Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is, from a multitude of perspectives, a book-end. If Owen Wister is said to have spawned the Western genre (in fact a slightly spurious claim, given the multifarious incarnations of the myth in popular culture prior to The Virginian), Cimino is widely credited as its executioner. The financial debacle at United Artists, caused by the picture’s wildly over-budget shooting, is well documented, [1] and broadly dissuaded major studios from speculating in the genre in the decade to come. This infamous disaster, however, should not be permitted to obscure the film’s integral, and equally terminal, place in the genre’s ideological continuum. Though released in 1980, the film arose from a concept spawned in the early 1970s, and was to be the culmination of the countercultural trends which characterised the Hollywood Western after 1969.

If this was indeed a farewell to the prestige studio Western, it is appropriate that the setting for The Virginian – the oft-mythologised Johnson County War of 1892 – should return as the site of the genre’s obligatory violent conflict. Heaven’s Gate takes the subversion of Wister’s 1902 novel – previously carried out by George Stevens’s Shane (1952) – to a radical extreme. These steadily more hostile depictions of the violent campaign waged by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) against smallholders and farmers reflects the increasing ambivalence to corporate power within the Western genre. Where Wister diagnoses fin de siècle social ills by championing the right of the WSGA to lynch ‘rustlers’, Shane affirms the farmer’s right to land. Cimino, however, posits the thesis that the cattle barons and the institutions of monied capital which support them are an elite, and genocidal, cabal.

Patrick McGee highlights the extent to which the Hollywood Western had, throughout its history, ‘repeatedly formulated the question of who has the right to wealth, the right to the power that wealth seems to bestow, and the right to freedom in the form that Marx specified as the definition of wealth’. [2] If, as this argument holds, Westerns had always been ‘about’ class struggle, yet traditionally obfuscated that imperative, then Heaven’s Gate is a singular act of unmasking. Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ of 1893 is commonly applied to the Western genre for its elegiac affirmation of American exceptionalism; the Western ‘safety valve’ offering immigrants and workers the chance to forge their own destinies, thus averting the class conflicts which had bedevilled European social relations. Cimino’s film, however, demands that attention is turned towards Turner’s lesser-dramatised disquiet at the officially-declared closing of the Frontier in 1890: what Barry Langford describes as the ‘undertow of both nostalgia and anxiety for the future in Turner’s survey of an ostensibly triumphant present’. [3] McGee goes on to identify [4] in Cimino’s film, along with Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976), an attempt to create what Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), termed a ‘Messianic cessation of happening’. The ‘brief epoch’ of the cowboy identified by Wister here takes on an altogether more radical slant, since the joint tasks of unveiling the Western’s dominant ideologies and subverting its established signifiers lie at the heart of Heaven’s Gate’s political agenda.

Figure 1 / Figure 2

This notion is ably symbolised by Cimino’s shot composition, as Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) rides towards Sweetwater shortly after his arrival at Casper railway station. A bereft immigrant woman struggles to pull the family’s wagon along the road, her two children trying to help by pushing from behind (Figure 1). Atop the wagon lies not only the family’s possessions, as they head for their new life as sharecroppers on the Wyoming plains, but the body of her husband, who has been murdered by thugs employed by the WSGA. Spliced between two side-on shots of this pitiful, static scene is an identical framing of Averill’s horse and carriage, speeding comfortably away from them after he has promised to get help (Figure 2). Most strikingly, by associating the widow’s position, as the draught of her wagon, with that of the horse at the front of Jim’s carriage, this juxtaposition emphasises her status in society as a beast of burden, offering an apt symbol for the manner in which the immigrants are butchered like animals through the course of the film. Additionally, each vehicle is ‘ridden’ by a male representative of his social class: one a wealthy Easterner, the other the brutally beaten dead body of an immigrant. Jim’s carriage, the commonplace vehicle of the Eastern ‘dude’ in the genre, signifies propriety and wealth, the framing implicating Eastern capital – of which Harvard-educated Averill is inescapably a representative – in the abject misery of the working classes.

These shots therefore unmask the Western genre’s obfuscation of class tensions, the inertia of the struggling workers demanding that history pauses to take cognizance of their plight. Jim’s backward gaze at the family as he rides away suggests his simultaneous feelings of guilt and of impotence to make good his promise of help, since in Heaven’s Gate all are embroiled in a rigid class system. ‘Whole damn country’ll be nothing but widows and orphans soon’, he mutters. Just like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, indeed, his eyes are turned towards the past, perceiving in horror the ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’, yet powerless to halt the headlong procession into the storm ‘we call progress’. [5]

Jim Averill’s carriage rushing away from the wreckage of the class-struggle way out West is therefore replete with symbolism, since Heaven’s Gate is a self-conscious intervention in the pre-existing mythic discourse of the Johnson County War. Cimino’s counter-historical occupation of Wister’s hallowed epoch directly implicates the upper-classes of the East – of whom Wister was one – in both the oppression of the working classes and the cloaking of this brutal history.

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[1] See Bach, Steven, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, (New York: William Morro, 1985).
[2] McGee, Patrick, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p.xiv.
[3] Langford, Barry, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp.65-6.
[4] McGee: From Shane to Kill Bill, p.202.
[5] Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, (London: Pimlico, 1999), p.249.