Westerns

John White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415558129
• eBook ISBN: 9781136855597
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

It is a common assertion that the history of America is written in its Westerns, but how true is this?

In this guidebook John White discusses the evolution of the Western through history and looks at theoretical and critical approaches to Westerns such as genre analysis, semiotics, representation, ideology, discourse analysis, narrative, realism, auteur and star theory, psychoanalytical theory, postmodernism and audience response. The book includes case studies of 8 key westerns:

• Stagecoach
• My Darling Clementine
• Shane
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
• McCabe and Mrs Miller
• Unforgiven
• Brokeback Mountain
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Including a chronology of significant events for the Western genre, a glossary and further reading, this introduction to an important genre in film studies is a great guide for students.

1
INTRODUCTION

THE APPROACH OF THIS BOOK

This book aims to provide readers with an overview of a genre that is frequently viewed and written about with enthusiasm but which is less often seen in relation to the range of possible analytical approaches offered by film theory. The main focus will be on introducing readers to a variety of theoretical approaches that could be adopted when studying the Western. Books on Westerns can devote much of their space to retelling the story found in each film under discussion: here, by contrast, it will be assumed readers are already familiar with the basic plot and are ready to begin considering potential ways of understanding the film in relation to the culture and society that has produced it.

It is a common assertion that the central myth of the United States is written in its Westerns, and there is clearly considerable truth in this statement.¹ However, in books on the subject, the investigation of this myth often amounts to little more than a retelling of legendary stories of the ‘Wild West.’ This approach tends to consider only the obvious surface narrative exchanges found in the films; struggles between groups such as cattle barons and ‘sod-busters,’ cavalry and ‘Indians,’ and marshals and ‘hired-guns.’ In places, the genre is more deeply examined in relation to the history of the period in which the films have been made, with the relevance of both American foreign and domestic policies being considered. This approach offers profounder insights into the Western and will form part of the analysis on offer here.² It will involve some consideration of the class confrontations, racial antagonisms, national identity crises, generational dislocations, gender tensions, and sexual repressions found within Westerns and the apparent certainties advanced around these issues. It will be suggested that each of these elements needs to be viewed as existing in relation to both the historical period represented in the film and the era within which the film has been produced. Westerns tend to take as their subject matter a particular (if somewhat elastic) historical era, but they also reflect (and participate in) the various contexts of the periods in which they have been made.

The danger with an approach such as this is that it can lead to rather vague generalized responses to individual films. For example, we may simply see Hollywood Westerns of the late 1960s as reflecting the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War and those from the previous 20 years as commenting on the Cold War.³ There is certainly some truth in such linking of Westerns to the historical period of their birth, but the detail needs to be considered carefully in relation to each film with an awareness that it is just as certain there are other equally interesting things that could be said about these same films. For this reason, a range of theoretical approaches will be explored in relation to Westerns. The effort will be to demonstrate ways in which further dimensions to each film can be uncovered and to suggest that the most fruitful investigations will often involve a combination of approaches. The best that can be hoped for in such a short book dealing with such a vast potential collection of films is that possible forms of investigation will be made sufficiently clear for readers to take these forward for themselves in the analysis of further Westerns.

As we are dealing with a commonly recognized genre, genre analysis will provide a starting point for our theoretical consideration of Westerns. As a genre, Westerns display a series of common features over time: recurring reworked visions of landscape and settled place, continually re-emerging set types of character confrontation, and constantly re-examined thematic oppositions. Westerns explore features of human experience that have remained constant: the isolation of the individual, the potential brutality of group and individual human interaction, the willingness of human beings to journey in search of a ‘better’ life, the tensions of family relationships, and the harshness of the natural world. Some of these features, and others that might be said to establish the Western as a genre, will be explored and outlined in relation to specific films. Ultimately, however, the limitations of both the generalized historical approach, mentioned earlier, and the simplistic categorization frequently associated with genre analysis will be identified. Against these shortcomings, this book aims to assert the potential insights offered by a range of further theoretical explorations and proposes the usefulness of incorporating a range of approaches within any analysis of a specific text. A complex matrix of films fall within the category of Westerns and each should be dealt with as a specific text existing within specific contexts and investigated from clearly designated theoretical standpoints.

