The Honor, Violence and God in The Western

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The American Western genre in both film and literature has always been an arena for authors and filmmakers to explore some of the larger philosophical questions about human nature. From realizing the idealized versions of hero figures that stand for justice and courage to the inverted character of pure villainy, the classic Western often sets up this dichotomy of good versus evil. This kind of trope is most notably present in much of the genre's earlier works, especially the Western film of the 1940s and 1950s, the hero's like Gary Cooper and John Wayne.

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However the genre has grown, developing a different focus with time which focused not on the absolutes of human nature but the ambiguities. This encompasses moral, ethical, and spiritual ambiguity that often is a result of recognizing and coping with the harm realities of human nature and the natural world. This essay will examine this progression through three works: High Noon (1952), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian.

These three works represent the progression of the Western genre as a whole, and the audience's shifting world views and appreciation for their metaphorical messages.

While there are several different lenses through which to view the Western this essay will focus on three aspects, the function of honor (or lack thereof), the trend towards increased violence, and the facet of religious of theistic presence in the world of the West. The more simplistic representations of honor, violence and God are seen in High Noon, while The Wild Bunch shows a significantly more complex and ambiguous attitude towards these aspects of the world of the Western, and Blood Meridian uses the building blocks of the genre to push past its historical limits and explore a much more exocentric and philosophical view of human nature through the genre.

The function of honor, and heroic stoicism was one of the Western's earliest identifiers, which originally was idealized by the hero of the story but over time was morally skewed and eventually done away with all together. Looking back to the classic Western films of the 1950s and arguably one of the most famous examples of this period High Noon it is apparent how important the moral character of the protagonist was to the honor of his story and the simplistic representation of society's ethics.

Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is the prime example of the honorable and noble hero figure, not only is he a man of the law he is also retiring to become a simple store owner and family man with his wife Amy (Grace Kelly). The evil that he must face is embodied by a criminal that he had brought to justice who is returning to exact his revenge. Their conflict is a shootout, where Kane is pitted against this rival Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), in which the two sides are very clean, Kane is fighting for honor and justice, Miller is fighting for vengeance and revenge. The role of honor and values by 1969 when The Wild Bunch was released was much more amorphous and hard to define. Some critics attribute this to the ever present moral ambiguity of the Vietnam war culture and others simply belief that filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah were more interested in exploring a more complex side to human ethics. Writer J. Hoberman claims that "Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch ... embodied a striking inversion of values. At once cynical and romantic" (Hoberman, 88) that were distinctly different from the purely romantic figures of previous Westerns.

The characters in The Wild Bunch are much more ambiguous is terms of their morality and sense of honor, in fact it is arguable that none of them fall into the character of "good" or "bad" they all spend most of their time in a grey area between those two states. There is a certain honor code present amongst the gangs which is obviously broken, and then paid for, when the posse abandons Angel. Their skewed sense of honor and ethics is not criticized, but ultimately it is paid for with the utter decimation of the various posses. McCarthy also explores the idea that the traditional definition of honor is much different than its actual existence in human behavior. Academic Dana Phillips says that "the book's odd power derives from its treating everything and everybody with absolute equanimity; its voice seems profoundly alien, but not alienate" (Phillips 451). This is in reference to how human McCarthy's voice really is, despite the worlds of his writing to be so very dissimilar to our own. Like Peckinpah's characters, McCarthy's are not driven by a clean set of ethics, they exist in a morally ambiguous world driven by cruelty and personal gain, nowhere is there a stoic hero to set the bar for honor and morality.

Critic Natasha Mayne writes that McCarthy's "cowboy protagonists are understated heroes, but their heroism fails to translate into the powerfully reticent, laconic heroism of the popular Western" (Mayne 4) because they are not driven by a larger or nobler set of ideals, making their desires secondary to their actions. For McCarthy honor is only measured by achievement. The judge aments in Blood Meridian "As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right" (McCarthy 280). Even the representation of justice in this world judges everything by blood, not by law. T honor that he is describing is distinctly different from any form that modern people live by. It is as if McCarthy is discrediting the classic opinion that men can be the hero figures depicted in films like High Noon, and as Scholar Jay Ellis surmises "Perhaps, then, McCarthy closes his Blood Meridian at a line of division between a world without pity and a world consumed in it, yet nonetheless persistently cruel" (Ellis 95). McCarthy gives more power to this certain cruelty than to the hypothetical existence of a purely honorable or good hero by letting all of his characters swim in blood. He does not discriminate between characters, but let's them all be cruel and viscious, which in some way he resents as form of social justice.

The extreme and graphic violence of in the Western Genre, especially McCarthy's West is just one side effect of this distorted view of honor. One scholar, Andre Bazin states that this "mutation in the western genre as an effect of the awareness it has gained of itself and its limits" (Bazin, 50) and subsequently its attempt to represent a more realistic, visceral and anti- glamorized world view than was shown in classic Westerns. Looking at the violence in High Noon it is innocuous and relatively not disturbing, lacking any grit or blood. This is a classic feature of the Western that features characters of unquestionable moral character, even the violence around them is inoffensive.

