A defining feature of the Western is that the civil order it depicts lacks developed institutions, particularly political institutions. Sometimes this absence has to do with questions about the legitimacy or desirability of the direction in which the civil order is headed in so many Westerns: toward the institutions of lawmaking, of political action, representation, and organization. At the very least, in the matter at hand in certain Westerns, the political is depicted as at best irrelevant, at worst corrupting. Or so I shall argue in what follows.
There is another feature of such Westerns, which I believe functions as a correlate to the absence or distrust of political authority. That feature is a representation of a kind of moral law, and in particular of justice. These two features suggest that certain Westerns can be read as representing a moral law in a particular relation to the civil order and its burgeoning political dimension. In the potential normative vacuum created by the absence of political authority, the moral law steps forward in such Westerns as the first law that must be kept. It is natural or transcendent, in the sense that its authority does not depend on any civil or political order. It not only provides a normative center of gravity for such Westerns, but it also implies a condition of the legitimacy of the coming political order. In such Westerns, the value and legitimacy of the civil order is therefore depicted as rooted in a certain kind of moral law.
After outlining a classic instance of this vision of the moral law in relation to the civil order, I will present Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) as offering a variation on the vision, one that amounts to an evolution of it. Despite the appeal of the vision, I will argue that the variant of it in High Plains Drifter should alert us to certain of its shortcomings. In particular, I will argue that conceiving of the moral law as transcending civil institutions in a particular way can in fact undermine our ability to determine and live up to that law.
In order to see this Western representation of justice, and of the legitimacy of the civil order as rooted in a certain relation to the moral law, let us first consider another Western standing clearly in the background of High Plains Drifter, namely High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952). In High Noon, the town of Hadleyville proves itself unworthy of the law when it fails to back Will Kane (Gary Cooper) against the return of outlaw Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), sworn to vengeance against the lawmen who put him away. Miller has been pardoned, which (as the act of a political official) indicates that the civil order is here under siege due to a political failure. Indeed, as I shall argue, Hadleyville’s failure is depicted in High Noon as a failure of the political, even of the political as itself a kind of failure.
Hadleyville’s failure is foretold in a scene in which Judge Mettrick (Otto Kruger), who sentenced Miller, delivers a hasty “lesson in civics” to Kane, the marshal who arrested Miller. During that lesson, the judge takes down the U.S. flag, packs up his scales of justice and law books, and explains to Kane that the civil order is by nature weak, and that people will accept tyranny and fall in line behind the powerful, no matter how unjust the powerful might be. That is why the judge is hurrying to get out of town, and he recommends that Kane do the same. The civil failure is crucially depicted sometime later in a sort of impromptu town hall meeting in the church. There the townsfolk, while acknowledging their debt to Kane for having brought law and order to Hadleyville, blame “politicians up north” for pardoning Miller. Furthermore, they claim that the conflict between Kane and Miller is now a private matter, since Kane has recently resigned as marshal. In order not to discourage the investment of those same northerners, the townsfolk ultimately encourage Kane to run, so that the inevitable fight with the Miller gang might not occur on the streets of Hadleyville. It would give the town a bad name, after all, recalling the days before Kane came to make the town safe for “women and children.” In sum, this political discussion is shown not merely to be ineffective, but to reinforce and even extend the town’s hypocrisy and cowardice. The town, in other words, proves the judge’s point.
Interestingly, it may well be the words themselves, the very political dialogue, which the picture regards as corrupting. More than once Kane is asked why he is compelled to stay and fight Miller. He is generally unable to explain why, and often he, or others speaking on his behalf, refer to his reasons as something that cannot be explained if not already understood. Kane’s predecessor and patron, the old marshal Martin Howe (Lon Chaney Jr.), tells Kane that he is not surprised the town won’t stand behind him, since people “got to talk themselves into law and order,” and that they don’t really care about or value the law and the lawman. Since Kane’s reasons are something that cannot be explained, we already know that no amount of talking is going to improve their situation. The upshot of all of this is that when Kane eventually vanquishes the Miller gang, he throws his tin star in the dirt and leaves town as the residents of Hadleyville flow slowly back into the street. Despite being saved from the Miller gang, the town has shown itself to be unworthy of the law. Bad times are coming for Hadleyville, in the form of either more Frank Millers or the northern politicians who pardoned him, or both.
What is it that Hadleyville lacks, making it unworthy, illegitimate, and ultimately incapable of defending itself against Frank Miller? Howe suggests that it is lack of care or respect for the law. But that answer is ambiguous. The town, after all, is courting the developed political order to the north, an order already revealed to be complicit in the problem the town now faces. It is not concern for the positive law, much less political order, that is at the heart of what Hadleyville lacks—not merely laws on the books, or a judge, or even a marshal.
