Unforgiven’s influence on Cowboys & Aliens

No one can possibly make a modern western without paying tribute to what many consider a masterpiece of western fiction: The Unforgiven.
Cowboys & Aliens is no exception.
In some ways, The Unforgiven ripples through nearly every scene in this film, filling it with allusions and echoes of the earlier film.
In The Unforgiven, we have a notorious gunman, who is trying to forget his past, trying to live up to his wife’s expectations of a decent man.
In Cowboys, we have an outlaw who has been granted a gift of forgetfulness, a chance to find absolution by fighting on the right side – largely because he can’t remember who he was, but who has already taken the first step towards salvation when he fell in love with a prostitute named Alice.
In The Unforgiven, the outlaw, whose wife has died, gets an offer to avenge the wrong done to a prostitute named Alice, by taking up the bounty to kill them.
We get repeated images and situations in Cowboys that we saw in the Unforgiven, including a spectacular shoot out in the beginning, the hero being beaten up by bad guys, even a similar scene of the hero being stitched up.

We even see him looking at a photograph of his dead wife in the Unforgiven, the way the hero in Cowboys does.
There are a number of repeated images, comic elements such as attempts to learn or relearn how to shoot, and other sequences that are clearly drawn from the earlier film as a tribute.
Cowboy’s hero even wears the same hat at the hero in The Unforgiven, and we get a similar scene of law men coming into the bar in both films.
But the essence of the character is the same: both outlaws have to live with their notorious pasts and must somehow make things right so that they can move on into the future.
While the Cowboys hero steals blood money from fellow crooks, the Unforgiven hero earns his blood money.
Both heroes struggle with memory, although in the Unforgiven, the hero can’t remember because he was mostly drunk when he committed his felonies.
There is even a similar theme about death and afterlife in both films, as The Unforgiven hero mistakes Alice the prostitute for an angel. In Cowboys, we get the alien woman who pretty much is an angel. In both films, the heroes are well aware of good and evil, heaven and hell, as the Cowboy hero tells the villain to collect his gold in hell, while the villain in the Unforgiven tells the hero, he’ll see him in hell. Since in both films, it is clear that while they might be able to make amends, they are doomed to eternal punishment.

Shane and Cowboys & Aliens

It is nearly impossible to say just how much of Shane was taken to make up Cowboys & Aliens since both films make so much use of the same basic elements of the western.
Geography of Shane is much more limited since nearly all of the action takes place within view of the town, where as Cowboys & Aliens provides us with a wider range.
The cattle baron as the dark character may possibly be attributed to Shane, but modified to become one of the heroes.
In Shane, farmer and cattleman represent two great ways of life clashing. In this film, the cattle baron – the former military man – dominates a town that was once thought to be a mining town. While he and his son lord over the locals, it is not with the same clash of cultures.
Three elements are likely taken from Shane, however, the funeral scene, the Jake riding off into the blue horizon, and, of course, the dog.
In both films, the funeral becomes hugely symbolic in the need to pay respects to the dead. While in Shane, it becomes the focus of resistance, much in the way Irish funerals did in the feud against British oppression, in Cowboys & Aliens, the scene is used to continue the duality of mortal and immortal life that makes up the continuing religious theme.
The dog in this film looks very much like the dog that plays an important role in Shane, one of the beasts which lends realism to the western scene, and provides a kind of witness to the events. The dog plays a similar role in this film.
And, of course, the ride off at the end of both films is nearly identical. Strangely enough, it has a similar meaning. In Shane, the hero cannot escape his past as a violent gunfighter, telling the boy that it is impossible to live in peace with the killing he needed to do. We get a similar allusion in Cowboys & Aliens. In both films, the hero is denied the woman he loves. In Shane, he leaves because the woman he loves is married to another man, in Cowboys & Aliens, the woman he loves is dead.

