“I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.”
—Margaret Atwood, “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy”
An image as old as the American West: a stranger rides into town. Usually, town is just a handful of houses lined up to create the illusion of a main street, false fronts lending the buildings a sense of height and importance that they haven’t yet earned. Maybe they never will. Or maybe, as in Keoma and The Outlaw Josey Wales, it’s a ghost town. The buildings sprang up swiftly near silver mines, built by settlers hoping to seek their fortunes. When the mines went bust, so did the towns. The residents drifted away, leaving behind empty buildings with loose doors banging against their frames in the wind. The wild will reclaim them, but not before our titular cowboys ride through, emblems of a way of life that’s swiftly disappearing.
It’s a way of life that never really existed, either. This image isn’t as old as the image-makers would have us think; the Old West itself is a myth that’s only as old as the settlers who invaded it, bringing their tall tales and broken promises with them. The country hasn’t been here for very long. Neither have the movies. The United States was just turning two hundred in 1976, and the movie camera was less than a hundred years old. As a country, we tend to romanticize things we think are gone before their time, and we like to root for the heroes we think of as underdogs. We—Americans writ large—have a penchant for glossing over the uglier parts of our history, for reinventing ourselves, absolving ourselves of past sins without admitting guilt. That ghost town over there isn’t a failed attempt at a settlement; it’s a battleground, an opportunity for a new scheme, a reminder that we’d been great once and a claim that we’ll be great again someday. It’s a lie we prefer to romanticize as we tell it, again and again, transforming it into legend.
*
In 1976, the Western movie genre was dying out. It had been declining for a long time, but the death rattle of the studio system that made classical Westerns had been audible for years. Easy Rider (1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) had heralded the beginning of the New Hollywood movement. The studio system was trying to catch up. In the very near future, Star Wars was going to mash up the Western with samurai movies and Flash Gordon, inventing something entirely new in the process. The sun was going down, and with it, the old studios and traditional cowboys.
However, movie cowboys don’t go down without a fight. The titular characters of 1976’s The Outlaw Josey Wales (directed by Clint Eastwood after he’d gotten original director Philip Kaufman fired) and Keoma (directed by Enzo G. Castellari, also in 1976) are both ex-soldiers who’d fought in the American Civil War. Josey (Clint Eastwood) fought for the South, Keoma (Franco Nero) for the North, and each man is ambivalent about the causes they’d bled for. They’re loners seeking freedom, whatever that means to them. Josey refuses to submit after his side loses the war, so he pushes further west to avoid the long arm of the American government pursuing him. Keoma’s returning home to a ranch and a town where he’d never felt he’d belonged, searching for a freedom he can’t define. His father was a white settler and his mother was First Nations1, a fact his three white half-brothers hold against him. Both Josey and Keoma are haunted—and hunted—by their pasts, romanticized for their prowess with horses and guns, a pair of fiercely independent protagonists who keep finding themselves with helpless women under their protection.
Josey and Keoma are hard men who are more comfortable outdoors than inside, who are content to let their guns do the talking. Josey’s a family man for about 90 seconds of screen time before marauding Union soldiers burn his farm and murder his family. He throws in with a crew of Confederate soldiers in response. It isn’t about North vs. South or freedom vs. slavery for Josey, it’s only about revenge. Keoma doesn’t even know what he was fighting for. “I just happened to be on the winning side,” he says on his return home from war. His own story begins with a flashback to his childhood in which a handful of tipis burn, their occupants slaughtered. America is a land of contradictions: the self-professed land of the free built on the institutions of slavery and genocide. We tell ourselves we’re individuals, beholden to no one, even as we’re shaped by our circumstances. We think of ourselves as the main character. We print the legend. Josey and Keoma embody that sense of individualism—and, intentionally or not, their respective movies bear the weight of the contradiction at the heart of being an American. One sits too close to the American experiment, its perspective warped by its own noxious political ideals. The other sits too far away, a portrait of Americanness from the outside. Push the two together and the image comes into focus, an approximation of the real thing in the negative spaces both movies leave behind.
*
The Outlaw Josey Wales is an ugly movie, both ideologically and aesthetically. It refuses to acknowledge the reasons for the Civil War in the first place. The country’s greatest sin, according to Josey, is keeping men from their right to live free on the land with their families. Oppression becomes a matter of individual choice, and rebellion an individual choice to push back. The fog of war descends as a blue filter over the lens, and when it lifts after the Confederates surrender, the surrounding countryside is wooded and brown, an ordinary-looking land. The framing is workmanlike, a matter-of-fact cinematographic approach that matches its taciturn protagonist. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees allows the characters’ faces to slip regularly into deep shadow. We can see the shape, but there’s no subtlety.
Some pieces ring more true than others. The parts set in Missouri look like Missouri, with its rolling rocky wooded hills. As Josey makes his way further west, the settings grow more fantastical: Utah and Arizona doubling for Texas. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the genre, swapping in the buttes of Monument Valley as stand-ins for the geography of other states, lending the already-mythical stature of the Old West an even more otherworldly quality. Josey starts as a man and ends up a myth, his surroundings stretching to fit his reputation. He’s a man of few words, but the camera and the framing of the story do enough talking for him.
