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High Noon and The Pulp Ethos – castaliahouse.com

High Noon and The Pulp Ethos

Monday , 21, August 2017 18 Comments

The pulp ethos is a real thing. Some people think I just made it up or something. Or they think I’m being evasive when I refuse to define “pulp” as a distinct genre in its own right.

Of course, not everyone wants to spend a solid year surveying a bunch of works that nobody is talking about and which are generally regarded as juvenile, poorly written, and dangerously retrograde. Authors tend to want some sort of checklist they can use to confirm that their work stacks up reasonably well against the pulp masters. Watching how some of this plays out, I can’t help but think that Plato knew exactly what he was talking about when he wrote the Allegory of the Cave!

One of the key flashpoints that comes out of these conversations is this one from Misha Burnett’s Five Pillars of Pulp Revival:

In Pulp stories there is not simply the risk that that the hero may fail to defeat the villain, there is also the greater risk that the hero may become the villain. A hero should have a code to follow, and lines that he or she is resolved not to cross. That line should be close enough that the temptation to cross is real—maybe not constantly, but from time to time. There is almost always a really good reason to break one’s moral code, particularly to protect a loved one in danger.

I have to say… this is not something you accomplish in a couple of scenes. This is not an element you fold into your story concept in order capture a veneer of pulpy greatness. Go back and watch the classic western High Noon and you’ll see, this moral dimension saturates everything.

The entire premise of the story is about the former sheriff deciding to stay and fight according to his principles when he could just as soon leave town with the woman he’d just married that day. The bulk of the scenes in the film focus on the rationalizations people in town, at the saloon, and at the church give for refusing to stand by him when he faces deadly peril for his decision.

And that’s not even the half of it. There is a greater conflict that emerges from two key characters’ differing moral codes. It’s self-evident to Gary Cooper’s character that he has to stay and face a pardoned outlaw that has sworn to kill him. But it’s equally self-evident to his wife– a convinced Quaker– that staying and fighting is inherently wrong. She forces him to choose between his principles and their marriage!

As all of this plays out, there is some pretty hard talk on the matter of this quandary, most of it from the character of Helen Ramirez:

I’m going to tell you something about you and your friend Kane. You’re a good-looking boy, you have big broad shoulders. But he is a man. It takes more than broad shoulders to make a man, Harvey, and you have a long way to go. You know something? I don’t think you’ll ever make it.

And it gets even better:

Amy Fowler Kane: That man downstairs, the clerk… he said things about you and Will. I’ve tried to understand why he wouldn’t go with me, and it’s got to be because of you.
Helen Ramírez: What do you want from me?
Amy Fowler Kane: Let him go. He still has a chance. Let him go.
Helen Ramírez: I can’t help you.
Amy Fowler Kane: Please.
Helen Ramírez: He isn’t staying for me. I haven’t spoken to him for a year, until today. I’m leaving on the same train you are.
Amy Fowler Kane: Then why is he staying?
Helen Ramírez: If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you.
Amy Fowler Kane: Thank you anyway. You’ve been very kind.
Helen Ramírez: What kind of woman are you? How can you leave him like this?

How does it play out? In the most thrilling way possible, of course. And it is exactly the same sort of thrill you get reading Edgar Rice Burroughs or Leigh Brackett stories.

Now the thing that strikes me most about this is just how quickly this sort of thing evaporated. Science fiction and fantasy at the time it came out was well on its way to falling into the grips of people that thought the sort of man and woman presented in stark relief here were not just “unrealistic”, but downright ludicrous. There is something here that was very rapidly driven out of the public sphere. The impact on the wider culture was both inevitable and unsurprising, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s comments in the late seventies atest:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

The bulk of us reading and writing about science fiction and fantasy right now were either very young or maybe not even born yet when he said that. Anyone that is right now dabbling in reviving something of the pulp ethos faces an absolutely tremendous cultural gap, something far outside most of peoples’ capacity to even imagine at this point. No one is simply going to make a run through a checklist and get this pitch perfect.

So take some time to go read some actual pulp stories for yourself. I guarantee it will blow your mind in the absolute best way possible. And it can change how you think about all kinds of stuff!

18 Comments
  • Chris L says:

    John Wayne saw High Noon as trying to rob the western of heroics. His reasoning was that the Cooper character should have had no trouble getting help (it’s the frontier, and frontiers aren’t for wusses). He felt so strong about the issue that he did Rio Bravo as a counter argument.

    • Jeffro says:

      That is a great argument to be having. And with a script by Leigh Brackett backing it up, it’s a knockout.

    • Vlad James says:

      That’s very interesting. I haven’t seen “Rio Bravo” yet, but neither interpretation is right or wrong. A lot of traditional Westerns are great. A lot of anti-Westerns, like “The Wild Bunch”, are great, too.

      Also, I love the interpretation of “High Noon” at the very beginning of “Once Upon a Time in the West”.

    • Terry Sanders says:

      As a morality play, HIGH NOON is spot on. As a Western, John Wayne had it right.

  • Anthony says:

    I’m going to bring up the neo-western “Justified” again, because I just talked about it and (hint, hint) I’ll be doing another article on it on Superversive Tuesday.

    In the season 2 finale, “Bloody Harlan” – a classic episode – Raylan learns Winona, his ex-wife, is pregnant with his child. He is planning on leaving Harlan county and taking a safer job as a shooting instructor so he could raise his child, when he learns that a 14 year old girl named Loretta has gone missing and stolen a gun.

    The following conversation with Winona is very reminiscent of “High Noon”. Some paraphrasing:

    Winona: Raylan, please, you don’t need to do this. You’re not working right now. It’s not your problem.

    Raylan: She’s a 14 year old girl!

    Winona (voice breaking): I know! It’s not your problem.

    Raylan: I have to go.

    Winona: If you go, don’t expect me to be waiting when I get back.

    “Justified” was so awesome.

  • Vlad James says:

    I absolutely adore High Noon.

    Not only is it a masterpiece of a Western, but it’s one of the finest commentaries on human nature, particularly heroism, in ALL of film. Yeah, one can definitely think of it as embodying the best of pulp stories.

  • Matthew says:

    I tried to watch this for the first time recently and was surprised to find Gary Cooper’s character despicable. He’s a bully, aloof from the townsfolk, doesn’t go to church except when he needs a posse, tries to recruit in a bar full of the friends of the “bad guys”. Add that to the judge who already had to flee a job in a previous town, and this is clearly the story of rootless cosmopolitan elites who suppress populists.

  • Mark McSherry says:

    OUTLAND, (1981) with Sean Connery playing the marshal on a mining colony on Io, is a HIGH NOON in space. Rumor says that HIGH NOON’s director, Fred Zinneman called it a rip-off.

    OUTLAND’s director was Peter Hyams, who would go on to direct 2010 in 1984.

    I saw OUTLAND in a theater but not since. HIGH NOON I’ll watch every few years.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/

  • Donald says:

    Jeffro, what’s the source of the Solzhenitsyn quote?

    Thanks!

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