It is at this point, as a range of theoretical perspectives are employed to examine the features of a particular film (or particular films) made at a particular time (and, therefore, within specific contexts), that the genre approach and the historical approach can return to validity. It is worth noting that, although this book will focus on Westerns, readers should be able to take the outlined theoretical approaches on offer and apply them to further film genres of their own choice. Although the debate over the nature, place, and role of genre analysis within film studies is not directly addressed, the clear implication of the line being taken here is that such analysis must take place in unison with other possibilities. The film text is situated within a series of overlapping and intertwined contexts involving historical, ideological, social, and economic considerations; is part of a process of production and consumption; is received in popular and critical terms; and becomes implicated in the development of theoretical discourses. The resulting polysemic nature of the text naturally creates a polysemy of theoretical and interpretative possibilities. Despite the fact that distinctive choices of approach to particular films will continually be made within this book, this underlying fact remains, and it should, therefore, be taken as understood that an array of further possibilities of investigation for any single text or combination of texts will remain unexplored. Any textual analysis we might undertake is forever coming into being and is never fully formed: an existentialist choice of possibilities continually exists.

AN INTRODUCTORY APPROACH TO WESTERNS

Westerns exist within the context of a Hollywood cinema industry that has operated as part of both the ‘American’ domestic economy and the global economy since before the First World War. These films also take their place within the wider media, specifically within a popular culture of frontier-town newspapers, serial magazines, paperback novellas, Wild West shows, radio shows, and TV series. At the same time, all of this – the cinema industry and the extended media culture – has taken its place within a changing twentieth-century society while putting forward representations of (in particular, but not exclusively) nineteenth-century American society. Westerns must, therefore, be seen in relation to the flux of American society over an extended period; that is, as existing at the moment of their production and exhibition within a pattern of institutions, types of socioeconomic relationship, forms of organization, and socially created norms and values and referring to an earlier period with its own expression of these social dynamics.⁴

The nature of genres in general and the Western in particular will be examined in the opening section of Chapter 3 of this book through an examination of specific case-study films. The concept will be considered in terms of its everyday use and in relation to theoretical considerations such as iconography and audience expectations. However, some initial discussion of the concept of genre is necessary as this book takes as its most basic premise the existence of a group of films that readers are going to be prepared to see packaged together as forming in some way a distinctive category of (in particular, but not exclusively) Hollywood movies. Briefly, the rules and conventions of genre are said to constitute a type of language, or code, by which filmmakers construct film while at the same time operating as a language, or code, by which audiences read film. These rules and conventions are seen as being subject to change over time as social outlooks (and audiences) alter and filmmakers develop the genre.

This concept of genre enables us to theorize about the ways in which films are organized. We are able to consider codes (systems of signs communicating meanings) and conventions (shared cultural, social, and textual practices) both within and between films. It is these codes and conventions and our familiarity with them that make it possible for us to ‘read,’ or understand, films. However, although the codes and conventions of a genre may come to seem to be so, they are not ‘natural.’ Through codes and conventions that are agreed between producers and audiences, a Western from the 1940s, for example, presents us with a very particular version of maleness. Over time, social norms and expectations change, and so conventions displayed in textual practice change. In our example, the nature of ‘maleness’ might come to be questioned or, diverging further, former notions of maleness might be satirized. A genre has the flexibility to incorporate such change while retaining a sense of itself as a continuing, coherent (if evolving) type of cultural expression.

In general terms, genres such as Westerns have been seen, on the one hand, as operating as a ritualistic playing out of social issues for the audience and, on the other, as a presentation of ideological positions for the audience’s consumption. Ultimately, however, genre can exist only within the relationship of particular spectators to specific films at certain moments. Genre has to be seen in relation to the expectations viewers bring to films and uses to which they put films (Altman, 1999). This is not to say broader cultural and ideological factors are not at stake and that genre as a social fact does not exist outside of the viewing experience but that the crucial motivating dynamic of genre exists in the interface between spectator and screen.

Despite this core moment of active agency, it is acknowledged here from the outset that the concept of genre also helps the film industry to manufacture products that are known to be acceptable to audiences, targeting particular market segments and tailoring the product to evolving social norms and expectations. In this way, audiences, as consumers, are able to organize their viewing, attending the cinema (or, more recently, buying DVDs or downloading films) to obtain the mix of genres they personally desire. It is also the case that within this process of production and consumption, genre enables advertisers to target their own market segments, or niche markets. Genres such as the Western, then, have provided one means of organizing the production, distribution, and exhibition of films as commercial products and facilitating the parallel consumption of further associated merchandised products.

