Shane
The opening to this film made me damn near tear up, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. It was only later that I realized I was mourning a dream. I felt like I took a bullet to the heart. The landscapes and the music, it strikes you all at once. You never see it anymore, film is so rarely beautiful (in that way) now. This is so pure, so sincere. It makes me a little sick seeing how many people complain about that on here. I know this world never existed, not in the 1950s and not in the 1850s. It’s no more real than Arthurian Romance, but that’s exactly what it is: the dreams of a nation. That we could be something good, that it wasn’t all just power and money.
It’s akin to uncovering some ancient Babylonian tablets. America never had a mythology, but that didn’t stop a few dreamers from trying to give it one. This is the fruit of their Labor; I for one think they understood the assignment, and it’s not their fault that their dream wasn’t achieved. The seeds they sowed just didn’t take root deep enough. The yield was quickly stomped over by a rancher and his cattle drive, in pursuit of wealth and power. If only there had been men like Shane to protect the impossible dream.
The American Knight Errant in his most nascent and pure form. Much like the ranchers who are replaced by the homesteaders, America is a land of heroes who can never possess that which they protect. This is the land of the stranger, and a nation has to be what it is.
Fringed garments are a symbol of the frontier, of the fringe if you will. In the beginning of this film, Shane wears fringe. We are shown quite explicitly however, that when he is trying to take on this simpler life, he makes an effort to dress like the farmers, effectively taking on their flesh like Christ being born as a man. By the end of the film, he dons his fringe once more.
It takes a hero to runoff all the tyrants, but the people of this country do not trust the hero to be a part of their society once he has done so, he has already proven that he cannot have a simple life. That he is meant for more and will create that more wherever he goes, they fear what that “more” represents. They cannot tell a hero from a tyrant. Even the hero himself knows that he is what he is, and so he knows that there is not a place for him in the world they are creating. So he will continue to wander. Striking down tyrants where he can and yet never taking his rightful place in the void they leave behind.
In America Lancelot does not serve a King Arthur, but rather a lowly hog farmer. There’s something poignant about that. To a man like Shane, the most unattainable thing is not a crown, it’s a simple life. A man’s gotta be what he is.
Shane isn't real. He never existed, no matter how bad we may want him to. For just a brief moment though, he lived. Maybe in that moment we became just a little more like him, or at least found what he was fighting for.
10/10