When "it was a different time" just doesn't cut it

I had a far more negative reaction to Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter than I probably would have at a time we were all a bit less woke about gender politics in the movies. But I hope I would have had a pretty negative reaction to it even then.

We use the phrase "it was a different time" to excuse a lot of tone deaf treatment of women and minorities in films from decades past ... not to mention, I suppose, to excuse the behavior of Hollywood men who thought it was okay to massage the shoulders of production assistants and occasionally grab a little bit of their asses. We're moving past that second one I hope.

But I still don't understand what the hell Clint Eastwood was thinking in High Plains Drifter.

One of the first things his "man with no name" does in this film is rape a woman. Yes, you heard that right. When a woman comes up to him in the street and gets a bit sassy with him -- after he's just killed three men in the tonsorial parlor, mind you -- I at first thought he was going to be comparatively chivalrous and laugh it off. Even when she slaps the cigar out of his mouth, I figured his reaction would be muted. I mean, he's not going to hit a woman, is he?

Well, he doesn't hit her. He does something far worse.

He grabs her by the arm, hauls her off to a local barn, lays her down in the straw and forces himself on her.

Presumably because Eastwood had an instinct toward what he thought would preserve some of the sympathy for this character, he of course has her "get into it," of sorts, halfway through. I mean, she's a slut, and sluts like to get fucked, don't they? His character would have only done that because he could "see it in her eyes," right?

Ugh.

I was frankly aghast at what I was watching. Yes, this had happened.

I suppose you could say that Eastwood was making some kind of commentary about bad men, and including his own character in that group. This was considered to be a revisionist western even 19 years before the revisionist western he is most associated with, the best picture winner and true classic Unforgiven. You might even say it was bold and/or "brave" for him to throw away a good deal of the audience's sympathy ten minutes into the movie, assuming he had enough sensibility to recognize that an act like this would do that.

But I didn't think that. I just thought it was ugly. The "man with no name" (he really does never give his name, just like in those Leone movies) is supposed to be a badass and someone you want to emulate, and unless the movie is damning his actions in no uncertain terms, it's effectively endorsing them.

Interestingly, the movie does try to damn his actions in a way. The woman he rapes comes upon him in the bath at that same tonsorial parlor and takes about three shots at him at nearly point blank range, and later tells the sheriff that he raped her, even using that very word. But the film portrays this woman as idiotic and venal and weak-willed, a fool that it laughs at every time she's on screen. Never mind the way it makes her so incompetent with a gun that she fires three shots at him from like five feet away and can't hit him.

If the film's awful portrayal of women were limited to this one character that would be something. But the other female character in the movie -- there is literally only one other -- is the innkeeper's wife, a woman who appears to be of strong moral fiber. Until, that is, the scene immediately after Eastwood blows up the upper story of her hotel as an unnecessarily complicated way of killing them men who tried to break into his room and beat him in the dead of night.

In this scene she's understandably furious with him, as he has just essentially ruined her livelihood, not to mention blown up the very place he was hoping to sleep that night. (He had previously ordered the rest of the hotel to be cleared of guests so he could have the whole place to himself, part of the escalating price of defending the town against three miscreants who were just released from prison and are coming to kill anyone within range.) She lets slip that the only place that wasn't destroyed is "our room," meaning the one belonging to her and her husband. So Eastwood raises and eyebrow as if to say "I'll take that one, then."

So then he grabs her by the arm and escorts her down to the room, toward what end I can't say because he knows where it is, so he might as well just go there unaccompanied and make himself at home. When he suggests that he can't sleep with her because he needs a good night's rest, she's so enraged by his ego and his presumptuousness that she grabs a pair of scissors and comes at him where he's lying on the bed. You probably know where this is going. He grabs her wrist to prevent her from plunging the scissors into his neck, and twists this gesture into a passionate kiss. The next shot is of them awakening in the morning in bed together.

Now I'm really pissed.

It's one thing to suggest that women are attracted to mean who treat them poorly, an idea that has some unfortunate truth to it. It's another to have Eastwood essentially rape two of them and have them "start to like it" halfway through.

By the end of the movie I came to realize that Eastwood was probably not trying to hold up this character as a paragon of heroism. But the damage had been done by that point. Even if he has a righteous reason for putting this town in his sites and submitting them to this monstrous behavior -- a reason I don't totally buy, but okay -- you can't just go around killing people and raping people and making it seem cool because Clint Eastwood presents as a badass and he's the star of the movie. That's just irresponsible filmmaking.

Then there's just the inept staging of some of this material. The town is guilty of having been complicit in an event where the three miscreants whipped a local lawman to death in the town square, as none of them did anything to stop it, and in fact, they likely encouraged the act because the lawman was going to blow the whistle on some shady dealings that were helping prop up the town. The staging of the whipping, seen twice in flashback, is really shoddy, even though it was 1973 and they didn't perhaps have the ways of making it look convincing that they would have today.

But even this wouldn't have bothered me so much if Eastwood himself hadn't experienced one of these flashbacks. As he's falling asleep his first night he flashes back to the whipping death of this local lawman ... even though he was not present for the event. That's just lazy filmmaking.

This was only Eastwood's second directorial effort, so inexperience can be blamed for some of this. But the overall feel of the film is shocking and nauseating, and neither of those things in a good way. It feels as though he made Unforgiven almost as an apology for this movie. Will Munny had skeletons in his closet, dozens of them, and may have been guilty of worse crimes even than the "man with no name" of High Plains Drifter. But the fact that we don't see it is the right moral choice, and makes the same point more effectively.