Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools

Bc. Tereza Mannová

The Proposition and : Two

Revisionist Westerns from Two

Continents

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr.

2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank doc. Tomáš Pospíšil for his support, insightful comments and valuable advice. Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Theories of

3. The Evolution of the

4. Film Analysis

4.1. Dead Man

4.2. The Proposition

4.3. Violence

4.3.1. Violence in the Western Genre Films

4.3.2. Violence in Dead Man and The Proposition

4.4. Violence and Masculinity

4.5. Loneliness as a Condition for Metaphysical Quest

4.6. Violence and Poetics

4.7. Cinematography

4.8. Music

5. Conclusion

Bibliography 1. Introduction “The Western was born one day under the skies of New Jersey at a time when robbers deprived of their picturesque prey, the stage-coach, launched themselves into train robbery in accordance with one of the most solid traditions of the trade”

(Rieupeyrout 116). The Western genre originated and grew from the real life experience of American people living in the frontier and during the twentieth century went through the periods of high popularity, being the most popular Hollywood genre, followed by the periods of decline. Nowadays, many film critics consider the

Western to be a dead genre. They explain the end of once so popular genre, the

American genre par excellence, by various reasons. The truth is that as much as the

Western dominated film studios and film theatres in the first half of the 20th century and then in the 1960's and 70s, it is now an outsider, a marginal genre. Yet the author of this essay believes that it is premature to speak about the death of the genre as the

Western film survives in sort of a hibernation state, waking up from time to time to offer the audience the best bits and pieces of its potential.

This essay attempts to demonstrate that even though the Western genre has lost its supreme position within the cinema, it is still a potent field where films of high quality and value may arise. To support this argument, two films that are deeply rooted in the tradition of the Western genre are going to be analysed, namely Dead

Man (1996) directed by and The Proposition (2006) directed by John

Hillcoat. These two films were chosen for various reasons. Dead Man was shot in the

90s, thus being a representative of the the end of the 20th century cinema, whereas

The Proposition represents here the 21st century. Concerning the origin of both films, these films are not typical representatives of the Western genre, as Dead Man was

1 directed by an independent director and The Proposition was directed in Australia.

Both these films are usually considered to be revisionist Westerns, even though a few critics suggest that they are not actually westerns at all. Moreover, some of the critics blamed both the films for being too violent and showing too much death and despair.

And last but not least, there were voices among critics mentioning the resemblance between these two films.

Thus this essay aims to look closer at all the aspects listed in the previous paragraph to make clear if these films can be labelled as revisionist westerns and compare to what extent they correspond and in what aspects they differ. Special attention will be paid particularly to the depiction of violence and its role in the development of the narrative. The element of violence will be observed and put in the context of Mitchell's theory of masculinity that is one of the decisive elements for origin of violence. The main characters whose lives are imbued with violence will be identified as lonely drifters who undergo their transformation thanks to the harsh and dangerous landscape and the condition of loneliness. In the second part of the essay, the symbiosis of violence with poetics will be under the scope of the analysis with reference to literature, music and visual art. The introductory part of the essay will offer a brief discussion of the theory of the genre and then the overview of the development of the Western genre will be provided with respect to provide some information of its conventions and clichés.

2 2. Theories of genre The term genre is used very frequently in this essay, therefore it is necessary to look closer at the meaning of the term and its history within the area of film criticism. The word is of French origin and comprises two meanings, “type” and

“kind” (Neale 7). The first person who categorised literature according to its “type” or “kind” was Aristotle, who in his Poetics tried to divide poetry (understand literature) into separate groups or categories. Aristotle's categories were again resurrected in the Renaissance, and during time were developed into a rigid system of more and more categories with “its own proper tone, form and subject matter”

(Buscombe 12). Thanks to the rigidity and “rather mechanical and dictatorial approach” these categories were gradually abandoned particularly by romantics, and were again revived in late 1930s by Chicago-based school of criticism known as the neo-Aristotelians. They started to pay attention to “the influence on the artist of already existing forms and conventions” (13). The neo-Aristotelians' approach was a reaction against the New Criticism which claimed that “a work of literature exists by itself,” so when analysing literature they refused “any external reality, whether contemporary or historical” (13). Thus neo-Aristotelians tried to rescue “literature from such self-imposed isolation” building upon the Aristotle's attempt to categorise literature. As a result they resurrected the theory of (13).

As far as the field of film studies is concerned, the genre theory entered the world of film criticism in the 1960s as an alternative to auteurism. The reason why some of the critics began to look for another critical approaches was that auteurism was not able to help those critics who tried to identify institutional conventions and take into account the audience of Hollywood cinema. Tom Ryall, for example, argues that: “The theory, though important and valuable during the 1950s and 1960s

3 for drawing attention to the importance of the American cinema, nevertheless tended to treat popular art as if it were 'high art'”(qtd.in Neale 9-10). Against the auterism mostly oriented on the person of the auteur and the film itself, Ryall puts a concept of

“a triangle composed of artist/film/audience”(10). He argues that genres “may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film-maker, and their reading by an audience” (10).

As is obvious from the above, throughout history, there have been large discussions on the topic of a genre and up till now various critics and scholars have tried to question especially traditional definitions of a genre. Thus the word genre is still a term with a very vague meaning. These discussions have taken place not only among film critics, but also literary critics and even speech-oriented linguists such as

Pratt, Hirsch and Derrida.

There are different perspectives on studying film genres that draw on different critical approaches. One of them is a formalist or structuralist approach that focuses especially on semantic and syntactic components of the film. An important proponent of this approach is for example Rick Altman who draws on the structuralist or formalist perspective, particularly on the work of Tzvetan Todorov and French semiotics. They distinguish between semantic and syntactic approaches to the genre claiming that “we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions that depend on a list of common traits” and the ways these traits are structured and put together within a text. (Altman 31) That is to say, semantic approach “stresses the genres building blocks,” the semantic parts of the film such as settings, roles, imagery, plot, themes and value assumptions, whereas the syntactic approach

4 examines how these building blocks are structured, thus privileging “the structure into which they are arranged” (31).

In the 1970s another important critics tried to unveil the nature of the genre as such, for example Edward Buscombe and Colin McArthur, who intended to

“demonstrate the active role played by genre conventions in shaping the form and the meaning of individual Hollywood films” (Neale 23). Buscombe chooses the genre of the Western to demonstrate how certain images and conventions “define and embody” the situation or action “through images that are familiar,” and also through the images “that are strange” (qtd. in Neale 11). Buscombe builds upon the concepts of 'inner' and 'outer' forms of genres established by Warren and Wellek in their collaborative work Theory of Literature (1948). For them, the inner form of the genre was characterised by specific metre or structure, whereas the outer form was demonstrated by attitude, tone, and purpose. On the basis of the outer form of the genre Buscombe uses the term “visual conventions” that fits well into the very influential concept of iconography. (Neale 1999)

The term iconography comes together with the term iconology from the work of Erwin Panofsky and in the field of film criticism was popularised by Lawrence

Alloway. It was the concept of iconography in particular that Alloway applied within his theory of genres and cycles. He argues that the meaning of the film is always influenced by the analysis of the previous films and that regular audience of the films possesses this knowledge thanks to exposure to previously seen similar films and because the audience can relate what is happening on the screen to their real life experience, to their interests and activities. The concept of iconography was widely accepted by other film critics as they could concentrate on visual aspects of popular

5 films. What Slotkin perceives as a crucial difference between a and a film is the inability or very limited possibility of a film to convey the inner life of the characters, to mediate their thoughts and feelings and to make metaphors. Therefore, he argues, films are largely dependent on the visual and “the success of the movie narration depends on a set of optical and psychological deceptions through which a discontinuous series of 'still' images creates the impression of continuous motion and sustains the illusion of narrative continuity” (Slotkin 232). Also McArthur supports such an argument in his Underworld USA (1972), claiming that visual conventions help to convey meaning. He categorizes genre's iconography further and divides the repeating visual patterns into three types: “those surrounding the physical presence, attributes and dress of the actors and the characters they play; those emanating from the milieux within which the characters operate; and those connected with the technology at the characters' disposal” (qtd. in Neale 13). Buscombe then stresses that not all generic conventions are visual in kind” but are definitely “the major defining characteristics of a genre” (14).

Andrew Tudor in his essay “Genre” (1973) advocates the crucial importance of established conventions for a genre and especially for the Western genre. The essential conventions he recognizes within the Western are for example “ritualistic gunfights, clothing corresponding to good and bad distinctions, revenge themes, typed villains and many many more” (Tudor 5). The importance of these genre conventions Tudor tries to demonstrate on the existence of parodies. He argues that “Without clear, shared conceptions of what is to be expected from a western, such humour is not possible” (5). Therefore, if people talk about the

Western, they actually “appeal to a common set of meanings in our culture” (5). In

6 fact, the same can be said about a critic who by the word Western not only claims that the “film is a member of a class of films (westerns) having in common x, y, and z,” but also suggests that “such a film would be universally recognized as such in our culture” (6-7). That is to say, that Tudor implies the importance not only of the characteristics “inherent in the films themselves” but also of the “particular culture within which we are operating”(7). In other words, it is not only the iconography of the film that is the decisive factor for categorizing the film as certain genre but also audience's “collective believe” (7).

This approach to a genre is usually called an audience-based approach. Rick

Altman notes that the critics applying this approach in mostly 1970s “dwelled on the mythical qualities of Hollywood genres and thus on the audience's ritual relationship to genre film” (30). A big proponent of such an audience oriented approach apart from those mentioned above is for example John Cawelti who in his Six Gun

Mystique Sequel (1999) defines a genre as “a body of texts which a culturally knowledgeable person would call Westerns, and whatever narrative, theme, historical development and artistic achievement that body of texts implies” (8). He further admits that this approach implies the fact that “knowledgeable persons” can and surely will “often differ as to whether a particular marginal or new work really is a

Western” (8). On the other hand, he is persuaded that “there would be little doubt among “knowledgeable persons” about the great majority of generic Westerns” (8).

This approach therefore assumes that the audience possesses such knowledge that enables it to predict story outcomes, to identify symbolic meaning of different images, and also to understand the meaning of the setting.

Within this approach, two parallel lines can be traced that Altman recognizes

7 as ritual approach and ideological approach. They both stress the role of the audience in the interpretation of a genre but the ritual approach emphasises narrative systems, whereas the ideological approach focuses on the roles of institutions. (Altman 30) It means that ritual approach “sees Hollywood as responding to societal pressure thus expressing audiences' desire” and it implies the connection to the myth, that brings into play audiences' own cultural, political and religious believes and experiences. In other words, the ritual approach attributes “ultimate authorship to the audience, with the studio simply serving for a price, [and] the national will” (30). The ideological approach, on the other hand, demonstrates “how audiences are manipulated by the business and political interests of Hollywood” thus suggesting that “Hollywood takes advantage of spectators energy and psychic investment in order to lure the audience into Hollywood's own position” (30). Especially some Marxist critics understand a genre “as an instrument of social control which reproduces the dominant ideology”

(Chandler 4). They argue that the genre film is able to influence the audience in such a way that they internalize or “naturalize ideologies which are embedded in the text”

(4).

The reader-oriented critics, however, question this assumption pointing out that “people are capable of 'reading against grain'” (Chandler 4). Altman goes even further in his critique of ideological approach and in his argumentation aims at the ritualistic approach too. He suggests that “Hollywood does not simply lend its voice to the public's desire, nor does it simply manipulate the audience” (37). He takes into account historical, dynamic aspect of a genre drawing on the fact that genres develop and change in time hence going “through a period of accommodation during which the public's desires are fitted to Hollywood priorities (and vice versa)” (37). He

8 further explains that “the public doesn't want to be manipulated,” therefore “the successful ritual/ideological 'fit' is almost always one that disguises Hollywood potential for manipulation while playing up its capacity for entertainment” (37).

Using the structuralist/formalist terminology Altman states that;

Whenever. . . a semantic genre becomes a syntactic one – it is because a

common ground has been found, a region where the audience's ritual

values coincide with Hollywood's ideological ones. The development of

a specific syntax within a given semantic context thus serves a double

function: it binds element to element in a logical order, at the same time

accommodating audience desires to studios concerns. The successful

genre owes its success not alone to its reflection of an audience ideal, nor

solely to its status as apology for the Hollywood enterprise, but to its

ability to carry both functions simultaneously. (37)

As is evident, modern critics apprehend genres not as some fixed and stable categories but as a dynamic corpus changing in the course of time. As Chandler notes, “the generic corpus ceaselessly expands, genres (and the relationship between them) change over time; the conventions of each genre shift, new genres and sub- genres emerge and others are discontinued . . . ” (5). Each new film that seems to fit into a genre category can be the triggering impulse stimulating the change within the genre in any of its aspects and can even bring forth a new sub-genre. If this is true, there is no doubt quite a strong potential of the authors to influence the change of genres thanks to their experimentation with genre conventions. In addition, it is fairly evident that neither one can deny the influence of the audience on the development of the genre through its “changing preferences,” nor can one abandon “the role of

9 economic and technological factors” or the interaction between genres and media.(3)

As is more than obvious, genres are by far no strict or rigid categories of prescribed conventions and characteristics, but a flexible system reacting to more factors hence developing and changing during time. Moreover, even in a given time critics and audiences do not have to agree on whether a particular piece of work can or cannot be classified as a particular genre film as the reader will be able to see in a following chapter. As the main scope of this essay is the western genre, let us now have a look at the Western genre in more detail. To understand how the conventions of the western have been formed and how they have developed during more than a century, it is necessary to briefly recapitulate the history of the Western genre.

3. The evolution of the Western To begin with the history of the genre itself, it is important to state that the era of the American West “lasted from about 1850 to 1900,” the time when “the

American country was expanding at a staggering rate”(Gary 2). This era represents the main theme of the Western genre films telling stories about Santa Fe and Oregon trails with new settlers marching with hope for better future; the cow towns growing around the rail road stations with cowboys sitting on horse-backs driving the cattle across the plains. (2) In the meantime the civilised Eastern America was hungry for adventurous stories of the real western characters, portraying dangerous fights with

Indians and hard burden of life in the harsh, uncivilised country. “Dime about the West” picturing the real western heroes and legendary characters such as “Kit

Carson, Wild Bill Hickok, and Jesse James” flooded the book stores and new stands.

(2) To name just a few, it is inevitable to mention Washington Irwing and particularly

James Fenimore Cooper, who in his novels “identified the basic character types for

10 the genre” and pronounced the America's realization of “the loss of a natural frontier”(Rollins 2). American West left its traces also in visual art, with artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederick Remington and Charles Russell, who on their canvas emphasized especially “epic mountain vistas, valiant cavalry actions, and noble Indians” (Gary 2). And last but not least, people who longed for authentic west could visit Wild West shows with real horses, cowboys, Indians and outlaws.

This world of the west frontier life attracted no doubt also the first film- makers who decided to focus their cameras to the wild west. As André Bazin notes, the Western “is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself” (140). The first film-makers thus had rich inspiration because the West was already a mythologised space when the first film-makers turned their cameras to it and they just built upon the already set “pre-cinematic forms and conventions” created by the dime novels and Wild West shows. (Slotkin 234) In fact, Slotkin argues, “No other genre has pre-cinematic roots of comparable depth and density”

(234).

One of the first such encounters is The Great Train Robbery (1903), Edwin S.

Porter's pioneering western produced by Thomas Alva Edison studio. This film is usually glorified as one of the first real western films, as the first building block which inspired other directors who could further build upon the theme and conventions presented there. The question is, whether this film was perceived as a

Western as soon as it was released. Neale and other critics suggest, that it is very unlikely. What made the film so successful and popular was not the Western genre itself. Marshall suggests, that even though retrospectively this film is often considered to be “the blueprint for all Westerns” or “the first important Western,”

11 “the contemporary success of The Great Train Robbery was due to its location within generic paradigms provided by , 'the chase film', 'the railway genre', and

'the ' rather than western” (qtd. in Neale 40). Moreover, Neale states that according to Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1961) the term

Western was first used as a generic noun around 1910 probably as a result of the success and rapid development of the movies depicting the themes and area of the western frontier.(39)

The Great Train Robbery is a short 12 minute lasting film that “shows us a train robbery in progress and the killing of several robbers, complete with scenes of incredibly smoky gunfire” (Herzberg 2). The film “is based on and exploits Butch

Cassidy's Wild Bunch” thus bearing the notion of authenticity as the real Bunch did their last train robbery in July 1903, the same year the film was released. And one more reason for its popularity, Herzberg argues, is the fact that it was “the first film with a plot!” (2)

The first silent films predetermined the tendency to dramatize history “on the screen as completely as possible” (Rieupeyrout 118). The audiences of these silent films were delighted and amazed by “Indian wars, Civil War, the Gold Rush; biographies of famous or infamous persons,” as all these were included “under the heading of history; stagecoach attacks, claim jumping, cattle rustling, and hold-ups might fall in what we have designated as the frontier cycle” (118-119). And there is no doubt that all these basic situations “were unquestionably inspired by reality”

(119). Here, right at the birth of the Western genre, the history and fiction met to patiently reconstruct “like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the history of the New World”

(127).

12 One should, however, keep in mind that as much as the origin of the western genre is rooted in history, it is not the history that defines the genre. As André Bazin mentions, “The relations between the facts of history and the Western are not immediate and direct, but dialectic”(143). Also Buscombe is aware of the relationship of the Western to America's geography and history. He, nevertheless, argues that these links “focus and participate in various ways and to varying degrees in what is often termed a 'mythology'” (qtd. in Neale 125). This mythology is central to American history, culture and identity and “is grounded in the notion that there existed a moving western frontier in the US between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries” (125). Slotkin calls this problem a “dilemma of authenticity” being aware of contradictory expectations that audience had towards the Western. On one hand, the Western was connected to a concrete place and the particular part of

American history, on the other hand, it conformed to the “ideas of setting, costume, and heroic behaviour derived from literary fantasy” (235). He mentions one of the devoted proponents of the authenticity and real stories in his films, William S. Hart, a famous actor and director of numerous Western films from 1920s – 1930s. In an interview given in 1920 Hart, in order to explain his compromise in case of realism in his films, argues that “although the true stories . . . were better than any of his own scripts, neither the critics nor the public would recognize them as the real thing” (qtd in Slotkin 244). Therefore, he could “offer only those versions of truth that conformed to the expectations generated by a 'false' but culturally proponent mythology” (244). It is fair to say that Buscombe actually considers history to be relatively unimportant part of great deal of Westerns. He argues that if history is the main thing westerns present to their audiences, “it is hard to see why half the world's

13 population should spend its time watching them” (19). On top of that, he adds that those who define Westerns as films primarily about American history of western era completely “misunderstand the nature and meaning of genres and how they work”

(19).

