The Western has always provided its audience some element of the Sublime. Its alien settings of oceanic plains and beautiful, hostile mountains; its retrogressing to a period of instability and violence; and/or its (usually unfortunate) presentation of “mysterious” and threatening Native Americans all removed most of its viewers from their places of mundane familiarity. Sometimes, however, the Western can provide more. It can bring the viewer to the Spiritual: that element of the Sublime providing its receiver a transcendent awareness of his or herself and the world.

John Hillcoat’s (and screenwriter Nick Cave’s) Australian Western, The Proposition (2005), is such a film in its own particular way. It is not a religious allegory like Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985), where a messianic rider answers a little girl’s prayer. Nor is it a Bergmanesque spiritually-existential journey like Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), where a violent man must reconcile himself with his inherent violent nature. The Proposition is spiritual in how it reveals the chaotic violent history beneath the “order” of the nascent Australian “West,” and in how it reveals the true horror of that violence to both its characters and audience. This provides both characters and audience a possible catharsis and greater awareness of the use of violence and its physical and spiritual costs.

The film is set in a small town in the Australian Outback in the 1880’s and begins with a montage of photographs showing the town’s, and Australia’s, history. The first photographs depict brutal killings and arrests of Australian natives termed “Aborigines.” The next thread shows their forced “civilization” through British-run school systems. The final thread veers into the present “white” history of the town, showing the slaughter of a white family and their subsequent graves, suggesting a connection between the initial events of the montage and the final ones: a thread between the “orderly” violence creating the town and chaotic violence still haunting it. That chaotic violence is the horrific murder of the Hopkins family by the Irish-Aboriginal Burns gang, led by the charismatic and psychopathic Edward Burns (Danny Huston), setting forth the proposition of the film’s title and the eventual spiritual revelations of the film.

The maker of that proposition is Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), the town’s police chief who has come from England with his upper-crust wife and imbues British orderliness into his immaculate desert estate adorned with lovely gardens and ornate finery. The slaughter of the Hopkins, however, defiles that purity and traumatizes Stanley. To hopefully purge his town of the violent threat of the Burns’, as well as himself of his trauma, he makes an indurate offer to Arthur Burn’s brother, Charlie (Guy Pearce), whom Stanley has recently captured along with Charlie’s child-like mentally-challenged younger brother, Mikey. Stanley offers pardons to both brothers if Charlie hunts Arthur down and kills him. If he fails, Stanley will hang Mikey on soon-to-come Christmas Day.

This proposition, this attempt to instill order and control chaotic violence through violence itself, initiates the spiritual awakening for the major characters in the film, the members of the town, and the audience itself. The town, like Australia, was built on such violent control and subjugation of the Aborigines and (to a lesser degree) its Irish immigrants. So, Stanley’s proposition replicates that hubristic control and subjugation, setting off a chain of events revealing to all involved two spiritual truths of violence: its chaotic nature can never be fully contained by order, and few can bear its true horrors when they are fully revealed.

The four primary characters involved in that chain are Stanley; Charlie Burns; Stanley’s boss, the government official, Eden Fletcher; and Stanley’s wife, Martha. Charlie’s goal somewhat mirrors Stanley’s. Like the lawman, the outlaw Charlie is haunted by violence and sought to free himself from it by leaving Arthur’s gang (with Mikey) shortly before the Hopkins slaughter. Now, he must commit to violence one more time against one brother to save another—and himself—from it. Fletcher, who (backed by British authority) has regularly used violence to subjugate local aborigines and maintain “order” in his town, countermands Stanley’s proposition. Seeking to remind the town of its lawfulness and the violent power behind it, Fletcher orders Mikey to be flogged on Christmas Day with a certainly lethal 100 lashes. Finally Martha (Emily Watson), Mrs. Hopkins’ best friend, who has no experience with real violence but is haunted by nocturnal imaginings of it, decides to attend Mikey’s flogging to expiate her dreams and misguided vengeful anger.

This all comes to a head, and the film’s primary revelations occur, at Mikey’s horrific flogging. While Charlie is away hunting Arthur, Fletcher orders Mikey brought into the town square over Stanley’s physical and vocal objections. Looking childlike with his long, flowing hair and terrified, bewildered stare, he is tied to the whipping post as the town—thinking him guilty—looks on in approval, and the audience—knowing he is not—looks on in horror. The filming of the flogging moves into slow motion. However, it is not the intensifying, event-heightening slow motion Peckinpah famously utilized in The Wild Bunch. It is a belaboring, excruciating slow motion bringing the audience closer to both Mikey’s suffering and the townspeople’s developing repulsion at the horror they are witnessing. As their smiles segue into grimaces, and they gradually abandon Fletcher’s proffered spectacle, both film viewer and towns-person see violence’s visceral ugliness and reject the authority presuming to wield it.

No towns-person is more affected than Martha, who faints and falls not far from the residual blood. Now sharing her husband’s traumatized and “enlightened” state,” she retreats to her immaculate home and bathtub hoping to literally cleanse her trauma and guilt before her and her husband’s Christmas dinner. It is at this Christmas dinner, where The Proposition finalizes its spiritual awakening of both audience and characters, and where almost all narratives of violence meet in a cataclysmic fugue. With the literal sacrifice of an innocent occurring on that day, this choice of day for the final event cannot be coincidental. Christmas signifies the advent of a new spiritual era, as do the Christmas day events in the film.

Charlie, recognizing that advent for himself, finalizes the film’s “fugue” with the two words, “No more,” ending or altering many violent histories while opening possibilities of many nonviolent ones. Appropriately, the film’s last shot shows Charlie looking westward into the sublimely beautiful Australian sunset. Like the film’s townspeople and audience, he has endured and momentarily transcended the violence of Australia’s western past. Now looking forward into its new West, he can see and grasp a future spiritually free of that violence and past.