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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2273765" data-attributes="member: 4937">Dannyalcatraz: I don't know what to tell you.  You're understanding of what I've said is becoming increasingly muddled, and while that's probably my fault I don't know how I'd go about getting things straight again.   If you can't see the supernatural themes in High Noon and High Plains Drifter, I'm at a loss as to what to do.  Particularly in High Plains Drifter, in the final scene in Hell in which the Dwarf asks the man with no name, "Sheriff, I don't know your name.", and the sheriff, standing before what is apparantly his own grave says, "Yes you do." most people understood this to be leaving open or even strongly suggesting the possibility that the Sheriff was the ghost of the previously murdered man.   If you say you can't see any supernatural themes in the movie, well I'm at a loss of how to show it to you seeing as you've already seen it with your own eyes and you still don't believe it.   All I can say in my defense is that I'm far from being the only person who sees these things.   Try googling "High Plains Drifter" and any one of the following words, "ghost", "fantasy", "surreal", "horror".   You should get thousands of links.  Things like the number of bullets fired by the gun and the fact that the man had no name are rather irrelevant.   That the character is massively larger than life is closer to the point, but certainly not the whole of it.But this has all become a red herring because I never said that the Western was a genus of fantasy.  I only said that the Western had a lot of highly romanticized content, and that the line between a romance and a fantasy was not clean as far as I'm concerned - to the extent that I felt I did not have a good definition for where one ended and the next began.   In fact, as long as we are on the subject, the line between a SF and a fantasy is not perfectly clean and bright to me either - which is not to say that I don't think it can be, merely that it isn't always.   There are examples of stories which we might call 'Science Fantasy' in which the author is interested in themes of both 'The Other' and 'Good and Evil' to a greater or lesser extent and so cross the genera.  But I still don't define either Science Fiction or Fantasy by what I consider its most superficial and easily discarded elements - the particular visuals evoked by the setting.  I know what foreshadowing is.  Let's please stop pretending that its so remarkable to claim that High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider have elements of the supernatural, because frankly given how common this claim is, it's rather tiresome to have to defend it at such length.   By analogy, just because you didn't see the Arthurian imagery at the heart of Tortilla Flats doesn't mean it isn't in there, and you claim of ignorance about it would not increase confidence in your ability to discuss the book at depth.   Therefore, since the character of the Western is not at all central to anything I'm talking about it, why don't we move on.You mean the fact that I pointed out that its basically a swords and sorcery story only the magic swords are called 'light sabers' and the sorcerers are called 'Jedi'?  The farm boy still goes off on a quest to save the Princess, and still discovers that he's actually not really a farm boy but was born a Prince, and even if the dragon is called a Death Star he still slays it with a single blow using his sorcerous skills that he learned from the old wizard.   You mean that train of thought?  Why should I be defending my train of thought?  You haven't said a damn thing to show me that that isn't a fantasy.  Changing his loyal steed into a Starfighter and his squire into a robot in order to make the story more powerful and evocative to the audience is no different at all to me than painting King Arthor and Gwain in recently invented state of the art plate mail, even though the stories are set centuries into the past.For crying out loud, how hard is it to see these things?  Did you ever see the 'Making of Myth' exhibition when it was at the Smithsonian?  I am more than happy to argue with you over the meaning of the facts, but I'm getting a little tired of arguing with you over the existance of the facts.</blockquote>

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