What is interesting about the first silent Westerns is that vast majority of them was shot on the East coast, mostly in studios, such as Edison company and the

Biograph Company. There were a few exceptions, for example in the production of the Edison Company, who travelled to distant places of New Mexico and Utah to make sort of ethnographic films about lives of Indians. Still, this company made most of its films in the studio, even their famous 20 second long shot of the ritual

Sioux's dance called Sioux Ghost Dance (1894). As Simmon explains, this “short kinetoscope film of beaded and barechested men and boys is made even more otherworldly and deathhaunted by the stark black backdrop common to all early films shot in Edison's one-roomed studio in West Orange, New Jersey” (26).

As for the themes and plots of these early westerns of silent era, Neale suggests that as a whole, these films were very diverse even though they all were based on the frontier mythology. There were hundreds of Indian Westerns made between 1900s and 1920s with Indians portrayed mostly as “noble and tragic,” usually performed by white actors. These Indian Westerns attempted to show from a variety of perspectives the character of an Indian. Some of them mediated to the audience a notion “of disappearing frontier and dying race of people,” others focused on “the difficulties faced by Indians who have been educated in Anglo-American colleges and schools and who have adopted Anglo-American values and codes of behaviour” (Neale 128). Of course there were also films exploring “the topic of

14 miscegenation” and “the loyalty and devotion of Indians to white's” and definitely there were numerous films about “historical conflicts between Indians and whites” promoting “white supremacist attitudes” towards Indians. (128)

Another category of films that lured audiences to the theatres were Cowboy westerns portraying cowboy's everyday life filled with labour, resting and sleeping, occasionally and often unexpectedly interrupted by the excitement caused by life cattle stampede, or the crew that hit the town, or “tribal delegates” (Mitchell,

Westerns 26). Lee Clark Mitchell argues that the popularity of the cowboy Westerns was caused especially by the characteristic features of cowboy lives such as independence, sovereignty, and self-confidence. In the times that put strong emphasis on the importance of nuclear family, Mitchell argues that the character of a cowboy represents “a nostalgic dream of escape from middle class obligations and in particular from family ties . . .” (26-27). In other words, the life of a cowboy perfectly met the audience's fascination with “the figure of principled drifter,” such as the figure of Odyssey representing freedom that the audience itself “sacrificed for the security of civilized life” (26).

As soon as around 1911 critic voices started to pronounce death of the

Western film which sounds very strange if one takes into consideration that the longest Westerns shot those days lasted only 15 minutes. Scott Simmon, however, argues that retrospectively, these pronouncements seem to be reasonable, because most of the film-makers massively started to move their companies from the east to the west to be right at the place where real Indians and cowboys lived their amazing history. (2003) Thus, the Eastern western dies and new era of Western films made in the west can start. According to Slotkin, this shift to the west was caused primarily by

15 the Patent's company attempt to gain a monopole over film production and distribution in the east. Therefore, the companies decided to move their business to western cities such as Chicago, Tulsa, Oklahoma and many other places in Texas and

Colorado. Finally, Los Angeles, “a distinctly 'western' city, with long structural and commercial links (via rail road) to the cattle and mining frontiers of Arizona, New

Mexico and Texas” became the major centre of film industry with its famous

Hollywood studios producing the majority of American films since those days. (235)

Why was the newly born Western genre so attractive and popular among the audience not only in America but also in Europe? What attracted people on different continents living in different regimes, with different culture, and experience to go to the theatres and spent their hard earned money on moving pictures showing Indians and cowboys in short black and white shots? Bob Herzberg assumes that popularity of the Western genre was partly caused by the feeling of nostalgia for “a simpler, less hurried past”(3). The beginning of the twentieth century was both in America and

Europe characterised by the rapid development of technologies so “to a rapidly growing civilization learning not only to communicate and build better, but also to destroy people on a scale hitherto unknown, the hero of the Old West presented cleaner, simpler alternative” (3). For American audience, the western genre represented a connection with their own very fresh history. After all, “experienced wranglers and cowboys” joined the film-makers to “work in the movies and actual outlaws and lawmen acted as 'technical advisers'” (Hughes xi). The real history and fiction thus mingled within the genre bringing into the films authenticity and credibility. Another factor that contributed to the success of the western films were

“the simple values of the western as dictated by the pulps” that informed the audience

16 that “the American west was built on the pursuit of justice and defeat of outlawry”

(Herzberg 3). Thus, the audience outside the could, and actually did, believe in the American nation “founded and built on honesty and initiative, not racial, religious or territorial strife” (3). The Western films caused that for the rest of the world, America symbolised the place “where freedom and equality were the order of the day” (3). And that was, especially for Europeans exhausted and threatened by the First World War, the dream they were dreaming about, the ideal they strived to achieve.

During the 1920s popularity of the Western genre rose enormously and culminated around 1926, when the first sound films appeared on the theatres announcing the decline of the Western between years 1927 – 1929. The boom of the

Western films was important and influential part of the development of Hollywood cinema as the genre itself helped to form solid ground for rise and development of other film genres. Slotkin claims that the silent Western films “helped shape producers' understanding of the importance of setting and reference, the possibilities of location and action shooting, and the appeal of the star” (254). In addition, they introduced the historical and also literary tradition of the Frontier myth into the new media together with “its symbols and references and its peculiar way of blending fiction and history into cinematic terms” (254).

The Western gained a great deal of respect by Hollywood studios with the silent films The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924). The Covered

Wagon tells a story of a great wagon track leading from the East to the West coast down the Oregon Trail. The film was the endeavour of the Paramount Picture studio and it represented a great box-office success as it earned 5 million dollars, even

17 though it was quite an expensive film. In fact, at the time of its release, the film was considered to be “the most colossal film undertaking of all times” (Calvert n.pag).

Moreover, the film was a milestone in the development of the Western genre as it lined up the path for other film-makers to follow. The Covered Wagon was the first epic western that foreshadowed further evolution of the Western genre towards the epic sagas. Its format and theme inspired for example John Ford who only a year later released his The Iron Horse, telling a story of building the transcontinental rail road. (Johnson n.pag.)

In the meantime, talking pictures started to attract film audiences and the popularity of silent Westerns declined for a short period of time to enter the world of a few years later to continue and further develop the themes and the iconography established by its silent predecessors.

The rise of the Western film was finally interrupted by the beginning of the

The Great Depression. Hollywood studios gradually abandoned Westerns in favour of other genres such as gangster films, or “Victorian Empire” films. (Slotkin 259) As one of the reasons for the decline of the genre during crisis, Slotkin identifies the vision of history that the Western represented and that seemed to be invalid in the times of The Great Depression. How could the mythology of “the progressive dream embodied in the Myth of the Frontier” represent a credible story for the audience facing “the historical catastrophe?” (256) In fact, as Slotkin indicates, the

“progressive interpretations of Turner's Frontier thesis” was explicitly rejected by

Roosevelt's New Deal administration indicating the closure of the frontier and the absence of any other open frontiers to be reached and “civilised” (256).

During the years of The Great Depression, there were only a few A Westerns

18 made in the Hollywood studios, but the genre had a chance to survive in B Western films. Slotkin compares B Westerns to dime or pulp novels in the literary field. Their primary function was to satisfy audiences craving for particular type of familiar stories. Therefore, the major feature of these B Westerns was not originality but familiarity. The films were made in series “based on recurring characters or performers” and many of the characters had their antecedents in dime or pulp novel characters. (271) Ray White suggests that “B Western formula plots romanticized and glorified the American West, depicting the struggle between a hero and his sidekick and villains who stole cattle, land, and gold mines, or who tried to take valleys, towns, banks, and watering holes” (135). The recurring stories of these notoriously known events appeared again and again throughout the series with only minor changes. Slotkin claims that the self-referentiality had even such dimension that the directors recycled some of the footage of earlier production, “particularly for recurrent scenes like horseback chases or displays of trick riding” (272).

Another typical aspect of B Westerns was the establishing of a series actor star which was characterised by distinctive style and whose real character and appearance corresponded more or less with the film character. To achieve even more authenticity and confusion of reality and fiction, some of the actors were encouraged by the studios to take the names after real famous Western heroes or participants such as “Buffalo Bill Junior”, “Bob Custer”, or “Buddy Roosevelt”. (Slotkin 272)

Gradually, most of the stars of the silent Westerns re-established in the B Westerns but there were of course new actors that emerged and started their career in the B

Western films. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were typical stars of the 1930s Western films. Autry was a pioneer in the character of a singing cowboy to inspire many other

19 singing cowboys that followed him in other series. was one of those, who actually built his career in B Western series.

The attempt to blur the reality and fiction in B Western films had, according to Slotkin, an important consequence as it enabled “some very interesting interaction between icons symbolic of the past and those referring to the present” (273). Thus, in great number of Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s the cowboys of the Old West had to cope with corrupt political bosses or “the Nazi agents dressed in cowboy garb, giving raised arm salutes, shouting 'Heil Hitler,' and praising the Third Reich” (White 154).

The distinction between old times and modern times and between fiction and reality was apparent also in the way the conflicts were resolved. The traditional

Western way of conflict resolution was “to take law into one's own hands

(vigilantism),” which was the only effective way to solve conflicts under the primitive conditions of the Wild West. (Slotkin 276) Thanks to the blurring between present and past, Westerns “heightened allegorical qualities of the genre and converted stock villains of the Frontier Myth into present day evils” and in addition suggested that “the heroic epic of Western vigilantism had a kind of timeless validity as a means of resolving a social or political impasse” (276). In other words, there were new possibilities open for the Western genre to be not only a platform for presenting history, but also a means to express attitudes towards contemporary issues, to raise serious questions through its allegorical dimensions and to offer possible answers to these questions. As Slotkin formulates it, “It became possible to see the mythic space of the Western genre as an appropriate field for the projection of the real questions about the state of the nation and for the cultivation of fictions embodying possible answers to those questions” (277).

20 The Golden age of B Westerns lasted up till late 1940s, when the studios needed to constrain their budget and were in large pressed to get rid of their theatre halls. On that account, they lost the marketplace for their production and B Westerns needed to be sold to make money. In addition, Johnson claims, the studios considered the B Westerns to be films primarily aimed at unsophisticated audience, therefore the genre recycled the old plots, characters and visuals and did not develop at all.

The Renaissance of the Western genre comes in 1939 when the Hollywood studios decided to invest into big feature A Westerns. The new Western films were

“larger in scale and ambition; many were in colour and all were more lavishly produced and promoted than previous western epics” (Slotkin 278). The new wave of

Western features reflected different political views of American history and future.

Slotkin divides Western films according to how they reflected these political attitudes into three main types: the “historical epic”, which he considers to be the most prominent of the three types, the films about Western outlaws which some historians refer to as “The Cult of ”, and the “classical” or “neoclassical” Westerns which represented an antithesis to the previous two kinds. (286)

The epic Western was the most important of the three kinds as it replaced and continued in the tradition of a very popular genre of historical romance and the bio-pic. The main themes of these epic films were associated with the idea of winning the west at the American Frontier through patriotism, technology and progress. These films celebrated American values, “advances in technology like building transcontinental rail roads or stagecoach lines,” showing the rail road as “the dominant symbol of Western progress in 'renaissance' Westerns” (287). They also stressed the importance of human labour and praised the advances in productivity

21 putting ranching way ahead to hunting. Last but not least, the films focused on common ordinary people, on their wisdom and virtue and also “the heroic individuals as the real initiators of historical change” (287). As a typical example of the historical epic Slotkin analyses Dodge City, one of the biggest box-office returns directed in

1939 by Michael Curtiz. The film concentrates on the historical period just after the

Civil War showing the modernization of the Frontier, here the concrete place being the Fort Dodge in Kansas. The rail road that is coming to the town brings important changes for the people such as “the end of buffalo-hunting life of the Indians and the development of the ranching and trail driving business” (289).

The Cult of the Outlaw films, on the other hand, tried to show the negative aspects of the progress and rapid development of technologies on lives of people in the West while building upon the tradition of the gangster films and the social drama.

This group consisted of thematically very coherent films celebrating the lives of famous western outlaws, especially of Jesse James and his band. As typical examples of this type of Westerns can be considered Jesse James, the film directed in 1939 by

Irving Cummings and Henry King, and The Oklahoma Kid (1939) directed by Lloyd

Bacon. The second one demonstrates how clichés of iconography and mythology of two different genres, namely Gangster films and Western, mingle and coexist in one piece of work. (Slotkin 295)

The third type of the Western genre film was the classical or neoclassical western which Slotkin characterizes as “the antithesis of both the progressive epic and the Cult of the Outlaw, since it eschews the insistent historicism of those forms for the formal austerity and poetic allegory of the W.S. Hart tradition” (286). Slotkin calls this type “classical” or “neo-classical” as these films draw on the old, traditional

22 storyline, styles and narrative structures but adopt them in a modernistic way. This category of films, Slotkin says, has an advantage over the two types mentioned previously, as the films do not historicize and therefore do not have to keep a strict ideological line but can deplore both ideological approaches towards history and progress. Thus, the two ideological lines of “progressive” and “outlaw” Westerns

“could be simultaneously entertained and played off against each other” (287).

John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) can be considered as an example of such

“classical”, or “neo-classical” type of Western. It is John Ford's first sound Western based on a short story “Stage to Lordsburgh” written by Ernest Haycox which was published in 1937 in Colliers magazine. It tells a story of a group of 8 coach passengers travelling from Tonto, Arizona, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, passing through a hostile and dangerous Apache territory. The film was partly shot in the

Monument Valley and various monuments are shown to create atmosphere of the film. Thomas Klein argues, that the landscape of the Monument Valley “helped shape the notion of the Wild West” thus inventing the Monument Valley as a cinematic icon. (Klein 122) The role of the landscape is not the only important aspect of the

Stagecoach, as the film also helped to establish John Wayne as a major film star of feature films and in addition, the film was highly appreciated by film critics.

In short, Johnson assumes, during the WWII the Western with its themes of patriotism and glorifying of American values “helped the country as a whole look at the nations history while we [Americans] prepared to send men into battle” (Johnson

4). During the war, however, Hollywood studios turned their attention to less optimistic issues bringing social themes and even love and eroticism into the Western genre. For example Howard Hughs' The Outlaw was banned in Maryland for its

23 sexual content. (4)

After the WW2, the Cold War and the growing interest in psychology influenced further development of the Western genre. As Johnson notes down, the

Westerns started to scrutinize “darker vision of human nature” and gradually,

“Western heroes and villains continued to grow in complexity until they weren't that easy to tell apart any more” (4). Psychology plays eminent role in the Westerns such as Pursued (Raul Walsh, 1947) or Blood On the Moon (Robert Wise, 1948) and notably Howard Hawk's Red River (1948) starring John Wayne as “a tough authoritarian cattle rancher who barks out orders and refuses to take anyone's advice”

(4). The film is filled with tension caused by the fight between the rancher and his adoptive son and its qualities lie especially in “brilliant characterizations” of the main characters. (4) As is evident, the Western genre gradually developed in its complexity from horse operas into films dealing with more serious and complex themes offering the audience themes to ponder.

The 1950s, Johnson argues, were the years of the maturity of the Western genre, the times when the audience became more demanding and the Western genre in response became more serious and self-reflexive. The development of the genre was largely influenced by the Cold War and Korean war that made American people look back at their roots and their own history recalling and reminding themselves of their traditional values. Such development, Johnson observes, resulted in re- examination of the way Indians were depicted in the Western films. Thus, films such as Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950), Across the Wide Missouri (William

A.Wellman, 1951), and Devil's Doorway (Anthony Mann,1950) tried to open “the eyes of America to the great injustice done the Indians” (Johnson 4). Broken Arrow

24 received better critical appraisal than Anthony Mann's first film Devil's Doorway, which was more radical in its “depiction of frontier politics” (Collins 126). Mann's film confronted the audience with “corruption and failure in frontier land negotiations” and was considered to be an allegorical portrayal of “early civil rights” but it also tackled the problems that Native Americans had to face after returning home from WW2. The film did not avoid even everyday issues that natives had to cope with regularly such as “poor reservation conditions, chronic local prejudice, racist and outmoded government supervision, land use crises, and, most important, a federal assault on tribal lands, sovereignty, and treaty rights” (126). Broken Arrow, on the other hand, tried to deliver more positive perspective on the life of Native

Americans suggesting that there is a “possibility of both assimilation and cultural tolerance” for the two ethnic groups living on one land. (132)

Such sense of optimism, however, diminished in a great deal of Westerns released during the 50s. In dark, psychological westerns such as Zinnemann's High

Noon (1952) or Mann's Winchester 73 (1950) a dark, pessimistic picture of the

Frontier prevails suggesting the presence of early stage of decay of civilization in

American society. These films, Joanna Hearne argues, “question the purity and goodness of both the hero and the community he protects” and serve as an inspiration for other, so called “revisionist” Westerns shot mostly in 1960s and 1970s. (Collins

141) Moreover, High Noon, Matthew J. Costello argues, became a “cinematic and ideological touchstone against which other directors sought to define their visions of the proper role of the individual” as it defined “a subgenre of politically self- conscious Westerns” that were later referred to as “law-and-order Westerns” (qtd. in

Collins 175).

25 In the 1950s, Westerns had to compete with horse operas that massively started to appear on television. As a result, the studios in their attempt to lure the audience into theatre halls started to put emphasis on visual quality of feature

Westerns. Thus, colour pervaded the Western films hand in hand with panoramic views of “majestic terrain of the west” (Johnson 5). The examples of such wide- screen colourful Westerns can be Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954) and Broken

Lance (Edward Dmytryk, 1954). Also the director John Stevens offered a great aesthetic vision in his film Shane (1953), he, however, accompanied it with unusual, even shocking amount of violence on the screen. (5) In Shane, “the archetypal

Western hero” appears to join “the struggle of the civilizing community of homesteaders against the cattlemen” (Dirks 4). This lonely hero is a typical character of Westerns, he joins the community, fights for it, brings everything to normal, but as he is “forever branded as a killer,” he has to go away, like Shane to the mountains.

(4)This lonely hero fits well into another feature that a lot of the post-war films had in common and what Neale calls the orientation towards masculinity incorporating the themes of “male business empires and patriarchal families,” the relationships between fathers and their sons and there were also films about “wandering loners, unattached mercenaries and all-male groups” (Neale 133).

A very important figure in the development of the Western genre in the

1950s was John Ford, who oriented mainly on the Western and in his three films known as The Cavalry Trilogy, namely Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow

Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), Ford established a sub-genre of Cavalry

Westerns. (Slotkin 365) Over the next years, the themes and conventions introduced by Ford re-appeared in many other Westerns, even though they were sometimes

26 varied and further developed. Nevertheless, Slotkin argues, they “retained the essential elements of Ford's original myth: the use of the cavalry as a microcosm of embattled American values, the representation of the Indian as the supreme enemy of those values, and the resolution of all the personal and ideological divisions of the microcosm in the process of defeating that enemy” (365). Thus, these Cavalry

Westerns established a metaphor between the Cold War and Indian War as a conventional structural element of the Western genre.

