I’m starting a series with Thomas at Everyday Liturgy on “Redemptive Violence in Film.” Here is the first post, from Thomas:
In the critically acclaimed genre stalwart High Noon, Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a town sheriff who learns of the release of a murderous, bloodthirsty villain named Frank Miller the same day he marries a Quaker woman and promises to retire his badge and lead a simple, peaceful life as a shopkeeper.
Conflicted about the release of Frank Miller, Kane decides to stop the horses, get back to town, and defeat Frank Miller once and for all.
But, in the years since Frank Miller went away to jail, the town so united by their victory over the ruthless criminal has now become a town more excited by money and good times than by justice, equity, and community. This is the world Kane has policed for so many years, and even though he is often told he doesn’t need to protect them, there is a new sheriff coming tomorrow, and it’d be best he just went away to avoid trouble Kane nonetheless stays to protect the town.
The town, so numb to guns and violence, wants no part in just another shooting. No one will join a posse to round up Miller again, so Kane decides to go it his own. This whole time, Grace Kelly’s wonderfully played Mrs. Kane, only a half hour after her wedding to this man, finds herself sitting in a hotel waiting for a train to take her to St. Louis and divorce (has to be a record). Mrs. Kane, as a Quaker, is a pacifist and cannot accept her new husband carrying around a gun, let alone being motivated to use it once more. She sits, perplexed and conflicted, in the hotel counting down the hours until the noon train.
[Spoiler Alert] Here in lies the myth of redemptive violence, when Kane must face down four armed men in the town center to defend his pride (now thoroughly hubris and self-deception). It is insane to protect a town that does not want you around, even more insane to make a rash decision that leads to your wife wanting a divorce after a half hour of marriage, and most insane to go against men four to one. And the myth is this: Kane wins. He shoots three of the men after the noon train comes in an elongated shootout that starts as his wife is leaving for St. Louis. She runs off the train thinking she will find her husband’s dead body, yet instead finds one of the villains. Her husband has killed. Instead of becoming infuriated and running back for the train, Mrs. Kane grabs a gun and shoots a villain in the back, giving her husband the chance he needs to finally defeat Frank Miller with a spree of bullets, sending him to his death.
Violence has brought peace, and the couple that was on the brink of divorce is united in the defeat of the forces that would have separated them, and they ride off into the sunset leaving the cowardly townspeople in their dust.
There is another way to read the end of this story, one that deconstructs the myth of redemptive violence. This myth says violence is the only way to assure peace. Unfortunately the peace the Kane’s find is one that is hollow and individualistic instead of uniting. Peace should be a uniting force, yet in the Western peace is not the salvation of a community as much as the use of violence as a will too power. The individual leaves only when they have exerted their will upon a place and exercised hubris as the only moral authority (watch Appaloosa, a movie that features the town’s laws being actually signed over to the hired guns).
Riding off into the sunset is a symbol of individualism at all costs, and the cost is community. There are a few movies, like The Magnificent Seven, where morality is not tied to economy but tied to justice, and the hired guns slowly become part of the peaceful community and the violence at the end of the film is defense, not mercenaries. One of the guns even stays behind and becomes incorporated into the community. The traditional western ethos is one of violence assures peace, and the approval of a Quaker going against her religion and a prideful man gunning down villians when he had no real legal authority or need to do so is a celebrated act. This act can be turned on its head though as the couple leaves the town immediately and sets off for the sunset. Violence is always an act of separation, and though violence has brought the Kanes together once more it separates them from the community. Peace, as any Quaker can tell you, is an act of unity and community. Peace brings unity, even if it enters the gray area of defense as in The Magnificent Seven. Redemptive violence is tragic because it only gives peace to one of the parties, and the other party is left dead or in ruins, as in war, revenge, and retaliation. The Kanes may look safe and sound and ready to enjoy their honeymoon, but they leave a town with four dead bodies and a broken moral compass, a town that on the outside looks a lot like what’s on their inside: persons who have compromised their integrity, religion, and morality for the sake of “peace.”