On the Up and Up or Down and Down?

By Audrey Stallsmith

If some of you are beginning to suspect that I watch too many westerns, you probably are right. Many are, of course, on the predictable side. But, like mystery novels, they can be compared to medieval morality plays similar to Pilgrim’s Progress, in which allegorical characters labelled with their natures always received their proper comeuppance. 

Though the people in westerns actually have real names, we usually can pick out “good guy,” “faithful sidekick,” “villain,” “good girl,” “bad girl,” etc. But I’ve found that the movies which really make you think also make you genuinely nervous. You can’t be sure who is going to live and who is going to die or even who the good guy and good girl are because—as with real life— that might change between the beginning and the end. 

We watched one of those recently, called Warlock, possibly based on the friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Halliday. In it the gunman was called Clay Blaisedell and his gambler friend, whose handicap was a club foot rather than Halliday’s tuberculosis, named Tom Morgan. As is common in westerns, they’d been hired to clean up a town terrorized by a bunch of renegade cowboys.

Since Warlock wasn’t incorporated yet, though, their badges were as bogus as their supposed authority. Not to mention that Morgan always established a temporary saloon and gambling joint in whatever town they were taming, so it is debatable whether the newcomers really contributed to the moral character of the place. And the usually distant sheriff didn’t appreciate their being hired behind his back by townspeople too scared to defend themselves. 

However, this plot takes a twist from the typical with one of the renegade cowboys called Johnny Gannon. As he would tell the bad girl, his gang hadn’t been so bad to begin with, when their major vice was rustling. But, somehow, as they’d become more feared, they’d become more violent, as if they had to live up to—or actually down to—their reputation. After a recent incident in which they’d stolen cattle from Mexico and massacred the Mexican cowboys who’d pursued them, Gannon wanted out. 

He'd found that, as G. K. Chesterton notes in one of those mysteries I mentioned earlier, “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.” 

Blaisedell might have taken issue with that since he did adhere to a certain code of his own as regards what was and wasn’t allowable in the gunfighter trade. But, unbeknownst to him, Morgan had a bad habit of eliminating anyone he thought might pose a real danger to them, often with a shot in the back. Since he derived what little sense of security and self-esteem he had from his stronger friend’s reputation, he couldn’t risk anything that would threaten it.

When switching sides, Gannon didn’t want to help Blaisedell and Morgan, since he thought their brand of violence just begat more violence. He went all the way to the other side instead and became a deputy, appointed out of spite by the offended sheriff. 

Gannon appeared desperate all throughout the movie, partly because he wanted to convince his brother to leave the gang too. But I suspect, he hoped to save his soul as well as his sibling. And, having no concept of a saving God, he saw his new dedication to the letter of the law as the only way for him to claw his way back up from the pit into which he’d slid. 

However, because “repent” means to “turn away from” or “to return to,” as in turning from one’s sins in an attempt to recapture one’s earlier innocence, Gannon really was repenting whether he knew it or not. Obviously scared to death by his responsibilities, which forced him to confront both his former outlaw friends and the hired gunmen, he didn’t expect to survive for long. But he moved through the town with a single-minded intensity of purpose that seemed to make everybody else uneasy—even his former friends who beat him up pretty thoroughly at one point without shaking his resolve. 

The romantic relationships in this film appeared backward too, since the good girl, Jessie Marlow, fell for Blaisedell because she was tired of being good, while the bad girl, Lily Dollar, opted for the newly reformed Gannon. He seemed to be pulling her up with him because she lost her desire for vengeance against Blaisedell and Morgan—who had killed her earlier lover—and wanted only to protect her present one. 

Unfortunately for Jessie, although Blaisedell intended to quit his gunslinger lifestyle and marry her, he gave up on that idea. Purportedly because he didn’t know how to do any other job except killing people. However, I suspect the real reason was that he made more money killing people than he would in any other job. And he didn’t have Johnny’s resolve to change no matter how much that change might cost him. 

Blaisedell’s code let him down because it was “his own.” Standing on something you’ve made up yourself, after all, resembles standing on sand because it can shift with your own preferences—and excuses. And, although the gunman had believed that his friend followed the same code he did, Morgan’s proved to be even “shiftier,” since Blaisedell’s threatened defection into domesticity sent the gambler into a violent tizzy. 

As to who ended up killing whom, I don’t want to spoil the entire movie for you! However, I will say that the townspeople did come through for Gannon in the end, perhaps simply because he was as scared as they were but took action anyway. Fortunately, he had something outside of himself—the law—to set his feet on. We’ll have to hope that he progressed from man’s law to God’s. 

One of the unanswered questions in this film is what happened to Jessie after Blaisedell abandoned her. She seems to have grown tired of fighting the cowardice exhibited by the other townspeople enough to be attracted by the gunman’s seeming fearlessness, even though there was no real morality underlying it. But, more importantly, she seems to have grown tired of being good when she could see no reward in it. 

If the fact that she was fixing breakfast for Blaisedell at one point meant that she had spent the night with him, she may have lost her virtue as in “chastity.” But she’d already lost her virtue, as in “conformity to a standard of right” before that. Or perhaps her virtue never had been aimed at pleasing God to begin with, but only at pleasing others. 

At any rate, I’m guessing Jessie proves that—on our way to the Celestial City—none of us are safe until we get there, no matter how long we’ve “kept the faith.” We can’t stay on one level of good any more than Gannon could on one level of evil. If we don’t retain our desperate single-minded purpose as he did and keep climbing, we may become bitter and/or apathetic instead and begin to slide. 

When tempted to romanticize the bad or ambiguous boys as Jessie did, we should remember that they actually are predictably undependable. The world weary Lily discovered that it’s the good guys who really can surprise you, even the newly good ones! 

As Chesterton writes in The Defendant, “civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. . .we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and. . .the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. 

“When the detective [or deputy!]. . .stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of. . . justice who is the original poetic figure; while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. 

"The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.”