![\"THE LONE RANGER\" Ph: Peter Mountain \u00a9Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer Inc. All Rights Reserved.](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2016\/05\/Lone-Ranger-300x152.jpg\")
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His back to us and to the camera, the hero walks silently away. His work in this particular community is done. He has restored the community to its better self.<\/p>\n
This is the closing image of the classic 1947 film The Bishop\u2019s Wife<\/em>, which I watched recently. Cary Grant as the angel Dudley\u2014sent to guide the bishop away from his egotistical ways and back into the arms of his neglected wife\u2014has effected this conversion not only in the bishop but in other characters as well.<\/p>\n And as I watched Dudley walk away from us and from the community where he has intervened for the good, I suddenly thought: I\u2019ve seen this scene before. My husband and I are on a kick of viewing 1940s and 1950s Westerns, which often end this way (though the departing hero might be on horseback rather than walking).<\/p>\n \u201cShane! Come back!\u201d is the famous plea at the very end of Shane<\/em> (1953). It\u2019s much the same as the legendary ending of John Ford\u2019s The Searchers<\/em> (1956), with the John Wayne character\u2014having rescued the young girl who\u2019d been kidnapped by Indians and returned her to her family\u2014walking slowly away from us and from the family, into the wilderness.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s The Lone Ranger<\/em> TV series of 1949-1957, which my husband and I are also watching. (Don\u2019t worry: we\u2019re not bingeing. We restrict ourselves to one episode per evening.) Each episode ends identically: the Lone Ranger has restored justice to the frontier town that had been overtaken by outlaws. As the key \u201cgood\u201d characters chat in smiling relief, Tonto and the Lone Ranger slip silently away from us and from the town. The final shot is of them riding off into the distance.<\/p>\n It might seem odd to place The Lone Ranger<\/em> in the same category as the The Bishop\u2019s Wife<\/em>. Dudley effects an inner<\/em> conversion on the characters who had gone astray. The Lone Ranger, while occasionally moving a \u201cbad guy,\u201d or a conflicted guy, to inner conversion, is most often restoring the externals of justice: the bad guys end up behind bars.<\/p>\n Still, there\u2019s a deus ex machina<\/em> methodology in both cases (literally in Dudley\u2019s case, since he\u2019s an angel sent from above to do his job).<\/p>\n Now you\u2019re probably wondering why I\u2019m devoting so much time to these \u201cgood conquers evil\u201d tales. I\u2019m wondering, too. Part of the fun of watching The Lone Ranger<\/em> is simply its silliness: it\u2019s my half-hour escape at the end of each day. But there\u2019s something more about all these 1940s-1950s Westerns, and about The Bishop\u2019s Wife<\/em> too. They\u2019re all, I\u2019d say, art shaping itself to a very human longing: the longing for a restoration where evil is indeed conquered by good.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no accident that this is the Christian narrative as well, which we celebrate especially at Easter.<\/p>\n The tough facts of our real human lives\u2014as individuals and as communities, whether local or global\u2014are of course messy, complex, a tangle of good and bad motivations and actions. But I don\u2019t think this makes the \u201ctriumph of good\u201d stories mere fantasy. They represent our deepest desire: we ache for the good in ourselves and in our world to win out.<\/p>\n When I get snippety with my husband, I ache for this evil habit to be transformed by my better self. When terrorists bomb yet another target, we ache for the Lone Ranger to come and wipe them all out in a half hour.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to get too heavy here. The Bishop\u2019s Wife<\/em> is a delightful comedy. The Westerns I\u2019ve been talking about aren\u2019t meant to be deep. But the light, and even sometimes frivolous, entertainment that these films offer connects by a sort of Wi-Fi to a need at our core.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why they\u2019ve become classics. Initially, the Western cowboy genre as it developed in the 1940s and 1950s might have been expressing the post-war triumphant relief of the U.S. and its allies at having defeated the definitely evil Nazis. But that historical context has faded, while these films have held up now for sixty to seventy years.<\/p>\n Finally, I want to return to the image I began with, the image that closes these films. Why, I\u2019m wondering, must the figure who has brought about good then slip silently away? I think maybe it\u2019s because he can\u2019t have an ego.<\/p>\n \u201cThis mask stands for justice,\u201d the Lone Ranger says in nearly every episode. Justice must get our final attention, not its human (or in Dudley\u2019s case, angelic) agent.<\/p>\n And yet it\u2019s not only that he can\u2019t have an ego. Leaving aside the Lone Ranger, whom we never get inside of at all (he\u2019s wonderfully, consistently superficial), these other heroic figures have made some sort of personal sacrifice in the course of bringing restoration to the community. As they walk away, solitary, they\u2019re aware of what they\u2019ve chosen to give up in order to effect the good of others.<\/p>\n It\u2019s their Passion and Crucifixion, we might say.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image above is reproduced by the U.S. Departure of Agriculture, licensed by Creative Commons.<\/p>\n Peggy Rosenthal<\/a>\u00a0is director of\u00a0Poetry Retreats<\/a>\u00a0and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include\u00a0Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times\u00a0<\/em>(Franciscan Media), and\u00a0The Poets\u2019 Jesus\u00a0<\/em>(Oxford). See\u00a0Amazon<\/a>\u00a0for a full list. She also teaches an online\u00a0course,\u00a0\u201cPoetry as a Spiritual Practice,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0through\u00a0Image<\/em>\u2019s Glen Online program<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n
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