Thus, these three family groups embody the Western’s “essential conflict between civilization and savagery” (Schatz 48), with the Saint family on the savage side and the two families of Frank Castle on the civilized side. The urban setting of Tampa is the wilderness, the “contested space where forces of social order and anarchy” (Schatz 83) collide, and it contrasts with the natural world specifically associated with Frank Castle and his family structures. In the first scene with his son, he talks to him in the lush, green back yard of the family home. Later, there is the seaside family reunion. Finally, when he first drives up to the ugly tenement building where he will be living, the master shot reveals it to be located in a bleak, underdeveloped neighborhood next to a sad and scraggly empty lot. However, in the next shot, Joan is shown digging in the dirt, planting flowers, surrounded by a verdant patch of green next to the brick edifice of their home, as she turns to watch his car pull in. The city, as wilderness, is emphasized by long shots of the skyline dominated by towering vertical structures that bring to mind John Ford’s favorite shooting location in Arizona’s Monument Valley, “where awesome stone formations reach up to the gods but the desolate soil around them” (Schatz 47) is not arable enough to support the community that lives there. This isolated building is like the hardscrabble little settlement that tries to coax a living from the edge of the wilderness.
These oppositions are further demonstrated through the concept of high culture versus low culture. The strains of a Puccini opera accompany the most elaborate fight scene in The Punisher when Frank is nearly pummeled to death by a 6’II”,310—pound character known as “the Russian,” a villain hired by Saint to kill him in a scene first enacted in Garth Ennis’s “Glutton for Punishment” chapter of Welcome Back, Frank. Good guys in both Tombstone (1993) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance recite the same ideas in the “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, with all these scenes serving to associate the forces for good with high culture. In a contrasting example, Howard Saint calls in a professional hitman, Harry Heck, from Memphis (played by country singer and actor Mark Collie) who shows up at Joan’s diner with an ominous guitar case in hand. He opens it, looking directly at Castle, who is seated nearby and whose hand goes for his gun just in case the black-clad stranger does not pull out a musical instrument. Surprisingly he does and begins to sing a mournful and threatening country song that speaks of a time when Frank’s time won’t be his own anymore. This hired gun sports black nail polish and a tattooed teardrop by his right eye, affectations that place him squarely in the bad guy camp, and before he leaves the diner he tells Frank that he will sing the song at his funeral.
In The Punisher, it is through the elements of ritual, along with masochism, sadism, and fetishism, that further connections to the Western (and its generic offspring) are discernible. Ritual is depicted most notably in scenes of family meals and food that are inextricably linked with notions of family and community. The Castle family, even in so brief a period as they are onscreen, is shown sitting down to two large, communal dinners. There are toasts offered to family, the long tables are loaded with plates of food, and when assassins arrive on the scene, there is a shot of bullets shattering a large bowl of salad as the outdoor barbecue pit explodes. There are two later scenes that transfer the dining ritual to Frank’s new situation. In the first, he is eating alone at a window table in the diner where Joan works and the only other patrons are Dave and Bumpo, who are eating at the counter. In the second, to show his gradual (if temporary) integration into the small group, he is interrupted in his solitary consumption of canned sardines by the invitation to have some real food with his neighbors. They sit down at a small dinette set to a regular meal of meat, vegetables and iced tea, all of which are served in retro kitchenware (frosted glasses and serving bowls in blue, yellow, and, most tellingly, tangerine and avocado) that harkens back to an old-fashioned era of nuclear families. Joan and Frank are like the parents of the two younger participants, as they all sit down at the dinner table and say what they are thankful for after such a satisfying supper.
