most people seemed to think he was joking.
Conclusion
This was a well crafted, interesting, ugly, and troubling film. If you made it this far, you probably can decide for yourself if you want to watch it.
Stay tuned for Part 3 and Unforgiven.
-m
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