To get at what Hadleyville lacks, High Noon invites us to ask another question. What compels Kane to stay and fight? It is no longer his professional duty. It is also not the need to protect Hadleyville. It is made clear throughout the movie that some citizens of Hadleyville, notably the saloon owner, Gillis (Larry J. Blake), and the hotel clerk (Howland Chamberlain), actually think that their interests were better served when Frank Miller rode roughshod over the town. Things were livelier then, and business in the saloon and the hotel was likely better. Regulation, it seems, has always been bad for business. Certainly we sense that something is at stake for Hadleyville, but not the town’s destruction. Whatever Miller threatens in the civil order cannot easily be accounted for in terms of safety, welfare, or private interests.
What compels Kane, I contend, is the fact that Miller has committed serious and violent wrongs, wrongs that strike at the dignity and status of persons as such, wrongs which must be opposed and negated. The reason Kane has trouble explaining this is that it cannot be easily or properly accounted for in terms of consequences to the interests of people, including even his own interests. The reasons of prudence do not necessarily lead to the conclusion that such wrongs must be opposed and negated. Rather, justice itself demands it.
This then is what Hadleyville lacks: clear insight into a demand of justice, a moral or natural law defining right and wrong, and especially the will or courage to execute that law. We may summarize this trait as rectitude.1 In such a Western, the right kind of gunfighter represents this moral law, which prefigures, transcends, and grounds the legitimacy of the civil order. It transcends that order in the same sense in which it is a natural law. That is, its authority and perhaps even its actualization do not depend on the civil order, or on any legal or political system of institutions. On the contrary, the authority of these depends on it.2 I will therefore sometimes refer to it as the law that stands behind the law.3 Crucially, it is represented as a law that cannot be properly known or determined by political discourse or legislative action or perhaps any collective communicative or discursive actions of persons. This also suggests an epistemic sense in which the law is natural. Our knowledge of it, as in Kane’s case, is a matter of clear moral sense or intuition, perhaps incommunicable to others. Deliberation regarding what the moral law is or ought to be, what amounts to a violation of that law, and what is required in its defense has little place in this vision and is sometimes actively derided. At the very least, such deliberative practices are as likely to obscure as to clarify the moral law.
With this representation of justice and the civil order in view, I turn now to Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. My main contention will be that that the representation of justice in High Plains Drifter is an evolution of the representation described above, one that follows from this depiction of the law that stands behind the law.
High Plains Drifter is set in the fictional mining town of Lago. In the opening shots, the Stranger (played, of course, by Eastwood) rides down into the distant and isolated town, out of a cinematic haze of heat and hills.4 Jane Tompkins argues that the landscape shot, common to the opening of the Western, establishes the preeminence of nature and the absence of culture and society.5 But the haze in High Plains Drifter is initially indistinct and disorienting, a misty blank that only gradually gives way to a landscape in focus, as if to suggest that the earth, along with the Stranger, is materializing before our eyes.
A marshal has been murdered in Lago, killed by assassins hired by the owners of the mine. He was bullwhipped to death in the street. Eventually we learn that the marshal, Duncan (Buddy Van Horn), had discovered that the mine was on government land, a fact that would invalidate its claim, drive the Lago Mining Company out of business, and presumably ruin the town. The marshal was murdered before he had a chance to reveal what he knew.
Lago is waiting for revenge to rain down on it. The marshal’s killers are soon to be released from jail. After the murder they were railroaded, framed for stealing a gold ingot from the company. Having recognized their power in a town in which power had expelled the law, the assassins had begun to take liberties. The town, compounding its sins, got rid of them. But the people of Lago are sure Stacy Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and his partners, the Carlin brothers (Anthony James and Dan Vadis), will return for revenge, and so they have hired three gunfighters for protection. It is worth noting that Sheriff Shaw (Walter Barnes) seems not even to be a candidate for protecting the town. He is an ineffective placeholder occupying a meaningless office. Because it has deprived itself of the real law, the town must resort to hiring out the work of protection to second-rate killers. Unfortunately for Lago, within minutes of his arrival the Stranger kills the three gunfighters. The ease with which he kills them is remarkable. When the gunfighters interrupt his drink, attempting to intimidate him by asking whether he thinks he’s fast enough for life in Lago, he grabs a bottle of whiskey before they can reach their guns and replies, “a lot faster than you’ll ever live to be.” When they pursue him to the barbershop and threaten him again, interrupting his shave in the process, he shoots them all dead, after which he rapes Callie Travers (Mariana Hill), who has knocked the cigarillo out of his mouth and insulted him on the street.
