Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Outlaw Josey Wales
1976 · Clint Eastwood · The Outlaw Josey Wales on Sightlines
A man spits tobacco juice on a dog. The dog stays. It follows him out of Missouri and most of the way to Texas, and somewhere on that road he starts feeding it. Everything that makes The Outlaw Josey Wales strange for a revenge Western is already in that exchange: Wales aims his contempt at whatever comes close, and whatever comes close declines to take the hint.
Eastwood's fourth film as a director opens with the most reliable engine the Western owns. Pro-Union Redlegs burn a Missouri farm and kill a family. The farmer digs a grave, picks up a pistol, teaches himself to use it, and rides. Gilles Deleuze had a name for this shape, and the Western was his textbook case for it: the large form of the action-image. A situation presses on a man from every side, the man acts, the act changes the situation. Deleuze called the pressing situation the encompasser, and noticed that in a Western it breathes — the film alternates a vast open milieu with the thin taut line of the man crossing it. Bruce Surtees photographs exactly that respiration. Anamorphic country, riders reduced to marks on it, then a cut to a face in a shadowed room lit hard from one side. Wide, tight, wide. The Western's lungs.
Then the engine runs out of anything to do.
That is the film's real invention, and it is easy to miss because nothing about it announces itself. Wales never loses his competence; he is the most efficient killer in the picture. What he loses is the link between killing and resolution. He guns down Redlegs and the war does not end. He crosses a river and the pursuit reassembles on the far bank. Deleuze's term for this is the crisis of the action-image: a character can still act, but the act stops closing anything. This is why he is worth bringing to a Clint Eastwood picture. He is the critic who took seriously that the Western is a machine with a specific shape, and he described this exact failure mode before anyone thought to apply it here. In The Naked Spur, which Josey Wales descends from directly, the punishing wilderness pursuit is where a man's damage gets worked out of him. Here the pursuit stops leading anywhere and becomes simply the condition of staying alive.
What grows in the vacancy is the part everyone remembers. When the action-image weakens, Deleuze observed, films stop being built around a target and start being built around a trip: loosely linked people, slackened causality, episodes that accumulate instead of advancing. He called the situation dispersive, and the shape the voyage or ballad form. Josey Wales is a picaresque. An old Cherokee attaches himself. A Navajo woman. A Kansas grandmother and her granddaughter, from the other side of that border war. The dog. None of them is plot. Each is an arrival. The southward line stitches together places with no relation to each other, a trading post, a ferry crossing, a rundown ranch, into what Deleuze called a line of the universe: a zig-zag holding disconnected spaces together by nothing except the body moving through them. Ferris Webster's cutting refuses to hurry any of it, and the set-pieces stay legible rather than fragmented, so you always know where everyone is. The geography is clear. It is the destination that has gone soft.
Meanwhile the thing hunting him has no face you can shoot. Terrill leads the Redlegs, but behind Terrill is an amnesty that was a trap, and behind that a government with a schedule for civilizing the frontier. Deleuze called this the condemnation of the plot, a diffuse arrangement standing behind the visible one that no gun can reach. Fletcher, the Union man, spends the film discovering he is inside it.
Watch the faces while this happens. Deleuze splits the close-up in two. One kind of face is a contour, an immobile surface that reflects and holds a single quality, giving you nothing to read. The other is made of features, small movements gathering into an intensity. Eastwood's Wales is the first: hooded, squinting, speaking at a near-whisper. Chief Dan George's Lone Watie is the second, and Eastwood cast him almost as a continuation of the deadpan elder he had invented for Little Big Man, borrowing the same ironic cadence. His monologues on having once been civilized, on no longer being able to sneak up on things, do the film's thinking out loud precisely because Wales's face refuses to.
And the spitting. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, uses gest for a posture that exposes a relation rather than expressing a feeling. Wales spits on a dog, on a scorpion, on a man he has just killed. It is not temperament. It is a refusal of ceremony, the same gesture given to vermin and to the dead, and it tells you what the war has made of his sense of occasion.