As an opposition to this Indian-enemy line there emerged another approach that did not portray Indians as enemies but it “centred on a sympathetic portrayal of the Indian side of the cavalry/Indian wars” (Slotkin 365). Thus, Slotkin asserts, “the iconography and ideological stance of this 'cult of the Indian' was the mirror image of

'the cult of the cavalry'” and could serve as “a save and effective vehicle for a liberal critique of the Cold War and the unfulfilled promises of the New Deal”(365). These two lines of Westerns, “the Cult of the Cavalry” and “the Cult of the Indians”, co- existed and developed during the 1950s and even in 1960s, but Slotkin notices “that their usage diverged: the cavalry film tended to remain responsive to Cold War issues, while the Indian film provided a setting for stories related to the domestic struggle over civil rights” (377).

To some up, the 1940s and 1950s can be marked as the heyday for the

Western genre; it not only grew in numbers of films produced those days, but it also grew in complexity and variability and the directors such as Anthony Mann, Budd

Boetticher and John Ford lay the solid ground of Western plots, themes and iconography to inspire and lead future directors of the Western.

Nevertheless, the golden age of the Western genre did not last long. With the

27 arrival of the 1960s, slow decline of the Western genre started to be apparent.

Studio's made an afford to beaten the decline with its “size and scale” investing into wide-screen western epics full of Hollywood stars. Thus films such as The Alamo

(John Wayne and John Ford, 1960) featuring John Wayne, The Magnificent Seven

(John Sturges, 1960), the remake of a Japanese classic Seven Samurai (Akira

Kurosawa, 1954) starring Oscar nominated Elmer Bernstain and another seven

Hollywood stars, and How the West Was Won (John Ford and Henry Hathaway, 1962)

“a tremendous, star-studded three-generation story of pioneers” were shot to attract and bring the audience into cinema. (Dirks 4) However, in spite of these spectacular enterprises, the Western genre started to age together with its directors and stars and it slowly began to loose its dominant place in the cinematic market. As Johnson claims,“With the number of Westerns released plunging as low as 11 in 1963

(compared to 90 in 1953), the Hollywood Western looked vulnerable” (6).

There were, nonetheless, attempts to bring new life into the Western genre via new special features and even sub-genres. In America, such attempts came with the director . As Dirks argues, “Peckinpah made his biggest impact on the evolution of the Western with his Hollywood production of The Wild Bunch, one of the best Westerns ever made - and filmed during the height of the Vietnam War” and it is no coincidence that the film is often considered to be “an allegory about the

Vietnam War” (5). It tells a story of a band of outlaws living in Mexico during the times when the civilization represented here by mechanization and urbanization took over their old western lives. The Wild Bunch is considered to be a masterpiece among

Westerns “marked with bloody, slow-motion, ultra-violent choreographed ballets of death” (5). In spite of extreme violence and blood splattered over the screen, or

28 maybe just because of it, the film grabbed the attention not only of the audiences, but also of the film critics who called it “a beautiful elegy of the Western itself” (6).

Nowadays, it is apprehended as a revolutionary film that inspired the film-makers of

“urban crime thrillers and inner-city gunfighting of the 1970s” and also later directors including Quentin Tarrantino and John Woo. (5)

Another fresh wind bringing new horizons for the Western genre did not come from the American continent, but surprisingly from Italy, Europe. Italian director together with Clint Eastwood and other American Hollywood stars brought quite profound changes to the development of the Western and he

“created the legendary man-with-no-name in a series” of his so called “spaghetti”

Westerns. (Johnson 6) Leone situated his movies in “god-forsaken, dry-as-dirt

Mexican villages,” where “unwashed, unshaven outlaws . . . swagger like Hercules while silently assessing every wallet in town” (7). The changes Sergio Leone brought into Western films included “a new European, larger-than-life visual style, a harsher, more violent and rough depiction of frontier life, revenge-seeking bandits and bounty hunters, haunting and jarring music from , choreographed gunfights, and wide-screen closeups” (Dirks 5). Leone's masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the

West (1968) representing classical epic Western and shot in Ford's favourite location of the Monument Valley, with Henry Fonda starring as a “black, villainous murderer,” embodies all the themes, tactics and experimental visuals that the director had introduced in his previous films. (5) Johnson points out that Leone plays with the conventions of the Western genre like a cat with a mouse recalling the famous opening scene of the film where Leone “stretched time to the absurdist degree” (7).

Johnson argues that the almost 15 minutes long opening scene of Once Upon a Time

29 in the West “shows nothing more than three gunfighters waiting on a train, but it's one of the great sequences in the history of the Western” (7).

It is, though, fair to say that at the time Leone released his films, or to be more precise, when the films were premièred in the USA, many critics disputed quite a lot whether especially Leone's so called Dollar trilogy can be called a Western at all. The films Fistful of Dollars (1964, US release January1967), For a Few Dollars

More (1965, US release May 1967), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, US release December 1967) caused a hot debate among the American critics. As McClai asserts, “Critics found the Dollars films deeply problematic on a number of levels: their unusually graphic and cynical violence, their ambivalent relationship to historical and generic 'realism,' and their relationship to the history of the Western genre as a whole” (1). Speaking in Altman's terminology, McClai notices that most of the critics found the films accurate particularly on the semantic level pointing out their historical realism which seemed to mark “the films as rather conservative,” but otherwise, especially on their syntactic level, they found the films being at odds with the Western genre. As McClai formulates it, “the horses and hats and guns remained, but the story and the themes seemed vastly different” (6).

The critics then started to argue whether the films are “revision” or

“reversion” of the old Western formula, but still, they refused to admit that these films are Westerns. Later, the critics ceased to make difference between these two terms and started to use only the term “revision” to describe films that revert genre conventions. Revisionist Westerns “reinvented, debunked, redefined and ridiculed” the genre by questioning the themes and basic elements. Even though the critics were aware of the fact that the genre was changing as well as the whole Hollywood

30 was, they felt that it was the change to worse. It may therefore seem quite contradictory that the same critics appreciated the earlier revisionist films as a prove of the genres healthy development arguing that the Westerns of the 60s “revised, and thereby modernized, the genre” (6).The revisionist Westerns of the 50s and 60s brought what the critics considered to be adequate and “legitimate” changes in the genre that they were willing to accept and even welcome. As McClai asserts, critics, despite all the changes and experimenting, were able to find “authentically 'folk' core of the genre generally intact, and it was to this core of meaning that they referred the true lineage of the Western” (7). Leone's films just did not seem to provide such a traditional genre core that the critics could identify. Some of them argued that the films did not offer the traditional straightforward plot, others could not get used to the hero who did not fit into the previously built formula as he was selfish, vicious, with no firm moral codes, and some claimed that the outer appearance of the film imitated Western, but the typical Western theme was missing in Leone's films. (7)

Not all of the critics, however, refused to see Leone's films as rooted in the

Western genre, and argued that especially A Fistful of Dollars represents an old tradition of Western and the anti-hero tradition in particular. In short, those critics who refused to accept Leone's films as Westerns were, according to McCail, motivated by their sense that they “attacked the genre at its very heart and later critics confirmed this fact by celebrating it” (10). Thus today, Sergio Leone's films are no doubt considered to be an important part of the Western genre canon and his Once

Upon a Time in the West is frequently ranked by contemporary film critics among the best Westerns ever made. (e.g. Hughes or Dirk)

As the 1960s and 1970s proceeded, more revisionist westerns were released

31 and a few of them even attempted to portray Native Americans and their way of life in a more sympathetic manner. To mention just a few, A Man Called Horse (1970,

Eliot Silverstein) tried to depict real life of Sioux Indians in the Dakota. John Ford's last Western Cheyenne Autumn (1964) focuses on “the destruction of the Native

Americans by portraying the forced, late 1880s westward exodus of Cheyenne

Indians from Oklahoma to their tribal lands in Wyoming” (Dirks 5). One of the most famous revisionist westerns of the 70s is Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) based on Thomas Berger's novel, starring Dustin Hoffman as Jack Crabb, “a 121 year old survivor of Custer's Last Stand and the Battle of Little Big Horn” (5). While telling

Jack's life story, the film in fact functions as a parallel to the Vietnam tragedy and alongside it attempts to demythologize the past and reveal “the genocidal atrocities visited upon ethnic Indians by US forces” (5).

But the notion of the death of the genre could be felt everywhere. Not only there were less and less Westerns shot at the end of the 1970s and 1980s, but also the film-makers and actors who achieved their fame through the Western genre were dying. Such directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and many others died in the 70s and when the icon of the western hero, John Wayne died in 1979, Johnson claims that

“a large part of America's faith in the Western” died with him. (6) “Without the participation of these old masters who really knew the West,” Johnson complaints,

“the new movies become second hand stories, homages with little life or vitality of their own” (6).

As a result, during the 1980s the Western genre seriously declined and was slowly disappearing from cinema, even though there were “few hopes for recovery”

(Johnson 7). In 1985 Silverado (Lawrence Kasdan) tried really hard to revive old

32 clichés and themes in the story of a misfit bunch of friends who join up together to fight the injustice in the town. Even though the film received two Oscar nominations and had quite a lot of positive critiques (e.g. Roger Ebert in Chicago Sun-Times) the audience unfortunately “stayed apart” (Johnson 7). Another films made in the 80s looked for the way to resurrect the genre by trying to appeal young, teenage audience

(Young Guns 1988, Christopher Cain) or by recycling the old, once very successful, themes (Pale Rider 1985, Clint Eastwood). None of these attempts, however, succeeded to stop the decline of once the most popular . (7)

A change came with Kevin Costner's directorial début Dances With Wolves

(1990) that, according to the IMBd, won 7 Oscars and another 34 awards and 28 nominations and became “the highest grossing Western of all time, with a domestic take of $184 million” (Dances n.pag.). The film was one of a few films “to cast

Indians in acting roles” and yet more interesting is the fact that approximately 25% of the dialogue is not in English but in Sioux and Pawnee. In addition, the English dialogues are accompanied with Lakota Sioux subtitles, whereas the Sioux and

Pawner dialogues are accompanied with English subtitles. (Dirks 5) The film follows the revisionist tradition portraying Native Americans in a sympathetic way and the white Anglo-Americans as bad. Nevertheless, the story is narrated in the first person singular by the main character, Costner’s Lieutenant Dunbar, who is pictured as the good one. Terefore, Alexandra Keller suggests, the film really is revisionist in its content but “it still attempts to recuperate the category of Individual Anglos. Yes, white folks were institutionally terrible, the film suggests, but this one was okay”

(Keller 243). She further explains that the fact that the Sioux's nation renamed

Lieutenant Dunbar as Dances with Wolves “permits him to colonize their historical

33 prerogative, to speak in place of them while seeming to speak for and even with them” (243). This may be the reason why some of the American Indian groups did not appreciate the way they were portrayed in the film in spite of the fact that the film was “officially sanctioned by the Sioux” (Dirks 5).

Another milestone in the recent development of the Western genre is Clint

Eastwood's Unforgiven released just two years after Dances With Wolves. Eastwood’s

“magnificent meditation on the Old West” won 4 Oscar awards and another 39 awards including a Best Picture Academy Award, and according to IMBd earned approximately $101,157,447. (Johnson 7)The film attracted the audience as well as critics by its “bitter ironies and brutal violence meted out by lawmen and outlaws alike,” and also by the excellent acting of Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman. (7)

The two previously mentioned films were quickly followed by a variety of

Westerns such as Geronimo, an American Legend (1993), Tombstone (1993), Wyatt

Earp (1994), and The Quick and the Dead (1995) which was a mixture of horror movie and conventions. In spite of this outburst of films in the

90s, the genre was still in the process of decline and many critics started to consider the Western genre as a relic of past, as something, that is already dead, but that, from time to time, can re-emerge in a small number and attract and please audiences as well as the critics. Gary Johnson, for example, claims that “the Western exists in limbo. It still has the power to fan the sparks of imagination, but our distance from the West has weakened its authority” (7). He further prognoses that “As the myths and heroes of the American West fade away, the Western becomes just another genre, a genre that becomes more remote with each passing year” (7).

So far the last Western film released in December 2012 is Quentin

34 Tarrantino's Jango Unchained. The plot is set in the South two years before the Civil

War and tells a story of a freed slave Django and Dr, King Schulz, a bounty hunter, who sets out on a journey to save Django's wife from a Mississipi plantation owner.

Tarrantino typically uses great deal of violence together with humour to narrate the story of a terrible period of slavery in America. The film echoes and refers to older

Western films, particularly to The Wild Bunch thanks to its very graphic depiction of violence and to Mandingo (1975) through one of the characters. The film is actually a mixture of genres, using conventions of the Western genre as well as of the action films and comedies. (“Django” n.pag.)

As a hope for the future of the existence of the western genre may be considered the current shooting of Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski), a story of a Native

American warrior Tonto who “recounts the untold tales that transformed John Reid, a man of the law, into a legend of justice” (Lone Ranger n.pag.). The film should be released in July 2013 and should be a mixture of the western, comedy and .

35 4. Film Analysis

4.1. Dead Man Right in the middle of the nineties, Jim Jarmusch, an independent American director, released his film Dead Man (1995). The film has a very simple and straightforward plot. The main character, accountant William Blake (), is travelling from his native town Cleveland to the far west to get a new job in the town of Machine. As soon as he arrives to the town, he finds out that the job does no longer exists and he decides to spend his last money in a bar to get drunk. There he meets an ex prostitute Thell (Mili Avital) and they end up in Thel's apartment. Here they are surprised by Thel's ex boyfriend, there is a gun shot in which Thel dies,

Thel's ex-boyfriend is killed by Blake who himself is seriously wounded with a bullet that gets stuck in his chest. Right from this moment he becomes a hunted man who immediately sets on a journey to escape the hellish Machine. On his way through the woods, he encounters a native Indian called Nobody (Gary Farmer). Nobody is another central character of the film. As a child he was caught and taken to Great

Britain where he was shown as an attraction. There he came across the poetry of

William Blake and the poems influenced him so much that he decided to escape and get back to his homeland. But alas, he was refused by the people of his own tribe for his otherness, they did not understand him so he had to leave and roam in the vast western lands alone. Thus the two outcasts meet and Nobody, who at the beginning believes that Blake is the dead poet, becomes Blake’s companion on his journey towards death. They aim westward to escape the bounty hunters following Blake, but it is not only escaping journey, it is a spiritual one too, as Blake is slowly dying and

Nobody tries to help him find reconciliation, and get to “the other side of the mirror”, to the other world, the world of death. At the end of the film, both main characters

36 die, Blake on a canoe drifting on the sea and Nobody in a gunfight with Cole wilson, one of the bounty hunters.

Soon after the film was released, it provoked debates among film critic. Some of the critics felt puzzled by the film, such as Roger Ebert, who in his review complains that Jim Jarmusch “is trying to get at something here” but unfortunately

Ebert does not “have a clue what it is” (Ebert, n.pag). Stephen Holden in New York

Times called the film a “sardonic nightmare vision of the Old West” that pictures “the

Wild West as an infernal landscape of death” which “sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy.” Gutthmann characterizes the film as “Mixing poetic mysticism, violence and droll comedy,” he however criticizes Jim Jarmusch that he “gets so caught up in stylistic touches and loopy humour that he never finishes the statement he started to make about the fragility of our lives and identities, and how vulnerable we are when removed from the comforts and social constructs that usually surround us.” Also

Mark Savlov adds on a criticizing note, even though he admits that the film is

“Beautifully shot in high contrast black-and-white” he also pinpoints that Jarmusch's

“Dead Man fails not because of any one particular flaw, but instead stumbles, caught in a quagmire of metaphysical constructs and Western lore.” Rita Kempley characterises the film not as the Western but rather as a “poetic, peyote-stoked ” closing her merciless critique with the following words: “Bad movies have a way of writing their own epitaphs. Here, the protagonist engraves the tombstone: 'I've had it up to here,' Blake says. 'I haven't understood a word you've said. . . .'” To sum up, there was a vast amount of negative or ambiguous criticism on Jarmusch's Dead

Man right after its release and just a few critics really understood and appreciated this

37 piece of work. Maria Schneider, for example, notices a few years later that “A lot of critics have dismissed Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man as pretentious hipster histrionics replete with black-and-white photography, downbeat chic, and Johnny Depp, but with little emotional feeling.” She, however, claims that Dead Man is “as strong as anything else he's done” while arguing that “Jarmusch's trademark quiet irony, affinity for the outcast and oddball, and moonscape visuals suit the Western genre well.” Desson Howe calls Dead Man “an existential sitcom of a western full of deadpan humour, a sort of unhurried, art-house pace and some of the strangest characters ever seen” and he concludes that the film “offers many pleasures.”

It is obvious, that the reactions to the film were rather ambivalent. Right from the festival in Cannes where Dead Man was premièred, David Sterritt reports that the spectators at Cannes festival “mixed cheers and boos in their response” to its first screening, but there were also viewers who “sat in apparently puzzled silence as the strange, engrossing story came to its enigmatic end.” Obviously, the audience's reactions to the film did not differ from the responses of the film critics. Sterritt himself is one of a handful of critics who did not scorn or condemn the film, on the contrary, he concluded that “it's one of the most exciting pictures of the year for moviegoers who like a touch of the unexpected, even when revisiting a genre as old and familiar as the western.”

Jacob Levich even dares to write that the real poet William Blake might be fond of Dead Man, “an in Western clothing that seeks to articulate the very

Blakean notion of the poet as outlaw.” He argues that the film “is a filmic rendition of

William Blake's life and thought - although, thankfully, director-writer Jarmusch eschews the dimestore Freudianism of the biopic form” but “instead he uses the

38 conventions of the Western genre to construct narrative and visual analogues of some of the thorniest features of the poet's worldview.” Thus just beneath the surface of the conventional outlaw story “lies a visionary allegory of the soul's progress from physical death to spiritual transcendence.” Jonathan Rosenbaum in his elaborative review for Chicago Reader rated the film as a masterpiece. He especially appreciates that Dead Man “is one of the few westerns to see through the cheesy mythology that white people were the first North American settlers, but its approach is casual and poetic rather than preachy; the warm, comic friendship between Nobody and Blake, neither of whom entirely understands the other, is central to the film” (The Acid n.pag.). He claims that the film “represents a fresh start, even a quantum leap for

Jarmusch, in style as well as subject.”

In spite of the fact that the critics as well as the audience were quite cold towards Jarmusch's western Dead Man, time worked for the film and gradually various critics started to understand and appreciate this unusual piece of work.