In a sign of both its desperation and its turpitude, the town turns to the Stranger for help. Though initially disinclined, he agrees to help after he has been assured a free hand in the town. Under the pretense of preparing Lago to defend itself against the Bridges gang, what unfolds is, I shall argue, a perfect exposure and negation of Lago’s corrupt civil order.
In the course of these preparations, the Stranger dreams more than once of Duncan’s murder, appears to dream of himself as Duncan murdered, in fact. After an attempt on his life, which he effortlessly escapes, he rides out to torment the Bridges gang, already close to town. Invisible in the hills, he fires down on them with uncanny accuracy, only to frighten them and stoke Stacy Bridges’s vengeful fury. When the time comes, the Stranger, having had the town painted red in preparation for a “welcome home” celebration, abandons Lago to its destruction by the Bridges gang. That evening, as the gang’s revenge is near to climax, the Stranger returns unseen and kills the assassins one by one, in the very place they had bullwhipped the marshal to death.
The justice in High Plains Drifter is distinctively retributive. It is a matter of answering for a crime, of getting precisely what is deserved. Consider, for example, the reversals and exposures that unfold once the Stranger is placed in charge. The greed that led to the town’s corruption is turned on its head. Economic exchange is reversed, as the Stranger appropriates and redistributes goods according to his whim. He drives guests from the hotel, and when the preacher (Robert Donner) calls the dispossessed his brothers, the Stranger suggests that he take his “brothers” in, which the preacher does, at the same rates the hotel was charging. He exposes the loveless marriage between the hotel owner, Lewis Belding (Ted Hartley), and his wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom). We learn in flashback that Belding had restrained his wife when she tried to intervene on Duncan’s behalf.
These reversals occur while the Stranger ironically attempts to teach the town the courage it needs to defend itself. Hence, in the process of teaching Lago the importance of courage, the Stranger exposes the corruption that flowed from the town’s lack of moral courage when it acquiesced to Duncan’s murder. That lesson is fully learned when Mordecai (Billy Curtis), the town “runt” who had cowered beneath a porch during Duncan’s murder, kills Belding as Belding aims to shoot the Stranger in the back. It is the final killing in the movie, marking Mordecai’s moral elevation and ensuring Sarah’s liberation.
At the heart of these reversals is punishment for Duncan’s murder, and the punishment is startlingly precise. The wicked are killed; the weak are terrified. Those who bullwhipped the marshal are whipped in turn. The mayor (Stefan Gierasch) and the sheriff, who abdicated their duty to the law, are stripped of even the trappings of their false authority, replaced in their offices by Mordecai. Callie Travers, who used her sexuality to curry favor with powerful men, is raped. It would be no overstatement to say that in the universe of High Plains Drifter desert is the only engine that drives the narrative.
The Stranger avenges Duncan’s murder, but he also forces Lago to acknowledge its guilt, which is essential to the retribution. This is clearest at the movie’s climax, when the townsfolk fearfully realize that the assassins are being killed by bullwhip at the site of the marshal’s murder. It is telling that nearly everything the people of Lago have said about themselves and their town has been false. Indeed, the movie’s first piece of dialogue seems designed to tell the viewer just this. The lead thug informs the Stranger that most people find life in Lago a little too fast for them. But we have just seen the Stranger ride through a motionless town, its inhabitants pinned behind their doors and windows, fearfully watching him. What follows is a series of lies in which Lago attempts to hide its true identity. Of course, all of the lies flow from the town’s attempt to cover up its crime, a crime motivated by the need to keep the marshal from revealing the truth about the mining company’s claim, and so also about the founding and the legitimacy of the town itself.6 Sarah and Mordecai are the only townspeople who speak sincerely to the Stranger. Reflecting on the threat the Stranger poses, Sarah says: “You are a man that makes people afraid, and that makes you dangerous.” The Stranger replies: “It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid.” He is out to expose what they know inside, but everywhere he would turn to discover the truth he finds only lies. Instead, the truth about the murder is revealed in his dreams. The dream sequences recall the disorienting effect of the haze at the beginning of the movie. At first the viewer cannot discern what is going on, who is being whipped, and why. But gradually the disorientation fades and the truth about Lago is revealed, even as the denizens of the town try to obscure it, thereby revealing all the more about themselves.7 The Stranger need not bother with ordinary methods of discovery, and the viewer has access to what he knows via his dreams, which are perhaps revelations to him, but seem more likely to be tormenting reminders of something he already knows. And given the precision with which he metes out punishment, he seems to know it perfectly. The use of dreams makes the Stranger a kind of seer of hidden truths, and we are privy to his vision. They tell us, among other things, that knowing the relevant truth here, namely the guilt of the town, will not require investigation or argument. In short, no trial or deliberation will be necessary for justice to be done to Lago. Instead, what is required is clear moral vision, vision here associated with revelatory dreams, and the courage to act in accord with it.