The climax is not a shootout. It is an agreement about words. Wales and Fletcher arrive at a tacit understanding that the war is over and that the man standing there is somebody else; dyin' ain't much of a livin'. Deleuze's late work calls this fabulation, people caught in the act of making a story that lets them exist. The Texas ranch is his other late idea made literal. "The people are missing," he wrote of political cinema: the nation a film would speak for does not exist, so the film has to invent one. Look at who ends up defending that house. A Confederate irregular, a Cherokee, a Navajo woman, two Kansans. No nation holds them. They build one.
One sour footnote, stated plainly because it is well documented: the novel came from "Forrest Carter," later revealed as Asa Earl Carter, an Alabama segregationist speechwriter. It postdates the production and sits apart from it. It is still hard to unsee — a forged author under an invented Cherokee name, writing the book in which a man survives by becoming a story other people agree to tell.
What did it do to the form? It showed that a Western could lose its motor and keep running, converting pursuit into household without turning into a parody or a funeral. Ford's The Searchers gave Eastwood the loner framed in a doorway, excluded from the warmth inside; Shane gave him the gunfighter who wants to put the guns down; The Wild Bunch gave him the elegiac weariness and, concretely, Jerry Fielding, whose mournful folk-inflected brass Eastwood imported wholesale. Josey Wales takes all of it and does the one thing none of those films would do: it lets the man through the door. It is also where Eastwood became a filmmaker rather than a star who acted in films, taking over from Philip Kaufman mid-shoot in an episode so contentious the Directors Guild wrote a rule about it. Sixteen years later he made Unforgiven, and everything difficult in it — the killer who cannot stop being one, the elegy played straight — was first tried out here.
Next time, don't watch the gunfights. Count the arrivals, and notice how early the film stops caring whether he gets his revenge. Then ask what it costs a Western to let its hero stop.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The opening engine: Redlegs burn the Missouri farm and murder the family, the encompassing situation presses, and the farmer learns to shoot and rides out to change it — the classic situation-action-new-situation shape Deleuze takes the Western as his model for.
- respiration-space — Surtees's anamorphic 2.35:1 vistas placing small figures against enormous terrain, alternating with low-key, shadowed close work on Eastwood's squint — the milieu breathing against the taut line of the pursuit.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Wales remains lethally competent, but the revenge engine stops resolving anything: the film disperses its energy into community-building instead of driving to a single cathartic confrontation, and the war embodied by Terrill and Fletcher simply will not end.
- dispersive-situation — The ragtag ensemble that drifts into Wales's orbit — an old Cherokee, a Navajo woman, a Kansas grandmother and granddaughter, a wandering dog — each an arrival rather than a plot function.
- voyage-balade-form — The picaresque, journey-structured mode: a linear southward flight organized as episodic encounters, with Webster's additive, unhurried cutting supporting the accumulation rather than accelerating toward a goal.
- vector / line of the universe — The zig-zag south linking spaces with no relation to one another — trading post, river-ferry sequence, rundown ranch, the final Texas homestead — held together only by the body crossing them.
- condemnation-of-the-plot — Behind Terrill's Redlegs stands the amnesty that was a trap and the state's scheduled 'civilizing' of the frontier; Fletcher, the Union man, discovers he is inside an arrangement no gun can reach.
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Eastwood's hooded, near-immobile contour face and clipped near-whispered delivery set against Chief Dan George's mobile, feature-driven Lone Watie, whose deadpan monologues on being 'civilized' and on sneaking up on things carry the film's comic and moral counterweight.
- the-gest — The recurring tobacco-spitting — on a dog, on a scorpion, on the dead — behavioral staging that exposes a relation to killing and ceremony rather than expressing an inner feeling.
- fabulation / legending — The late exchange in which 'dyin' ain't much of a livin'' and the tacit agreement to call the war over resolve the drama: peace arrives as a version of events two men consent to tell, not as a shootout.
- people-are-missing — The surrogate community assembled and defended at the Texas ranch — a Confederate irregular, a Cherokee, a Navajo woman, Kansans from the opposing side of the border war — a people no nation holds, staged as the physical construction of a home.