Raising a new church in My Darling Clementine, the opening meal from The Searchers, and the predominance of the kitchen (and some extremely large plates of food) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance all speak to the presence and importance of ritual human behavior in Westerns. In contrast, the Saints are never shown eating together. After Bobby is killed, Howard, Livia, Johnny, and the family capo, Quentin Glass, sit around a glass table and toast their missing member, but there is no food in sight. They do not partake in traditional family rituals and the setting of this one table scene takes place in their nightclub, called Saints & Sinners (an appropriate expression of genre dialectics), where they are surrounded by bodyguards and strangers. It is primarily the fringes of their home that appear onscreen: the balcony, the patio, the foyer, never a kitchen area, and, aside from Bobby’s burial, their own forms of ritual are done individually, not as a family. Howard goes to the office at precisely the same time every day and Livia spends every Thursday night working out at the gym, getting her nails done, and going to the movies. Each one of them performs these routines like clockwork, providing Castle with the tools he needs to destroy them. Such negative connotations of ritual, therefore, emphasize the stark difference between the Saints and the more civilized family in the tenement.
There has always been a “strong undercurrent of masochism” (French 16), along with sadism and fetishism, in Westerns, as well as film noir and melodrama. For example, in the Western films directed by Anthony Mann, the “heroes are frequently wounded in painful ways which go far beyond the obvious purpose of providing a revenge motive” and beatings are often administered “at the hands of sadistic enemies” (French 118), which is clearly the case in John Ford’s film when Liberty Valance repeatedly hits, kicks, and humiliates James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard. The horse head scene in The Godfather, is a perfect blend of gangster sadism and Western semantics within a melodramatic family saga. In The Punisher, Howard Saint kicks at the prostrate lackey who led his son Bobby into the trouble that got him killed, then shoots a leg out from under another employee before killing him with two additional bullets. Livia Saint passes the decree that, not just Frank Castle, but his entire family, is to be killed to avenge Bobby’s death. Later, after Castle has planted some incriminating evidence, Howard draws out the murder of his best friend and closest associate, Quentin, by slapping him, cutting his arm, and stabbing him several times as the man begs to know why. Furthermore, he invokes the name of Jim Bowie, who died at the Alamo, as he copies that frontiersman’s ritual of kicking aside the furniture before a fight. Later, as lightning crashes, he is equally cruel to his wife for her perceived affair with Quentin (who, unbeknownst to her husband, was gay) before he throws her off a bridge to land in front of an oncoming train (a twist on the old melodramas where a righteous woman is on the railroad tracks). For his part, Quentin tortures young Dave by pulling out all the studs and small hoops that adorn his face in an effort to get him, or Bumpo, to tell them Castle’s location. In their determined silence, with Joan hiding an unconscious Frank in a freight elevator beneath their feet, the makeshift family proves as heroic as any western hero.
Frank, through the bullet scars and the superhuman beatings he endures throughout, is a figure with both literal and “symbolic wounds” (French 118) that position him “between subject positions of mastery and being mastered, sadism and masochism—and thus between traditional masculinity and femininity” (MacKinnon 86). This dualism leads logically from the division of “nineteenth-century stage melodrama into ‘melodrama of action’ and ‘melodrama of passion’” (MacKinnon 94) to a film such as The Punisher in which both of these elements play out. Likewise, in the graphic novel Welcome Back, Frank, writer Garth Ennis has a drunken doctor (shades of Doc Boone in Stagecoach) work on Castle after a brutal shoot-out. The doctor itemizes the weaponry and the wounds: “Six magnum loads … Massive tissue damage, puncture
d lung, three broken ribs, fractured sternum, more blood out of you than in” (Ennis). The specificity of pain here points to Frank’s doubled status as both a vulnerable, broken body and a nearly invincible warrior—a living embodiment of action and passion.
The body of Thomas Jane, in the character of the Punisher, is fetishized in this film adaptation, along with his weapons and his car. He is frequently filmed in fragments, with his biceps, his thighs, his lean waist, shown in various poses as he wraps himself around the engine of his car while rebuilding it or as he straps on various weaponry. He is shown to wear guns, virtually clothing himself in them in the way that female characters are often filmed putting on suggestive attire. The camera tracks slowly over his collection of military ordnance: grenades, arrows, shells, a high-tech bow, and multiple guns. He is equated with all this hardware, even with machines, as close-ups of his arms and hands combine with both engine and weapon components to fill the frame. Likewise, in the comic book The Punisher: War Zone, Frank Castle’s body is emphasized, depicted as overtly male, even homoerotic, sitting on his unmade bed clad only in underwear. His biceps are flexed, his calf muscles bulging, and his chest, back, and arms are covered in hair. The warrior’s body, then, is a fetish symbol just like his weapons, especially every possible permutation of the gun. As a visual medium, the Punisher graphic novels are able to foreground the image of the gun through the exaggerated perspective found, for instance, in the artwork of Tim Bradstreet and Steve Dillon. Castle’s guns are often drawn as they thrust toward the reader, enlarged and at a downward angle, emphasizing the Punisher’s dominant stature. They are prominent in both the text and the art, clearly designated as fetish items.
