White Hat, Old Hat, Black Hat

The Wild West conjures images as clear and bright as the sun at High Noon. Whether the West in your mind is a desert blistering under a Spanish sun, or a backwater town blanketed in the snows of the Appalachian mountains, there always stands, with guns on his hips and a hat on his head, cinema’s most enduring icon. The cowboy exploded back into public consciousness when pioneers, like Edwin S Porter, headed West to get  in on the silver nitrate rush and crafted the fresh rules of cinematic storytelling with The Great Train Robbery (1903). The final image of the bandit blasting his Six Shooter at the audience created a genre to dominate cinema through the 1950s and remained a staple long after.

Over a century later, the Coen brothers created the short, sharp stop at the end of a long rope with No Country for Old Men (2008). The horse is saddled up with all the right equipment, endless Texas plains, fierce shootouts, a quest for riches, and the ‘Black Hat’ Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) vs the ‘White Hat’ Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). No Country is the ride into the sunset (although the genre will never fade) of what the best of the Western genre has known since 1903 – the ‘man of the West’ is an anachronism unfit for the modern world.

The cowboy belongs to the archetype of wandering hero. Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name is a staple of the genre, but he began as a samurai from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which was in turn based on Dashiell Hammet’s detective from Red Harvest; and to cap it off, Frank Miller likens the detective to a knight in blood caked armour. These heroes are principled men from an old world that roam until adventure calls, enter the fray, win against the odds, and then ride off. They ride off for further adventure because they are men of action and because they do not fit into the coming modern world. Take, for example, what John Ford’s iconic final shot in The Searchers represents: John Wayne cannot enter the home of modern America; he has to return to what remains of the wilds.

Moss is the White Hat of No Country, he’s resourceful, brave, and principled to a fault (the story unfolds because his morality drives him to deliver water to the wounded cartel member). The physical battle of the movie is between Moss and the ultimate Black Hat, Anton Chigurh, but the real battle is a spiritual one between the Black Hat and the Old Hat – Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). Moss is a cowboy hero of the present day, the hero as we have seen in countless western adventures, but Ed Tom Bell is what happens to an unchanging hero who stays in a changing world, and meets something new.

“You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would’ve operated these times…The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it…. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore…”

Anton Chigurh is the unknowable modern evil; he uses a silenced shotgun, uses a tracer to hunt for the money, and kills indiscriminately with a bolt gun reserved for cattle. Chigurh  is a force of nature without morals, much like the classic Black Hat, but the oncoming modern world has only provided Black Hats with further advantages. Ed Tom Bell spends the narrative of No Country confounded by Chigurh. He stares at the imprint of the broken lock on the walls, travels by horse when Chigurh switches cars with ease, and even discusses the use of bolt guns on cattle without ever connecting it to Chigurh’s method.

There is no showdown between Ed and Chigurh, but in one moment they nearly meet. In the motel room where Moss met his end, Bell works up the courage to enter, imagining Chigurh on the other side. After checking the room is clear, he sits down with relief and knows that he must retire, a move that is unheroic and much crueller than if he had faced Chigurh with honour. Moss should’ve ridden off into the sunset long ago.

Riding into the sunset is the classical ending for the Western and has served as a visual metaphor for something implied in classical Westerns – the death of the hero. The cowboy wins his gunfight against the odds, saddles up, and rides towards an infinite horizon with a tunnel of light at the centre. As modern Westerns arrived, this implied death became ever more explicit. John Ford holds a wake for poster cowboy John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, while New Wave filmmakers could either freeze frame before Butch Cassidy and the Sun- dance Kid’s inevitable deaths (thereby mythologising them), or follow on to the logical bloodbath like Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch. Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western endings developed into explicit death: Pale Rider follows a literal ghost gunslinger, while Gran Torino is a swan song for cowboys that have lived too long. The anachronistic element of the character forbids them integrating into the modern world, so they either leave in a metaphoric death or die explicitly. Ed Tom Bell comes to realise the pain of an anachronism integrating into a modern world when recounting his dream:

"The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up…"

Ed Tom Bell lives at the crossroads of cowboy history. He’s too young to be John Wayne, yet too old to fit the strange milieu of 1980s Texas. He’s the right age, however, to be the young boy of Shane (1953) and his dream is reminiscent of the movie’s end.In the eyes of a child, Shane rides away to another adventure and fight another day; to older viewers, the boy is calling after a hero already dead. Bell is now the older man, older even than his hero father, and his dream is stripped of mythic romanticism – darkness, no horizon, and a flesh-and-blood hero, sheltering by a fragile fire, a fire that represents the memory and essence of myth.

 Shane is ultimately about the formation of cowboy myths as impressionable eyes reshape fact into myth: this is why Shane rides away in the dark towards a skyline interrupted by mountains, because the young boy will retell the story of Shane riding off into the sunset. The young boy is keeping the story of Shane alive and passing that torch down through the ages. Bell is keeping his father’s fire alive by remembering him, but as he grows older and cynical, that mythic fire dwindles. Bell also realises something about his own fire. The Black Hat offered no stand-off with Bell, slaughtered the White Hat, and wiped out any character that could pass on the legend of Ed Tom Bell. Without wide eyes to shape and reshape the fact into legend, even the myth of Ed Tom Bell won’t survive the modern world. Who will keep those fires burning in the darkness?

Jack Wightman is that film nerd who works in a bookshop. He loves writing screenplays and articles, but sweats over the simplest of paragraphs, this bio included. You can read more of his articles at justonemansopinion.org.uk