“The world is what you make of it, my friend. If it doesn’t fit, make alterations.” — Stella (Linda Hunt)
This summer, while most people paid attention to the 30th anniversaries of Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club, the pearl milestone for Lawrence Kasdan’s postmodern Western, Silverado, was passed over. The second collaboration of Kevin Kline and Kasdan (after The Big Chill), Western genre films were all but extinct after the skewering Blazing Saddles gave them in 1974.
The year 1985 brought not one, not two, but three Westerns into theaters. The first, Rustler’s Rhapsody, died a quick death in May. The second, Pale Rider, released two weeks prior to Silverado on June 28, was Clint Eastwood’s final Western prior to Unforgiven seven years later and continued the anti-hero theme Eastwood would explore throughout the latter part of his career. On July 11, a Western-weary public ignored Silverado in favor of a time-traveling DeLorean. It, like This Is Spinal Tap the previous year, would discover its audience on video.
Western films are known for their monomythological aspects: the strangers ride into a corrupt town to save the innocents from an external evil. The strangers must then bring the town back to its Edenic roots by adopting the townspeople as extended family. In fact, all Kasdan’s films support the ideal of the extended family.
However, Western films provide very little in terms of actual family and emphasize the need for an extended dysfunctional family. This is the type of Western seen many times over the years on both television and in the cinema. A major aspect of this type of Western is the idea that moving west will cause a rebirth of spirit and action. Kasdan’s film does not vary from this typical formula. It is the strength of that paradigm which allows Silverado to function as social commentary, making a worthy addition to the Western genre.
https://youtu.be/jnCiCsrCuoo
The audience first meets Paden (Kline) all alone, dressed only in long johns and socks, in a sea of sand, dying of thirst. Biblically, this shows Paden at both a new beginning and old ending, as God’s chosen Old Testament punishment to civilization was using the desert to smite a city, cover it over, and begin again. Paden, in this sense, was reborn from his previous life when Emmett (Scott Glenn) finds him and gives him water. Water is the bringer of life. Therefore, Paden must make the best of his second life, as his first was worthless. Paden was an outlaw who rode with Cobb (Brian Dennehy) and Tyree (Jeff Fahey), gunmen who killed without a second thought. His term of imprisonment gave him time for reflection and he used it to his advantage, as his rebirth requires him to repair his damaged soul.
Kline plays Paden as emotionless, who will kill for small reasons. Kline’s detachment fits the character, as Paden knows that involving himself in other people’s lives is the reason he ended up in the desert dying of thirst. However, he feels indebted to Emmett (both in saving his life and giving him money) and accompanies him to town.
The only time Paden shows emotion is when it comes to his horse. “The only thing I ever lost that I really loved except maybe my hat [was my horse],” Paden says. So when he sees another man riding his horse, he runs into a gun shop, buys an ancient gun, and stands in the middle of the road, demanding his horse back. Kline’s Paden doesn’t flinch, doesn’t acknowledge that a man firing bullets on a stampeding horse is coming toward him. He calmly raises the gun, fires, and the man drops. He then takes the horse and they both kiss on the mouth. Paden’s emotions, for once, are out in the open. Kline, in this sequence, chose to portray Paden as cold-blooded killer; many outlaws in the real West killed for much less. Try as he might, Paden cannot shake his own instincts.
Paden, like all men, is easily corruptible. His time with Cobb and Tyree was spent as an outlaw. Time changed Paden, giving him a new lease on life and a desire to spend the rest of his life peacefully. So when Cobb comes up to him with a job offer after a chance meeting in town, Paden immediately declines, but isn’t too proud to be put back in Cobb’s pocket by taking a $13 loan to buy clothing. Paden walks into a saloon, freshly clothed, and just having killed a man, sees another man with his hat and kills him. In the space of a day, Paden has been left for dead, killed two men, recovered his two prize possessions, and put in jail with Jake (Kevin Costner), Emmett’s brother.
Kline plays Paden as though he has the power over everybody due to his superior firearm skills. In his world, the morally righteous are the ones who have gunslinger skills. Paden keeps trying to find a way of being a legitimate man; he feels the days of the outlaw are over, so he resolves to escape jail with Jake and follow them to Silverado, so that he can finally make a break with the past. In Silverado, however, the old corrupting influences resume, as Cobb is not only the sheriff of the town, but also the owner of the Midnight Star saloon. Cobb offers Paden a job, and even though Paden knows Cobb is not an honest man, he takes it anyway. But his belief that he can be legitimate in a world of corruption is naïve.
Paden’s motives are ambiguous, covering his true feelings at all times under a veneer of stoniness. Neither favor nor disfavor is shown in his demeanor. Kasdan wrote Paden as the hero (or the antihero, as is common in the Western), but Kline portrays Paden as both hero and villain. The portrayal of lawman as villain or corrupt is a common theme in this film, which is told from Paden’s point of view. In the beginning, just after his rebirth, he sees all lawmen as evil, because he is still recovering from the time he spent in jail and the dissolution of his outlaw ways. By the end, he sees the lawman as just and it takes a morally bankrupt man such as Paden to fight against the influentially corrupt Cobb.
Paden strikes up a friendship with Stella, the manager of the saloon (Linda Hunt). Paden and Stella are equals, both contemptuous of Cobb frightened of him. When Cobb introduces the two, he knows that they’re similar. Paden tells her, “The only place I’m happy [is a good saloon].” Stella responds, “Me too. What’s wrong with us?”
Ultimately, Kasdan takes the conflict down to two men: Cobb and Paden. Cobb has always thought that Paden was too soft-hearted. When he first sees Paden, he asks, “Where’s the dog?” Tyree asks the same question. Later, at his saloon, Cobb relates the story of how Paden found the dog, rode with it, and when it was tangled up in Tyree’s horse, Tyree shot it. Paden, even though the dog hated him, elected to stay behind as it was dying, while a posse was coming after them. Paden was caught and put in jail for a dog that despised him. Now Cobb sees Paden as that dog, coming to trip him up, and Cobb has to put him down.
Cobb knows that Paden is morally, physically, and spiritually superior to him in every way, so he waits for Paden instead of hunting him down. Kline plays Paden’s stoic attitude throughout this scene, as Paden matter-of-factly walks down the main street of Silverado and gets into the traditional “shoot-out stance.” He easily guns Cobb down, vanquishing the corruption. Or has he? By killing Cobb to bring peace to Silverado, he is still morally wrong. Paden takes over the duties of sheriff from Cobb, but because Kline has shown Paden’s moral ambiguity throughout the entire film, the audience is left to wonder whether or not Paden is a good arbiter of moral justice. Both Kasdan and Kline signify that the only way to fight the corruption in the system is to become corrupt oneself.
There are so many stories within the film that I could spend 1500 words on, whether it is Cobb and Stella, or Paden and Emmett, or Jake and Paden. Kasdan layered the film with so many overlapping relationships that it becomes a tapestry of human desire, lining the redemptive stories have become part of the American fabric.
John P. Inloes (@suburbandwarf) really loves westerns, but the problem with them is that they’re so formulaic that it frustrates him. He thinks the ideas presented by the western are universal, yet specifically informed by the American experience. That’s why he loves seeing John Cleese in Silverado. It’s a jarring reminder that America was, first, a British offshoot, and that in the period of the movie, was only a few generations old.