The naturalness of Castle’s earlier associations and his penultimate involvement with weapons and battle as “an archangel without wings, a superman whose main interest on this earth is to redress wrongs” (Fenin 30), comes down to a key opposition. “Because the Westerner exists on the periphery of both the community and the wilderness, he never loses touch with either world” (Schatz 51). The way Ethan understands Indian burial rituals in The Searchers, and the way that Bannion’s capacity for violence comes to rival that of Vince Stone’s in The Big Heat, is paralleled here with the symbolic ability possessed and utilized by Frank Castle. When he arrives in Saints & Sinners for his final showdown with Howard Saint, he spends several minutes in the woods nearby, a natural, outdoor space, fitting himself with guns, explosive devices, and a bow and arrow. Like the Indians in Westerns, he is skilled at this most stealthy of attacks. And like many examples of the Western genre, we hear the phsst of the arrow before we see it strike its first target, a guard outside the club. As he falls downward, out of the frame, we see Castle in the far distance firing his weapon from an elevated position, as Native Americans were often depicted doing from the bluffs and mountains of the Old West.
Interestingly, the second shot of Castle shooting his bow and arrow is done using the kind of iconographic pose one would associate with Robin Hood, not an inappropriate comparison because he later leaves behind money he has stolen from Saint’s business for his three low-income neighbors. Iconography plays a large part in our relationship with genre films, especially as it regards the Western hero with “his horse, his gun” (Buscombe 286) and the tense shoot-out on Main Street. The composition of the shots in The Punisher depicting two showcase shoot-outs copies those used in virtually every example of the scene ever filmed. Castle, wearing a long black duster, pulls back the edge of his coat over his holster: “he wears a gun on his thigh” (Buscombe 203) and his hand is shown in close-up, hovering over it, ready to draw. The two men facing him do the same and there is a series of head shots and eyeline matches as they assess each other. When Castle gets the draw and fires two guns at once, spent shell casings are ejected past his head in a flurry of firing and his enemies are lifted off their feet in slow motion photography that is “as stylized, graceful and artfully choreographed as a ballet” (French 116), an effect that has been part of cinematic screen violence since Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Gangsters and cowboys tend to die well on film.
It is through iconographic symbols that further thematic connections can be made within the combined Western-superhero canon. For example, the set design in The Punisher forms a link to another, more mainstream superhero. In one of the nightclub scenes, there is a live band playing and behind them is a replica of the rotating double rings that are used in the trial scenes on Krypton in Superman and Superman II. These rings are the site of judgment, of justice, in Superman and, in their echo here at Saints & Sinners, ultimate evoke a similar image. Meaning-through-symbolism abounds in Westerns through icons such as the white hat (the good guy), the horse (the Old World), and the train (the New World, intruding).
In The Punisher, Frank Castle wears a t-shirt that his son gave him on the day he died. It is black with a white skull face on the front, which comes to symbolize the part of him that died with his family as well as his own eventual status as a bringer of death to those he hunts. Young William told him that it would “ward off evil spirits” and it becomes his dark identity when he goes into battle. In Ennis’s The Punisher: Born, the white skull illustrates this duality by speaking to Frank Castle as an external voice, Death itself, and at the same time represents his own internal darkness. The film adaptations of other comic book heroes also use distinctive symbols such as the illuminated Bat signal in Batman and the flaming avian outline left behind by The Crow (both are, likewise, vengeance narratives). These later superhero films illustrate a shift from idealistic heroes with simple, more ideological goals (“Truth, justice, and the American way” in Superman) to personal, darker-themed, revisionist revenge tales. This transition mirrors the one that occurred in the Western film genre, as embodied in the character arcs found from Stagecoach to The Searchers and on through the nihilism of the Western’s later cycle found in The Wild Bunch and High Plains Drifter.
