We cannot literally put Marshal Will Kane on the analytic couch, but he has much in common with a young man who was analyzed by Dr. Arlow.
With much thanks to the members of the NY chapter of the Psychoanalytic Study of Film who discussed this film in June, 1999.
Post 9/11, the idea of a town under threat from psychopathic killers reverberates with our personal fears. High Noon is a film about coping with dangerous bullies, about terror and its effect upon a community. Its pertinence to our current situation is one example of its universal appeal. In its own time, it was a statement about the McCarthy era and the need for courage. The outer dangers change in form from generation to generation, while the inner dangers with which they reverberate are more constant.
High Noon was released in 1952. Along with Shane, it was heralded as a mature, psychological western. It won awards at the time and quickly became established as a “classic”. Most readers have probably seen it, but not in many years.
The story is about a small town marshal, Wil Kane, who discovers on the morning of his wedding day, as he is about to retire and leave town, that a vicious killer, Frank Miller, has been pardoned and is returning to town on the noon train to exact vengeance on the marshal who arrested him. At first, Wil heads out of town with his new bride as originally planned, urged on by his friends, but he turns back to face Miller and his three cronies. They wait for Miller at the train station while Wil tries to recruit deputies to help him. As he goes through the town, he gets no takers. Most turn him down out of cowardice and practicality. They argue that Frank Miller’s only interest is Kane; so that it is in their best interest and Kane’s if he would leave. Kane’s deputy, Harvey, backs out because he feels slighted that he was not chosen to replace Kane as marshal. The only ones to offer help are a middle aged drunk and a boy.
Kane’s bride, Amy, became a Quaker after her brother and father were killed in a gunfight. She wants no part of more violence and waits at the hotel near the train station, ready to leave on that same noon train while the film’s recurrent theme song keeps wailing, “Do not forsake me, oh, my darling, on this our wedding day.”
The story has been generally understood as a psychologically minded tale of a man who has the courage of his convictions. He will not accept somewhat reasonable rationalizations to skirt what he sees as his responsibility, and he knows that running, once begun, can never stop. He is afraid, but knows he must face his fear. One of the powers of the film is that we can easily identify with the fear that Kane and the townspeople feel. The gunmen waiting at the train station look frightening. There are few of us who would not be very tempted to accept the rationalizations to avoid this fight, and at some level we know it.
The film begins with contrast, the ornery gunmen preparing to enter the town and the smiles on the faces of the townspeople at the wedding of Wil and Amy Kane. When it is realized that Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train, bent on revenge, Wil and Amy are rushed out of town on a wagon.
Wil is barely out of town when he realizes that he must go back to face the threat, against his wife’s pleas. He explains his reasons over time. He feels a sense of responsibility. The new marshal won’t be arriving until the next day. He also feels that if he runs now he will have to run for the rest of his life. “What’s a hundred miles? They’d come after us. We’d never be able to keep that store, Amy. They’d come after us and we’d have to run again, as long as we live.” We have all known the fear of a confrontation, the conflicting urges to flee and stay.
A patient described in the psychoanalytic literature a few years after High Noon appeared similarly had to face a man who could hurt him.
“’I went to see Ms. X, the secretary, at the University. … This time I got the word. ‘The financial officer wants to see you.” I had sent a letter of complaint regarding a delay in getting paid. Now, two weeks later I was told, “Mr. P. wants to see you about the letter.” I had the thought, “I’ll be punished.” I felt scared.’” (Arlow, 1959 p. 616)
As he waited in the outer office, he betrayed the urge to flee with his gaze:
“‘Suddenly, I looked out the window at the fields and the surrounding landscape.'”
He, too, was contemplating a wedding day.
“The patient at this time was engaged to an attractive young woman of his own faith and found himself in a serious conflict over whether to have intercourse with her.” (Arlow, 1959, pp 615-616)
Kane’s “serious conflict” over Amy appears to have nothing to do with sex, but with his fear of losing her if he confronts Frank Miller. The song tells us that that is his greatest fear. “I’m not afraid of death, but, oh, what will I do if you leave me?”
Amy is a Quaker. Her father and brother were killed defending what was right. Now, she is against all violence. She cannot understand why her husband would stay to fight and decides that if he will she cannot stay with him. She cannot tolerate a violent image of her husband and will not allow herself to be re-traumatized with another violent death of a loved one. She leaves Wil with the intention of taking the noon train out of town. Her abandonment of her new husband is particularly painful as he prepares to face his deadly enemy.
