Pale Rider and Sustainability

Instead of focusing only on the classic western conflicts of earlier Westerns—the battle between cattlemen and farmers, or between free range and fenced ranchers—Clint Eastwood’s remake of Shane (1953), Pale Rider (1985), highlights and critiques the consequences of 1850s-1880s’ corporate mining and its continued repercussions into the 1980s, hydraulic mining that must be destroyed through eco-terrorist means, according to the film’s blatant rhetoric. Unlike any other Eastwood Western, Pale Rider provides its audience with a clear vision of the environmental horrors hydraulic mining causes, even including detailed descriptions of the technique, while showing the devastating results of this great engineering feat.

As a way to foreground the horrors of this technique, deep into the film, Josh LaHood, the corporate miner’s son (Christopher Penn), explains how he and his men are able to thrust two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch of water at the side of a mountain, a process called hydraulic mining that was engineered around 1850 to extract as much gold as possible from mountain crevices. Josh describes the process to fourteen-year-old Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny), a prospector’s daughter, and his detailed description is juxtaposed with images of falling trees and soil devastated by pressurized water shooting out of monitors, the water cannons used to strip the hills of topsoil and growth to make the gold beneath easier to find, all more powerfully presented through Bruce Surtees’ camerawork. 

According to Josh LaHood: 

About three quarters of a mile upstream we diverted half of Cobalt Creek. See, it flows through a ditch along the contours of the slope and ends up about a hundred yards up yonder….It flows into … a three foot pipe and then flows down slope real steep. And then that narrows to a two-foot pipe. And then a one foot pipe. You see all the time that water’s flowing downstream, it picks up speed. And it picks up force by going into the thinner pipes….By the time the water reaches the monitor, I’ve got about 200 pounds of pressure per square inch. I can blast that gravel out of that cliff and then it washes into the bed and then it travels right through the sluice.

While looking at the land around her, Megan tells Josh, “It looks like hell.”  But Josh is only interested in the product of the degradation: “You know I can get 20 tons of gravel a day in this river,” he says. Seconds later, while the audience watches hydraulic monitors shooting water at the cliffs above the Yuba River, Josh attempts to rape Megan, in an obvious parallel to what is happening to the landscape. Josh fails only because Preacher (Clint Eastwood) saves her.

This scene from Pale Rider introduces one of its most important themes: the violent exploitation of the environment and of those most connected to it. Although this theme is prevalent in mining films like North Country (2006) and Silver City (2004), it is missing in any other Eastwood Western. In fact, Pale Rider is the only film directed by Eastwood that focuses blatantly on such an environmentally-packed issue. Pale Rider not only examines how the environment can be exploited, it also takes the time to demonstrate a better way, an alternative to the absolute destruction of large scale corporate mining centered around the fact of hydraulic mining. Just as Preacher saves Megan, the individual miners the LaHoods oppose (“tin pans”) can save the land from the mining baron, LaHood, and halt his environmentally devastating methods using violent eco-terrorist means.

But Pale Rider not only problematizes corporate mining techniques, suggesting that the corporation should be obliterated; it also provides a viable alternative to the consequences of hydraulic mining—individual tin panning in a cooperative community seeking to plant roots and raise families, an alternative that is attainable with the help of eco-terrorism. In contrast to LaHood and his greed for gold, for individual miners like Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty) and Spider Conway (Doug McGrath), “gold ain’t what [they’re] about.” Pale Rider, then, offers a politically charged solution to the environmental destruction threatened by hydraulic mining interests.

This solution in Pale Rider has not received any detailed examination. Extreme eco-terrorist violence drives the ultimate solution offered in Pale Rider, and while it is couched in mythological terms similar to High Plains Drifter (1973), the inclusion of Hull Barret in the mayhem and killing keeps the environmental argument grounded in the here and now and provides for an alternative to the individualist “progressive” model of the Western, as defined by Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation and Regeneration Through Violence. Since Preacher and Hull take a collaborative approach to eco-terrorism; they promote communal sustainable development rather than individual progress like that Slotkin describes.

Instead, the resolution of Pale Rider harks back to The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) where, according to Slotkin, Josie forgives his enemy with the statement, “All of us died a little in that damn war” (633). It also prefigures the anti-revenge themes in Eastwood’s critically acclaimed Unforgiven (1992) and Mystic River (2003). Although violence does provide “regeneration” (Slotkin’s word) in Pale Rider, it ultimately serves both a working class community and the natural world that sustains it.