This trait is absolutely abolished by McCarthy, who was in many ways building upon the trope of graphic violence established by Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah was criticized for his use of violence, which he hoped people who find disturbing and offensive, but unfortunately they often found it entertaining. McCarthy accepts his audience's need for violence and serve's it up continuously with passages like: "stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs"(McCarthy 50). This passage may be saying more about the audience though, than the characters. McCarthy is proving his point that man is ethical ambiguous and violent at heart by offering the visceral and highly descriptive passage and expecting his readers to enjoy it, even while being repulsed by it because it has a sort of poetic tone, punctuated by powerful works and careful articulation that sound good even though they mean something terrible. Peckinpah and McCarthy share an attitude of resign and acceptance towards man's cruel and violent tendencies. As critic Jay Ellis points out the American West "was purchased with the blood of thousands of people and animals, and at the price of inscribing across the vast spaces of the American West the rectilinear constraints that only civilized humans could dream up, and that only barbarous humans could enforce" (Ellis 86).

He calls attention to the fact that the ideals of the West were not pure and noble, as High Noon would have you believe, but rather a free for all where only a few predatory souls survive. This is an inversion of the classical Western, as Maybe points out "McCarthy's western work is routinely heralded as 'revisionist' for its postmodern 'anti-Western' tendencies" (Mayne 4). Its abandonment of ethics and defensive violence goes against everything that the genre originally stands for, and yet is still an undeniable part of the Western cannon. Instead of showing that violent actions can be justified and honorable "In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else" (Phillips 435). This is similar to Peckinpah's attitude except that McCarthy does not attempt to show that eventually everyone must pay the price for their actions, instead he says these actions are just part of living in this world, and there is no recompense of larger sense of justice in the end. McCarthy's sense of nihilism is a stark contrast to the classic Western's reliance on a higher power siding with the hero to ensure ultimate justice for all. In High Noon there is an obvious sense of divine right, being on the side of Kane in his struggle against evil.

This biblical kind of set up is an obviously Western and Christian dichotomy in the most monotheistic sense. The hero of the classic Western always has God on his side. Writer Robert Warshow claims that "In High Noon we find Gary Cooper still the upholder of order that he was in The Virginian, but twenty-four years older, stooped, slower moving, awkward, his face lined, the flesh sagging, a less beautiful and weaker figure, but with the suggestion of greater depth that belongs almost automatically to age" (Warshow, 43). This kind of hero is all part of the Christian cannon, a respected elder, tried and true, who has learned throughout his mortal life the values of good and bad. This kind of biblical figure is wiped away by the later films, and almost nowhere to be found in The Wild Bunch, although the ultimate sense of justice still pervades, giving the sense that God has not abandoned the West. The fact that nearly everyone dies in some ways is the universe exacting justice for their moral ambiguity.

This greater sense of justice is gone entirely in Blood Meridian and it its place is a kind of apocalyptic state of existence. One passage in particular describes “bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end" (McCarthy 20). This is both a literal and figurative earth's end, representative of the kind of judgment day, or purgatory that the human race lives in perpetually. Ellis is not so absolute in his interpretation of McCarthy but admits that "No matter how we read it, on moral matters, it remains thick and dark" (Ellis 88), which is completely opposite from the moral message presented by Kane in High Noon. While not many critics or scholars are willing to say that McCarthy has taken the Western genre to a completely Godless place, Mayne concedes that "the world of Cormac McCarthy's novels is extremely experiential, vastly visual, and above all, ambiguous" (Mayne, 8).

This kind of resignation towards the world of McCarthy is perhaps what he is looking for, to have his audience accept how he views humanity to a certain extent or at least sap them of the will to argue for absolute good or evil. Phillips has a more constructive and hopeful view that "Blood Meridian does not wholly reject the notion of value, but the values it describes are not ones for which we have ready terms. For McCarthy, the history of the West is natural history" (Phillips 453), which removes the world almost entirely from being defined in terms of human theism. McCarthy sees the world as Godless, a sort of desolate wasteland run by men, and ruled by their animal instincts. He offers very little hope, rather a lesson in survival which has no happy ending, merely the chance to live for slightly longer in a harsh and cruel world.

The main issues of the Western are always honor and morality, decided primarily by violence and justified by the justice of a higher power, and in viewing High Noon, The Wild Bunch and Blood Meridian it is obvious that the genre has undergone a huge change from celebrating the purity of honor and morality to questioning the very existence and truth in these concepts. The characters of High Noon are examples of the struggle between good and evil, just as written in the bible, justified by the blessing of a higher power, while the characters and actions of The Wild Bunch often defy this classical structure and question its reality even while showing that ultimately there is a code of justice in the natural world. Blood Meridian denies the existence even of this justice, showing that there is no ethical code or moral bar by which men are judged, there is only competition, survival and cruelty, that even though man is advanced, he is not above these animalistic urges. This progression of work shows that while the Western genre is often a celebration of the ideal human spirit and intention is also an exploration of the realistic human state, which is not so pretty and a good deal less admirable than the ideal.