Amy Kane is an innocent. One of the first things that we notice about her is that she (Grace Kelly) is much younger than her husband (Garry Cooper). We are not even sure, at first, if this difference is intended or merely an artifact of casting that is meant to be overlooked. But, Wil is not merely older looking; he is more experienced than Amy in the ways of the world. His former lover was the sophisticated Helen Ramirez.
When Kane goes to the town hotel to warn Helen that Frank Miller is coming, he finds Amy there, seeking harbor away from the lecherous gunmen at the train station.
As he starts up the stairs towards Helen Ramirez’s room, the hotel clerk asks, with dripping sarcasm, “Think you can find it all right?” The comment is meant as much for Amy as for Wil, and Wil looks back at Amy as he continues up the stairs.
After Kane leaves the hotel, Amy approaches the hotel clerk.
“Who is Miss Ramirez?”
“Mrs. Ramirez? She used to be a friend of your husband’s a while back. Before that she was a friend of Frank Miller’s.”
Arlow’s patient does not describe a former lover, but there is another woman, with whom he is less conflicted about his sexuality:
“‘I went to Mr. P’s office and saw Miss X, his secretary. I’ve had lots of sexual thoughts about her. I’d often watch her walk down the halls and would have the thought, I’d like to climb into bed with her.'” (1959, p. 616)
Arlow has told us that (like Wil Kane) this man’s former lover was of an ethnic background different from his own, presumably further from the image of his mother or sister.
Sex is brought in subtly in this fifties film. Frank Miller’s younger brother, Ben, leers at Amy at the train station. We are given a hint of sexual danger to come. Ben says to the other two gunmen, “Hey, that wasn’t here five years ago.” One of them answers with a surly, “So what?”, to which Ben replies, “Nothing, yet.” For the gunmen, Amy is a sexual object. If Kane cannot defeat Miller’s gang, the innocent Amy is in danger of sexual attack. Amy Kane’s fear and abhorrence of violence takes on an additional, sexual meaning.
On the surface, Kane’s confrontation with Frank Miller has nothing to do with sex, and yet it does. When Kane goes to warn Helen Ramirez, she greets him with hostility, although we have seen her admiring him in front of others, particularly her young jealous lover, Harvey, the deputy. When Helen sees Kane enter her room, she stares at him, then snaps,
“What are you looking at? You think I have changed? Well what do you want? You want me to help you? You want me to ask Frank to let you go? You want me to beg for you? Well, I would not do it. I would not lift a finger for you.”
Hell hath no greater fury than a woman scorned. Clearly, Kane left her.
He explains that he came to warn her that Frank Miller was coming:
“I think you oughta get out of town. I might not be able to … Well, anything can happen.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” she answers.
“I know you’re not, but you, you know how he is.”
“I know how he is. Maybe he doesn’t know.”
“He’s probably got letters.”
In this brief dialogue we see the artistry of the filmmakers. Without saying anything explicitly, the film has planted in us the seed of an idea that Frank Miller’s hatred of Kane goes beyond the arrest. There is a sexual rivalry. Kane has slept with Miller’s woman after sending Miller to jail. Miller’s younger brother has been eyeing Kane’s bride and Kane has taken Miller’s woman after defeating him.
It is in the context of that sexual rivalry, not quite fully in our awareness, that we wait for the noon train. With mounting tension, we see the clocks in the town advancing towards noon, almost in real time as we watch the film. Someone in our film study group wisely raised the issue of the meaning and significance of that train. It certainly focuses us on the issue of time and the inevitability of that confrontation as it approaches with Mussolinian ruthlessness. In that sense, it gives us a sense of death and all the other inevitabilities that we know we will one day have to face. It is a deadline.
But the train has another meaning, another inevitable collision, in the language of our unconscious fantasies. A train is a powerful, heavy machine that carries enormous momentum as it speeds towards its destination. Children, particularly boys, are drawn to the phallic image of trains speeding through tunnels, down tracks towards their inevitable destinations. This train will penetrate the town and bring with it seemingly unbridled violence when it plants its evil seed in the form of Frank Miller.