Earth Day Screenings with Celebration of the Arts at Eastern Illinois University

PROGRAM 2: THE ENVIRONMENT WHICH SURROUNDS US from Flaherty on the Road

Coal Spell 
(China, 2008, 8 min.)
Director: Sun Xun

For Sun Xun, to erase is just as important as to draw. His work as an animator is not so different as that of a historian. And Sun’s work is very concerned with history and myths, especially with regards to how they interact. Adding to the process of drawing/erasing, Coal Spell also employs the use of found footage as traces of the past, for markers of events within history or mythology.

River Rites
(USA, 2011, 12 min.)
Director: Ben Russell

Russell takes his transcendent cinema to new heights with this amazing short documentary which transforms an idyllic riverside scene of a group of Saramaccan Maroon children playing and washing in the river into a sort of sacred animist rite. Features a superb noise-metal soundtrack from Mindflayer.

Three Men and a Fish Pond
(Latvia, 2008, 52 min.) Latvian with English Subtitles
Directors: Laila Pakalnina & Māris Maskalāns

A film on the celebration of life beyond violence, predation, and death. In her director’s note for Doc Alliance Films, Laila Pakalnina herself has said that “perhaps this film is rather very simple instead of very complicated—about our physical and spiritual understanding of the world simultaneously. It is about the fact that there are people. And also birds, and fog, the sun, night and so on. That everything exists.” But beneath that apparently simple and calm surface runs an undercurrent of film history and vital knowledge. On the first issue, we can find here references from Charlie Chaplin to Sergei Eisenstein, or from Soviet rural drama to a “Flahertynian” exploration of the relationship of characters and landscapes; on the second, a profound depth of understanding the circle of life and death as dramatic but also joyful. The film’s simplicity is an achievement very few have: unpretentious, humoristic, respectful of her characters, but also of the animals, plants, and even objects, all part of the same universe. 

Chimpanzee and the Idealized Family

Despite the “Disneyfication” of its mood-inducing score and a narration by Tim Allen that anthropomorphizes its animal subjects, Disney Nature’s Chimpanzee (2012) most effectively and authentically illustrates the strength of combining extended and nuclear family structures because it relies solely on documentary footage of a young chimpanzee’s coming of age. Originally the filmmakers planned to document Oscar’s relationship with his mother, Isha, but after she is killed, they continue filming, and by accident, record an unlikely relationship between alpha male Freddy and the now-orphaned Oscar.  This accidental footage also demonstrates the absurdity of our assumptions that such empathetic bonds between males are possible only in human culture.

Overhead shots of a rainforest through clouds introduce the film’s “deepest Africa” setting, and a crane down toward the trees presents the film’s chief characters, a troop of chimpanzees welcoming new life, a “precious baby boy named Oscar,” the focus of this story. Close-ups of Oscar and his mother, Isha, provide a high cuteness quotient in this troop of thirty-five chimpanzees, while also emphasizing the dual familial perspectives of the film that illustrate extended and alternative nuclear approaches.

The extended family unit is displayed in multiple scenes in the movie. Scenes show the troop members working together to nurture their children and gather food, using rocks as tools to break open nuts. The narrator tells us the grandfather is 50 in this rich society in the heart of the jungle. Scenes in the nut grove introduce the troop’s alpha male, Freddy, who uses a stick to grab ants out of a hollow branch, “bugs in a sock,” according to our narrator. Oscar leaves his mother’s side, enjoying independence after three months or so. The narrator tells us “dinner isn’t in the same neighborhood,” however, introducing a major conflict in the film, that between rival troops of chimpanzees battling over fruit and nut groves.

This extended family unit depends on Freddy's dominance. In one scene, for example, the music grows ominous when the troop is attacked by the rival troop led by Scar, their “formidable leader.” As the narrator explains, “for Aisha, it’s run or die.” Freddy leads the escape.  “Their enemies have won a small victory but have yet to win the war.” The grove of nut trees in the center of Freddy’s land will serve as the point of the standoff, we’re told, because Scar must conquer it to ensure his troop thrives. Aisha keeps her son safe while Oscar learns the skills he needs to survive. Overhead shots of trees and waterfalls substantiate the richness of Freddy’s territory. Mist rises from the water highlighting Oscar and Aisha’s entrance to the nut grove from beneath the falls. The nuts are in season, so it’s time for a feast. The scene is celebratory, and Oscar’s ploys for food are humorous.

Scar reinforcement of his own dominance for his troop highlights the need for an alternative nuclear family structure. Freddy and his troop stock up on fruit, especially fruit from fig trees  and the nut grove with which Freddy plans to protect and sustain the family, but Scar and his troop have wiped out the fruit in their territory and enter Freddy’s for his figs and nuts. The music signals Scar’s arrival. Lightning provides a spectacular backdrop for the battle and serves as cover for Scar’s raid. Freddy’s troop is in disarray, and Oscar is separated from his mother. Her death emphasizes the authenticity of this extended family structure, while also introducing a new vision of a nuclear family stressing the empathetic possibilities of an alpha male.  

