Pale Rider

Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider is a strange beast. Conceptually, it's an obvious retread of the actor-director's earlier western High Plains Drifter, to wit: a ghostly stranger appears out of nowhere to dispense a Biblical kind of justice on a threadbare settlement packed with wrongdoers. Whereas Drifter wallowed in cruelty and a windswept damnation, Rider position's Eastwood's phantom as a literal miracle, one that rides out of the imagination of a furious teenage girl, Sydney Penny's Megan, to answer her tearful prayers. Megan resides alongside a stream where her mother's partner, Michael Moriarty's Hull, sifts for enough gold to settle the debts he's accrued in the nearest town. The camp, little more than a dozen middle-aged men and their simpleton sons, are being pressured to abandon their duff claim by drunken, spoiling miners so that a greedy magnate can sweep in and unleash a deluge of industrial effluence on these autumnal lands.

Pale Rider, although routine in terms of premise is notable in how it contextualises its star. These means of presentation even differ based on who is currently appraising him. The audience, who are privy to whispered conversations and insert shots of an impossibly scarred body, are prompted to consider Eastwood's Preacher as a supernatural presence. A dead man returned to life to revenge himself on the killer who shot six bullets through him. Preacher is the same sort of wandering loner as Shane or Sanjuro; a kind of character that Eastwood has plenty of experience inhabiting and deconstructing. The defeated prospectors, used to a deranged sort of toil premised on fleeting shots at fortune, see him as their leader. A man of faith who is smart and resourceful enough to carry them to victory against their much braver and far more experienced, in the ways of warfare, persecutors. He's serene, self-assured and masculine in ways they cannot hope to be. 

Yet another interpretation comes from Megan and her mother Sarah, played Carrie Snodgress. They see this gunslinger in purely romantic terms, a figure of such tempestuous sexual energy that they both pick their moments to proposition him. Preacher demurs, at least in the case of Megan, reassuring these women that someone else - someone lesser - will find in themselves an ability to stick around, beyond the bloodshed he was summoned for, and make them happy. It's not even that Preacher is specifically sexless. After Sarah has confessed her hurried affections, he asks her to close the door of her sinking shack, to silence the echoing taunts of a crooked lawman, then he strides purposefully towards her. If anything his behaviour is suggestive of some pre-established, but fading, connection. Just as we are prompted to examine Preacher in archetypal terms, he also relates to others using similar parameters. Relationships are general; detail extraneous and unimportant. Even Eastwood's approach to violence in Pale Rider is unusual. Preacher's slaying of the seven lawman recruited to exterminate him is almost farcical in its arrangement. Eastwood concealing himself in ways that only make sense when considering this three-dimensional setting from the flat, two-dimensional perspective of a screen.