Timecop: The New Western

Timecop centers around action film (the “action movie” developed into its own genre) star Jean-Claude Van Damme’s beautifully choreographed fight segments. “Sure, there‘s a little acting in there too…but w

Where does this new settling ability come from? In Timecop, it presents itself with alteration of the vengeance theme. Retribution is extremely important to the western. Peter French says, first referring to altruism, “It might not be close to the most important or most desirable end or most noble end, morally speaking. Vengeance may be a higher or more noble end.” (French 125-126) He claims that it can even make morally ambiguous characters heroic. However, because the movie deals with time travel, Walker is able to transform the theme of vengeance into a new theme of rectification. For ten years (it seems) Walker has been depressed by the memory of his wife, killed in the maniacal explosion of his home. He has become a loner, left with only home videos to mourn to (I don‘t really understand how he’s retained home videos if his house blew up, but….) Eventually during a mission, being in the right place at the right time--the day of her death, he is able to undo his wife’s murder by murdering her murderers. If traditional western heroes could resurrect their tragic dead, it can be said they would too. Walker’s vengeance is still vengeance (the audience can tell by the way he acts towards her murderers, snapping one of their necks,) but his has a sweeter reward than previous heroes‘.

hat really counts here is, of course, the action” (Marshall 217). Highlighting his astonishing martial arts acrobatics, shots are reminiscent of Peckinpah’s, with extensive match-on-action cuts and careful attention to rhythm. Pieces are shot at varying speeds with viewer-satisfying close-ups of explicit violence (in one scene in particular, Van Damme mercilessly snaps the neck of a helpless villain.) The death count similarly amasses uncountable in these stunning sequences except, contrasting The Wild Bunch, all of Van Damme’s fighting is done with his bare hands. (Though, I’ll never understand why he doesn’t just shoot the bad guys.) Noting all this, it should now be said that there is much more than action to this film. (Well, at least in how it relates to westerns.)

Interestingly, the time travel world, just as the traditional western, is again and again seen to be a man’s world. Professor Jane “Tompkins believes that the Western is really about the fear of men losing their position of dominance in society to women and “feminized Christianity”” (qtd. in French 16). Author Julie Levinson writes, “The portrayal of a definitive masculine ideal is the mainspring of the Western genre. In the classic Western, male and female dynamics are delineated and irreconcilably opposed….[such as] the book versus the gun, the church vs. the saloon,…and indeed the East vs. the West” (par. 1). This world of time travel is portrayed as a masculine world as well. As a matter of fact, Walker’s wife is killed directly before he is to start the job working for the TEC, the Time Enforcement Commission. And, once Walker reconciles his past (and present and future because of this,) it could be assumed that he will quit the TEC and take up a less dangerous job in order to spend time with his family. Furthermore, during Walker’s time travel days, only one female character is shown participating in this travel. This character, of Gloria Reuben‘s, is depicted vulnerable, unconfident, naïve, nervous and disloyal. She is a foil to Van Damme�

Some topics in this essay:
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