The Stranger materializes out of the heat and descends from the mountains, killing and raping with ease. He paints Lago red, renames it “Hell,” and burns it clean in a ritualized acknowledgment of and atonement for its crime. He punishes all transgressors. He liberates Sarah and elevates Mordecai, the only two citizens who seem to have acknowledged and felt genuine remorse for Lago’s crime. Above all he avenges the murder of the marshal. When he leaves the town, though it has been decimated, the remaining inhabitants can breathe and even smile at last, their bloodguilt having been lifted, their civil order cleansed.8 He leaves Lago in the direction from which he came, through the cemetery. He was not passing through; Lago was his destination, his goal.9 Having done what he came to do, the Stranger returns into the haze of the hills, into whatever stands behind nature, on the other side of the cemetery.
As the Stranger leaves town he passes Mordecai carving Duncan’s name into a grave marker. Duncan has been acknowledged, and this is a sign that the civil order has returned to legitimacy, each individual having received his due and recognition. Mordecai looks up at the Stranger and remarks that he still doesn’t know his name. “Yes, you do,” the Stranger replies. The scene invites speculation about the identity of the Stranger.10 One possibility is that the Stranger’s name is Duncan, the dead marshal’s brother.11 Or perhaps the Stranger is the ghost of Duncan himself, who like the ghost of Banquo has returned to avenge his own murder.12 But the Stranger’s enigmatic claim that Mordecai knows his name also suggests that the name of the Stranger has been announced sometime before, or is eternally known. Death is his name. He rides a pale horse. Hell follows him. The first man he shoots, he shoots in the forehead, the crimson hole gaping as if to indicate that he did not have the seal of God on him.13 And though he kills the Bridges gang for their murder of Duncan, he also uses them as instruments of Lago’s destruction. Those three, Bridges and the Carlin brothers, are the other riders of this apocalypse.14 Hence the Stranger is an agent of God’s punishment. It is important that he remain nameless, though we are told that we know his name. This fact keeps him as close as possible to God the unnamable, to a strange and remote God. It keeps him from being one among the named inhabitants of the civil order.
His strangeness and his precision are further keys to understanding the relation between the civil and the moral orders depicted in the movie. I spoke above of the moral law of some Westerns as transcendent in the sense of having authority independent of civil institutions. But here that transcendence appears to involve an authority beyond even nature itself. It is supernatural in contrast to the worldliness of the civil, and outstrips even the power of nature. It enjoys absolute authority over the civil order. It is supreme. When the civil order strays, its transgressions trigger retribution from beyond. This civil order of Lago cannot keep its own justice. To be righted and provided with at least the possibility of legitimacy, Lago needs an emissary, an executioner of the law beyond. High Plains Drifter represents that law as not only absolutely authoritative, but also as perfectly, metaphysically precise. The Stranger’s retribution is without error and in perfect keeping with the nature of Lago’s various crimes. He turns Lago inside out, cleanses it, while he and his law are utterly independent of it. The purity of his authority requires such transcendence. Far more radically than the gunfighter riding into the sunset, the Stranger rides out of materiality, out of corporeality, and into another world, into the domain of a perfectly just and, for all we know, merciless God.
High Plains Drifter therefore depicts the law that stands behind the law, as divine law. This is the law that gives Marshal Kane’s tin star meaning. It is the law that Warlock (Dmytryk, 1959) distinguishes from two deficient kinds of law: the law identified with the peace and order the powerful man brings, the law the town of Warlock buys when it hires Marshal Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda), and the positive law associated with the distant political order, the law advocated for in Warlock by the disabled and often drunk Judge Holloway (Wallace Ford). In addition to providing a fabulously satisfying mythical template for the telling of a classic revenge story, the representation of such law as divine in High Plains Drifter can also be understood as an evolution, an unfolding of what we might call the logic of the representation of justice in certain Westerns.
