The Western

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Daniel Yezbick

Over the course of the twentieth century, the cultural significance of the Western has overwhelmed the borders of a simple film genre. The Western film's many incarnations remain the most obvious and popular frame for the mythos of the American frontier, but the Western itself is usefully conceptualized as a widely transitory aesthetic mode comprised of recognizable conventions and icons that have spread across the face of international culture. From early-nineteenth-century examples like wild west shows, wilderness paintings, and dime novels to the legions of celluloid cowboys and Indians that ruled American movie houses from the 1930s through the 1960s, the full scope and majesty of the Western also made substantial contributions to radio dramas, television series, comic books, advertisements, rodeos, musicals, and novels. As the Western's various forms continue to coat our cultural landscape, its apparently simple images have acquired a prolific range of meanings. Today, the Western constitutes a truly international entity, but its visual and ideological roots retain a distinctly American sense of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship. At the heart of its mythology of cowboys, Indians, horses, and six-guns, the Western can be read as a potent allegory for American society. All the hopes, triumphs, failures, and anxieties of American cultural identity are subtly written into the Western's landscape.

The primary colors of the Western palette are simple but bold. First, the Western can never be Eastern; its aesthetic foundations are consistently grounded in the South, West, or Northwest portion of the American continents. Some Westerns like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) migrate as far as South America. The Lone Ranger enjoyed a brief sojourn fighting pirates on the Barbary Coast, and Midnight Cowboy's (1969) Texan Hustler, Joe Buck, even emigrates to New York City. In every case, the Westerner always operates in a distinctly obvious fashion that effectively brings the West into foreign and exotic locales. Jim Kitses and Edward Buscombe suggest that the Western mode is essentially a fusion of American history, myth, and art into

a series of structuring tensions: between the individual and the community, between nature and culture, freedom and restriction, agrarianism and industrialism. All are physically separated by the frontier between the West and the East. These differences may be manifested in conflicts between gunfighters and townspeople, between ranchers and farmers, Indians and settlers, outlaws and sheriffs. But such are the complexities and richness of the material that the precise placing of any group or individual within these oppositions can never be pre-determined. Indians may well signify savagery; but sometimes they stand for what is positive in the idea of "nature." Outlaws may be hostile to civilization; but Jesse James often represents the struggle of agrarian values against encroaching industrialization.

A man with a gun is usually at the center of these continually shifting situations and conflicts. In any medium, from advertising to radio, the Western drama is rarely resolved without some use of, or reference to, masculine violence. The Western's "game" of binary conflicts also relies on an easily recognized hierarchy of standardized pawns. These "stock" characters comprise a profoundly limited cast of expressive icons headed by principal Westerners like the cowboy, the gunslinger, the sheriff, the cavalry man, the outlaw, the rancher, and the farmer. These are often accompanied by feminine companions and minor bourgeois players like the frontier wife, the saloon tart, the town drunk, the doctor, the mayor, the merchant, the gambler, the barber, the prospector, and the undertaker. Minorities like Mexicans, Indians, and half-breeds tend to exist on the periphery as obvious antagonists, "faithful companions," or ambiguous alien influences. Whatever their arrangement, this specialized cast populates a decidedly wild, moral universe that codifies the ethical complexities of a century that seeks order and peace through nostalgic backward glances at the untamed west. The form's continual preoccupation with the ghosts of the Civil War, the threat of Indian miscegenation, and the disappearance of the open plains all emphasize our wish to simplify or assuage a problem in American society through Western pageantry. Phil Hardy carefully delineates the cultural significance of the Western's therapeutic charms:

In short, at a time when frustratingly complex issues like the Bomb, the Cold War, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Suez, were being raised, the Western remained a simple, unchanging, clear cut world in which notions of Good and Evil could be balanced against each other in an easily recognizable fashion.

This is not to say that Good always triumphs or that Good ever appears as constant and clear cut as the authors of Westerns might have wished. On the contrary, the evolution of the Western exhibits a tendency towards both pious optimism and depressed cynicism. For all the vibrant Americana celebrated in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Westerns like William Wellman's Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Sam Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) depict a decidedly pessimistic American milieu that turns on ruthless physical, racial, and economic violence like lynching, massacres, and prostitution.