The use of irony in satire has become a relevant and overused tool throughout the modern age. The use of earnestness towards utterly frightening things has been used extensively to make fun of many things from the army to the acting police force that we have. All of this is fun, well executed and funny, but what happens when it means more? What happens when a director and writer make a film that takes the culture that people live in and use their own tailor-made assumptions to create a film that is both a celebration and a scathing criticism of said culture? In 1969, on the verge of the “greatest decade of film,” William Goldman and George Roy Hill did just that. The result was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Butch Cassidy follows the titular characters as they rob banks and trains and eventually run from what is referred to as the “Super Posse,” a group of men tracking them down to kill them. They eventually flee to Bolivia, where they are eventually killed by the Bolivian army and police force. The trick to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is that the two titular characters are the protagonists of the piece, but they aren’t the good guys. Hollywood was just coming out of an era of both “Romantic Westerns,” like Shane and The Searchers. These were Westerns that idealized the “lone gunmen” and the nobility of the West. The recent past had also provided people with the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci which often framed the criminals at their center as good men put upon by the West itself. Blondie, of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example, is a murderer and a thief, but he’s ultimately framed as the “The Good” that the title suggests. There’s no irony there, either. One of the reasons why The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, is so excellent is that Blondie, an ultimately noble man comes out on top. He’s a hero and he’s a badass of incredible proportions and when that beautiful final shootout happens, good ultimately succeeds. Butch Cassidy lacks that angle. Butch and Sundance (played by undeniable heroes Paul Newman and Robert Redford) may be bantering and funny outlaws that the audience is supposed to enjoy, but their funny dialogue feels a bit forced. You don’t have to go too far to realize that this is intentional, not only mirroring the forced earnestness of the Romantic Westerns but also forcing us to like these characters. But we know we shouldn’t. I often hear that Butch Cassidy demythologized by using the more realistic trappings than the Romantic Westerns or the Spaghetti Westerns, but it does so by showing us two absolutely despicable murderers and forcing us to like them, commenting on the Western in the process. This wouldn’t work without the almost forced dialogue because, without it, we wouldn’t be clued into the reality that this isn’t reality, but it is, in fact, a myth. The film opens with the line, “Most of What Follows Is True,” which would seem to contradict this, but it instead seems to force the audience to think about the way that the film is actually fabricated. What we see isn’t real, but the fact that we the audience want to see it as the only reality is almost the point. The film takes a moment to show us the characters in pictures as they travel to Guatemala. It’s the type of sequence that allows us to see the film aggressively telling us to believe what we are seeing yet is very regressively telling the audience to not believe all of this. The final shot of the film has the men both running out to face their deaths, but they are ignorant to the fact that they will die. They are ridiculous and they have just murdered many honest men. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a self-aware fantasy, where the emotionality of its fantasy is just as compelling as what that fantasy is making the audience think. The Old West was supposed to be a place where the nobility prevailed and Butch Cassidy hopes to trick you into thinking that, but doesn’t succeed. It never wants to really succeed, and by applying irony to the West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved that we could never go back to the Romantic West. Bibliography 1.Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. Perf. Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 1969. DVD.
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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