Finally, Dead Man became a respected and even succeeded to enter several

Western genre books and anthologies. Jim Kitses and Greg Rickmann, for example, decided to include an analysis of Jarmusch's film into their second addition of

Western Reader (1999) as an example of a . Tom Dirks lists Dead

Man among the greatest recent Westerns, and Janet Walker included Melinda

Shaloky's essay on the topic of repressed western history in Jim Jarmusch's Dead

Man in her Westerns: Films Through History (2001), the book which is focused on the historical meanings and functions of the Western film genre. Obviously, Dead

Man became a part of the western canon, and even though it is not a typical representative of the Western genre, it uses its conventions and stereotypes in such a

39 way that most critics rank the film among revisionist westerns, and Jonathan

Rosenbaum, who wrote a whole book about Dead Man, even coined a new term

'acid-western' to characterise this film.

To look in more detail on the Western genre conventions and themes that can be traced in Dead Man it is necessary to look back to the overview of the Western genre history. As the reader already knows, the first genre films from the beginning of the 20th century focused on the characters of native Americans showing their way of life and the problems these people had to face and cope with. Dead Man as well runs around the character of a Native American called Nobody thus following the pattern established by the early pioneering Western films. The theme of the Indians who were taken to and raised in England falls into the problems the first black-and- white films dealt with. Jarmusch, however, wanted to portray Nobody neither as

“nobel and tragic”, nor as a savage who should be eradicated, but as a human being in all its complexity, thus reverting the clichés of classical western films.

(Rosenmbaum Dead Man 47)

Another obvious visual and narrative convention is the rail road bringing

William Blake to the West. As was mentioned earlier in this essay, rail road represented a stable symbol of civilization and progress bringing civilized East into the Wild West. The train was a main setting for the very first Western film The Great

Train Robbery, numerous Western films had their plot running around the building of the railway and the necessary fights with Indian-enemy who did not want to give up their land to the White invader.

The very first scene of Dead Man shows William Blake travelling by train from his home town Cleveland to the far western town of Machine. During his long

40 journey, the viewer can witness the continuous changing environment outside of the train as well as inside. The passengers travelling with Blake at the beginning of his travel are decent gentlemen in elegant suits and hats reading newspapers accompanied by well kept ladies in noble dress. As the train goes further westwards, these noble gentlemen and ladies are replaced by farmers and their wives dressed in typical country clothing. Outside of the window, Blake can see deep forests and fields. The more westwards he moves, the more “uncivilized” the passengers seem to be. Long haired, bearded men with wild look in their eyes, wrapped in furs, with riffles resting in their hands, some of them sleeping and snoring, others drinking whiskey. The look out of the window reveals an empty broken stagecoach with

Rocky mountains in the background, and then the hostile vast and empty landscape with just a few rocks in the middle and some miles further a few deserted and broken

Indian teepees indicating the presence of Indians.

The scene culminates after the train runs out of the tunnel, offering the audience a typical picture of the train as a symbol of evil – black monster with grey and black smoke steaming all around while running very fast towards the audience.

In this scene, Jarmusch tackles the tradition of the Cult and Outlaw films from late

30s and early 40s that tried to show the negative side-effects of the civilizing process in the West on people's lives. Portraying the train as a monster with attributes of the

Christian image of devil, Jarmusch adds to the critical note on the negative aspects of the progress of civilization and rapid development of technologies and especially industry on western society thus inverting “the positive symbolism associated with trains as instruments of civilization in classical westerns” (Rickman 386).

This attitude is explicitly revealed when the introductory scene of the film

41 culminates. The train stoker sitting opposite Blake asks Blake why he has “come all the way out here, all the way out here to hell” (Dead Man). When Blake shows him the letter confirming him to get a job of an accountant in Dickinson's Metal Works in

Machine, the stoker notes with a bit of a fear in his voice that Machine is just at the end of the line while admitting that he cannot read. This uneducated man, however, gives Blake an advice: “I wouldn't trust no words written down on no piece of paper, especially from no 'Dickinson' out in the town of Machine” (Dead Man). And he adds with a persuasive tone while one of the hunters behind him is opening the window and getting ready to fire that “You're just as likely to find your own grave”(Dead

Man). Immediately, starts and all the other passengers jump out of their seats grabbing their riffles to shoot buffalo through the train windows.

This scene sketches the plot and main idea of the whole film, it leaves nobody in doubt that this film is not going to be an optimistic colourful western epic but a dark, depressing, deadly journey to hell. As was mentioned earlier in the essay, one of the factors critics held against Dead Man was quite a large doze of violence. Here, parallel can be traced with Sergio Leone's westerns that as well as Dead Man lead the audience to the harsh and very rough setting of the frontier where violence is nothing exceptional, where revenge-seeking bandits and bounty hunters chase their victims to take law into their own hands. This vigilantism, as the reader already knows, is nothing new in the Western genre, in the contrary, it is a typical convention as it is the only effective way to reach the law and order state under primitive conditions of the

Wild West. In Dead Man the group of bounty hunters decides to take law into their own hands and set out on a journey to seek revenge, to kill William Blake because he killed Dickinson's son. The journey of a lonely hero is another of the clichés

42 reappearing in the Western films. In Dead Man, Blake has a companion, a guide who helps him to accomplish his quest, but still, it will be argued later in this essay, we can identify this journey as a lonely quest. After all, William Blake is travelling with

Nobody.

To sum up, Dead Man possesses great deal of typical Western genre attributes and conventions: there is the necessary frontier setting, the appropriate time of the second half of the 19th century, there are Indians, hunters, guns, chase for revenge and vigilantism, lonely hero, there is the clash of civilization and wilderness. The film exploits a variety of Western conventions, although in a subversive way. There can be no doubt that Jarmusch shot a western, even though a very original one which, as

Jens Martin Gurr formulates it, “brings out the stereotypes and concepts virtually encoded in the genre itself and which thus radically undermines both the Western genre and the 'American Ideology' implicit in it” (8). In doing so, the film ranks among the long tradition of revisionist westerns. Mary Katherine Hall suggests that the revisionist westerns in fact position themselves against the previous films,

“claiming to present a newly sympathetic and realistic view of Indian culture and a new condemnation of white conquest, only to find themselves a generation or two later the traditional Westerns against which new ones are positioned.” She suggests that this paradox may be caused by the fact that “'revisionist' Westerns participate in the same ideology they attempt to criticize. This statement, however, does not mean that the film-makers literally recycle or copy the ideology perceived as the dominant in the film maker’s culture. Rather, it is a process of negotiation of the dominant ideological elements with the oppositional ones. As one of the aims of this essay is to look closer at the revisionist aspects of the film, the reader will have a chance to

43 see the way Jim Jarmusch negotiated these ideological elements in his Dead Man in comparison to John Hillcoat's The Proposition, another remarkable Western labelled by critics as revisionist.

4.2 The Proposition Almost ten years after Dead Man, John Hillcoat's The Proposition (2005) was released on the Australian continent, but unlike Dead Man was praised immediately after its release. Philip French describes the film as “both a realistic action movie and a forceful fable about the birth of a nation.” He claims that “You can certainly speak of this film in the same breath as such recent American westerns as Unforgiven, Dances With Wolves and Open Range” ranking this Australian western among the best American Westerns of the 1990s. Peter Bradshaw identifies “The spirits of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone” being invoked “in this horribly brutal outback western.” He admits that it is not a film for everyone, thanks to its violent and brutal scenes, he, however, appreciates it as “a very stylish, arresting piece of movie-making, throbbing with heat and fear and violence and with fiercely uncompromising lead performances from Guy Pearce and Danny Huston, whose faces are baked, impassive masks, eloquent of nothing but despair” (Bradshaw n.pag.). Definitely, vast majority of the critics praised the film as an extraordinary work that cannot let anybody calm. As Angus Wolfe Murray expresses it, “This is a film of uncompromising intensity and breathstealing beauty, as violent and ugly as anything that nature can conceive.”

Most of the critics identify the influence of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio

Leone's films in The Proposition. David Edwards argues that “From Leone comes a fascination with close-ups of battered, lined faces, and an intense focus on a

44 landscape so barren and inhospitable it takes on a kind of alien, hallucinogenic beauty.” As the reader knows from the overview of the Western genre history, Sam

Peckinpah was the most influential and widely praised American director shooting revisionist westerns in the 70s. Another similarity of Hillcoat's Western with

Peckinpah's films is, no doubt, vast amount of violence and blood which will be discussed later in this essay. Edwards identifies Sergio Leone's influence “In its occasionally mournful air and sympathy for brutalised people in a bleak environment” which strongly “resembles Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West

(1968).” Hillcoat is not as it could seem just a plagiarist recycling the conventions employed by these masters of Western. Edward argues that neither is John Hillcoat “a postmodern collector of empty visual and thematic tropes” nor does The Proposition

“just pay homage to its genre precursors. . . .” In the contrary, the film “absorbs them, along with well-worn Australian myths and legends, into a wholly contemporary fable.”

A few critics mentioned in their reviews the resemblance with Jim Jarmusch's

Dead Man. Chris Knipp in his review for CineScene notes down that “Its period look resonates with that of Jarmusch's Dead Man.” Also Peter Krausz admits that the film echoes Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), “which has similar nihilistic tones” (20).

John Hillcoat admits that “I wasn't consciously influenced by that film, but I can see the connection with the anti-hero character”(20). He then explains that he “was influenced by the anti-westerns, especially of the 1970s, from directors like Robert

Altman and Sam Peckinpah, as well as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Wake In

Fright [Ted Kotcheff, 1971].” (20) Hillcoat confesses that he intended to “celebrate failure in our national history tainted and morally compromised by violence” (20).

45 Here we can identify the motif of a variety of revisionist westerns who try to negotiate ideology of majority and offer alternative approach in this case not only towards colonial history of Australia, but also towards such themes as loyalty, family, betrayal, and frontier justice.

The plot of The Proposition is quite simple and the characters are familiar to the Western genre audience. The story takes place in the rural Australian Outback, a hot, harsh and hostile piece of land, in the late 19th century. It tells a story of three

Burns brothers whose gang is responsible for lots of crimes in the area. At the beginning of the film, two of the brothers are captured by Captain Maurice Stanley

(Ray Winston), a local police officer, for violent attack on Hopkins' farm, where they raped pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and then murdered the whole family. Charlie Burns

(Guy Pearce) is offered a proposition by Capt. Stanley: if he finds and kills his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), the gang leader, within nine days, he and his younger brother Mike (Richard Wilson) will get a pardon and be free. If he does not kill him,

Mike will be hanged right on Christmas Day. Charlie sets out on a journey to search his psychopathic brother while Mikey, a simple-minded younger brother, is kept in the prison. But things go differently than Captain Stanley and Charlie expected and the film ends with Mikey being lynched to death and Captain Stanley and his wife

(Emily Watson) being attacked by the rest of the Burns gang. The cataclysmic violent final scene of torture and rape is brought to a halt by Charlie, who decides to shoot his brother and Stoat, but it is too late, at least for Mike.

The Proposition is usually labelled as a revisionist Western as well as Dead

Man. Even though the film is not set in America, the audience can find a variety of the necessary ingredients in the film that make the Western genre recognizable. The

46 time of the late 1980s is accurate, and instead of the typical American frontier the story takes place in the Australian frontier. The Australian Outback, the inland, is the place where the cultures of colonizers and indigenous people meet, it is the place where the fights over the land are on daily schedule, this is the piece of land that

Captain Stanley came to civilize. Aside of the appropriate setting, the audience is offered typical characters, there are outlaws and law men, there are natives, there are fights and necessary violence, there is a lonely hero travelling on a horse back to do the right thing.

What makes The Proposition a revisionist Western? What does Australian

Western have in common with an unusual American black and white Western made by an independent director? What are the revisionist aspects of both films? These questions are to be answered in the following comparative analysis of The

Proposition and Dead Man. First of all, the attention will be paid to the violence which has been frequently complained about or at least stressed by a majority of film critics in reference to both films.

4.3 Violence When Dead Man was released, it was according to IMDb rated by MPAA

(The Motion Picture Association of America) with letter R “for moments of strong violence, a graphic sex scene and some language” (“Dead Man” n.pag). It is interesting that the Australian Film Censorship Board (AFCB) even banned the film and ranked it into category of Refused-classification for its connotations of violence and sex, thus being the only western country to ban Dead Man. The problematic was not so much the violence, but the explicit sexuality. To be more specific, the problematic scene lasts only 4 seconds and shows a woman having oral sex with a

47 man holding a pistol. The Australian film world successfully fought against such a restriction and finally, the film was re-rated as R. It may look like a paradox that ten years later AFCB had no problem with Hillcoat's The Proposition showing, no doubt, more violence and sexual content than Jarmusch's film. The Proposition was as well as Dead Man rated R for strong grisly violence and language. It was not, however banned in any of the Western countries.

4.3.1. Violence in the Western Genre Films The reader is aware that violence is the core of the Western genre right from the beginning of its existence. Scenes depicting violence appear in Great Train

Robbery, the very first Western film, and one can hardly imagine a Western film without cowboys, law-men and outlaws carrying their guns behind their leather belts being prepared to shoot whenever needed. Thel in Dead Man explains with a smile to easterner William Blake after he is horrified when finding a gun under Thel's pillow that “this is America” thus echoing Slotkin's and Hoberman's idea that “the true America is being shaped here in the West through the law of the gun” (Shaloky

48). American nation and identity is formed not by gentlemen in chequered suits and flat hats, carrying valises, but by adventurers, Indian fighters, missionaries and hunters who fought with a gun to master and civilize the wilderness, by those who killed and were killed during their brave attempts to colonize the West. Violence, therefore , “lies at the core of the western, the genre that America has long considered the quintessential manifestation of its national ethos” (48).

Lee Clark Mitchell argues that “the Western obsession with violence grows out of the larger fascination with what is now termed the construction of masculinity”

(Violence 176). He claims that masculinity is formed by biological factors as well as

48 cultural ones. Therefore, the typical outbursts of violence appear in the Western films to test “both these assumptions – the body that must recover its masculine features

(tall in the saddle, quick on the draw) and the characteristic male response celebrated by the Western (restraints, taciturnity, endurance)” (176). It means that violence in the Western genre enables to show men's “manliness both as handsome cinematic figures that rivet the viewers gaze, and as individuals capable of triumphing over adversity as only men are allowed to do” (176).

As Stephen Prince declares, the first controversies and ,subsequently, also the first attempts to regulate violence on the screen appeared as soon as around 1909.

The way violence was shown on the screen was rather different from what is nowadays audience used to, as it had “overtly theatrical quality and mode of representation” (Prince 12). Prince explains that violence “is shown in full figure framing, with a camera at a comfortable distance from the action, and the victims of punches or gunshots behave as they might on the stage. They fail about and then fall to the ground” (12). Film-makers changed their orientation towards violence after the coming of sound, as the sound “made violence palpable, gave it texture and rhythmic form, made it sensuous and overcame the abstracting effects of the silent image”

(12). With sound, the audience could witness cries of victims and barks of weapons together with the violent images.

As soon as these stylised pictures of violence appeared, there were limitations imposed upon the directors to control the range of expressions they could use. Prince asserts that “state, municipal and country agencies across the country worked actively to shape and control the conditions of motion picture representation” thus “controlling the content of American film” (Prince 19). As a result, the film

49 industry established Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to protect itself from such pressure, and formulated the “Don'ts and Be Carefuls” which were later, in the 1930s, incorporated into the Production Code. Prince notes that surprisingly, violence was not included among the Don'ts but only among the

Carefuls suggesting that violence was not “deemed sufficiently disturbing or objectionable to ban entirely from the screen” (20). Instead, film-makers were just

“asked to be careful in their depictions of violent behaviour” (20).

Over the years, as a reaction to more violent and brutal scenes appearing especially in gangster films, the PCA (Production Code Administration) released regular amendments to the Code to regulate depiction of violence in the cinema. In fact, over the thirty years, up till the 1960s, the Production Code influenced to great extent how violence was portrayed in American cinema. In 1968 the PCA was abandoned and was replaced by a MPAA Code and Rating Administration (CARA) with its G-M-R-X rating system based on the age suitability that has been valid up till now. Thus the system finally enabled film-makers to shoot films with violent or sexual content for adult audience without restrictions.

It is, nevertheless, important to point out, that the Western genre enjoyed for the long period of the existence of the PCA sort of a privilege together with the war films. As Prince observes, “the violence in Westerns and war films is typically presented as a kind of righteous violence, carried out by heroes of strong moral purpose”(33). Therefore, PCA was more tolerant towards violent scenes in these types of films and, as a result, the violence in Westerns “was more sustained, graphic, and brutal than what would be tolerated in a ” (33).

Yet, the abolishment of the censorship caused vital changes in the Western

50 genre, especially in the way violence started to be depicted on the screen. As the reader may remember, the 1960s and 1970s were the revolutionary years in the development of the Western genre, as Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone released their masterpieces that shocked critics with the amount of violence and particularly with the graphic depiction of the violent scenes that were not only shocking but also attractive for the film fans. These films, and The Wild Bunch in particular, portrayed the people on the screen as living creatures made of flesh and blood, and consequently, the portrayal of their dying was very realistic, showing the wounds, the tortured bodies and, of course, blood.

Richard Slotkin asserts that the “irreducible core of the western story-line is to provide a rationalizing framework which will explain and perhaps justify a spectacular act of violence” (qtd. in Shaloky 62). This spectacular, graphic act of violence was in the course of time brought forward “as a scene good and necessary in and of itself: as a climax whose aesthetic necessity and power became an acceptable substitute for the moral and ideological plot-rational that originally provided the scene's motivation and justification” (62). Thus a few film-makers made the act of violence “a highly aestheticised and carefully organized spectacles of apocalyptic vision,” so creating a pleasing image of violence. (62) This is the case, for example, of already mentioned Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, whose depictions of violence are “based on the sensual beauty of the image” (62).