This dark evolution of the Western genre is described by Thomas Schatz when he writes that legendary Western director John Ford “deconstructs and critiques” (77) the myths of the frontier, myths that he himself helped create in early Westerns like Stagecoach. Gung-ho Manifest Destiny and jingoistic ideologies gave way to cynicism and a fragmentation of Western heroes as they began to fight against even their own mythic identities. The cowboys themselves grew darker, more violent, and more divided within themselves in just the same way that comic book vigilantes, like the Punisher, would. Thus, the public personas and the secret identities of superheroes are the modern enactment of this evolving cultural representation.
In the same way that so many of these film genres are connected, so too are questions of fetishism and iconography to style, and they all find their culmination in visual aesthetics. “Really, it is not violence at all which is the ‘point’ of the Western movie, but a certain image of a man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence” and “to work out how a man might look when he shoots” (Warshow 203). There is an element of this idea playing out when Travis Bickle practices pointing his gun at a mirror in Taxi Driver, itself a hybrid of influences which include film noir and Westerns, most notably The Searchers. In Amy Taubin’s comprehensive exploration of Taxi Driver, she describes screenwriter Paul Schrader’s and director Martin Scorsese’s conscious, deliberate use of John Ford’s Western as “the ur-text” for their film (19). When Travis points his gun at the mirror, examining how he looks in that pose, he is linked to the John Wayne character: “Ethan, the lone wolf, becomes Travis, the psychopath, trying to work out on his own what it means to be a man” (Taubin 20). The legacy of the Western gunslinger is fragmented within Travis, “who has problems with boundaries and with splitting” (Taubin 22) in his identification so that his own reflection is part pure image and part meaning, to him and to us. In other words, through the genre conventions of the Western and our own expectations as honed by those conventions, the image of a man with a gun
is imbued with cultural, historical meaning. He, as a character, is made mobile across multiple genres and, in the case of the graphic novel, multiple media as well. Artist Steve Dillon, in Welcome Back, Frank, draws the Punisher in such a way that we see the Western hero, deliberately and clearly. In a Chapter 1 panel, he stands alone in the frame, wearing a long duster coat, with a holster strapped to each thigh, and a gun in his hand. All at once, we are looking at a revisionist cowboy.
Finally, The Punisher evinces a lineage to film noir through several elements, most notably through the use of deep space, glass imagery, wet surfaces, and oblique lines. In the aforementioned Robin Hood—inspired shot which takes place in the nightclub, there is deep horizontal and vertical space behind Frank Castle as he pulls back his bow; when we see Howard Saint enter the club, he is filmed through a wire railing that is rendered as oblique lines cutting across our field of vision. The walls and ceiling of his upstairs lounge area are composed entirely of a grid-like design of lines that also appears oblique from our perspective. “Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city [and these] oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable” (Schrader 219). The 1988 film Die Hard provides a visual model for this, as it effectively transplants the technique so prevalent in ’50s film noir into a modern action hybrid. Die Hard, itself evoking a classic Western by situating its isolated hero within a confined space where he is forced to shoot it out against a superior force, depicts a world of oblique lines in the walls, elevator shafts, ductwork, a zig-zagging conference table, and stairwells that fill the frame throughout. Likewise, in The Punisher. outside the building, where Castle and Saint have their final confrontation, each man stands at the narrow end of key oblique lines in the pavement, which is wet. In fact, in nearly every scene shot in the city, the streets are wet (though we never see rain) as they glisten with reflections. The theme of glass furthers this noir tendency to emphasize water and reflective surfaces. Frank smashes through a glass display case to get his deceased father’s guns, the glass that he has been drinking copious amounts of Wild Turkey out of drops from his hands to the floor (and falls toward the camera), the Saint building is a glass skyscraper, and Quentin’s last name is “Glass.” By the time the explosions and gunplay of the final battle are over, all of these ingredients have come into play as the villain lies dead in the street; an urban frontier justice has been served and decades of film language have spoken.
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