‘A Little Law and Order Wouldn’t Hurt Anybody Around Here’: ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ and ‘High Noon’

This chapter discusses the scapegoat as the historical artifact lying at the base of judicial order through a close reading of two classic but ‘iconoclastic’ Western films: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon (1951). What links these two otherwise very different films is their unusually frank treatment of the central legal paradox of the Western which might be called originary violence: in order for the community-within-the-wilderness to be established and for the rule of law to be created, a foundational murder must be committed. Originary violence is central to Girard’s notion of the scapegoat—the product of the violent unanimity of the group directed against a designated enemy—as not just an abstract but as a temporally concrete phenomenon; it also corresponds closely to the friend-enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt’s theory of constitutional law. Schmitt’s notion of the decision, that precise moment in time at which the identity of the enemy is named, allows the community (the friends) to emerge. The word ‘decision’ is etymologically derived from the Latin term Decidere, the initial incision into the body of the sacrificial victim; hence, the iconic plot of the Western—the war of the community against the outlaw—is dramatically identical to an act of scapegoating. The subversive genius of both films lies with their revealing of the sacrificial nature of the Western drama.