To hell and back

Clint Eastwood is one of those “iconic” movie stars. In that respect, he seems to be the last of his kind.

Growing up in the Great Depression, his film persona has stayed close to his working class roots.

One of the striking features of his filmography is the presence of Scriptural motifs. This is all the more striking since Eastwood is not a Christian.

But the Scriptural themes crop up in various ways. As one critic has noted:

“In the first of the Leone films, Clint's character was styled as "a grizzled Christ figure" (to use critic Richard Corliss' phrase) who undergoes a calvary and a resurrection before bringing redemption--at the end of his gun barrel--to the hellish Mexican border town of San Miguel. In the first film Clint's Malpaso Productions produced, Hang 'Em High, his character, Jed Cooper, is hanged and left for dead in the movie's opening minutes. Rescued, he becomes a lawman who liberates an entire frontier territory from lynch law. In High Plains Drifter, the first western Clint directed, his character quite possibly represents a figure reincarnated to bring justice to a town every bit as evil as San Miguel. In Pale Rider, his Preacher is unquestionably such a figure--returned from the grave to defend the meek and the weak from their earthly tormentors. In the two most aspiring of the films he has directed, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven, he plays a man broken in spirit who finds redemption through altruistic actions reluctantly undertaken (and in the latter, more ambiguously stated).”

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High Plains Drifter is a parable of the damned. The movie opens with a long shot of a God-forsaken desert, out of which a mysterious man on horseback emerges—or should we say, materializes?— in the simmering distance.

He descends from the mesa to a small town along the lake. At first the townsfolk greet him as a savior. He will defend them against a band of violent convicts, recently paroled.

But it turns out to be a Faustian bargain. He milks the townsfolk for all they're worth, and destroys the village in order to save it. They are ordered to paint the town red, and rename it hell. Gallows humor from start to finish.

Another tough of biblical and bitingly irony is his elevation of the town dwarf from the lowest rung of the social ladder to the town’s mayor and sheriff. The midget’s name is Mordecai—a name reverberant with OT overtones.

The character of Mordecai lies in the venerable Christian tradition of the holy fool. The meek and weak whom the worldly-wise despise—who will, in due time, inherit the earth while the high and mighty are cast down (i.e. the Magnificat; Isa 14; Ezk 28; 1 Cor 1-3).

The town stands under judgment for a guilty secret. For the townsfolk engineered the assassination of their sheriff, and the stranger is the murdered sheriff incognito, returning from the grave to wreak vengeance on his killers and their collaborators.

Pale Rider is a thematic sequel to High Plains Drifter. The later film is the mirror image of the earlier.

In the opening scene, the protagonist once again descends from above.

His role is, again, to deliver the defenseless from their enemies. And he is, once more, an avenging wraith returning from the grave to dole out retribution to his killers.

But the parallels exist to accentuate the contrast between the two movies.

Instead of descending from a dry, searing mesa, he comes down from the snow-capped Sierra Madres.

He comes in answer to prayer. He comes in prophetic fulfillment—as death incarnate, under the guise of a pale rider (Rev 6:8).

He calls himself “the Preacher,” and dons a clerical collar.

In this case, the people he comes to save are worthy of his services.

Eastwood’s manipulation of Biblical motifs is often unorthodox. But the arresting and unforgettable power of his best work is owing, in large part, to the use of Biblical themes, metaphors, and plotlines.