Comparing The Woman With No Name In Monte Hellman's The Shooting

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The Woman With No Name in Monte Hellman's The Shooting Works Cited Missing Generally forgotten by critics, and classified as alternately a cult classic and a B-movie (in reference to both its budget and its reception), Monte Hellman's The Shooting is a film worth revisiting. At a remote camp in the middle of the desert, a Woman With No Name arrives to hire two men to lead her to the town of Kingsley, days after one of the camp members was shot dead and another ran away. On their descent into the scorching desert, it becomes apparent that the Woman has misled her employees as a hired gun joins their party and they continue their journey, it would seem, to execute somebody. The Woman from time to time physically leads the pack, and is always …show more content…

At the heart of the scene is the metaphor central to this opening shot; that of male instability, masculinity in crisis. Coley has given his horse to the Woman With No Name and rides on the back of Gashsade's steed out of necessity. He has given up his means of transport, his agency. Without his horse, Coley lacks mobility in the narrative and his position as a male is challenged. The male body is celebrated in the Western with "the phallic image of a man on horseback, sitting high above the ground, upright and superior, gazing down at a world whose gaze he in turn solicits" (Mitchell, 167). This celebration, typical of the genre is denied. Coley shares the space of the horse with another man and that superiority is negated. Gashade's power is challenged even further as he is forced to stoop over the front of his horse (shot 3) as if to carry the burden that is Coley. Masculinity in the Western is "not simply a blunt biological fact... (but rather) a cultural fiction that must be created, then re-created" (Mitchell, 155). These male characters are without the ability to create a masculinity for themselves. As "the Western is invariably pitched toward an exhibition of manly restraint" (Mitchell, 155), Gashade and Coley can never …show more content…

To 'have' the cinema is, in some sense, to 'have' the woman" (Doane, 498). Yet a returned gaze denies that possibility to have her. This action upsets expectations of the viewing experience and brands this woman as a threat. As "the voyeur ... must maintain a distance between himself and the image" (Doane, 499) representative of the distance between desire and its object, the voyeuristic act is turned on its end in this scene. The apparent interaction of the screen and the viewer breaks the act of viewing a spectacle and forces the audience's gaze away from the object of voyeurism. This is in keeping with the tradition of the intellectual woman who "looks and analyzes, and in usurping the gaze ... poses a threat to an entire system of representation" (Doane, 504). The woman as looker is an affront to subordinate female roles. Mulvey points out that men "cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification (and are) reluctant to gaze at (their) exhibitionist like" (Mulvey, 488). The general roles of "woman as image (and) man as bearer of the look" (Mulvey, 487), become complicated through Hellman's camera placement in the scene, and work with the narrative by reinforcing the Woman With No Name's position as an independent and determined woman, and emphasizing Gashade's and Coley's struggle with the

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