The phallic image of the train approaching the town to deposit its violent passenger creates a complementary image in the town, which becomes a passive female receptacle ready to be violated. There stands Wil Kane, forced to do battle with the frightening intruder, much like another of Arlow’s patients who entertained an unconscious fantasy of doing battle with his father at the entrance to the vagina. (Arlow, 1991) The patient we have been following had a similar fantasy.
“As the conflict over whether to have intercourse with his fiancée was becoming more intense,” (p.619) the patient’s associations linked thinking about having intercourse with her with dreams of snakes attacking him from a woman’s vagina and thoughts of crashing his car into another in a tunnel and having fistfights with a man, there. (Arlow, 1959)
“Let us compare the objective situation [in the waiting room outside the treasurer’s office] with the patient’s unconscious fantasy. In reality, the patient found himself with a sexually tempting woman while waiting to enter the inner office. In the office was an authority figure, an adversary, with whom he might quarrel over money. This configuration corresponds to the elements of his unconscious fantasy—namely, an encounter with the father and/or his phallus within the body of the mother. “ (Arlow, 1969, p. 12)
Like Arlow’s patient (in his unconscious fantasy), Wil Kane is anticipating a violent confrontation, “an encounter with the father and/or his phallus within the body of the mother.” But, as an older brother (to Ben), as the seed deposited by the phallic train, as a contemporary of Kane, almost his antithesis, Frank Miller can also be seen as a brother, perhaps an evil twin, who enters into a life and death battle with Kane in the womb.
Arlow’s patient gives us a clue as to how that battle is to be won. While waiting with the secretary outside the treasurer’s office, he experienced a dejas vu. Looking out of the window at the surrounding landscape, he had the uncanny feeling that he had seen it before and been through it before. The analysis traced that symptom to a defense against his anxiety connected to his memory of the bible story of Jacob stealing his father’s blessing with his mother’s help. The patient’s mother had often reassured him when he had been afraid that he had been through it before and survived.
Like Arlow’s patient, like Jacob in the bible, Wil Kane needs the support and approval of the woman to be successful in his encounter. Wil is upset at the failure of the townspeople to help him, but he is most deeply troubled by Amy leaving him, a theme hammered home repeatedly through the song. He needs her to defeat his rival, but there is more.
He also must have her support to overcome her fears. As we have seen, Amy’s pacifism is not just a wish for peace and brotherly love; it has a sexual meaning. Amy is an innocent, a virgin. Her fear of violence extends unconsciously to a fear of the aggressiveness of sexuality.
Similarly, Kane is conflicted about deflowering his new virginal bride. This is a film about a wedding day. Frank Miller does not only represent a powerful, aggressive rival. As was quite rightly pointed out by a member of the study group, Miller and his gang, train and all, also represent the aggressive sexual urges that the groom is struggling to come to terms with on his wedding day as he draws closer to the conjugal bed. (“High noon” becomes midnight.) This adds meaning to the opening scene in which he attempts to ride off alone with his new bride. He turns around—he is not ready. Can he tame the violent, sado-masochistic passions in himself without compromising his proper role as a sexual aggressor? These are the conflicts and demons he must face before he can properly ride off with his bride. It is the similarity between Kane and Frank Miller—they are both gunmen—that frightens Amy.
For this reason, despite our wish for Wil to recruit help from the townspeople, this is a conflict that Wil and Amy must confront themselves. Like Arlow’s patient, unconsciously unable to complete intercourse without the woman’s approval and support, Kane needs Amy’s acceptance, support, and ultimately collusion with his violence in order to consummate the marriage.
This is the key to the film’s resolution. Through clever tactics, daring maneuvers and good marksmanship (as well as the bad guys’ inability to hit him with their first shots), Wil succeeds in paring down the gang. At a crucial moment, Amy, who has left the train at the first sound of gunfire, thinking Wil has been shot, overcomes her own scruples and fears and shoots one of the gang members. In the final confrontation, Frank Miller grabs Amy and tries to use her as a shield, but she scratches his face and struggles free long enough for Wil to shoot him. Together, Wil and Amy have overcome the wedding night jitters. Amy Kane’s participation in the violence has not only molded them as a family, but has also given Kane tacit approval to do the loving violence that we know will come as they ride off to begin their new life.
Arlow, J.A. (1959). The Structure of the Déjà Vu Experience. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 7:611-631.
Arlow, J.A. (1991). Methodology and Reconstruction. Psychoanal Q., 60:539-563.