I argued above, via High Noon, that some Westerns not only depict the civil order as vulnerable, they also tend to regard with suspicion, if not outright cynicism, the political and legislative aspirations of that order. Law books and political association are regarded as at best irrelevant to the matter at hand, and at worst corrupting, especially emasculating ventures.15 The people of Hadleyville or Warlock may long for law and order, but the Westerns themselves are wary of the moral value as well as the efficacy of securing law and order through political association and legislative action. To avoid disintegration, the civil order seems poised between two normatively undesirable options: order imposed by the powerful or order secured through political association. I have maintained that a Western resolution of this dilemma is to appeal to a law that stands behind the law, a moral or natural law, which grounds the legitimacy of the civil order. But in the context of the Western, to call this law a natural law is problematic. For the nature commonly presented in the Western is a nature shorn of moral sentiment,16 a nature reflected in the attitude of Abe McQuown (Tom Drake), leader of a gang of cowboys, who explains that he terrorizes Warlock and runs off its lawmen to remind the town that he was there first, and that he will call the shots as long as he wants to. In the face of that kind of nature, the natural law is the law of a stronger man, exactly the law Warlock buys when it hires Marshal Blaisedell. What the natural law provides is therefore something more like a Hobbesian sovereign than the law that stands behind the law in High Noon. In the Western, the moral law cannot be rooted in nature.
The Western’s doubts about our capacity to make our own law, as well as about rooting the moral law in nature, come to explicit aesthetic representation in High Plains Drifter’s depiction of the moral law as divine, as beyond our civil institutions and beyond nature. This logic is reflected in Eastwood’s own Western persona, notably the one that made him famous: the Man with No Name of the Leone pictures. The Man with No Name is surely a drifter, but hardly a representative of the moral law, even in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where he ironically stands for the Good. He is the gunfighter as antihero; his independence is not associated with moral authority. On the contrary, his independence is a function of moral disorder, the disorder that flows from the deficiencies of the forms of law discussed above. The biblical proportions of High Plains Drifter indicate that Eastwood could not reclaim No Name from moral disorder simply by returning to the lost innocence of moral intuition and the courage of the good man.17 If the attitude toward nature and society grows too cynical, the moral authority that might establish the latter’s legitimacy (or redeem the former) requires that the moral law be increasingly remote, absolutely authoritative, and perfectly precise. It also requires that its agent be something more than the good man. This turns the gunfighter into the Stranger, executioner of a divine law whose authority is strange and terrible.
High Plains Drifter’s self-consciousness is already implicit in the peculiar nature of Lago’s misdeed. The marshal discovered that the mine was on government land. The very order about which the Western is typically so cautious, sometimes to the point of cynicism, here is the linchpin of the wrongdoing. In killing the marshal, Lago deprived itself of law in many ways. Not only does the town eliminate the law’s enforcer, but also its connection to the state as a whole; political authority is evaded. It is not clear that the nullification of the company’s claim would have been fair, so I don’t mean to suggest that the movie encourages us to adopt the federal perspective. But the fact remains that the core of Lago’s corruption, its violation of the moral law, involves its repudiation of the legitimacy of the government’s claim to the land. This fact, in turn, erodes any legitimacy the civil order of Lago might have generated out of its own political and legal institutions. Lago’s own act of cynicism toward political and legal authority (the fact that the mine is on government land is at one point referred to as a “mere technicality, really”) serves to isolate it in its corruption. Lago exposes itself to transcendent retribution by severing its ties to worldly accountability.
High Plains Drifter therefore reclaims the idea of a law standing behind the law, but does so as if aware that the civil order, or a common attitude in Westerns toward that order, has created out of itself the need for transcendent retribution. When the normative authority of the civil order breaks down, when we doubt our own normative resources, justice itself must be depicted as transcending our civil order, as an ideal toward which we strive or from which we have fallen. To think the relation between the civil order and justice would then require thinking a world beyond the civil (and, in the Western, beyond nature), from which the moral law may descend and into which it may return.
How are we to think of this conception of the law behind the law, which seems in part generated by the Western’s own doubts about lawmaking and political association? Though the reclamation of this idea in High Plains Drifter is self-consciously mythic, it is not for that reason ironic. In fact, the moral attitude of the movie is fairly clear: have the “guts” to defend what’s right, lest a remorseless, unforgiving angel be sent to turn your world upside down. More than once the movie makes clear that our humanity depends on this courage, and that moralizing rationalizations of wicked deeds (for the good of everyone, the price of progress, according to Belting) are self-serving hypocrisies. The Stranger even tells the sheriff that the only thing wrong with Lago is a serious lack of guts. In fact, the Stranger’s various conversations with the sheriff may be taken as a civics lesson meant to contradict the lesson given by Judge Mettrick in High Noon. Sheriff Shaw begins High Plains Drifter as an ineffective, ironic representative of the law, but one of the movie’s last shots is of his cautiously smiling, sunlit face as he looks up at the departing Stranger. It is as if a burden has been lifted from him in particular, so that now he may be free to function as a genuine representative of the law. This in turn suggests that what I have deemed the Western’s distrust of the civil order might best be characterized as expressing the idea that without this moral underpinning the civil order will be defective and easily corrupted.