Keoma’s otherworldliness comes from its own setting: it was shot on location in Italy, and the Old West that Keoma rides across is lush and green and mountainous, every inch a European fairy tale, albeit one populated by gunslingers. There’s no impulse to dress up the story in period-accurate clothing, which grants the film a little more room to play with its own romanticized aesthetics, its relationship to its own “Americanness” already at a remove. The film makes use of a sort of folk-song Greek chorus, narrating Keoma’s inner monologue and his circumstances over a twangy guitar—a bizarre choice that presents the point of the movie so plainly it’s both endearing and off-putting. Keoma is dressed in tight bell-bottom pants and coarse textiles, shirtless and bearded and hairy, every inch a wild man. We meet him riding into a ghost town, a place he returns to again and again. The first time we see him there, he exchanges a few words with an acquaintance of his who reminds him where he came from. Past and present collapse in on each other. Keoma’s memories take shape as actual people and places springing up around him. His younger self runs past him, sharing the same frame as his adult self. We don’t just cut away to the past: the past encroaches on the present. Tipis burn in flashback, and we see the smoke drift past a grown-up Keoma’s face decades later. He watches as his younger self is bullied by his half-brothers. There’s a fire in him that they can’t quench.
The brightest color in Josey’s story is the orange of the blaze that consumes his cabin, hard and hot against the blue sky. Josey doesn’t fight out of any sense of loyalty to the South; he fights in opposition to the North and the soldiers who’d set that blaze. The Outlaw Josey Wales romanticizes this notion, zooming in on the character’s taciturn pain to the exclusion of everything else. The film doesn’t have the decency to even acknowledge that the war had been fought to end the institution of slavery. There are no Black actors at all, and any time the word “freedom” is mentioned, it’s about Josey’s ongoing rebellion against the Union. He keeps going after the Confederates surrender because, he says, “I got nothing better to do.” The film portrays this attitude as an honorable sort of nobility. It squares Josey’s aimless rebellion against duplicitous Union soldiers who extract oaths of loyalty from unarmed, surrendering Confederates before gunning them down. The conflict is transformed into a battle between individual freedom and collective treachery.
It’s a lie of omission, but a lie all the same. After he rescues a Diné2 woman named Little Moonlight (Geraldine Keams) from a pair of men assaulting her, the woman claims a life debt. Josey bristles at the notion, telling his traveling companion, a Cherokee man named Lone Watie (Chief Dan George), “Look, you tell her I don’t want nobody belonging to me.” The line lends a sense of credulity to the lie that the Civil War had been over “state’s rights.” No doubt there were men like Josey who told themselves they were fighting for their own personal freedom, but the truth and the damage remain: Josey fought on the side of slavery, even though his story, his words, and his actions refuse to acknowledge that reality. Little Moonlight tags along behind Josie and Lone Watie like a shadow, the first of a string of helpless characters whom Josey picks up. Individual freedom is attainable for characters like Josey, who have their wits and their strength, and most importantly, happen to be male. The remainder—the old, the women, and the weak—have to band together under Josey’s shadow to experience the same freedom he enjoys.
Keoma has the decency to tell the history straight, even though the characters remain ambivalent toward the war, and the script handles the issue without much grace. “Never could figure out what the war was about,” Keoma says to his father, and then: “I just happened to be on the winning side.” His carelessness about the war extends to his dealings with George, the town’s only Black resident, who’s taken up drinking since Keoma went away. George taught Keoma how to shoot a bow and arrow as a boy; it’s implied, but never explicitly confirmed, that George had been enslaved by Keoma’s father. Now he’s a broken man, a token nod to the fact that the promise of America doesn’t come true for everyone. “I used to have something to hope for,” he says. “My freedom…I found out what it was worth. That’s why I drink.” He’s abused by the men who run the town, former Confederate soldiers who force the residents to work in the local mine, turning a profit in silver that the laborers will never see. George and Keoma both know that they’re outsiders in a country that claims to welcome everybody, but favors the white men who have guns and money.
Keoma doesn’t spend much time engaging directly with the Civil War, but the fact that the town has been taken over by former Confederates speaks volumes. After his return, Keoma decries the rest of the town for “not liking” guns and being unwilling to arm themselves against the Confederates who have taken over. Today, this line reads as ruggedly individualistic, a kind of second-amendment apologia, but in context it’s a practical suggestion. The only language fascists understand is violence, and the Confederates who run the town enjoy a fascist flavor of control over the lives of the townspeople. World War II had ended just 30 years before Keoma was made; Mussolini’s reign would have been in living memory, as vivid as Keoma’s flashbacks. There’s honor in fighting against fascist oppression, tooth and nail, and Keoma repeatedly stands up to the thugs in town even when it’s dangerous; to do otherwise would be to accept governance by honorless men.
