“I Didn't Expect to Find Any Fences Around Here”: Cultural Ambiguity and Containment in Shane

The opening shot looks down into the valley. We see snow-capped mountains in the distance and verdant fields before us. A horse and rider come into the scene from off camera, moving into the valley. We see first the horse as it rides away, bringing into view the rider whom we see only from the back. The shot then changes as the credits are imposed on a wide view of the valley stretched before us, with all the glory of the Grand Tetons gracing the screen. We are drawn to the mountains in the back, behind the listing for costumer and cinematographer. We then notice a small figure, dwarfed by the natural world surrounding him, riding his horse across midscreen, an antlike presence engulfed by nature. The opening of Shane (1953) evokes the natural man that is one of the key features of the epic western. In this case, it is done quickly, almost preemptively, to embed the film in the genre. It may be the quintessential naturalist opening, or it may be an unsubtle evocation of the imagery. Whichever, it succeeds in getting us to accept this as a conventional western very quickly, a necessary act because it will turn unconventional almost immediately. The third shot is of the settler household of Joe Starrett, a log cabin in the valley with the mountains again in the background, and a pond in the foreground in which a large stag is wading. We are brought into a close-up of Joey Starrett, a young boy with his gun stalking the stag. He is clumsy. He rustles branches and bumps into rocks. The stag turns to the sound, notices the boy, and returns to drinking as if nothing is out of place. A distant rider is visible, framed in the stag’s antlers. The rider approaches quietly, but the stag is alerted to his presence, stops drinking, stares, and then bolts. As Shane rides into the foreground, we notice his buckskin shirt and pants; he is clad in nature, enveloping him more deeply in the vision of the natural man evoked in the credits. Yet, if Shane is one with nature—clad in it, surrounded by it, almost indistinguishable from it—why does the stag run? Is there something unnatural about Shane? This is only the first of a number of unconventional elements in Shane, and it forces us to reexamine the film. Embedded more deeply in the conventions of the genre than the 1950s films of John Ford or Anthony Mann and released a year after High Noon (1952), George Stevens’s Shane has a simplicity and comprehensibility that belies its more subtle treatment of sociocultural issues. Shane has often been seen as a traditional western celebrating an American cultural consensus, and is generally ignored in studies of Cold War films or