There is something deeply satisfying (and perhaps quite right) about the movie’s depiction of the law that stands behind the law as emanating from or expressive of a divine authority, for such a depiction expresses the sort of claim this law has on us, a claim not subordinate to our individual preferences or inclinations. It indicates that the law has a necessity and authority that outstrips our private pursuits, including the vain and selfish ends to which political association and positive law can be put. This is perhaps part of what Marshal Kane finds impossible to explain. When we fail to stand and oppose serious wrongs done to ourselves and others, the kinds of wrongs that strike at the very dignity of the person, then we forfeit our own status as persons and allow that we may be treated as mere things. Such a law is not one among many options for us. It is rather constitutive of us as persons. If we fail to keep it, no matter how much security and satisfaction might be guaranteed by a civil order, we fail to be persons.18 The general lack of dignity exuded by the people of Lago attests to this fact.
The depiction of this law as divine may also capture something constitutive of us in a slightly different sense, something deeply rooted in our psychological nature, for despite the fact that we often speak of punishment as being for the purpose of deterring crime and maintaining order, our punishment decisions are in fact often rooted in retributive motives.19 We have, it would seem, a very deep sense that an unpunished wrong is an intolerable affront to justice. This is so, irrespective of the actual future threat the unpunished wrong poses, and perhaps even of the “progress” or common “good” the wrong may have advanced. And so, with perhaps a little exaggeration, we might say that the Stranger is an emissary of a god of our own nature, our own deep attunement to the law he represents. Lago is discordant, its craven selfishness having muted the call for justice.
Nevertheless, there is to my mind something unsettling and even deficient in this representation of the law that stands behind the law, and I will spend the rest of this essay exploring some of what I take to be its shortcomings. Perhaps I can begin this exploration by pointing out a possible tension in this representation of the law. I claimed above that the punishments meted out by the Stranger are startlingly precise and, I venture, quite satisfying to most viewers. We recognize that justice has been done. But inasmuch as the Stranger is also clearly marked as an agent of divine justice, to what extent may we call this our justice, and is it appropriate to imply that the legitimacy of the civil order is answerable to or grounded in such a conception of justice? Though the narrative allows for Duncan’s personal desires as victim (“damn you to hell,” he says to his killers) to mingle with the absoluteness of this moral law, the mingling is in fact what Duncan says it is: a call to a higher authority. We may be reassured by this call as well as unsettled by it, but it is unavoidably a call beyond ourselves, certifying the desire for revenge by means of the transcendent moral authority. The call may well be prophetic,20 which I take in part to imply that it is meant to restore us to our true, better, higher selves. But that does not imply that we should necessarily endorse it.
The danger of such a call and such a conception of the law that stands behind the law might begin to come clear if we consider the strangeness of the Stranger. His isolation belongs to him: he enters town with it and he insists upon it. The town attempts to embrace him, but he rejects the embrace. This is another mythic reversal of High Noon, in which the town is to blame for the isolation of Kane, who turns to them again and again for help. The Stranger eschews many norms of the civil order, and in many respects taunts our moral assumptions and expectations, even if we see in his deeds a perfect justice. Such taunting is perhaps most acute in the Stranger’s rape of Callie, which occurs very early in the movie.
What is the meaning of this fusion of pristine justice and its uncanny, taunting agent? It is part of the prophetic or apocalyptic fabric of the story, a warning that there is a law to which we are answerable, but a law that is distant and strange. We will recognize it as perfectly just, but also as alien and awesome. But something else is in play here as well, something perhaps brought out by Sarah’s initial reaction to the Stranger. Sarah exhibits moral courage otherwise unknown in Lago. One might therefore have expected her to gravitate immediately to the Stranger. Instead, she initially regards him with disdain, itself a sign of her courage. Presumably she sees in him just another man wielding violence selfishly, raping women and killing men according to his whim. This marks his law as strange, even to those who would respect and keep it. Seen from Sarah’s initial perspective, it brings the Stranger eerily close to the very injustice he has come to overturn.