Josey has no honor, though his movie presents him as honorable. He’s at his most eloquent when he’s mourning the dead. When one of his fellow Confederates (Sam Bottoms) is mortally wounded by the Union soldiers pursuing them, Josey uses the boy’s corpse to give his hunters the slip. He ties his body to his horse, mutters that “the blue bellies will give you a better burial than I could,” then sends the horse at a gallop through the Union camp, prompting the Union soldiers to pursue the decoy, guns blazing. Perhaps they will actually give the boy a decent burial, but not before his body’s been desecrated by pursuing guns. The truth of the matter is that Josey Wales is opportunistic. There’s no dignity in his companion’s last ride, only trickery.
Trickery, of course, is how Josey moves through the world, and the film treats his trickery as proof of free-thinking intelligence. It’s a frightening implication, given that he’s willing to use a fellow soldier’s corpse as a decoy, and he does the same with his own horse to get the drop on Lone Watie, sneaking up behind him as the other man stands surprised by the riderless horse. “They call us ‘civilized’ because we’re easy to sneak up on,” says Lone Watie. “White men have been sneaking up on us for years.” The two men have no love lost for the American government; Lone Watie is Cherokee, and he lost his family during the Trail of Tears. Here, The Outlaw Josey Wales manages a version of the story that’s closer to the truth: the American government made promises they had no intention of keeping in order to get the drop on the other sovereign nations who’d been here long before them. Still, the film frames Lone Watie’s plight as another example of governmental overreach, a few sad lines and a bloodless response to the blood-boiling injustice of stolen land and murdered children. The film pities Lone Watie, though it doesn’t exactly sympathize with him.
Lone Watie is reenergized and catalyzed to take up arms again by Josey’s decision to reject the U.S. government. The two ride off together, a pair of lone individuals who begin to pick up stragglers as they make their way west. The movie remains Josey’s story only, Lone Watie simply a supporting character, a helpmeet. Eastwood’s thesis is that all men need to be free individuals, that society is only good if it’s actively chosen. It’s an argument that only works if the starting blocks are placed equally for everyone at birth; it’s an argument that ignores the circumstances we’re born into, the odds we’re stacked up against. It’s willfully ignorant of race and gender and circumstance, conscious only about its characters being actual people so long as they’re able to aim and fire a gun.
*
It’s not a Western without a six-shooter. Life is tightly intertwined with death when everyone packs a loaded pistol on their hip. To settle the frontier is to accept and mete out violence—the only real law recognized and respected by settlers and ex-Confederates alike. Clint Eastwood’s performance is at its most compelling when he’s facing down someone who’s drawn a gun on him. He stands still, eyes never blinking, like a snake about to strike. Keoma has quick reflexes too, though Franco Nero holds himself more like a bear, arms loose and wide by his sides.
Both men yearn for closure and for freedom. Josey’s freedom is a libertarian desire to be left alone, and his closure is revenge; Keoma’s freedom is something he can’t define, but that stands in opposition to totalitarianism. Both men can only be satisfied on their own terms. One of the townspeople asks Keoma why he’s helping them, and his response is mostly a shrug. He’s doing it not out of a sense of duty, but for himself, and he’s willing to say so out loud, though his answer is accompanied by a noncommittal “I guess.” Even after he’s taken a ragtag crew of settlers under his protection, Josey stands alone and apart from the others. They find an abandoned ranch to settle in, an unoccupied space already perfectly suited to their needs. The land waits for them to come and live in it, destiny made manifest in a comfortable house nestled near a curve in the river. Collectively, the group makes the place their home, though Josey remains apart. When he’s on screen, he’s alone in the frame, or else separated from the other settlers by split-log fences or tall trees. He’s isolated from their little community, and therefore (according to the movie) free.
Josey intends to leave again; the closeness of the community is too much. When he rides out from the ranch, he’s confronted by the Union bushwackers hunting him, a large group of horsemen forming a human boundary line near the river at the edge of the ranch. Josey is framed at a distance as a lone rider in opposition to their collective might. The image serves as the movie’s most potent lie: Josey is just one man against a system of oppression, the movie’s framing says, and it is right and just and even romantic for him to stand in opposition to the Union simply because he does not want to conform to their duplicitous ways. But in the film’s own terms, Josey isn’t alone, even though he’s always being framed as such. He’s backed up by the other people living at the ranch. It’s the lie that nests at the heart of the United States: I meant no harm, I just want to live, I’m the hero of my own life, regardless of the consequences my actions have on anyone else.
Both men are compelling because they’re not really human at all, these tall men with guns who exist as manifest destiny personified. They can’t stay in town because they’re perpetually passing through. Like Josey and Keoma, they’re defined by the roots they’ve lost, their need to keep pushing past borders and riding further west into the sunset. They’re the notion that might makes right, the myth that a single well-timed bullet can solve every problem. They ride free across the frontier, and yet they keep returning again and again to the same ghost town, trapped in a cycle of violence. Josey’s story ends when he kills the Union officer who’s been hunting him with his own sword; Keoma’s ends when he finally faces his own white supremacist brothers in a three-way gun battle. Both stories reach their respective climaxes in the middle of desolate ghost towns—the only sound, in Keoma’s case, the wind and the cries of a woman in childbirth. The new world is struggling to be born, and we’re free to make it into whatever shape we want. Or so the stories claim. Only time will tell if that’s true.