It’s a lot easier to spot the flubs in a movie than it is to find them in a book. Often when you question something in a text you’ve gone so far beyond it that you couldn’t necessarily find it without a lot of trouble in backtracking. One page in a book, after all, looks pretty much like every other.
We’re watching High Plains Drifter (again!) with Clint Eastwood. We’re also watching the NASCAR Daytona 500 race, switching back and forth at hubby’s whim. I love these old westerns, and especially the Eastwood ones (as Elaine of Seinfield would say, Eastwood’s definitely spongeworthy) but one thing has always bothered me about this movie. There’s an obvious flaw in planning.
Eastwood comes into a town terrorized by some bad guys and is talked into helping them. He actually makes fools of them and pushes them to their limits by his demands. His reason is that he, as sheriff, was bullwhipped in the street by the bad guys a while ago, and these same people just stood and watched. The problem?
I don’t care how many years went by between episodes, and you don’t have to be Clint Eastwood; why doesn’t anyone in town recognize their former sheriff?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Even though it was never said, I thought in that movie he was supposed to be sort of a ghost. It always had a vaguely supernatural feel to it.
For the same reason a reporter cannot be recognized as a superhero if he wears glasses?
I guess we were a more naive group back then, ladies. Suspension of belief, I think it’s called, is what is necessary to get over the tendency to scrutinize too closely. Funny, I can do it in literature and love magical realism such as Paz’s or Marquez’s work. The older I get, the less docile and trusting I am.
Suspension of disbelief. Required for various books, films and hope for the human condition.
I always liked to think that the townspeople buried the memory so deep in their collective conscious–partly from guilt, partly from fear if he ever returned–that they refused to accept Clint’s character’s return. Sort of along the lines of “Believe a lie long enough, it will become truth.”