Robert Redford’s Death Shocks Fans Who Thought He Was Zach Galifianakis In That One Meme
American arts and culture lost a titan today with the passing of Charles Robert Redford Jr., star of such landmark films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and, apparently, The Hangover Part III.
As one of the most influential artists in the history of popular cinema, Redford leaves behind a body of work that is indispensable to the Hollywood canon, but, given how Redford’s once-prodigious output of projects slowed down once he reached his 70s and 80s, there are entire generations of terminally online moviegoers who may not have seen a single film from Redford’s peak. The actor, director and producer retired from onscreen roles in 2018, and, even before then, the average Gen-Z-to-Millennial was more likely to recognize the Sundance Film Festival founder as the bad guy in one of the Marvel movies than as Sundance himself.
Don't Miss
However, there is one Redford role that everyone who grew up on the internet would recognize, even if they don’t know it. Sydney Pollack’s 1972 Western blockbuster Jeremiah Johnson featured Redford as the title character who, in one of the most iconic slow zooms in movie (and meme) history, confused the hell out of today’s comedy fans who couldn’t believe that Zach Galifianakis was dead — or that he was 89 years old.
In the hit 1972 Western film, which could not cast Galifianakis as a lead because the comedian was three years old at the time, Redford played a character based on the legendary mountain man John “Liver-Eating” Johnson. A fur trapper and a Mexican War veteran, Redford’s scraggly and bearded Jeremiah Johnson endures tragedy and conflict as he becomes embroiled in inter-tribal warfare shortly after marrying a Native American woman and having a son with her, giving them both a tender nod as he learns to live off the land.
Roughly four decades later, that nod became one of the foundational pillars of internet culture as users reappropriated a clip of the Jeremiah Johnson scene as a wildly popular reaction GIF, one that most people apparently believed to be from some early Galifianakis project that they hadn’t seen. Today, those terminally online humor fans learned about an important piece of film and culture history — and I like to think that Redford himself would look back and smile knowingly if he could see them now.