4.3.2. Violence in Dead Man and The Proposition Jim Jarmusch in his Dead Man subverts this spectacular image of violent acts, he does not attempt to appeal on aestheticism. Rather, the reader can trace inspiration with the first Western films which showed violent scenes as a matter of

51 fact. His heroes kill out of necessity, for various reasons, and there does not seem anything heroic about the killing. Jonathan Rosenbaum even describes the way

Jarmusch handles violence in this film unnerving. (Rosenbaum, Acid Western n.pag)

The first killing the audiences can witness is shooting of buffalo through the windows of the train. The stoker informs Blake that the shooting is approved by the

American government and that there were millions of them killed last year. The government initiated killing of buffalo to eliminate their numbers and thus eliminate

Native Americans, as buffalo were their main source of living. Another act of violence is Charlie Dickinson's shooting in Thel's room, which is motivated by his

“hurt pride” (Shaloky 62). Bill Blake, then, kills Charlie to save his own life. The whole scene resembles old black and white films where killing and dying had the above mentioned theatrical qualities. As Shaloky argues, “Bill Blake's haphazard shooting at Charlie Dickinson verges on burlesque, which, however, turns grotesque as Charlie unexpectedly dies pierced by a wayward bullet” (63). William uses the weapon to protect himself, he has no other choice, the killing is just a matter of circumstances and there is obviously nothing heroic in the act of killing. On the contrary, Bill is terrified, his hand is shuddering, the audience can read overwhelming fear in his eyes. In addition, Charlie dies just the way he would have died in a gangster film shot before the Production Code was abolished, plainly, in a theatrical way, he just tumbles down on the ground. Rosenbaum describes in his review that

“Every time someone fires a gun in this movie, both the gesture and its result are awkward, unheroic, even downright pitiful; it's a messy act devoid of any pretence of stylishness or existential purity, creating a sense of discomfort and embarrassment in the viewer usually expressed in laughter” (Acid Western n.pag.).

52 Throughout Bill's journey, several other killings happen, none of them is, however, melodramatic or spectacular, none is made primarily to please the audience.

As Shaloky explains, “Nobody kills to protect Blake, the bounty hunters and the marshals (are prepared to) kill for reward money” (63). When Cole Wilson, one of the bounty hunters, kills Johnny the Kid, it is so quick and unexpected that the audience barely notices the shooting itself. When Blake and Nobody encounter a group of three weird trappers, after a short quarrel over whose the young nice

Philistine (understand William Blake) is, one of the trappers aims his weapon at another showing that in this wilderness, the right is pursued by a gun. He shoots at his companion's feet and the shot man in response takes a rifle and decides to kill

Blake. At that moment, Nobody appears with a knife from behind, and cuts the trapper's throat. It is very quick, just a little of blood, nothing spectacular. Shooting of the other two trappers that follows is comic and awkward, as both the trappers are not prepared and have to reload their rifles, they do it slowly, awkwardly, and of course too long to survive. Blake shoots one of the trappers to save Nobody but then hides his head under his arms like a child waiting for Nobody to kill the last trapper himself.

The change comes with shooting of two marshals following Blake for the reward of 500 dollars. As Blake slowly changes on his spiritual journey with Nobody, he gradually starts to resemble native Americans, he gets rid of the glasses, starts to wear a fur coat, he paints his face, he starts to accept a new identitity. When the two marshals notice Blake coming down the hill, they immediately aim at him with their weapons. For the first time, there is no fear in William's eyes, no awkward movement. He comes closer to the marshals and when they ask if he is William

53 Blake, he answers with a calm, stony face: “Yes, I am. Do you know my poetry?”

And as he is approaching the marshals, he pulls out his gun and shoots them both very quickly with no emotions commenting with a calm voice with a line from

William Blake's poetry that he learnt from Nobody: “Some are born to endless night”

(Dead Man).

The violence depicted in Dead Man gradually intensifies as the film proceeds. When Cole Wilson finds the two marshals killed on the ground, he looks at the profile of one of the marshals lying with the head in the middle of the debris of a fire ring that reminds of an aura around his head. As Shaloky comments, “No act of iconoclasm could be more literal, and repulsive, than the bounty hunter Cole Wilson's foot crushing the skull until blood and brains spurt out of its nostrils” (63). As she explains, “Wilson's snort 'It looks like a goddamn religious icon' voices the whole film's attitude toward the veneration of beautified and sanctified violence” (63). In this scene, even though it could lure the audience to be classified as an aestheticized violence, as a pleasing moment for the audience gazing at the dead body, Jarmusch in fact does the opposite. He confronts this aesteticized image of dead body with Cole's words to reverse this “ballet of bullet” (63).

Another violent act happens actually off-screen, as the only thing the audience can perceive is shooting that is heard during the black-out. As soon as the scene is set, we are exposed to a cannibalistic feast of Cole sitting alone at a fire with a huge portion of bones and flesh in his hands. Nothing is said, but the audiences cannot be mistaken that what Cole is enjoying is the hand of his companion. As the film is carried on, William Blake encounters more dead bodies and kills more people until he is finally shot again, this time in his shoulder. Seriously wounded, he is

54 transported by Nobody to a Makah village to get a proper canoe that would bring him to the other side of the world, to the place where he came from. The last thing he can see on this world is Cole shooting at Nobody and then mutual gunshot leading to death of them both. The shooting itself is made in an extreme long shot to set the viewers as far from the final violent scene as possible, yet enable them to be present, to experience it and thus feel appropriate feeling of sorrow and possibly dismay.

The violence presented in Dead Man almost always originates in some kind of necessity, it is not used to attract audience, to show exciting gunshots, screaming and splashes of blood. All the killing just fits into the reality of the frontier life, it is neither pompous, nor heroic, it is rather presented as ordinary, everyday reality of life in the Wild West. This ordinariness of violence and killing in the town of Machine,

Jarmusch first indicates by the hunters and pioneers travelling in the train who all have a gun prepared to shoot whenever needed. Then later, while Blake is walking the main street of Machine to get to the Dickinson's metal works, violence and death demonstrates itself through various visuals. As Blake is walking down the street, he can spot a carriage loaded with coffins, then an undertaker's shop full of even more coffins, there are piles of animal skins, and skulls hanging on the wall and finally a man pointing at him with his gun while having oral sex with a woman. This everyday presence of violence and death is then explicitly pronounced by Thel, who keeps a loaded gun under her pillow “Cause this is America”(Dead Man).

To sum up, violence in Dead Man can be considered the reverse of the expressive, spectacular way violence has been presented in Westerns since Wild

Bunch. If Rosenbaum says there is something unnerving about violence in Dead

Man, it may well be, apart of the awkwardness and non heroic behaviour, the fact,

55 that the audience has got used to get very close to killing and dying. Due to the camera distance, nowadays the audience can enjoy pleasure of the gaze at blood and tortured and wounded bodies from intimate distance. In Dead Man the audience is actually deprived of this pleasure, as most of the scenes are quick, the wounds are not visible much or at all, so the viewer cannot witness much of suffering. The viewers are aware that there are violent actions, but instead of being projected explicitly and in detail on the screen, the audiences have to project the details of violence in their minds.

As Szaloky stays it: “Violence action speaks where words are reduced to silence” (48). To follow her argument, one can assume that, in Dead Man, violence is actually the only way for Nobody to gain voice, to become somebody. It is his killing of Big George that reduces the silence and speaks for Nobody, and this is the language of Western that Nobody teaches Bill Blake. Obviously, even Nobody is aware of it when he explains to Blake that “Your poetry will now be written with blood” (Dead Man). One can but agree with Szaloky at that point that violence is the language of the Western, that in some Westerns it is guns that speak for the heroes more than their words.

John Hillcoat in his The Proposition also exploits the language of the

Western, he, however, seems to handle violence differently. Nick Roddick in his review and interview talks about “ghost of Sam Peckinpah” that is revived in The

Proposition. (n.pag.) Hillcoat himself admits his admiration for Peckinpah, which is obvious throughout the whole film and particularly from the opening scene, “which pays homage to & (1973).” The amount of violence delivered in The Proposition is truly enormous. One of the Australian critics even

56 noted that “only those with a strong disposition will be able to stomach scenes of throat-cutting, torture, rape and exploding heads”(qtd. in Collins 64). This statement suggests that, unlike in Dead Man, the violence in The Proposition is visual, spectacular, in the tradition of the Westerns by Peckinpah, Leone and their successors. In this film, the audience is offered various violent scenes to please their gaze, thanks to the frequent close-ups and very intimate distance of the camera. As

Felicity Collins claims, “The Proposition “offers a ‘theatre of death’, a landscape of destruction, a temporality of ‘transfixed unrest’ as the nation’s founding crime scene”

(65). Here, all the killing, brutality, battering and rape has a strong sense of reality, such that one might feel quite uneasy to endure the look, yet one might feel the craving to catch a glimpse of the horrifying scenes, to gaze at the “ballets of bullets”.

The very first violent scene the viewers are remorselessly exposed to is the bloody shoot-out at an Asian prostitutes house. The shoot-out and violence has no context given, it strikes like a lightning out of a blue sky. There is the horrified screaming accompanied with barking of pistols and swishing of bullets, the camera offers in close-ups horror in people's faces covered with dust and blood. On top of that, there is a strong tension in the scene as it takes place in a dark wooden house which might evoke sort of claustrophobic feeling in the audience. The whole scene lasts for more than a minute and offers pictures of fear, blood, the sound of breaking windows and cracking of the broken wooden walls. After the brutal burst of violence, everything goes silent, the camera moves slowly around the desolated house in a planning shot to offer the viewer look at dead bodies, stains of blood, feathers floating slowly to the ground, and the only sound disturbing otherwise deadly silent scene is the buzz of flies.

57 The scene that follows takes place in the same house, where Captain

Stanley captured and now is confronting Charlie and Mike, the only people who have survived the brutal attack by the police forces, to state his proposition. The audience is thus invited to watch the result of the violent attack of the police officers again, as the camera once more overviews in a planning shot the whole house only to show the audiences countless bullet holes letting the streams of sunshine enter the dark space of the house. Then, the camera shows through quivering hot air Captain Stanley's men digging graves for the murdered people. Charlie's and Mikey's faces are still dirty with dust and bloody stains and Mikey has a wounded arm. During the dialogue between Charlie and Capt. Stanley, there are cuts that show Charlie riding on a horse back through the black and white landscape. The only thing of this scene that is shot in colour is Charlie and his horse. The camera follows Charlie slowly in a tracking shot as riding through the country, finally arriving to the graves with three crosses bearing names of Hopkin's family. These are also shot in colour. This scene suggests that Charlie accepted Stanley's proposition and sets on a journey to find Arthur, his older brother. Yet, before he actually sets out, Charlie, for the first time, takes the viewer to the crime scene, to the ruins of Hopkins' house, that is again shot in black and white. As he slowly walks through the house, the tracking shot offers the viewer to see all the things reminding of the murdered inhabitants, such as broken chairs, pictures and photos lying in the dust on the ground. Charlie arrives to the closed door, and as he opens them, there is a tidy room with blue walls and empty cradle with clean white baby duvet. This is in fact the only undestroyed, survived place in the whole house that has otherwise turned into dirty ruins. This picture just adds more brutality to the violent attack of the Burn's gang as Mrs. Hopkins, raped and

58 murdered by Burns' brothers, was pregnant. The evil and brutality is put here into contrast with innocence to provoke the viewer's emotions about the brutality of the crime.

As Charlie travels deeper into the Australian Outback, the viewer is allowed to witness how harsh, hostile and dangerous the place is. This journey may remind of

William Blake's walk through the town of Machine with all those signs of moral decay and death. Similarly to Blake's stylised walk, Charlie, too, passes symbols of danger and death. This hostile, hot and dry part of land belongs to Aboriginal people who are prepared to kill any white settler who trespasses the border and enters their territory. As Charlie roams with his horse through large empty spaces of dry land, he passes debris of dead trees, then he comes across a dead horse lying on the ground with three spears stuck in its body and in a moment he finds an Aboriginal man in white man's clothes in the same position as the horse, with three spears stuck in his body. These bodies, no doubt inform, the audience that the Aboriginal people are fighting anybody who threatens their freedom, even if it is an Aboriginal one. The law of the Aboriginals was merciless, they considered those Aboriginals working as white men's servants to be traitors of their tribes.

All these images just foreshadow another violent scene that exceeds with brutality. When Charlie wakes up in the morning, he finds his horse lying on the ground with its head covered with cloth soaked with blood. Before he can spot the enemy, he is hit by a spear that penetrates his body very close to his heart. Right at the moment, he hits the ground, there is a cut to a head of one of the Aboriginals being literally blown up by a gunshot. Both these violent scenes are shot vividly, they are a very spectacular portrayal of brutal death and they look quite authentically. As

59 Charlie is hit, there is a close-up on his face which mirrors a surprise and pain, and a second later he starts to spit blood and as he holds the spear trying to pull it out, he tumbles to the ground. In this scene, the audience is invited to get the pleasure of the gaze at the violence and brutality, thanks to the intimate distance of the camera.

There are, nevertheless, violent scenes in The Proposition which happen off- screen. One of the most important violent scenes of the film, the flogging of Mikey, is shot as a montage of short cuts showing Mikey's flogging in such a way that the audience can see neither the wounds, nor the blood, as the camera offers a long shot assuming the position of one of the possible spectators in the crowd who cannot see

Mikey's whipped back because of a wooden cross. This scene alternates with a shot of the Burns gang back in the mountains listening to a beautiful singing of Samuel

Stoat, one of the members of the gang. He is singing with angelic voice a sad Irish folk song “Peggy Gordon”. The views of the two scenes alternate, whereas the sound of them both goes together, so Mikey's horrified, desperate and painful screaming blurs with Stoat's tender singing. These two alternating scenes are, in addition,

“bordered by a series of tracking shots that detail Charlie’s journey from one place to the other, and long shots of the sun setting and rising over both locations” (Stein n.pag.). The only graphic picture of violence the audience is exposed to in this scene is the picture of the scourge squeezed to get rid of great amount of blood, and then there is a picture of Mikey lying on the stretcher with his back covered with a cloth soaked with blood.

Erica Stein indicates that the song “Peggy Gordon” has a double function in this 39 strokes long scene. It links the two settings, the town of Banyon and Arthur's hideout, and, in the same time, “limits the ability of the viewer to read one place and

60 its signification as opposed to the other.” The camera wanders from horrified Mikey's face to the gathered crowd, then to the exhausted flogger, and in a planning shot slowly moves to the ground to show the pool of blood, just to move back to the people in the crowd with their hats and shirts full of flies. Mikey, beaten on the cross, is the outlaw, the unwanted element, the other presented here in the opposition to the townsfolk. This planning shot of the camera together with the long shots of the whole setting alternating with the shots of Stoat singing far back in the mountains may well serve to de-construct the concept of such opposition. The flies collecting on villains as well as on the flogging mob whose appearance does not differ much from dirty outlaws (with the exception of Martha Stanley and Edan Fletcher) just emphasize this subversion of the binary oppositions that create the core of classical westerns.

Simultaneously, Stein argues, “the intercutting is also ironic, juxtaposing the beautiful song with its ugly source (the toothless, dirty singer) and uglier intertext (a mob) and opposing the peaceful pursuits of the outlaws with the violent pursuits of the law.” In this Western, nothing just fits into the conventional oppositional categories, nothing and nobody is only good or bad, white or black, civilized or wild.

The audience, thus, may be puzzled till the end of the film who is the real hero and who is the villain.

Another off-screen violence is the killing of the band of Aboriginals by

Stanley's men. The audience is informed that Stanley sends his men to kill the group of Aboriginals as Eden Fletcher, a local landowner, who actually owns the town, orders to Stanley, supporting his decision with the argument that if they kill one of the band, they have to kill the rest too, otherwise the rest comes to revenge their companion. The audiences can see the police officers on their search for the group of

61 Aboriginals, but they only learn that the Aboriginals were caught and killed from the gunshots and from a short comment of Arthur Burns.

Another striking example of violence presented off screen, at least partially, is the scene with Arthur Burns killing Sergeant Lawrence. Again, the audience is well prepared for what is to come, as first Arthur is aiming at Sergeant with a gun, then he pulls a knife only to end up with Sergeant Lawrence lying on the ground in a stable.

Arthur finally does not use any of the weapons, but crushes Lawrence's head and neck with his boot. The only thing Hillcoat offers the viewer to see, however, is

Arthur's face. The brutality is illustrated through disturbing and intensive sound of the crushing head accompanied by a startled neigh of the horses.

Despite these off-screen violent scenes, Hillcoat surely does not intend to deprive his audience of the pleasure of relishing in long, graphic sequences of brutality and look at tortured bodies. Such an example of spectacular piece of violence is the sequence with Jellon Lamb, the bounty hunter, who finds Burn's hiding place and captures Charlie Burns and Samuel Stoat. The close-ups reveal both men tied up firmly and painfully. Stoat is lying on the ground while Charlie is pushed by Lamb's gun to get up and move on the rocky terrain with the whole body painfully twisted backwards. Moreover, as Charlie is half naked, the viewers are offered the look at his dirty, wounded body. In a moment, Charlie arrives and shoots Lamb so quickly, that the audience can barely notice. Hillcoat, however, elongates the violent scene through Lamb's dying. Lamb. Injured and bleeding, starts to recite lines from

George Borrow's Lavengro (1851): “There's night and day brother, both sweet things.

Sun and Moon and stars, all sweet things. And quiet, there's a wind on the east. Life is very sweet, brother” (Dead Man) and, surprisingly, the renegade Arthur Burns

62 finishes his words, “Life is very sweet, brother, who would wish to die?” He even recognises the author: “George Borrow, I believe. A worthy writer, and a beautiful sentiment sir.” They both are face to face, very close to each other, it is a long intimate moment, but Arthur ends it quickly claiming “But you're not my brother.”

He pushes dying Lamb to the ground and hands Charlie a knife to finish Lamb's life.

Charlie refuses so Arthur does it himself. Although, again, we cannot see the knife penetrating Lamb's body, we can hear the sound of dying Lamb, which is a death rattle sound, horrible and very intensive.

This scene represents another example of reversion of binary oppositions in

The Proposition. Two men that could be easily classified as negative characters, the vicious renegade Arthur Burns and merciless bounty hunter Jellon Lamb, who kills people for money, are portrayed here not only as the brutal men with no moral values, but also as men who are well educated and who appreciate art. Jellon Lamb gives Charlie a speech on Darwin and his On the Origin of Species even though he does not agree with Darwin's ideas, while Arthur has shelves full of books cut in the rocks of his hiding place.

The last and probably most violent scene, is again a combination of off- screen and on-screen violence. While Martha and her husband Captain Stanley are sitting at a Christmas table, the Burns gang bursts into the room to revenge Mikey's death. Graphic portrayal of torture and rape accompanied with lots of blood culminates when Charlie enters the door and kills Stoat just in the middle of the rape, and then shoots his elder brother Arthur. In this scene, the audience can again hear

Stoat singing “Peggy Gordon”, albeit this time, the song and the violence are present in one shot in one setting, as Stoat is singing while raping Mrs. Stanley. All the

63 violence and brutality is a spectacular show to please the audiences, to attract their gaze.

