Clint Eastwood's Supernatural Westerns

Copyright 2014 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it's not unusual for Western movies (and books) to express religious themes, such dramas and narratives rarely have supernatural elements. Two exceptions to the “rule” are Clint Eastwood's films High Plains Drifter (1973) and Pale Rider (1985).

In the former picture, certain of the protagonist's characteristics and abilities suggest that there may be more to him than is first apparent, and the movie provides a clue or two as to the possible nature of the stranger.

First, as James L. Neibaur points out in his chapter “High Plains Drifter” in The Clint Eastwood Westerns, the “stranger” whom Eastwood plays “is mysterious, he is controlling, he is all-knowing, and he is powerful” (104).

Second, Sarah Belding, the wife of hotel operator Lewis Belding, tells the stranger that the town's previous sheriff, Jim Duncan, was buried in an unmarked grave, adding “the dead don't rest without a marker” (104).

Third, in a dream it is revealed to the stranger that the town's leaders conspired to have the sheriff beaten to death by three brothers with whips, before allowing the murderers to be arrested. Having been released from prison, the killers are now on their way back to the town, Lago, to avenge themselves on the town.

Fourth, after painting the town red and renaming Lago “Hell,” the stranger abandons the townspeople, just as the killers return. In his absence, many of the citizens are killed, and the town itself is burned to the ground. It is only then that the stranger returns and kills one of the murderers, Dan Carlin, using a whip, which he then throws into the saloon, “alerting the two surviving brothers,” whom he kills (104).

Fifth, as the stranger rides out of Hell, Mordecai, a dwarf whom the stranger had named mayor and sheriff of Lago, is in the town's cemetery, carving a marker for a grave. “I never knew your name,” Mordecai says. “Yes, you do,” the stranger replies. The marker Mordecai carves bears the name Marshal Jim Duncan; it is for the sheriff's once-unmarked grave. Presumably, now that his grave is marked, the stranger will be able to “rest.”

As Neibuar observes, There has been some discussion as to the identity of the stranger”:

The script originally indicated that the stranger was the marshal's brother . . . and the scenes alluding to this [identity] were filmed, but Eastwood had them excised. In the film, the stranger is more a ghostly figure, perhaps a reincarnation of Duncan, based on the final lines between him and Mordecai and the supernatural air of the story” (107-108).

The New York Times's 1973 review of the film also suggests that the movie is intended to have a supernatural angle:

High Plains Drifter, with Eastwood as director as well as star, is part ghost story, part revenge Western . . . . It exalts and delights in a kind of pitiless Old Testament wrath . . . Eastwood's characterization of The Stranger [is that of a figure] who settles God's score with Lago . . . (108).

The fact that Eastwood, the director, cut the scenes that represents the stranger as the sheriff's brother and the clues that the character is a ghostly or reincarnated avenger, seem clearly to suggest that Eastwood himself wants the movie to be understood as having a supernatural theme.

Twelve years later, Eastwood would make another Western with a supernatural slant, Pale Rider (1985). Like the ghostly stranger in High Plains Drifter, The Preacher of Pale Rider “is mysterious, he is controlling, he is all-knowing, and he is powerful,” or, as Neibaur describes him, “he seems to have a mysterious, mystical quality, able to evade people in a gunfight by seeming to disappear. He comes from nowhere; he leaves when the job is done” (149).

The Preacher's association with Christianity is made plain by his arrival, just as fourteen-year-old Megan Wheeler is praying that God will send someone to deliver her mother, herself, and the other gold prospectors from the gunmen who just stormed through and destroyed their camp, killing her dog.

When she sees The Preacher riding into the ruins of the prospectors' camp, Megan believes that he is the answer to her prayer, and, indeed, he rides a pale horse, just like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, of whom she has just read in the book of Revelation: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

In discussing The Preacher, the Chicago Tribune's editorial writer, Stephen Chapman points out that he is not Christ the Savior, but the Jesus “who brought not peace but a sword, the one of Revelation who raises the righteous into heaven and casts the wicked into the depths” (149).

The Preacher's supernatural origin is also suggested by the feats he accomplishes single-handedly, exploits that the men among the prospectors are unable to accomplish collectively. He fights off several men, defeating them with no other weapon than an axe handle; he defeats a Goliath-size adversary with the same sledgehammer he uses to cleave a boulder in half with a single blow; he outguns a group of gunfighters notorious for their skills with a pistol; when he departs, he leaves behind him a courageous and united community who, before his arrival, were divided and afraid.