The film takes the time to demonstrate how this alternative nuclear family evolves. Too young to feed or care for himself, Oscar is losing weight, the narrator explains, and other mothers reject him because they can care only for their own young. Ultimately Oscar approaches Freddy and follows the leader to the best and safest place to eat. In an unusual turn, Freddy offers “gentle acceptance, more than Oscar could have hoped for,” serving as the surrogate parent Oscar needed to survive. Freddy even allows Oscar to ride on his back—something usually only a mother would allow. According to the narrator, Freddy even offers Oscar the first pick of nuts. Freddy is completely devoted to Oscar, an astonishing occurrence because the highest-ranking male even grooms the lowest.

The film also demonstrates that an alpha male can effectively serve as parent to both child and troop in chimpanzee culture. Although the narrator calls his devotion to Oscar a distraction, Freddy and his troop defeat Scar and his troop when they vie for the nut grove. Because Scar has rivals, some of them hold back, perhaps demonstrating that Freddy’s more balanced approach is the most successful. Oscar and Freddy transform a new beginning with the most unlikely foster parent in the forest. A softer side was there all along, the narrator tells us. The chimps begin to play again with the opening music—“I’m in a little bit of trouble.” The film moves out to an overhead shot, and Oscar’s story ends. But the film continues, showing viewers how the scenes were filmed, making the filmmakers’ walk through the forest in the Ivory Coast transparent.  The credits roll over footage of Oscar and Freddy grooming one another. As the credits end, the film tells us where viewers can go to help sustain a chimp population now 1/5 the size it was in 1960, but it is the relationship between Oscar and Freddy that stands out. 

In Chimpanzee, the filmmakers stumble upon and document an unusual parent/child relationship that highlights nonhuman animals as persons and, as Pete Porter explains, “encourage[s] the formation of a human-animal relationship characterized by respect and mutually beneficial reciprocation” (400).  It also illustrates well how flexible definitions of family may be, even in wild nature. The “realistically” photographed jungle Eden of Chimpanzee’s Ivory Coast accentuates the film' ideal vision of family that extends beyond species, making clear the possibilities of bonds between chimpanzees based on mutual allegiance rather than biology. 

Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Buried Environmental History

In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the James/Younger gang historically and mythically fights the railroad for lands confiscated by the federal government to serve the railroad. The gang’s robberies were seen by many as retaliation for what Southern farmers saw as land grabbing. This current Western at least peripherally responds to environmental issues related to conflicts between Northern industrial and Southern agrarian visions of land use, worldviews resting on progressive and populist versions of progress, respectively. As a traditional Western, however, the debate is unexplored and hidden behind the epic study of a rebellious hero at the film’s center.

Even though Roger Ebert claims there are homosexual undertones in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, especially in relation to Robert Ford’s (Casey Affleck) obsession with Jesse (Brad Pitt), he calls the film a “classic  Western epic” partly because “it was photographed in the wide opens spaces of western Canada, where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends,” rebellious heroes like Jesse James who gains mythic stature because he at least seems to rob symbols of corrupt corporate power for a reason: They stole his and other families’ land for a railroad that runs on greed in the name of progress, a progress that serves only the few. According to Ebert, the director, Andrew Dominik, “portrays his hero at a time when most men were so powerless, they envied Jesse James even for imposing his will on such as they.” In The Assassination of Jesse James, Jesse serves a community by embracing a mythos that empowers the populous even when their lands and lives are threatened.

            Unlike earlier sagas of Jesse James, however, the history behind Jesse’s robberies and murders goes unmentioned and emerges only in the portrayal of Jesse James. According to Ebert, “Brad Pitt embodies Jesse James’ mythic stature as if long accustomed to it.” And Peter Travers explains, “Brad Pitt totally nails it as Jesse James” in what Travers calls “this intimate epic.” The only reference to Jesse’s past comes through a voiceover at the film’s opening that calls Jesse a “Southern loyalist and a guerilla,” so the war never ended for him. No mention is made to the James boys’ loss of their land to the railroad, even as they rob another train near the film’s opening.

Only the landscape itself points to the environmental history behind the robberies, a landscape that becomes a character that seems to conquer figures who are shot and left in grasses or frozen streams. A claim that the James boys are “Getting back at Union men for wrongs” merely nods to the narrator’s opening words. Jesse James may have been a Southern loyalist and a guerilla, but in the James myth, he’s something more. He’s a hero defending the land and agrarian values of a post-Civil War South. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford adheres so tightly to the classic epic Western genre that it buries even that environmental message.