Defining the exact extent and nature of the genre of Westerns is more problematic. Delineating boundaries in terms of the historical date the films are set (often 1840–1890 is used) or the place in which the stories take place (the American West) is not just fraught with difficulties, it is ultimately impossible. Why not 1830, or 1900, or contemporary to the date of production as with B-Westerns in the 1930s? What exactly are the dimensions of the American West? How far to the north or south does it stretch? Can we have Westerns employing locations east of the Mississippi? Similarly, bounding the Western in terms of content, film style, and generic purity is equally difficult. A considerable variety of costumes, props, and locations have proved possible; certain narrative structures have recurred but not in such a way as to exclude other possible constructions; some types of shot have been used in a whole series of Westerns but not in such a way as to be an unavoidable requirement of the genre; and, frequently generic hybridity has proved the very lifeblood of the genre. Genres are fluid, plastic, dynamic, used in different ways by different critics at different times for different purposes. However, though this means the term does not have ultimate, finally fully determinable parameters, it does not mean the term has not had potent cultural meaning for filmmakers, the film industry, audiences, critics, and scholars over a period of 100 years. Categorizing elements of the world around us is functionally useful in a variety of ways but never finally sustainable in terms of providing us with hermetically sealed groupings. If we define the Western in terms of similarity of plot or storyline, we find ourselves outlining and allowing genre membership to a series of deviations from whatever we posit as the ‘classic’ structure. If we define our genre according to iconography, we find ourselves with an ever-lengthening list of modifications to the stereotypical cowboy hat, six-gun, and horse. If we define our genre according to subject matter, we may force most films into cycles involving pioneering wagon trains, cavalry– Indian engagements, law and order in Frontier towns, homesteaders versus cattle ranchers, and Civil War–related material, but then we are faced with defining what might be seen as linking such an array of cycles. What could be said to make such a range of subject matter coherent as a single genre?

Christian Metz suggested a genre could be seen as ‘a single vast and continuous text’ with its own ‘textual system’ (Metz, 1974: 121–126). Films within a genre such as the Western are seen as having recurring cultural codes, themes, and ritual events such as male friendship and the gunfight and cinematic codes such as the mise en scène of the frontier town. This may be, as suggested earlier, ultimately unsustainable⁵ but it remains a useful approach to Westerns. Similarly, Claude Levi-Strauss’s concept of ‘myths’ as a means by which cultures organize their view of the world into a structure of basic oppositions remains helpful. Jim Kitses employs this as a starting point for constructing an elaborate system of oppositional ideas to be found in Westerns centring on the ‘freedom’ of ‘the individual’ set against the ‘restriction’ offered by ‘the community,’ the ‘purity’ but potential ‘savagery’ of ‘nature’ set against the ‘corruption’ of ‘culture,’ and the values of ‘the West’ set against the values of ‘the East.’ He suggests all of these oppositions stem from a fundamental tension between the concepts of ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilization’ which overarches everything else (Kitses, 1969). What Kitses provides us with is not so much a necessary, unavoidable structure for the Western but a description of what we tend to find in Westerns. Even so, his schematic representation of the genre remains highly suggestive of an entire series of interesting interplays of ideas that occur in the Western and a valuable aid to discussing these ideas. In the end, to search for a metastructure, a meta-narrative, or a meta-form for the Western is to quest for the unobtainable: categorizing as an activity does not work in terms of finality. And yet, the theory-based effort to ‘nail down’ the Western continually offers fruitful moments of insight. Kitses’s use of the term civilization, it might be argued, should in fact be ‘American civilization,’ that peculiar creation of an amalgam between pioneering independence and something that might be denoted ‘neighbourliness’ as opposed to ‘community.’ His use of ‘individual’ and ‘community,’ it might be argued, omits important related concepts of ‘hordes’ and ‘the mob.’ However, such arguments merely contribute toward pointing up the rewarding layers of discussion such structuralist frameworks can provide.

Will Wright (1975) considers four basic plots for Westerns: the classic p...

Table of contents

• Routledge Film Guidebooks
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN
• 3 THEORETICAL AND CRITICAL APPROACHES TO WESTERNS
• 4 KEY WESTERNS
• 5 CONCLUSIONS
• SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR THE WESTERN GENRE
• GLOSSARY
• FURTHER READING
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX