The Woman With No Name in Monte Hellmans The Shooting :: Film Movie Shooting Hellman Essays

The Woman With No Name in Monte Hellman's The Shooting Works Cited Missing Generally forgotten by critics, and classified as alternately a cult classic and a B-movie (in reference to both its budget and its reception), Monte Hellman's The Shooting is a film worth revisiting. At a remote camp in the middle of the desert, a Woman With No Name arrives to hire two men to lead her to the town of Kingsley, days after one of the camp members was shot dead and another ran away. On their descent into the scorching desert, it becomes apparent that the Woman has misled her employees as a hired gun joins their party and they continue their journey, it would seem, to execute somebody. The Woman from time to time physically leads the pack, and is always deliberately in control of their actions. She is granted much agency in terms of both plot, and cinematic structure, frequently, for instance, holding a position in the frame physically over the men in order to deliver a command. She enacts the ability to do, without being done to, resorting to a performance of femininity /desirability at times to do her bidding. A textual analysis of the scene in which the childlike Coley is ordered by the Woman With No Name to stay behind in the blistering sun reveals a unique style with which Hellman plays with the conventions of the Western and the utilization of the gaze to question gender roles and authority. Open the Sequence Storyboard in a new browser window. The scene in question opens with an image (shot 1 in the storyboard) atypical in a film coded as a Western: two men riding together atop the same horse, as one critic points out, "jogging listlessly in a limbo without perspectives" (Strick, 50). At the heart of the scene is the metaphor central to this opening shot; that of male instability, masculinity in crisis. Coley has given his horse to the Woman With No Name and rides on the back of Gashsade's steed out of necessity. He has given up his means of transport, his agency. Without his horse, Coley lacks mobility in the narrative and his position as a male is challenged. The male body is celebrated in the Western with "the phallic image of a man on horseback, sitting high above the ground, upright and superior, gazing down at a world whose gaze he in turn solicits" (Mitchell, 167).