Just to be clear, with all due respect to Randolph Scott, Clint Eastwood is my favorite actor. The guy is awesome and I love his movies. However I have noted something interesting.
It is generally accepted Eastwood’s character, The Man With No Name, that appeared in the 1960’s was the first anti-hero. Ultimateactionmovies.com posted an article March 30, 2018 by Will Carter indicated so with the subtitle, “The Birth of ‘The Man With No Name’ Action Movie Archetype’.
It is interesting to note that throughout the 20th century and into the next, spirituality has been in decline, not just in America, but all over the world, as noted by W Sundberg in his article “Religious Trends in Twentieth-Century America” published in Word & World Volume XX, Number 1, Winter 2000.
A primary tenant of spirituality is forgiveness. An understanding we are all flawed. As fate would have it, just as this very important Christian belief was in decline, the Man With No Name was born and soon the character became a template for story lines of all types. By 2021 StudioBinder posted an article titled, “8 Character Archetypes – Examples in Literature & Movies”.
Before Eastwood’s character when forgiveness was still an important belief in American, two dimensional characters epitomized good with white hats and evil with black. As the Man With No Name began to spawn third dimensional characters across many story lines, the lines blurred and heroes began to show personal flaws.
Oddly enough, the concurrent decline in society’s belief in spirituality and the rise of the anti-hero has left current culture both with the inability to forgive while seeing their fellow man in a two dimensional light; either good or evil. Just as The Man With No Name has become a standard popular character archetype displaying a wide array of traits and faults in the last many years, society has lost the ability to see each other by the same standard in the same time frame.
Polarized by politics and cultural decline, no different than those families 160 years ago that sat across supper tables and argued about states rights, our society is fracturing. Eastwood’s character, while dark, was intended to show all men have feet of clay, but somehow that important trait of the Man With No Name doesn’t seem to translate.
The Man With No Name is almost 60 years old and while his character is popular the lessons he teaches fall on deaf ears. No man is all good and no man is completely evil, but in our narcissistic society, ready to find offense at the drop of a hat, we have lost the ability to see that.
Fathers and mothers watched their children arguing 160 years ago and many escaped across the Oregon Trail prior to the Civil War breaking out, so brother didn’t end up shooting brother. The culture war is on, my friends, but there is no Oregon Trail. There is no escape and we are all drug in and dug in.
May God take mercy on our souls,