Recently I watched the Western Pale Rider hoping to see some classic Eastwood rugged individualism and great gunfights. Indeed I did. Unfortunately, one small detail of the film kind of ruined it for me. It was just a little too. . . leftist. I expect to see obvious leftist preachiness in newer Hollywood flicks, but in a tough Clint Eastwood Western? Sacrilege.
Subtle political messages are typically injected throughout any given Hollywood film, but the explicitly stated ones are usually short, often only a sentence or two. Typically one hears them in the culminating monologue of the film, in which the plot is "wrapped up" into one neat little package. Or, in the case of action-packed films, the explicit political message tends to pop up in the motivational speech given by the hero right before the big fight. For example, in Pale Rider, a settlement of poor panning miners is being harassed by goons hired by a rich, powerful landowner named Coy LaHood who owns a successful hydraulic mining operation nearby. LaHood, ever the rapacious capitalist, is terrorising the poor panning miners in order to make them leave so he can claim their land. A mysterious "pale rider" named Preacher (played by Clint Eastwood) arrives to defend the poor miners from LaHood and his cronies. Near the end of the film, just before the culminating showdown with the bad guys, the Preacher -- who is practically worshipped by the oppressed miners -- delivers a leftist monologue to his poor, defenseless flock:
The vote you took the other night showed courage. You voted to stick together. That's just what you should do. Spider [one of the panning miners who was murdered by LaHood's goons] made a mistake. He went into town alone. A man alone is easy prey. Only by standing together are you going to be able to beat the LaHoods of the world. No matter what happens tomorrow, don't you forget that.Clint, say it ain't so! Such a collectivist, pro-majority-vote, anti-capitalist speech would have made even Marx and Lenin proud. In my eyes, after that monologue Preacher's individualist aura faded fast. Another scene in the film preaches environmentalism: Preacher and one of the panning miners pay a visit to LaHood's hydraulic mine and are visibly disgusted by the powerful jets of water eroding the hillsides in order to obtain gold from the gravel. The way the scene is directed makes it clear that despite the fact that the hydraulic mine is on legally owned private property, the capitalist miners in their rapacious quest for gold are evil for raping Mother Nature. Not to worry, though -- Preacher and the poor panning miners later blow up the "ugly" hydraulic mine with dynamite, rescuing Mother Nature and thus restoring justice to the world. (Granted, LaHood and his goons had committed plenty of nasty crimes against the panning miners to justify the dynamite attack, but the implication was that the dynamite was primarily in retribution for the "crimes" against the environment. The showdown with LaHood and his crew came later.)
I suppose it's inevitable that films contain various subtle and overt political messages. The world is a political place. I guess my beef with Hollywood is that if a particular Western film has to carry a political message, can't it occasionally be of a more libertarian type? After all, the Western frontier with its decentralized communities and lack of formal government was basically a vast unplanned social experiment in libertarian self-organization that was remarkably successful. Instead of always using Hollywood Westerns to depict the old West sensationally as a chaotic dog-eat-dog welter of lawlessness, how about once in a while telling a great, inspirational story about what the frontier was really like? As Thomas Woods explains in his book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask:
As an avalanche of scholarly work continues to demonstrate, the "wild" West in fact reveals the resilience and adaptability of the private sector, even in the production of so-called public goods like legal services, dispute resolution, and law enforcement. This is exactly the opposite of what we have traditionally been taught about the western experience. We are supposed to conclude that discord and violence must result in the absence of formal government and accept the old West as a cautionary tale of what happens when Hillary Clinton and Bob Dole aren't around to keep everyone in line.
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