In keeping with the typical Westerner, the Stranger is taciturn.21 His silence is attractive, especially since it is commonly contrasted with a use of words that is either ineffective or corrupt or plainly false. As we have seen, the law the Westerner keeps is sometimes presented as ineffable. If you have to talk about it, if it is subject to discursive determinations, hope is lost. This is why it is important for Westerns such as High Noon or Warlock or even The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to portray outlaws whose deeds clearly express contempt for their victims, a brazen denial that the victim has any right not to be treated as such. These are situations, as the minister in High Noon shamefully confesses, in which right and wrong are clear and the demands of justice plain. Seeing them requires no expertise and few words. Such situations help focus our attention on the importance of courage, which is part of their moral value. But if talk won’t help us determine the moral law, a death struggle or violent conflict is what settles matters. This kind of avenging justice can make for difficult mutual recognition, and so for an unstable ethical order. In High Plains Drifter, there is thus a telling point of contact between the absence of deliberation or adjudication and the fact that the Stranger’s presence is the result of a call for revenge. How do we know that he is not an agent of private vendetta, rather than of the law that stands behind the law? How do we know that Duncan’s claim is right? We see it. It is revealed to us. Here is the danger. The need for communicative action is suppressed, sidestepped, even derided. But without it, how can we make that law that stands behind the law our law? How can we make it more than just a private call for revenge, at best avenging justice? And here perhaps is the warning also implicit in the “prophecy.” The law that stands behind the law might well be private vengeance. That is, this law may not ground or justify the civil order at all; it may rather be the law that emerges when that order fails to keep its own justice, the law that emerges when it severs its ties to civil accountability. It would then be a law that will undermine community. So there is after all in High Plains Drifter a trace of the idea that what has come to Lago is not retributive or even avenging justice, but merely the violence that follows from the dissolution or corruption of positive law and civil order.
That is not, of course, what is ultimately depicted in High Plains Drifter, in which the revenge appears to be just.22 There may be such avenging justice. Perhaps it is even God’s law. But it is unlikely that we can determine the content of this law except through our ordinary processes of deliberation, and it is even less likely that these processes of deliberation can be shorn from their normative social context. Furthermore, if we are to keep this law, it would seem that there is no way to keep it except through some sort of civil institution, something that constitutes us as a we. The suggestion that we might know the law, perhaps by intuition or revelation, independently of our ordinary processes of deliberation (much less our institutionalized processes of adjudication), and that the law might be actualized independently of civil institutions therefore stands at least in considerable tension, if not outright contradiction, with what would seem to be requirements of our actually keeping this law. Truly to keep this law we would need to bring it down to earth, so to speak. To the extent that we remain doubtful about our own capacities to deliberate and adjudicate the claims of justice (or about the consistency of such adjudication with the courage necessary to execute justice, and so about our ability to exhibit a just character), to that extent we also remain doubtful about our ability to live up to the moral law, and so to answer its call adequately. Hence it would seem that the Western cannot afford too much cynicism about the civil order, just as it would seem that the concept of a moral law independent of social practice might lack the content needed for us to look after our own justice and keep our own law.
Our position, then, is this: to talk about justice can indeed be a sign of moral cowardice and selfishness, inventing complications where none really exist. We know the sophistry that puts words in the service of injustice. But to insulate justice from sophistry by depicting it as divine can be its own kind of sophistry. It can encourage the view that justice need not be discussed to be determined, since we have intuitive or revelatory insight into its demands, treating complications as though these are the products of weak-minded or weak-willed attempts to serve our own interests. Our moral judgments may require intuition, but we should be wary of depicting those intuitions as of something absolute or divine. For in that case we may obviate the need to justify them by ordinary discursive means. And if we do not justify them that way, we should be wary that these intuitions are rationalizations of our own selfish ends, undermining our attempts to recognize each other’s claims within the normative structure constituting our community, and so too the requirement that those who suffer at the hands of our justice ought to be able to recognize their own justice in it. In that case, the idea of the law that stands behind the law may just be an expression of our dissatisfaction with the necessary conditions of actualizing justice in the civil order, treating that order with unwarranted contempt. The appeal to justice beyond the civil, especially the kind of retributive or avenging justice so wonderfully mythologized in High Plains Drifter, should therefore be regarded with suspicion. It may enable violence and injustice in the very people who use violence in the name of justice, and especially order. In the words of that later Eastwood Westerner, William Munny, it may deliver us to a condition in which “deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
1. The perpetually upright Gary Cooper was, after all, exceptionally well cast.
2. This is one symbolic reason why the gunfighter is cast as an outsider even in Westerns that depict the civil order as somehow dependent on him, as in Shane (Stevens, 1953), for instance. But even where the gunfighter is depicted as a more troubling, antisocial figure, I suggest that one will often find that he keeps this law, if only or primarily privately, as with Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962). The law is integral to him as an independent person.
