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1 Writing the Showdown: What’s Left Behind When the Sun Goes Down High Plains Drifter (1973) High Plains Drifter,1 Eastwood’s first Western, clearly reflects the influence of Sergio Leone. The Stranger (Eastwood) rides into town as the residents gather nervously around, transfixed by the beating hooves of his horse. As Lee Clark Mitchell reminds us, the Western’s beautiful landscape is laden with moral meaning:2 here the Stranger rides out to a picturesque town built on the shores of a mountain lake, its tranquility suggesting the quiet beauty of the civilized life the town hopes to establish . Yet from the moment when the town gathers around the hypnotic beat of the horse’s hoof, it is clear that all is not right about the town of Lago. The beautiful landscape belies the social reality. On the surface Drifter is one of Eastwood’s most violent films, certainly in the beginning. First, the Stranger kills three men who harass him while he is getting a shave, and he hardly even aims when he shoots his gun from under the barber’s cape. Soon after, a woman accosts him on the street, insulting his manhood. He decides to teach her ‘‘a lesson in manners,’’ abruptly dragging her into the nearest barn and raping her until her struggles give way to enjoyment. Here of course there is a risk of the crudest kind of gender stereotype—‘‘rape the woman, kill the man.’’ The opening scenes of violence and rape certainly highlight this gender distinction. Drifter would hardly be a film to inspire a positive feminist analysis, but once we understand these events in the context of trauma—and how trauma unleashes the evil of what Sue Grand has called 10 Writing the Showdown 11 ‘‘malignant dissociative contagion’’—we begin to understand the power of Eastwood’s profound exploration of what happens when a community falls into horrific violence and murder, attempting at the same time both to hide and justify its criminal past.3 We only discover the Stranger’s past through a series of flashbacks, the first of which comes closely after the rape scene, as he lies down for his first night at the hotel. In the flashback, a group of men (whom we meet later as the outlaws Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers) surround the Stranger, whipping him violently as a faceless crowd stands by. Beaten to the point of death, the Stranger reaches out his hand and begs for someone , anyone, to help him. No one moves. In his work on the Western, Mitchell has written that brutality perpetrated against the male body, and whipping in particular, occurs in part so that we can witness the body’s restoration as once again intact.4 Indeed, standing up to such beatings becomes the hallmark of the hero’s masculine self-restraint, the paradoxical power of not acting. But here we see a man prostrate, begging for help. We face at this moment the absolute presence of the perpetrators and the bystanders who allowed the event to unfold—and the bystanders’ absolute lack of compassion multiplies the victim’s trauma, which involves not only the beating itself but also the deep and profound experience of being denied the status of a human being in the onlookers’ eyes. He is being stripped of humanity with each crack of the whip. Because the story does not cohere—we get only glimpses of meaning through flashbacks—the film can be classified as a broken narrative, but this is not the broken narrative of Sergio Leone’s Westerns.5 For Leone, violent acts seem to have their own meaning with very little narratability associated with them—because there really is no meaning to that kind of violence, and it remains only as a disruptive force. But in Eastwood’s Drifter, the lack of narratability is itself meaningful because it reveals the effects of trauma on shared meaning. Since what actually happened to Marshal Jim Duncan has been silenced, denied significance in order to allow civilization to flourish on the lake, the town has doomed itself to collapse under the weight of its own guilt. Gradually, the film begins to identify the Stranger with the murdered marshal, who discovered that the mining company that supports the town was operating illegally on government property. To keep him quiet, the company owners arranged for Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers to execute the marshal, with the cooperation...

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