The reader may already be aware that in Dead Man, violence manifests itself as something ordinary, as part of everyday reality, and that the brutality and killing mostly originates in necessity. From what has been said so far, we can assume that the depiction of violence in both films is different, as in The Proposition, the violent scenes are presented more or less in the tradition of Sam Peckinpah's spectacular violent scenes to attract and please the viewer's gaze, whereas in Dead

Man, the violence is very awkward, just a matter of fact that does not show itself to please the viewer's eyes. In short, the visual conventions that both directors employ in their films cannot be ranked into the same category. It must be, however stressed out, that violence in The Proposition is not portrayed to glorify the violence itself. On the contrary, the violent scenes are covered with dust, mud and thousands of flies that are everywhere, thus underlining the dirtiness and moral as well as physical decay of the white settlers, the brutal and violent community of the town of Banyon. This dirt and non-glorifying depiction of brutality and violence corresponds with non- glorifying portrayal of violence in Dead Man.

If the visual aspects of these violent scenes are put aside and instead, one focus on the characters, their motives and behaviour, another similarities may emerge. As Steve Habrat expresses, “We do have to wonder who the real savages are in The Proposition and that question is easily answered as the film moves into its second act. The outlaws use violence to protect their freedom while the Aboriginal tribes are using violence to protect what is rightfully theirs.” We can assume that these two groups have their reason, their brutality originates in necessity as well as in

64 the case of Jarmusch's heroes. The motif of violence and brutality that Burns' gang is demonstrated when Samuel Stoat asks Artur what a misanthrope is. Arthur explains that “A misanthrope is one who hates humanity.” (The Proposition) Stoat then asks again: “Is that what we are? Misanthropes?” Arthur briskly replies “Good Lord, no!

We're family!” All the violence, all the killing and brutality is in Arthur's psychopathic mind committed in the name of love and family.

If any violence should be legitimate and therefore justifiable, it should be the acts of military forces, the law men's action that should pursue the law and order.

In The Proposition, however, Captain Stanley's men use “senseless slaughter and overkill to send a message, all while flies gather on their sweaty backs. Yet Cave and

Hillcoat don’t ever squander an opportunity to show us how senseless all this violence really is. It is written in the reactions of those who pound a drum for it”

(Habrat n.pag.). Here, Habrat has surely in mind the introductory violent slaughter at the Asian prostitute house, during which all of the people including the prostitutes were killed except of Charlie and Mikey. The later killing of the Aboriginals would fit to this description too. Classical Westerns are probably confronted here, with their assumption that the order of the frontier community can be “restored through violent confrontations with unwanted evil elements” (Bodker 9). In the case of The

Proposition, however, the unwanted elements are not primarily the savages, the

Aboriginals, but the Irish gang that the police officers are fighting. The barbaric crime of slaughtering and raping white settler's family, which was according to

Bodker in the 19th century Australia usually assigned to Aboriginals, was in The

Proposition committed by the Irish people. As Bodker states it, “On both a real and metaphorical level this is Western civilization fighting with itself” (9). The same is

65 actually valid for Charlie, as “the unwanted element that Charlie is left to purge is of his own blood, and by implication part of his psyche” (9). In this film, even though the fights with Aboriginals are mentioned and it is explicitly pronounced that

Aboriginals fight with white settlers, as they want to get their own land back, the main focus of the film lies in the fight that the civilization of the colonizer leads within itself.

The same seems to be plausible for Jarmusch's Dead Man, where the focus of the violence lies again within white settler civilization, albeit the Native

Americans are present and also killed in the film. Blake, as well as Charlie, has to get rid of the unwanted element that is not the “savage”, the Indian, but white settler, the civilized colonizer. In addition, the cannibalistic murder of one of the bounty hunters plays for a barbaric crime, that the 19th century white settlers would have assigned to barbaric Indians. (9)

Obviously, a common feature of both films under focus is the common enemy, white savage, that is the undesirable element that both main characters have to fight. Thus one of the similar features of both films is the way they portray violence in terms of who is responsible for the brutality and how the violent acts are pursued. In both films, the depiction of violent and brutal acts is from this point of view shot in the tradition of revisionist westerns, ascribing the barbaric, most brutal, and what is most important, useless violent acts to white settlers, to the Western civilization itself.

66 4.4. Violence and masculinity In the following part of the essay, the attention will be paid to the way violence is exploited in terms of masculinity. As was already mentioned, Lee Clark

Mitchell claims that violence and brutality in American cinema are a means for expressing manliness of Western heroes. He argues that “Violence in the Western begins, as it must, with the hero's body, where attention is closely paid to physical features, costumed appearance, upright stance” (177). Mitchell talks about a paradox that is inherent in the Western genre in terms of masculinity, which evolves through the film, thus “making true men out of biological men.” The biological men, or to be more precise, their biological bodies are usually distorted “beyond power of self- control so that in the recuperation a masculinity can be revealed that is at once physical yet based on performance.” Thus, Mitchell argues, “the Western is invariably pitched toward an exhibition of manly restraint, thereby requiring the proof of generic excess in the form of repeated violence.” (177) It is therefore obvious that the male body is always in the centre of the genre, and that tortured, and consequently, wounded and bleeding male bodies have long created part of the

Western genre iconography.

With respect to this argument, one can conclude that both main characters of the two films under scrutiny, Charlie Burns as well as William Blake, just follow the pattern suggested by Mitchell. They both are seriously wounded, Blake by a bullet that is stuck in his chest, and Charlie by a spear, that protrudes his chest near his heart, similarly to Blake. Thus, large part of the film the audience is presented with a destroyed male body.

It may seem to be a paradox that the obsession with male bodies, “the celebration of male physic” is often connected with their destruction and mutilation.

67 (Mitchell 181) As Mitchell argues, “there is an almost obsessive recurrence of scenes of men being beaten – or knifed and whipped, propped up, knocked down, kicked in the side, punched in the face, or otherwise lacerated, clubbed, battered and tortured into unconsciousness.” He explains this frequent occurrence of destructed male bodies with reference to the landscape, arguing that the American Western landscape

“is associated with personal transformation”, suggesting that the West is a place

“where manhood might at last emerge yet still remain what it always was” (177-178).

American Western landscape itself is a symbol of masculinity, because it is defined by the absence of feminine objects. Masculine features of the landscape may vary from deserts, rocks, forests, pubs or saloons, brothels, police stations and railways, whereas feminine features may include gardens, shops, schools, pastures, fields and church steeples. A typical landscape depicted in the Western films is, according to Jane P. Tompkins, “defined by absence: of trees, of greenery, of houses, of the signs of civilization, above all absence of water and shade” (71).

It is indisputable that landscape has always been “one of the most important elements of the genre. It plays a major part in what Rick Altman calls the syntax of the genre” (123). Klein asserts that landscape, in addition, contributes to create semantic elements of the story, for example the characters. The landscape is often understood and depicted in terms of binary oppositions to contrast wilderness and civilization, nature and culture, garden and desert and so on. Klein argues there are links to be traced between certain types of landscape and “the character types” that inhabit the particular type of landscape. (123) Thus Indians and outlaws of the

Western genre inhabit the dangerous and harsh wilderness.

When comparing Australian Outback landscape with the American Frontier,

68 the viewer can but conclude, that there are apparent similarities with American

Western territory as “Australia had a frontier and a settler history comparable to the

Wild West in the middle of the 19th century” (Klein 124). The wilderness and hostility of the Australian inland is another element that American West has in common with

Australian Outback. Therefore, it can be claimed that Australian landscape can play similar role and convey similar meaning as the American Wild West does. Klein, however, comes with yet another perspective that should be kept in mind, arguing that “the opposition between wilderness and civilization in the sense that the wilderness can be controlled and colonized” is actually not valid for Australia as

Australian wilderness has never been completely tamed and settled by Anglo-Saxon settlers. The reason is its vast desert that inherently “can't be made habitable and this impact is significant for the myth of the Australian outback as well” (125). This

“extremely alien notion” is truly explored in The Proposition as Hillcoat together with Benoît Delhomme, whose impressive cinematography bathed in sheds of red and ochre colours from blood and sun, leave no doubt that this country is a hellish place. (125)

In such a hostile environment, a person is exposed to natural forces, “the sun beats down and there is no place to hide” (Tompkins 71). Tompkins suggests that there arises a negotiation between the hero and the landscape through the harsh physical setting. The landscape sends a message on physical level saying that if the hero is brave and “strong enough to endure it”, he will become just “like this – hard, austere, sublime” (71). On top of that, the landscape sends a spiritual message saying that it is a hard place to live, so “come and suffer” (71). Thus the landscape challenges both, the physical and spiritual levels of hero's life and personality. In

69 doing so, the landscape promises pain that seems to be irresistible for the hero

“because it awakens a desire for spiritual prowes, some unearthly glory earned through long-continued discipline, self-sacrifice, submission to a supernatural power”

(72). In short, the landscape, or nature possesses those qualities – bleakness and mercilessness, that the man needs to have to survive in this environment and also strives to posses as they are regarded to be “the acme of human moral perfection”

(73). It means that through its characteristic features, the landscape pushes a hero to undergo a transformation on both, physical but especially spiritual level. It is the platform for becoming a strong moral individual, for becoming a real man. Arthur

Burns is obviously aware of the power of nature when he explains to Stoat at the backdrop of one of the sunsets: “You can never get your fill of nature, Samuel. To be surrounded by it is to be stilled. It salves the heart. The mountains, the trees, the endless plains. The moon, the myriad of stars. Every man can be made quiet and complete. Even the lowliest misanthrope or the wretchedest sinners” (The

Proposition).

If one takes into account the main characters and the portrayal of their masculinity, it must be concluded that William Blake is not a typical representation of the Western male hero. When he comes to the town of Machine, he is an archetypal

Eastern gentleman wearing decent chequered suit, flat hat, and glasses. His smooth face and glossy, well kept hair strengthen the feminine impression that Blake evokes in the audience. Frankly, there is nothing masculine neither about his appearance, nor about his behaviour. He behaves submissively when getting in the conflict first with

Mr. Dickinson and then later in the bar. His manliness is literally drawn in the mud after he is thrown out of the bar into the muddy street with his silly small bottle of

70 whiskey, where he is offered help by a woman. His fear when he first encounters a gun in Thel's apartment, his awkward manipulation with the gun, and then his coward escape through the window of Thel's apartment are just further feminized features that complete the feminine character of the Easterner William Blake. All the paper roses in Thel's apartment and her brave gesture when she puts her body in the way of the bullet to save Blake's life are just icing on the cake together with the name of the famous English romantic poet which does not contribute much to add any sign of manliness to the character, on the contrary, for poetry has also feminine features.

As the film proceeds, however, Blake's feminines gradually disappears, partly probably under the influence of Nobody, who teaches him how to survive in the wild landscape, and partly by the pressure of the circumstances. The landscape with typical masculine features enables Blake the transformation mentioned above.

Nobody expresses Blake's personal transformation into man in one sentence when he says to Blake that “Your poetry will now be written with blood” (Dead Man). The reader already knows that Nobody is right as Blake really becomes a man with not only masculine but also “savage” features. His face gets painted with blood in a native-like manner, he starts to wear a long fur coat reminding us of the hunters travelling with him by train, he learns how to handle a gun, and his fear and awkwardness is replaced by dignity, calmness, self-confidence and mercilessness.

Charlie Burns, on the other hand, possesses masculine features right from the beginning of the film. He is a man wearing typical western clothes with wide- cramp hat, having a gun that he can handle quite well. He is a man with criminal past, so it is obvious that he is a tough person, he is merciless enough to kill. In spite of this, Charlie also undergoes a transformation, which is not as much physical as

71 spiritual.

4.5. Loneliness as a condition for metaphysical quest Both main characters are sent on a lonely journey through hostile and dangerous land as lonely riders. As Shai Biderman asserts, the lonely hero is “one of the common attributes of Western films” (13). He claims that the lonely hero “is the quintessential 'strong silent type' traditionally prized in the American psyche. He is strong in the sense that he is powerful in his physical, intellectual, and moral capacities” (13). He further explains that “there are two sides of loneliness” (13). One of them is what we could call “subjective, personal, inner feeling of isolation and estrangement from other people, in the sense of feeling lonely. The other side of loneliness is “the objective, public, outer view of one being physically away from others, in the sense of being alone” (15). Thus, if we speak of a lonely hero, we can speak about a character who is alone, without anybody else around, or about somebody who just feels lonely, albeit he is in presence of somebody else. Of course, both aspects of loneliness may appear together which means that the hero can be physically alone and in addition feel lonely.

The question then may arise, why the condition of loneliness, regardless in which sense of the word we consider it, is so essential for a person, and particularly for a Western hero. Biderman tries to answer the question with reference to Socrates and Aristotle who were persuaded that the life is worth living if it is examined and investigated and that “solitude is a primary position for such an epistemic quest, as it is the context that isolates and manifests the wondering voice who seeks for knowledge and truth.” Based on this argument, loneliness enables an individual to encounter the world and oneself “in an unmediated and uninterrupted way” (19).

72 Placing Biderman's argument into the context of Dead Man and The

Proposition, can illuminate what role the central motif of the quest, the lonely journey, plays in the development of the narrative of both films. Both main characters, William Blake, as well as Charlie Burns, are at the beginning of the films placed at the breaking point of their lives. Blake's parents died and his fiancé broke with him, he found himself lonely and decided to completely change his life, leave his home town and come to Machine to find a new life. Similarly, Charlie Burns after the brutal massacre of Hopkins family decides to leave his criminal life and his

“family” (understand the band of bandits led by his older brother) and together with his younger brother Mikey start a new life. Soon after their decision, after the fresh start, things go wrong and William and Charlie both get into a difficult situation. The circumstances lead them both on a lonely journey that on one hand takes them into hostile, dangerous landscape which pushes the heroes to undergo physical and spiritual transformation, and on the other hand, they are thrown into loneliness, which enables them to examine and question their lives in epistemological sense so enabling them to find “knowledge and truths” (Biderman 19). Their lonely quest is, hence, essential part of the story, which explains and makes credible the transformation of both characters into real, true man, through the acts of violence and through their wounded bodies that help them to achieve spiritual transcendence and masculinity imposed on them by the masculine character of the landscape. Their masculinity, then, demonstrates itself in their ability to behave like true men, to understand what is right and moral, to be hard, merciless yet “sublime” and to be prepared to accept consequences of their deeds.

Blake's transformation reveals itself in front of the shop, when he gives

73 Nobody his newly acquired weapon. Nobody refuses to take it, so Blake explains that he took it from a dead white man. When Nobody asks if he killed the white man,

Blake admits that yes. He understands that it is important for Nobody, as he believes it is right to kill white men. On the wall of the missionary station, Blake comes across a line of the posters offering reward for bringing wanted William Blake dead or alive for “The brutal murders of Charles Dickinson and fiancée, Thel Russell, also the murders of the following territorial marshals deputy Big George, Drakoulious,

Benmont Tench and one Salvatore Sally Jenko" (Dead Man). Again, Nobody seems delighted by so many dead white men and Blake decides to give the poster to

Nobody as a present, showing that he is now reconciled with his new identity of a criminal, a merciless killer. So far, when coming across those posters, he has been angry arguing that he did not kill Thel, he tore the posters and felt the whole situation to be unfair. Here, almost at the end of his journey, after being on his spiritual quest, after he has killed several other white men, he seems to be balanced, reconciled with his life and destiny. Also the subsequent scene in the shop supports this argument.

When the seller recognizes William Blake, he asks him for his autograph to attract

Blake’s attention. When Blake takes a pen, the seller pools a gun from behind a counter, but Blake is quicker and stabs the seller's hand with the pen uttering “There's my autograph.” (Dead Man)When the surprised and horrified seller declares “God damn your soul to the fires of hell” Blake replies with a stony face that “He already has.” Again, Blake's calmness, dignity and composure are demonstrated as a result of his transformation, of his quest. Furthermore, he fulfils Nobody's vision that he will write his poetry with blood.

One of the most poetic and transcendental scenes which illustrates Blake's

74 transcendence is when William finds death fawn in a forest during his spiritual quest, after being left by Nobody who decided to go on a peyotle trip. Before Nodody leaves Blake, he explains that such a vision quest connected with fasting is a tradition among Native tribes. Indians undergo those quests to get a vision and spiritual knowledge. Thus Blake actually really travels completely alone for some time, without food and water, but not so much that he wants to, but for he is unable to get some food. During his sort of hallucinatory journey he finds dead fawn in the forest, he mixes his own blood with the blood of the fawn and paints his face with native like painting. Then he curls up next to the fawn embracing it like a mother embracing her child. The scene is tender and touching, yet uneasy, when one takes into account that the fawn is like a mirror reflection of Blake himself. The fawn as a symbol of innocence and vulnerability is lying on the ground with a bullet in the chest as a reminder of William's own life and destiny. He was also an innocent young man who was shot in the heart and during his long lasting dying has lost his innocence and become a renegade, a killer of white man. During the vision quests Native Americans usually try to get into contact with their spirit guide in the form of an animal. Here, the fawn can be understood as a spirit guide, but as William Blake is actually already dead and there is no chance for him to escape it, the innocent spirit, that would otherwise guide him through his life, manifests itself as already dead too. Blake, nevertheless, keeps the bloody painting on his face till the end of the film, possibly as a symbol of spiritual connection with the innocence, or maybe as a symbol of what he used to be before he came to Machine, to the West and of what the West has made of him.

As Jonathan Rosenbaum agrees in his interview with Jim Jarmusch, Blake

75 came to the town of Machine as tabula rasa and everyone in the film wants to write over it. Thus, William Blake “picks up bits and pieces of his identity from other people in the film, including Nobody” (Rosenbaum, Gun n.pag). As Jarmusch sums it up “He’s branded an outlaw totally against his character, and he’s told he’s this great poet and he doesn’t know what the hell this crazy Indian guy is even talking about.”

He, nevertheless, gradually acquires all those brands of his character, as he really becomes an outlaw, he becomes a poet who writes his poetry with blood, and he and

Nobody find common ground, which is violence and death. As was mentioned earlier in this essay, violence becomes a language of them both, violence is what reduces

Nobody's silence and it is violence in which their strange friendship originated.

To conclude, it has been illustrated that the landscape as well as anything and anybody that is a part of that landscape, has definitely impact on the character of

William Blake. He transforms from an innocent boy with feminine features into a tough man whose manliness is revealed through his physical appearance as well as through his action. In this sense, Jarmusch employs a typical genre convention in a traditional way. The reader is informed, however, that such a lonely journey should also transform the character into a person of higher moral principles which is not fulfilled here, as this lonely journey ends with Blake's death. Thus, in this respect the convention is reversed, as the only result of the whole journey is the death of the criminal. The fact that Blake's spiritual quest was not completely successful and that he has not acquired the true knowledge of life, may be symbolised at the end of the film when Nobody informs Blake that “It's time for you to leave now, William Blake.

Time for you to go back to where you came from.” (Dead Man) And Blake asks with serious expression: “You mean Cleveland?” It is obvious that he does not understand

76 the metaphors Nobody uses, he has not been revealed the truth of his life and therefore does not understand the world around himself.