As Neibaur suggests, Eastwood underscores the supernatural dynamics of Pale Rider by ensuring that it shares similarities with his other supernatural film, High Plains Drifter:

The setup [of Pale Rider] has immediate similarities to High Plains Drifter (1973) upon the Eastwood character's entrance. In that film [High Plains Drifter], he enters a very quiet town. In Pale Rider, he arrives as the town has quieted down from a most recent attack. Among the first things the stranger does in High Plains Drifter is respond with stoicism to men confronting him in a saloon, later shooting them down when they physically accost him in a barber shop soon afterward. In Pale Rider, the stranger comes to the rescue of a man being attacked by a group of others, effectively beating them down. . . . The man he rescues, Hull Barrett . . . the leader of the miners, invites the stranger to his house for dinner. He appears wearing a clerical collar and is thereafter referred to as The Preacher. These initial scenes establish the character's abilities as well as a mystery about his backstory (148).

The scenes also establish a link between the two supernatural films and their supernatural heroes. However, the older movie invokes reincarnation to explain Sheriff Jim Duncan's return from the dead, while the later film invokes the Bible, solidly grounding Pale Rider's supernatural aspects in the Christian vision of death and judgment.

In High Plains Drifter, the stranger creates Hell; in Pale Rider, he is death, delivering the wicked to judgment, for, although Chapman sees Eastwood's Preacher as Jesus, the movie itself offers several clues that suggest a different identity for The Preacher: the film's very title, which is an allusion to Revelation 6:8, the Bible verse that equates the “pale rider” to Death, the apocalyptic horseman who ushers in hell, and the nature of The Preacher as a supernatural figure delivered by God in answer to Megan's prayer clearly indicate that he is Death personified, not Jesus.

Whereas the stranger in High Plains Drifter abandons “sinners” to hell, The Preacher in Pale Rider kills the wicked and appears to leave their eternal fate to the judgment of God.

Supernatural Westerns are so unusual that their existence—and their raison d'être—seem to beg explanation. Despite the mystical undertones of High Plains Drifter and the Christian overtones of Pale Rider, it's likely that neither film is an expression of religious faith on the part of Eastwood himself, who told movie critic Gene Siskel that he is an atheist. However, Eastwood also admitted that he does “feel spiritual things,” declaring that “if I stand on the side of the Grand Canyon and look down, it moves me in some way.” He's also a devoted practitioner of Transcendental Meditation.

Eastwood's own take on his supernatural Westerns is that both are allegories. High Plains Drifter, he says, is “just an allegory . . . a speculation on what happens when they go ahead and kill the sheriff and somebody comes back and calls the town's conscience to bear. There's always retribution for your deeds” (The Clint Eastwood Westerns, 105). Likewise, Eastwood explains, “Pale Rider is kind of allegorical, more in the High Plains Drifter mode: like that, though he isn't a reincarnation or anything, but he does ride a pale horse like the four horsemen of the apocalypse . . . It's a classic story of the big guys against the little guys . . . (The Clint Eastwood Westerns, 149).

For Eastwood, perhaps each of his supernatural movies is “just an allegory,” but, of course, the creator of a work of art doesn't determine its meaning, except for himself. Any interpretation that is supported by the details of the story itself is both reasonable and possible, and there seems more internal evidence in Pale Rider for a Christian interpretation than for an atheistic or a secular one.

After all, the movie deliberately alludes to Christian beliefs, to a specific Biblical account of apocalypse and judgment, and to a supernatural order of existence that transcends the ordinary world of the Wild West in which the movie is set.

Western culture is suffused with the traditions of the Christian faith; allegories which include supernatural characters and events, especially when they are informed by specifically Christian doctrine and tradition, can certainly be reckoned to possess and to communicate Christian themes.

Bane Messenger, the protagonist of my own series, An Adventure of the Old West, has a name of religious significance as well. Bane (the nickname by which Banan goes) derives from the Old English word bana, meaning “killer, slayer, murderer, a worker of death”; the Late Latin word angelus means “messenger.” Putting them together, Bane Messenger can be read as meaning Angel of Death, which, the books of the series, Good With a Gun, The Valley of the Shadow, and Blood Mountain, suggest, as does the short story “Bane Messenger, Bounty Hunter,” a prequel that introduces the series, is how Bane regards himself.

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His skill with a gun, like his indomitable will, his steely nerve, and his love for justice, equip him as an instrument of divine righteousness and wrath. It's his mission, he believes, to use the “gifts” he's received to ensure that justice triumphs and the innocent are protected from “the worst sort of men,” those, as a bounty hunter, he tracks down to kill or, as a lawman, risks his life to stop. Believing himself on a mission sanctioned by his Creator, Bane puts his own fate in the hands of God every time he draws his gun, putting his life in mortal danger in order to bring desperate killers to justice, dead or alive.