Western film structure in Cowboys & Aliens

What really annoys me about some critics’ reaction to this film is their lack of knowledge about western literature tradition.
Some keep calling it a mash up of Sci-fi and Western genres, when the film – like Wild, Wild West – is a tribute to the late Penny western novels in which space ships and other oddities were common features.
A TV series – I think the name was Briscoe County – was typical of the late western fiction that was published at the Turn of the Century, influenced sharply by the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
Like all films executive produced, produced or directed by Steven Spielberg, Cowboys & Aliens is an homage to other films. For instance, the rolling ball from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was hardly an original idea, taken literally from the 1959 film, Journey to the Center of the Earth.
This is particularly true in Cowboys & Aliens. Although I haven’t yet been able to find it, the opening scene comes almost directly from another classic film, as do several other critical scenes in the film – especially those dealing with pumping up the western aspects of the film.
More importantly, the film falls back on classic Hollywood structure to give it bones.
The fundamental element of this film like most classic westerns is why violence is necessary to preserve civilization.
We get this in nearly all of the main characters.
While Jake has become a champion for preserving civilization, he is a late comer to the cause, lured over to the good side by his love for a prostitute (something of an homage to Clint Eastwood’s “The Unforgiven.”
But each character is brought to the edge of violence for the same reason – the military man, frustrated with bureaucracy, is taught finally why the civil war was necessary and why the loss of his men over a corn field mattered – when the other option is total lack of civilization.
The minister gave sage “friendly” advice to the doctor, telling him to get a gun and learn how to shoot, then proceeds to teach him.
Even the grandson to the sheriff learns that he has to hold onto the knife and use it to preserve good.
This film also holds true to the linked pattern of open space imagery that is so essential to western.
Classic films have a strange riding in from the wilderness – such as in Shane – and we get that in this film, too. As in Shane, Jake rides back out into the wilderness, again at the end.
All classic westerns require a brawl in a saloon, and this film does not disappoint us, and like in classic films, we get something of a gun fight against the aliens at the end, with images of the exploding Columbia shuttle too boot.

It’s not what you were – Cowboys & Aliens

All of the principal characters in this film are struggling with identity, coming from one life with clearly defined role, and stumbling into the unknown.
The most obvious of these characters is Jake, who is struggling to find his lost memory, and finding at first that he was a really bad character, but someone who wanted to reform – but needed some dramatic moment to jolt him out of his old life into a new way of thinking.
The minister points out that he has seen good men do bad, and bad men do good, but it’s up to each person to decide which he is going to end up doing.
With faith as a central theme in this film, the minister points out that a man must make himself worthy of the lord, to recognize salvation and to embrace it.
Although Jake is the principle sinner that these lessons seem to touch upon – a man who needs to set things right after a life time of misdeeds, all of the characters are suffering similar need of faith.
The doctor comes to believe that he is responsible for his wife’s abduction because he chose to follow his dream by coming to the small mining down.
The military man is living in a past drenched with blood and betrayal, a survivor of the Civil War, who needs a new approach to the world. The woman/angel/alien needs to make the future better by making sure the evil aliens/demons do not get back with word about this planet.
The military man’s son is a spoiled brat who also needs a jolt to become a new man.
Even the boy – the grandson of the sheriff – is searching for identity.
This is why the minister’s dying words are so important, when he tells the doctor, it’s not what you were, but what you are – or perhaps what you will become.
All people are capable of change, and those who recognize it and embrace it, can be reborn into someone better – as each of the main character in this film have.
The more positive military man in the last scene tells Jake “We could use a good man,” in hoping to convince Jake to stay, ironically, Jake says – just before he rides off – “Yes, you can.”
While Jake has reformed, he must leave, perhaps part of the penance he must pay for his previous life, and there is this lingering question as to whether he will or not find salvation in the future.

tough guys of Cowboys and Aliens

Ritual in Cowboys & Aliens

The importance of ritual can not be overstated in this movie, since we get again and again that there is a proper way for nearly everything, and that in most cases, those who abide by the rules of the world get what they need or want.
Again, the minister plays a clear role in establishing these rules, outlining at various points for each of the main characters how they might reach their personal salvation.
Each character faces choices between going the right way or the wrong way, and generally, each must come back to the proper path in order to get what they need most.
Then, when the minister dies, and is buried, the characters are left to follow this or not.
When the military man urges the doctor and Jake to hurry, he says, "The only man who knew the right words to say is buried in the ground, isn't it enough that we took time to put him there."
Both Jake and the doctor say it is not, and concoct their own ritual to send the man on to the next world.
Getting to the next world is key.
It is through Indian ritual that Jake recovers his memory in order to bring the others to where the alien death camp is.
The military man’s son’s violation of basic rules is what leads him down the road to his own abduction. While some were willing to tolerate his spoiled acts, the sheriff is required to act when the boy goes too far.
And thus we get the ritual of sending him off to be tried.
But underlying all of this is the code of the west that says that each man must learn to fend for himself.
The military man when a boy was required to perform an act of mercy killing, part of his own becoming a man. The boy who is the grandson of the sheriff must go through a similar rite of passage to become a man.
This much the military man says to him when he hands him the knife, “Be a man.”
While one of the other characters says, “That’s hard,” another character says the military man means well.
But in the scope of things, this is how it must be done.

Old West heroes, Cowboys & Aliens