A French Unsettlement of the Frontier: Love and the Threatened American Dream in Heaven’s Gate (1980)

Abstract

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) occupies an infamous place in the canon of Western films. The film retells the story of the Johnson County War of 1892 in Wyoming, in which Anglo-American ranch owners systematically eradicated, with the aid of a “death list,” European immigrants who had been caught or accused of cattle rustling. Overbudget at an estimated 44 million dollars and overtime at two and a half hours long, critics have typically considered the film in terms of its commercial shortcomings. For instance, Michael Coyne considers the “quasi-Marxist” specificities of the film as failing to fit with the expectations either of the “moviegoers who enjoyed Westerns” or “those who would be ideologically responsive to such a theme” in different filmic genres (185). While there has been a critical tendency to dismiss the film as a failure based on a conflation of its economic and aesthetic determinants, the unconventional love triangle between henchman Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), prostitute Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), and sheriff Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) points to the need to reinvestigate Heaven’s Gate for what it does to subvert the precepts of the Western genre and the political value that this might hold. This love triangle, coded as a battle between two American men and one French woman, stands resolutely outside of the amorous conventions of the Western genre.