3. Hence, I am ambivalent about Bazin’s claim that the Western emphasizes the need for law in the context of fragile human morality. For the positive law in many Westerns is also depicted as weak, and the civil order it establishes as not always justified or desirable. See André Bazin, “The Western,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. II (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 145–146. The question of how my observations relate to the Western genre is a complicated one. It may be that the traits I identify are common only to those Westerns Bazin calls “superwesterns” and Warshow calls “aestheticized Westerns,” Shane and High Noon being the favorite examples. See Robert Warshow, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” Partisan Review (March–April 1954): 190–203, and Bazin “The Evolution of the Western,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. II. For a broader account of the genre willing to embrace more of the elements I have suggested, see Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, “Six Creeds That Won the Western,” Film Comment (September–October 1980): 69–84.
4. For a compelling synopsis and brief analysis, see Lawrence F. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996), 55–64.
5. See Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 69–87.
6. For an extended discussion of Westerns as meditations on our myths of “founding” the American West, rather than as themselves mythologizing that West, see Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2010). While he does not discuss High Plains Drifter, this aspect of the movie and the way in which Lago has denied itself legal standing with a series of false “claims” fits reasonably well with Pippin’s account. However, High Plains Drifter seems much less interested in the necessity and the fate of mythologizing the founding. It is rather a narrative about exposing (and rectifying) a particular falsification.
7. The Stranger’s dreams in fact fuse with one other flashback of the event: Mordecai’s traumatized recollection of it from his own perspective, on the ground like the dying marshal, hiding beneath a porch. That recollection ties Mordecai to Duncan and the Stranger all the more decisively.
8. In this I disagree with Drucilla Cornell, for whom the movie implies no serious moral repair, but instead depicts the trauma survivor’s reproduction of evil. See Drucilla Cornell, Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2009), 10–18.
9. Thanks to Rayna Patton for alerting me to the anagram of “Lago” and “goal.”
10. This is a speculation that I take to be in marked contrast to the anonymity of the Man with No Name, the Eastwood persona of the Leone pictures.
11. Eastwood himself apparently, fantastically in my view, has favored this interpretation. See Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, 61.
12. Buddy Van Horn, who plays Duncan, was Eastwood’s stunt double.
13. See Revelation 7:3 and 9:4. I thank Richard McClelland for encouraging me to acknowledge in greater detail the movie’s explicit references to prophetic and apocalyptic literature.
14. See Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, 61.
15. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a brilliant meditation on the attractions and deficiencies of positive law and political association. See also Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, 61–101.
16. See Tompkins, West of Everything, 72–73.
17. A number of critics have seen in the Stranger such a project of reclamation. See François Guérif, Clint Eastwood, trans. L. Nesselson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 95–96. See also Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 37–42. Smith follows Guérif, and reads Eastwood-directed Westerns generally as attempting to restore the form after the subversion he helped Leone execute against it. And see Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, 58, who especially emphasizes the supernatural dimensions of the reclamation.
18. This basically Kantian idea has a long philosophical lineage, and defending it is far beyond the scope of this paper. But for a classic articulation of it, see Peter Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962): 187–211. For an articulation of it in terms of punishment, see Herbert Morris, “Persons and Punishment,” in On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 31–88. For a discussion of it in terms of vindictiveness, see Jeffrie Murphy, “Two Cheers for Vindictiveness,” Punishment and Society 2 (2000): 131–143.
19. See, for instance, Livia B. Keller et al., “A Closer Look at an Eye for an Eye: Laypersons’ Punishment Decisions Are Primarily Driven by Retributive Motives,” Social Justice Research 23, no. 2/3 (September 2010): 99–116; Kevin M. Carlsmith, “On Justifying Punishment: The Discrepancy Between Words and Actions,” Social Justice Research 21, no. 2 (June 2008): 119–137; and K. Carlsmith and J. Darley, “Psychological Aspects of Retributive Justice,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 40 (2008): 193–236. Thanks to Richard McClelland for alerting me to this literature.
20. The editors of this volume have suggested this to me.
21. On the Western’s distrust of language, see Tompkins, West of Everything, 49–55.
22. I am therefore not claiming that revenge cannot be just, though our tradition of moral thought does tend to take a dim view of revenge. Retributivist theories of punishment, for instance, are often criticized for rationalizing vengeance. Hence retributivists often distinguish sharply between retribution and revenge. Yet revenge is not without its moral defenders. See, for instance, William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), and Peter French, The Virtues of Vengeance (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2001). For a defense of the emotions underpinning vengeance, see Jeffrie Murphy, “Two Cheers for Vindictiveness,” and Thane Rosenbaum, Payback: The Case for Revenge (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013).