The main character of The Proposition is also thrown into loneliness on his journey that according to the Western genre conventions leads to his spiritual transformation into an ideal man with strong moral values, tough, merciless but fair.

Charlie Burns rides through the harsh, sweltering, hostile land to find his older brother because he has no other choice if he wants to save his younger brother. His journey is therefore a “journey of moral dilemmas, weaving back and forth between such emotionally charged issues as brotherly love and bloody revenge” (Cenere 39).

Charlie is offered an immoral offer and he is trapped in the situation, as no possibility that lies in front of him, is a good one. He tries to find help in alcohol, drinking all the way to Arthur, and his painful situation is well illustrated when he talks with

Arthur after he partially recovers from his injury. The whole scene reminds of Sergio

Leone's famous sun set scenes, as Arthur and Charlie are sitting on top of the sandy rock watching sunset and infinite Australian plain. Arthur puts his arm around

Charlie's shoulders to create an intimate, family atmosphere which suggests that there are still bonds between them, albeit weak. Although Charlie has a pretty good chance to kill Arthur, as they are completely alone and only Charlie has a gun, he does not kill him.

In spite of the Arthur's company, Charlie's loneliness continues, even though he is not physically alone. It is apparent from Charlie's behaviour and from the dialogue that he feels lonely and desperate all the time trying to muster the courage to finish his task. Shortly, the whole time Charlie spends with his brother he is balancing, evaluating, trying to dare kill his brother but it is apparent that he is not

77 able to do it. He is aware that his brother Arthur is an evil man, yet it is his brother, his own blood.

Charlie echoes the archetype of the silent, wandering character who does not speak much, thus recalling Eastwood's nameless characters inhabiting his Spaghetti

Westerns. Charlie's internal struggle, his contemplating over morality and rightness of Stanley's proposition he accepted, lasts till the very climactic end of the film.

When Arthur learns that Mikey is in jail and should be hang on Christmas day, he immediately decides to go to the town of Banyon and rescue Mikey. Arthur, Stoat,

Two Bob and Charlie go to Banyon dressed as law men bringing dirty aboriginal

(Two Bob) tied in chains. They get quite easily to the prison, kill several men and rescue Mikey. Their bloody revenge ride then leads to Stanleys' house, right at the time of Christmas dinner. While Charlie stays with Mikey, who is dying in his arms,

Arthur and Stoat take revenge on Martha and Maurice Stanley for Mikey. It is

Mikey's death that makes Charlie to ride to Stanley's house and do what is right, be merciless and kill Arthur and Stoat, to finally stop all the brutality and violence overwhelming his whole life. His transformation into a strong moral man who does what is right and is prepared to face the consequences of his own deeds is finished here. He kills Arthur and Stoat and leaves injured but alive Stanley lying on the ground, even though he could kill him too, because he could blame him for Mikey's death. Instead, Charlie leaves Stanley saying “I'm going to join my brother now”

(The Proposition). The end of the film takes place in the typical sunset background, both brothers sitting together, watching sunset and vast open space of Australian

Outback. Arthur, then, just before he dies, asks Charlie, “You got me, Charlie. What are you going to do now?” The loose end offers a variety of possible futures for

78 Charlie but it is clear that he is a new person now, the violence, landscape and loneliness transformed him, but also left him alone. He lost both his brothers, he killed Arthur and definitely felt responsible for Mikey's death because if he had killed

Arthur during the first sunset on the sandy rock cliff, Mikey could have been still alive.

Charlie, unlike William Blake in Dead Man, finishes his transformation and in addition stays alive. In this respect, Charlie's character fits more into the conventional pattern of the lonely Western hero than William Blake. What goes against the tradition or at least subverts it partially is the fact that his transformation comes too late. Thus he is not the typical rescuer as Eastwood's nameless character who comes into the town, gets the inhabitants rid of the villains, rescues the town and then leaves. Charlie also kills the villains, but just too late for him and for Captain

Stanley and his wife.

4.6. Violence and poetics Throughout the essay, the reader may have traced another common feature of both the films that has emerged on the surface. It is the symbiosis of brutality and violence with art. In both films, Jarmusch as well as Hillcoat offer various allusions to the world of art, particularly to literature and poetry, but also to music.

Dead Man recalls the person of a famous romantic poet William Blake and throughout the whole film, various parts of his poems are recited, first by Nobody and later by the accountant William Blake. Jarmusch himself confesses that the poet William

Blake entered the film in fact by a coincidence, he “just walked into the script right before I was starting to write it” (Rosenbaum, Gun n.pag.). The lines recited in the film come mainly from Auguries of Innocence, for example the following reoccurring lines:

79 Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born

every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night (119-124)

But there are also lines from Proverbs of Hell such as, “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow,”or “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” Also the line recited by Nobody in the shop comes from

Proverbs of Hell: “The vision of Christ that thou dost see/Is my Vision’s Greatest

Enemy.” Interesting about these lines is that they sound like some Indian sayings. and

Blake considers them to be some Indian malarkey. Nobody explains to Blake that he learnt about the poet William Blake while being at white man's school in England.

When reading Blake's poetry, Nobody was so touched by the words of the poems that he found will and courage to escape his captors and come back home. The fact that

Nobody, a native American, is an educated man reciting English poetry, whereas Blake, an Anglo-Saxon accountant does not even know the poet, whose name he carries, demonstrates one of many reversions of the western genre, where native Americans are portrayed as savages, who cannot speak English at all or not very well, not to mention their illiteracy.

Together with these explicit quotations of Blake's poetry, Jarmusch implicitly alludes to Blake's work by the theme of the concept of innocence and experience. As

Gregg Rickman asserts, “Blake's writings comprise a lifelong investigation of the relationship between unmediated Innocence and hardened Experience” (382). Such

80 focus is obviously apparent in his probably most famous collection of poems titled

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789-94) where Blake presents the pastoral notion of innocent childhood in the opposition to the matured experience and positions these two aspects of human personality, or rather soul, into contrast. In Dead

Man the relationship between innocence and experience underlines the whole story together with a range of William Blake's imagery. It has been already illustrated that the accountant Blake undergoes a transformation from the innocent man to a criminal, thus perfectly fitting into William Blake's concept of the evolution from the childhood state of innocence to adulthood state of experience. It is important to point out here that

William Blake uses the word innocence not only as “harmlessness”, “guiltlessness” and

“freedom from sin” but as Briana Berg suggests, he also uses the word as

“inexperience.”

Also the character of Thel is possibly inspired by the character of William

Blake's The Book of Thel (1789) where Thel is pictured as “an unborn spirit dwelling in

'the vales of Har'” (Rickman 384). Blake's Thel, Rickman explains, is afraid of and reluctant to enter the world of experience. In Jarmusch's film, the character of Thel seems to reverse William Blake's poem, as when the audience encounter Thel for the first time, she is “pushed into mud of Machine's filthy streets” with words of one of her oppressors saying “We liked you better when you was a whore” (384). Thus Jarmusch's

Thel is a person living in the world of experience, who is trying to enter the world of innocence. All the paper roses in her apartment can thus symbolize the Garden of Eden that she longs for, a better, innocent life that, as the reader already knows, is not waiting for her on the earth. Her brave act of rescuing Blake, even though not fully successful, as the bullet penetrates her body and hits Blake, can be read as an act of redemption. As

81 she is not able to enter the world of experience within her earthly life, she dies to save

Blake's life. This moment is an important one for Blake too, as the world of innocence,

Blake's world, and the world of experience, Thel's world (and actually the whole town of Machine) meet and open the door for both characters. Thus,Thel's soul can leave the world of experience behind and enter the Garden of Eden, the world of innocence, whereas Blake enters the world of experience, the world of a criminal and refugee.

What is significant for this essay is the fact that both these transformations are mediated and enabled through the act of violence. Therefore the conventions of the Western genre merge with poetic world of a romantic poet and painter William Blake to narrate an existential story of wandering souls.

Not only poetry of William Blake but also the influence with his visual work can be traced in Dead Man. As Briana Berg argues in her analysis, “William Blake's engravings and woodcuts bear a resemblance to the images in Dead Man, especially his

Pastorals of Virgil.” His work is full of symbolism, mysticism and dreamy, surrealistic atmosphere, which is also present in Dead Man. Although Berg describes and interprets in depth variety of such images, for the purpose of this essay it would be sufficient to mention just a few examples. The reader may recall Blake's hallucinatory quest for vision, the mystic scene with the dead fawn. Another example may be the end of the film in the Makah village, where Blake is on the brink of death having hallucinations.

This scene is largely imbued with mysticism. To get to the Makah village, Nobody gets a canoe for Blake and they have to go down the river which Berg suggests is “a sort of cleansing crossing to another level.” She argues that “The Native American sees his past there, while the hero's life slips away as his blood flows into the water, another purification before he reaches the light of spirituality. At the same time, he is losing his

82 strength again, another sign that he is ending this phase of his journey.” She also points out that “The totem at the entrance of the Makah village is like the gate to another world.” In addition, as the reader already knows, Blake's last journey takes him on the sea where the process of cleansing of his soul may continue, and on top of that, to complete the purification of his soul, “rain starts drizzling on him.” Berg explains that

“This use of water is reflected in William Blake's original work as well. The mythology of this epic poet, constructed over the years, draws heavily on the Bible in which water is continuously used as a symbol of life.”

In fact, the whole visual construction of the film resonates with the surrealistic, mythic atmosphere of William Blake's work. The film is shot in black and white so creating an illusion that it has its origin long time ago, but more importantly, the shades of black and white contribute to create mystic landscape. Jarmusch constructed the whole film as a series of episodes that are alternating with black screen. The alternating of the scenes and fade-outs has a following pattern: “the scenes always fade to black and stay that way for a while, creating a string of vignettes analogous to mind pictures instead of steady stream of consciousness” (Berg n.pag.). The introduction to the following scene starts with the sound first and a few seconds later, the viewer is offered a picture of the scene as if Jarmusch intended to invoke the way people wake up from their sleep or from unconsciousness. While waking up, people can usually perceive the sound around themselves before they open their eyes and find out the source of the sound. This visual construction, Berg argues, “parallels with Blake's perception of events, as he continues to fade in and out of consciousness throughout the movie, his moments of awareness becoming shorter as he nears the end of his travel through the afterlife.”

83 These vignettes may also recall the way poems are written. The individual scenes or episodes are divided by black shots in the same way as stanzas of a poem are divided by blank spaces. Very insightful analysis of parallels between Dead Man and

William Blake's works of art can be found in Briana Bergs “Unveiling the spiritual nature of Dead Man” and in Gregg Rickman's “The Western Under Erasure”. The purpose of this essay, however, does not lie in the detailed analysis of this aspect of

Dead Man, but in the comparison with another Western film, which is The Proposition.

The allusions to literature in The Proposition has already been suggested throughout the essay. To recapitulate, Arthur Burns is a renegade who quotes Borrow and has his hiding place full of books. He admires beauty, in all its forms, being it a piece of literature, a beautiful song or natural beauty of the landscape. In fact, most of the violent scenes that are depicted in the film are somehow linked to beauty. The flogging of Mikey accompanied by “Peggy Gordon” has been discussed earlier in this essay together with rape of Mrs Stanley. What has not been mentioned yet is the fact that it is Arthur Burns who orders Stoat to sing the song while raping Martha. In the meantime, Arthur is sitting in a rocking chair with closed eyes, listening to Stoat singing. Also before the final violent attack to Stanley's house, Arthur stops with his band for a while to enjoy charming sunset, to admire beauty of the landscape and to contemplate over its power over human beings. In short, Arthur Burns is a man of contradictions, it is a man who puts love, family and beauty on top of his values, but in the meantime is capable of brutal killing and torturing. More over, it seems as if the combination of beauty and art with violence intensified his emotions, his appreciation of them both. This aspect of Arthur's personality seems to reflect the character of

Australian landscape, a cruel, harsh, hell-on-the-earth place that is hard to survive in,

84 but in the same time, it has its incredible and unique sort of lyrical beauty, at least in

The Proposition.

4.7. Cinematography The Australian Outback landscape is actually another important character that contributes largely to the development of the narrative. This is especially thanks to

Delhomme's work with the camera. There are various shots made “with a wide angle to capture as much of the beauty of the physical world as humanly possible” (McLachlan n.pag.). Some of the wide angle shots create an impression as if they were large paintings of the landscape thanks to their intensive colours of sun-burnish yellows, dark browns and burning reds showing its beauty as well as its ugliness. One moment, the camera offers in a planning shot “fields of yellowed grass and wheat,” red sun and yellow moon, and in another reveals the viewer dust, dirt, mud and flies. Phillip

Cenere, while reviewing the film, even dares to compare Delhomme's cinematography to oil paintings:

Many of the scenes resemble renowned Australian oil paintings. The heat

rising from the parched ground in the mythical town of Banyon, and the

depiction of human survival amidst the isolation and hardship of the red

desert and its decaying terrain are reminiscent of Sidney Nolan's Going

to Work, Rising Sun Hotel (1948) and Perished (1949), or of Russell

Drysdale's Sofala (1947), The Rabbiters (1947), and Sunday Evening

(1941). Meanwhile the idealized portrayal of Victorian life Down Under

is evocative of Frederick McCubbin's work. The Stanley household could

easily be a recreation of Home Again (1884), and Martha's wardrobe and

appearance resemble his portraits of Mrs McCubbin and Miss Flemimg

85 in A Lady in Grey (1900) and Study in White (1902). (38-39)

The portrayal of Australia and its landscape in particular is very vivid, intensive, and realistic. It is not a surprise then, that the film won several awards, especially on the

Australian continent, for best cinematography (AFI Award, FCCA Award, IF Award). As

Wilson McLachlan states it in his review, “Australia has never looked so bleak and fly- ridden. The flies are a major part of the atmosphere in The Proposition, they buzz around every character in and out of their eyes and mouths.” To appreciate its artistic quality, he even compares the film with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch arguing that

The Proposition demonstrates “the closest human approximation to the Catholic notion of Hell seen on film.”

Captain Stanley is aware of this hellish character of Australian landscape when he utters, “Australia – what fresh Hell is this?” while “looking out of the window at the shimmering silhouettes of his men digging” (Bodker 11). This hell-on-the-earth character of the landscape resonates with Dead Man and the town of Machine which symbolizes the world of experience in terms of William Blake's poetry. In Dead Man, the opposite of the world of experience is the world of innocence, which is symbolised by Thel's apartment full of paper roses and by the Easterner Bill Blake who came from

Cleveland full of expectations and hope. In The Proposition, John Hillcoat also offers such symbol of the world of innocence, of the Garden of Eden in Stanley's house and particularly the garden. Martha and Maurice live in “a small house surrounded by a patchy rose garden and a fence beyond which the land is untouched and desert-like”

(11). Stanley and his wife were sent to Australia to civilize this piece of land, this

“savage country”, and they brought in every tiny detail of their “civilized” home back in

England. Thus their little house reminds of a small island in the vast mass of hostile

86 wilderness. And consequently, Martha's garden full of roses, the most favourite of all

English flowers, represents here not only England, the land of the colonizer, but similarly to Dead Man, it can also represent the place where innocence meets experience, where tender Martha Stanley, that is portrayed in the film as decent, innocent woman deeply in love with her husband, enters the world of experience, when she is raped and humiliated. The truth is, however, that this is not her first encounter with the world of experience, as she was present at and in fact asked for Mikey's flogging. It can, nevertheless, be considered as her final and absolute loss of the world of innocence and entering the world of experience. The final scene where Charlie follows his brother's bloody traces through the rosy garden and through the broken white fence suggests that the Garden of Eden, the land of innocence, has been tainted by sin, by blood, and the broken fence that should have protected the inhabitants from the ugly, dirty and violent world outside symbolises the door open for Martha to enter the world of experience and for Charlie to enter the world of innocence.

Beniot Delhomme's work in The Proposition was compared to the work of great

Australian painters thanks to his use of colours and camera technique. Robby Müller did the same for Dead Man. His black and white cinematography was also considered as a master piece and was awarded NYFCC Award for best cinematography and nominated for Independent Spirit Awards. In one of the review Gordon Sullivan claims that “Not since color began to dominate Hollywood's output have we seen such a master of black- and-white cinematography. The shades and shape he conjures are gorgeous to look at” and what more, Dead Man “would work well as a , just allowing the images to speak for themselves.” Müller's shots remind of old black and white photos, they are full of shades of black and white, their composition is thoughtfully balanced, yet has its

87 dynamics especially thanks to his use of shadows, forced perspective and disappearing silhouettes which move the story forward and create tension and atmosphere. His last image of a lonely canoe drifting and slowly disappearing “into limitless ocean under a foreboding sky,” Iain Blair argues, “capture[s] the human condition — both the transcendence and existential angst — in all its messiness and mystery.” Similarly to

Delhomme, Jim Jarmusch himself compares Müller's work to the work of famous painters, suggesting that “he's like a Dutch interior painter, like Vermeer or de Hoeck, who was born in the wrong century” (Interview n.pag.).

What is interesting and may play an essential role in the success of both cinematographers, is the fact that they both come from Europe. Delhomme is French whereas Müller comes from Netherlands. Thus the cinematographers saw the two continents as foreigners, with fresh wide eyes open, as somebody who looks around with curiosity to discover the beauty of a new country. Therefore, they could avoid the typical clichés of Australian cinematography in Delhomme's case and American cinematography in case of Müller.

4.8. Music Very important poetic aspect of both films is the music score that contributes to the whole atmosphere and adds to the narrative of both films which together with highly artistic cinematoghraphy offer the viewer an exceptional artistic experience.

The author of the score for The Proposition is well known Australian musician

Nick Cave and his co-worker Warren Ellis (a long time violinist in Cave's band The Bad

Seeds). Moreover, Nick Cave is also responsible for the screenplay of The Proposition.

The quality and importance of Cave's contribution to the film is supported by a number of awards and nominations for best musical score (AFI Award, FCCA Award, IF Award,

88 World Soundtrack Award) and best screenplay (AFI Award, Chlotrudis Award, FCCA

Award, IF Award, Gucci Prize). (“The Proposition” n.pag.) In a review of the soundtrack Michael McLennan points out that thanks to such a combination of a musician and a script writer in one person, the “music feels wholly organic to the story” and “the barrier between underscore and scripted diegetic music is fluid to the point of irrelevance.” It is actually music that brings poetry to the film, thus echoing the poetry brought by the poet William Blake to Dead Man. As McLennan asserts, “From the opening credits, the sense of rough poetry is there, as the untrained voice of a child sings the traditional 'Happy Land' off-key over the gentle but grainy sound of Ellis's violin, the later played in fiddle style.” This subtle, tender song full of hope and optimism, yet played in sad and unnerving mood is accompanied with black and white authentic photos from the end of the 19th century alternating with photos from the shooting of the film, stylized into period photographs. These photos should foreshadow the theme of the whole film and settle the narrative into the context of certain place and time. They also introduce the first act of violence, as the last photographs show the scene of the Hopkins' outrage, and then the dead bodies of Hopkins' family lying on the bed with bloody wounds on their heads. Finally, the audience is shown the funeral of the

Hopkins and the last shot shows their graves.

“Happy Land” together with “Peggy Gordon” are two folk songs used in The

Proposition. Mark Brownrigg in his doctoral thesis argues that folk songs, ballads and religious songs has become “a cornerstone of the Western soundtrack” (Brownrigg 66).

He further asserts that “Hollywood Westerns from the 1930s to the '60s often begin with a folk song, and if the film's opening title doesn't quote an authentic folk theme, then its composer constructs a new one to the blueprint of the old” (66). He notices that

89 typically the songs are sung by males either in solo or in a group permutation, or they are just played by orchestra. Such examples of films opening with a folk song or a ballad are for example Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and Shenandoah. The use of the folk songs in the Western genre is according to Brownrigg rather homogeneous as majority of the songs is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and that “there is very little evidence of authentic black music in the Western, save for the rag-like numbers that accompany bordello scenes and such like” (69). In terms of genre conventions, the reader may assume that the use of traditional song “Happy Land” in the opening sequence of the film fits into the genre tradition. What goes against the tradition is the child singing, as obviously, children do not fit much into such masculine genre as the Western is. The use of untrained child voice may represent the innocence in the contrast to brutality of the

Hopkins outrage, or as McLennan suggests, it can aspire “to a goodness both Charlie and Captain Stanley strive to achieve.”

The rest of the music in The Proposition is composed by Cave and Ellis and reflects the roughness of the landscape and the hardness the people inhabiting this piece of land has to cope with. McLennan characterizes it as “a kind of blend of folk and rock music” and he pinpoints that “At times it feels like Cave wrote the dialogue with this music in mind.” Music as well as landscape contribute significantly to the development of the narrative.

The central theme of the score called “The Proposition” is a mournful music based on violin, bass, and drums that occurs several times throughout the film, it sets pace of the film, moves it forward, resonates with the landscape and also illuminates the motivation and meaning of the whole story. This motif is played when Stanley is on the screen or when Charlie is contemplating, such as in the scene where he looks at the

90 Hopkins' graves.

Another important reoccurring tune called “The Rider Song” accompanies

Charlie on his journey and its subtle lyrics reflect the inner conflicting state of Charlie's mind. Nick Cave uttering and whispering lyrics links, according to McLennan, “the aboriginal dreamtime imagery with western archetypes” thus representing a key to the conflicts of the main character:

“When?”, said the moon to the stars in the sky

“Soon”, said the wind that followed him home

“Who?”, said the cloud that started to cry

“Me”, said the rider as dry as a bone

“How?”, said the sun melted the ground

“Why?”, said the river that refused to run

“Where?”, said the thunder without a sound

“Here”, said the rider and took up his gun

This dialogue reflects what has been already explained about the role of the landscape in the transformation of the character, in his existential quest for true knowledge. The archetypal landscape communicates in this song with the archetypal hero to unfold for him the resolution of his complicated situation so suggessting how to handle the proposition. Thus, even though Charlie is a very silent character, his action and also music talks instead of him. Through music, the audience can understand his behaviour and his character and participate his internal meditation.

Dead Man similarly to The Proposition is influenced and formed by the person of a famous rock musician Neal Young who composed and recorded the soundtrack to the film. Neal Young describes that when he composed the score for Dead Man, he kept

91 in mind the concept that “'Dead Man' was basically a silent movie and that, you know, in the old days, in the '20s and stuff, when they had theatres, there'd be an organist or a piano player who would play along with the film, and that--and you'd get subtitles and the live music and that was it.” Consequently, when Young did the score for Dead Man, he projected the film on about 20 TV screens all around the room, some of them even hanging from the ceiling, and as he watched the film through, he played the music live.

If he saw there was a piano player in the bar, he just exchanged the guitar for a piano and when the scene was over, he walked to a pump organ or the electric guitar again. All the music is thus a real time experience, it originates in the film and coexists with it as a kind of symbiotic improvisation. It is basically a minimalistic piece of music that helps to set the slow pace of the film, and from time to time, Rosenbaum argues, even sounds like an apocalyptic version of American national Anthem echoing Jimi Hendrix. The main motif of the soundtrack, according to Rosenbaum, reminds of the spiritual

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” hence referring to the absolute loneliness of Blake as well as Nobody, who are all the time lonely regardless if they are together or not. (Rosenbaum, Dead Man 48) The sound of the electric guitar is very hypnotic, contributing to great extent to the hypnotic, dream-like character of the whole film.

Grail Marcus argues that “The modal melody is never resolved, never completed. It feels less like a song than a fanfare, a fanfare for a parade no one ever got around to organizing.” The fanfare celebrates life and death, or rather, as Marcus suggests, “life staring death in the face. Death is going to win, but not even death knows how long it’s going to take.”

The use of electric guitar is in fact the only modern element in the whole film.

On the other hand, Grail Marcus claims that “For a film set more than a century ago, an

92 electric guitar, playing a modal melody, surrounded by nothing, sounds older than anything you see on the screen.” It creates a contrast but also a bridge between the 19th century America and the present days, thus suggesting that issues and problems dealt with in the film are still valid and maybe painfully plausible for nowadays American society. The negative aspect of industrialization and technology together with the extensive occurrence of violence and the feeling of loneliness in an overcrowded world, these are the hot issues of a number of films set in the present days. The existential quest as well as the question of masculinity are also topics that can appeal to the contemporary society.

5. Conclusion

The aim of this essay was to provide a comparative analysis of two westerns from two continents: Jarmusch's Dead Man and Hillcoat's The Proposition. The main scope of the analysis lied in the investigation of the use of the genre conventions in both films, especially with respect to their revisionist, existential and post-modern character.

The main area under scrutiny, then, was the depiction of violence and its role in the narrative of the films. The study has indicated that generally, both films can be marked as revisionist westerns thanks to their frequent subversions of genre conventions. In addition, they both can be considered post-modern westerns, as they both display certain amount of irony and self reflection within the genre, together with trespassing of boundaries not only in terms of film industry but also between different art forms. Last but not least, both films question the constructs of the society, particularly the morality of western civilization and of the role of Indigenous population. Finally, the thesis suggests that the films can be described as existentialist westerns, as they both construct their narrative around the existentialist quest of the main characters for the meaning of

93 their lives, to find who they actually are through the choices they are pushed to make.

To recapitulate what has been discussed about Dead Man, it is obvious that the film is a revisionist, post-modern play that inverses characteristic genre conventions upside down. There is the typical American frontier myth, but instead of the optimistic, victorious portrayal of industrialization and civilization that brings progress into the

Wild West, the viewer is thrown into the metal hell that brings only suffering and death.

There are the good guys and bad guys but again, Jarmusch subverts their roles. Thus

Dickinson, who is the most important man in the community, is a mad tyrant, the law men are pictured as incompetent and immoral, the bounty hunters represent the worst of human race. The main character, William Blake, as the reader is informed, is the opposite of the archetypal western hero and neither the character of Nobody with his perfect English and declamation of poetry fits into the typical Western genre pattern of the Other. As Neil Campbell notes down, “the 'outsider' figure, so often silenced and

'death' in Westerns ('the only good Indian is a dead Indian') is given a central role in the narrative” thus re-establishing and subverting Western stereotypes. (160) The traditional genre conventions such as the gunshots and actually the whole portrayal of violence are offered to the viewer with a strong sense of irony suggesting that Jarmusch takes the Western genre as a platform for his experimenting with the genre conventions.

He can, therefore, rely on the audiences knowledge of the genre conventions to express his sceptical view of the frontier history and also of nowadays American society. The reader may remember, that unlike in traditional Western films, in Dead Man, the main character does not fight against the Other, but against his own community which is another typical feature of revisionist westerns.

The Proposition does not seem to subvert Western conventions to such extent as

94 Dead Man, yet it plays with the conventions in such a manner, that it can be classified as revisionist, post-modern existential Western. The Proposition intentionally refers to

Westerns of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah through the graphic, intensive depiction of violence, yet it partially subverts this convention, or better to say, it goes a step further. Leone and Peckinpah's films aimed to strip the genre of romanticism, but under all the violence, there was still a notion of “a sentimental longing for an earlier time when man wasn't shackled by civilisation - the myth of the lost West” (Fletcher n.pag.) .

In The Proposition, thanks to the character of the landscape mentioned earlier in this essay, there seems to be no such a notion of nostalgia for a lost happy land, “there is no lost golden age to return back to,” as “This is culture risen from genocidal blood.” This is, in addition, a civilization that similarly to Dead Man has to fight within itself.

Charlie Burns has to eliminate the unwanted element that is of his own community, what more, even of his own blood, thus reversing the traditional genre conventions. It has also been suggested, that the most brutal acts are not committed by barbaric Other, but in the tradition of the revisionist westerns by the civilized white settlers.

Another revisionist aspect of the film that has been discussed is the moral ambivalence of most of the characters, notably Charlie, Arthur and Captain Stanley.

Charlie is, in accordance to the western conventions, a lonely hero that undergoes a quest to find his identity, his manliness, but the quest does not finish in a typical way, on the contrary, Charlie, as the reader may remember, comes to the resolution too late. It has also been claimed that neither Charlie's brother Arthur fits into the conventions of the genre. He is portrayed as a poet, philosopher appreciating beauty, but in the same time, he is a psychopathic murderer. He is cruel, merciless, but also sensitive and intelligent. And as the reader is aware, Captain Stanley, the leader of the police troops

95 in Banyon, is also portrayed as a controversial figure whose authority is constantly threatened by his men, who suffers terrible headaches and drinks a lo,t and who is trying to keep his wife Martha as far from the hell surrounding them as possible. Similarly to

Dead Man, John Hillcoat presents the town of Banyon not as a symbol of victory of civilization over wilderness, but as a hell on the earth, as a place full of mud, dirt, dust, moral decay and flies all over there. In short, Australian Outback refuses to be captured and civilized. Also the Aboriginals are shown in the tradition of revisionist westerns as people who are neither noble, nor savages, but complex people fighting only to protect their land. They have an unquestionable advantage over the white oppressors, as they know how to survive in the harsh land, they do not try to rule the land but to live with it.

The post-modern character of Dead Man as well as The Proposition has been illustrated in the essay through the analysis of not only subverted conventions but also of the blurring of boundaries between genres. Dead Man bears traits of other genres apart from the Western, such as the comedy, drama and IMDb even describes the film as the fantasy. There are frequent inter-textual references to William Blake's literary work through the recitations of his poems, names of the characters and also through the visual aesthetics of the whole film. Lyrical black and white photography together with fade- outs determine the poem-like, slow pace of the whole narrative. As was suggested earlier, also Hillcoat employs inter-textual references in his film through George

Borrow's Lavengro referring to the world of literature.

Both Westerns allude to their predecessors within the Western genre. The unusual black and white cinematography of Dead Man reminds of the old black and white Westerns made in 1940s and 50s and as Jarmusch himself admits, also to Japanese film-makers Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. (“Dead Man” 44) Even though

96 Jarmusch explicitly pronounces that he does not like westerns much and that one of the reasons to use black and white cinematoghraphy was to avoid any unconsciouss impression of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone's films, he, either intentionally or not, alludes to Leone's idea of a no name character from My Name Is Nobody (Tonino

Valerii, 1973) through the character of Nobody. Leone's Nobody (Terrence Hill) is similarly to Jarmusch's Nobody not able to fit into his culture and is, in addition, a backward reference to Clint Eastwood's Man with no Name from the Dollars Trilogy.

Another, probably deliberate echo of Sergio Leone's film Once Upon a Time in the West is the introductory scene of Blake travelling to the west in the Pacific Northwest.

(Campbell 158) The character of Nobody mirrors the post-modern idea of blurring or trespassing boundaries through his lifestory. He crossed the borders of his tribe, culture, land and the ocean to travel to England, where he mimicked the white people's behaviour to survive. When he came back to America, his own people rejected him, giving him the name “he who talks loud, says nothing,” thanks to his tales of being captured.

Also Charlie similarly to Nobody echoes Eastwood's silent, wandering, nameless character, thus alluding to his Spaghetti Westerns. Leone and Peckinpah have been mentioned several times, but there are other references that can be traced in The

Proposition. As Nick Roddick states, The Proposition “harks back to the first years of the Australian cinema renaissance -- what David Stratton called 'The Last New Wave' -- where the tension between a hostile landscape and a country in search of a civilised identity, between freedom and compromise, forged a new mythic structure.” Hillcoat's

Burns' gang recalls “the first ever made in Australia,” which was The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait,1906).

97 Another feature that can contribute to the post-modern character of both films is the European origin of both cinematographers. Thus Robby Miller brings European approach to the American West and the Western genre through the cinematography of

Dead Man and Benoit Delhomme, implements his European look and attitude to the

Australian Outback and to the Western genre in The Proposition. What more, both cinematographers through their highly artistic photography evoke in the audiences the impression that they are looking at paintings thus trespassing the border not only between different genres, but also between low, popular art and so called high art.

Postmodern notion of both Westerns is underlined by musical scores of two remarkable rock musicians, Nick Cave and Neil Young.

As for the existential aspect of the films, it has been discussed in detail that the central motif of the narratives is the existential quest of the main characters. In case of

Blake, it is his journey to the other world, a meditation over life, death and afterlife that the viewer is invited to follow. Consequently, the journey is also the quest for identity, which is imposed upon Blake by other people. As the reader may oppose, this quest concerns not only William Blake, but also Nobody, who accompanies Blake on his journey and finally sends him to the land where he came from. Nobody, too, comes back where he came from, to his people, his nation and he dies exactly where he should – on the shore, in the place where the earth meets the skies. In case of Charlie, the existential quest is, too, concerned with seeking his own identity in order to start a new life, to get transformed from a criminal to a person of high moral values. It is more than obvious that both Westerns contemplate over the most essential, metaphysical human thoughts, hence stepping aside other existential westerns such as The Magnificent Seven, and

Once Upon a Time in the West.

98 What has not been discussed much in this essay, but is in fact another unifying element of both Dead Man and The Proposition, is the real interest and intent of both directors to make a film for and about Indigenous people. Jarmusch even does not have subtitled the dialogues that are in indigenous languages because he “wanted it to be a little gift for those people who understand the language” (Rosenbaum, Gun n.pag). Also

Hillcoat and Cave intended to show the “conflict between the law and the outlaw, the oppressor and the oppressed, man and nature” (Cenere, n.pag.). They were aware that

“The cruel reality of the Australian frontier is the story of violent conflict; white on white, white on black, black on white, and black on black,” and therefore their “mission was to depict this Australia as never seen before” (39). Cave declares that his

“motivation for writing the film script was that the subject of black resistance had not been given adequate representation in other Australian films and it was his intention to correct this absence” (Hart n.pag.). The author is aware that the issue of indigenous people is an important one to be analysed and worked on in great depth. The complexity of this issue is nevertheless, the decisive factor for the author to just tackle it in the analysis, as the scope of this essay does not lie so much in the problem of colonial history of oppression against native inhabitants, but rather in the identification of the genre conventions and the marked similarities of the two Westerns within these genre conventions and paradigms particularly with reference to violence.

To conclude, Jarmusch as well as Hillcoat use the Western genre as a means for expressing their attitudes towards history of their land as well as towards presence. The

Western genre seems to be a powerful tool to express one's attitudes, as there is everything: “Death, religion, philosophy” (Jarmusch, Projections n.pag.). The Western,

Jarmusch argues, is “about language. It’s about guns, it’s about law, it’s about the status

99 of an outlaw – there are all these levels to Dead Man” and the reader may agree that all this is valid for The Proposition too. Jarmusch as well as Hillcoat suggest that the

Western is not a dead genre, that it still has a potential for nowadays filmmakers who can use its notoriously known conventions, clichés and mythology to express their ideas, attitudes and opinions towards our world in a way appealing and easily understandable to present-day audiences.

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109 Abstract

This thesis analyses two films from two different continents, American

Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995) and Australian The Proposition (Hillcoat, 2006).

The purpose of the analysis is to look at the way these two films follow or subvert the genre conventions on the backdrop of the short introductory part of the genre theory and a brief overview of the history of the Western genre.

Special attention is paid to the element of violence, which represents the core of the Western genre. Throughout the essay, the depiction of violence is described in terms of the Western genre tradition. It is argued that the obsession with violence originates in the construction of masculinity, suggesting that through violent acts, the western heroes demonstrate their manliness. Masculinity and violence are linked to another typical genre convention of the lonely hero journey, which enables the hero to undergo his personal transformation on both, physical and spiritual level. It is argued, that this transformation is made possible not only through the condition of loneliness but also thanks to the pervasive masculine character of the Western landscape. The thesis demonstrates that most of the genre conventions are employed in a revisionist way thus enabling to call both films revisionist Westerns. The symbiosis of the big amount of violence with the world of literature and art in various layers of the films contributes to the post-modern character of both films. In addition, Dead Man as well as The

Proposition can be described as the existential westerns thanks to the metaphysical quest of the main heroes.

110 Resumé

Tato magisterská práce zkoumá dva filmové westerny ze dvou různých kontinentů, americký film Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995) a australský film The

Proposition (Hillcoat, 2006). Analýza se zaměřuje zejména na to, jakým způsobem oba filmy využívají nebo převracejí tradiční žánrové konvence, a to na pozadí krátké úvodní části o teorii žánru a následném stručném přehledu historického vývoje žánru western. Práce se zaměřuje především na zobrazení násilí, které představuje podstatu Westernu. Zobrazení násilí je zde zkoumáno jednak ve vztahu k tradici žánru, jednak navazuje na myšlenku, že posedlost násilím úzce souvisí s konceptem mužnosti. Mužnost a násilí se často objevují spolu s další typickou žánrovou konvencí, konceptem putování osamělého hrdiny. Toto putování umožňuje hrdinovi podstoupit osobní přeměnu jak na fyzické, tak na duchovní rúrovni. K takové transformaci hrdiny může dojít nejen díky násilí a osamění, ale také díky převážně mužskému charakteru westernové krajiny. Tato práce naznačuje, že tvůrci obou filmů využívají

žánrové konvence většinou odlišným, revisionistickým způsobem, čímž se mohou zařadit do kategorie revisionistických westernů. Symbióza přemíry násilí a světa literatury a umění na různých úrovních přispívá k postmodernímu charakteru filmu. Navíc je možné považovat Dead Man stejně jako The

Proposition za existenciální westerny díky metafyzickému hledání hlavních hrdinů.

111