The Outlaw Josey Wales

Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is a compromise between the classical Western and the anti-Western, between the early Eastwood figure and his later directorial self. His early figure, despite the consistent veil of nonchalance, was actually split in two: The Man With No Name was the total mercenary, in the game only for money or survival (basically the same thing), and Dirty Harry was righteousness personified. Josey Wales hews more closely to the first. Even as the rest of his Confederate company defects at the end of the Civil War, he decides to go it on his own--not out of loyalty, and not for the cause, but mainly because he wants to be left alone. That is, he doesn't want to be the subject of any government; he identifies with dispossessed Indians and optimistic homesteaders, people who flee the constraints and trappings of civilization. In the old Westerns (like those of Ford and Hakws), Wales would've found his new home thanks to the Union Army's help; in the newer ones (like the Spaghetti Westerns or Little Big Man), he would've been implicated in making the Indians dispossessed. Here, he gets a little of both: "governments" are the killers (not just in wars, or in the way the Union guns down the surrendering Confederates, a rather garish touch. It's federal ninnies who put the bounty on Josey's head). Our hero first became bloodthirsty fighting for one government, and now he's only bloodthirsty because he's trying to get away from the other. The film has the facade of the traditional Western, but an underlying note of post-sixties anti-war/anti-authoritarian cynicism. Josey Wales is thus about "the right to be left alone": the subset of the American dream that, today, has devolved into an American delusion, but one that's forgivable when applied to the period in which this was set, when the countless factors that bind the world's population today either didn't exist or were worn thin by the vastness of the West. Even Orwell admitted that the Old West was one of the few historical frames in which men were truly free. Or was it just the inaccuracies of the Western genre that made him, and billions of others, think so? The implications of that "right" (privilege, really, but Americans love their entitlements) are often maliciously misapplied, though not in this film; Josey exercises it fairly, trading being left alone for settling down and leaving others alone. Even so, that doesn't mean that Josey Wales is not simplistic when compared to Unforgiven, which balanced its gunslinger's right to do as he pleased with that of his victims' right to survive. Josey identifies with dispossessed Indians, but black people don't seem to exist here, probably because that would mean a confrontation with historical facts, a confrontation with what Josey's army really was fighting for--and it wasn't universal liberty. The film is a sentimental fantasy, set at a time when such fantasies were permissible, and featuring a dry hero who counteracts the preachiness of a lot of Eastwood's later work. It isn't profound, but it's a beautiful Western--you wallow not just in the beauty of the setting or the beauty of the dream but in the freedom from feeling that either are affected.