The Western

David Lusted

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138171701
• eBook ISBN: 9781317874904
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Western introduces the novice to the pleasures and the meanings of the Western film, shares the excitement of the genre with the fan, addresses the suspicions of the cynic and develops the knowledge of the student. The Western is about the changing times of the Western, and about how it has been understood in film criticism. Until the 1980s, more Westerns were made than any other type of film. For fifty of those years, the genre was central to Hollywood's popularity and profitability. The Western explores the reasons for its success and its latter-day decline among film-makers and audiences alike.

Part I charts the history of the Western film and its role in film studies. Part II traces the origins of the Western in nineteenth-century America, and in its literary, theatrical and visual imagining. This sets the scene to explore the many evolving forms in successive chapters on early silent Westerns, the series Western, the epic, the romance, the dystopian, the elegiac and, finally, the revisionist Western. The Western concludes with an extensive bibliography, filmography and select further reading.

Over 200 Westerns are discussed, among them close accounts of classics such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, formative titles like John Ford's epic The Iron Horse, and early cowboy star William S. Hart's The Silent One together with less familiar titles that deserve wider recognition, including Comanche Station, Pursued and Ulzana's Raid.

Part One
The Background

CHAPTER ONE
The Western as an Imaginary Space

A Childhood Game

When I was a child I played a game called Custer's Last Stand. It took its name from an event in American frontier history when Northern Plains Indians at the Little Big Horn River massacred a battalion of Seventh Cavalry troopers led by General George Armstrong Custer. Roberta Pearson has called it: 'an encounter of military insignificance but great symbolic resonance' (1998, p. 199). In our game, though, just two roles mattered; ail were soldiers with one exception who was an Indian. In the game, the soldiers took up a place and aimed pretend rifles and six-guns at the lone Indian. Contrary to appearances and despite the odds, history of a sort was re-enacted as the Indian would descend on his soldier victims and 'shoot' the lot of them. At this point, however, resemblance to the historical event and to life itself disappeared as the Indian chose his replacement from among the fallen, so that life and the game could revolve again.

My memory of this game demonstrates the power of the imagination to translate real events and fictions into everyday routines, practices and modes of living. Play is important for children as it provides opportunities to experiment with ways of relating to people in the social world around them. Good game-playing as children helps us to play at living with greater control and satisfaction as adults.

Fiction is another form of game-playing, and not just for children but for all of us, regardless of age. When we write and read novels, and make and watch fiction films, we enter into the imaginary, the cultural practice of imagining for pleasure and understanding. Fiction in films and other media offers popular cultures in which we can imagine our lives differently and learn ways of living better.

The fiction of the West as imagined in Western films is a good example. It offers a landscape of stories with a resonant vocabulary referencing a moment in American history and geography. Imagine a cattle drive on the Santa Fe trail, a gunfight in Abilene or carrying the mail for the Pony Express, and a cast of characters appears: outlaws like Billy the Kid, lawmen like Wyatt Harp and fictional pioneers like Chingachgook, the Last of the Mohicans. Hear the names of actors in Western films like Broncho Billy Anderson, Randolph Scott, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood - in films directed by Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah. Such textured language invokes imagery, in an associated iconography of visual decor (from open range to saloon bar), props (from bullwhips to Winchester rifles) and costumes (from spurs to Stetson hats). Such sounds and sights combine in dramas of conflict and resolution to inform and enrich our lives and the relationships we enter into. Such fiction is important, not just to escape out of ourselves, but to enter into ourselves more fully.

Playing `Cowboys and Indians' was a regular feature of my childhood. The street was a prairie, sticks and fingers were guns and bows, appropriate props and dress were optional. The individual and collective imagination was fed by Westerns on the screens of cinemas and television sets, in the context of a wider culture which included novels, comic strips and advertising, hi this, my childhood was little different from the childhood of twentieth-century generations around and before me. The idea of the West in Western fiction has been central to the global imaginary for over two hundred years.

The Western Imaginary Today

For generations today, games about the 'Cowboys and Indians' of Westerns may seem as remote as the geographical space and the historical period of the American West to which - however distantly - they refer. Certainly, Western fiction continues to be written and filmed but on far less a scale than at any time in the twentieth century.

There are obvious reasons tor the decline, connected with the passing of history. The agrarian society of the Western disappeared as tire twentieth century advanced. The ease with which Western actors and stunt men naturally and skilfully rode horses dwindled with the growth of a modern, urban America (Carey, 1995). Contrast Ben Johnson in Wagonmaster (1950) with Keifer Sutherland in Young Guns (1988) as they gallop and witness the difference in the saddle between Johnson's easy delight and Sutherland's mortal terror.

The loss of personal witness to the times in which Westerns are set is also a factor in the decline of the Western. Westerns were made by film-makers who knew the historical West at least through the personal experiences of older generations. Director John Ford claimed that his version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that climaxes My Darling Clementine (1946) came from the very lips of its central character, frontier lawman, Wyatt Earp (Bogdanovich, 1367, p.85). Another director of Westerns, Delmer Daves, claimed his maternal grandfather took the trip West in a covered wagon and later rode as a Pony Express rider (Wicking, 1969, p.59). No one today can boast of such personal relationships, however fanciful.

The system of film production that supported prolific numbers of Western films made at this time also declined after the 1960s (Buscombe and Pearson, 1998, p.1). At the height of Western film production in the first half of the twentieth century, film studios had their own ranches and horse wranglers, their own standing sets of Western towns and interiors like saloons. Under pressure from the great structural changes that followed the Paramount decree of 1946, Hollywood studios gradually gave up this kind of ownership, making it more expensive to stage individual Westerns (Maltby, 1995, pp.71-3).

The decline of the Western is therefore due to changing conditions of cultural and film production. But the decline of the Western imaginary - the desire to make fictions about the West - is due more to matters of space as of time, in a number of senses. First, in the sense of physical space; as the motor car has taken over the streets, so streets have become a dangerous site for play. And alternative sites - like suburban gardens and homes - may make home-owning adults constrain children's game-playing for fear of property damage. Kids don't play Cowboys and Indians much anymore because the freedom of designated spaces for play have materially changed, and so have the games. Secondly, in one of those new domestic spaces, playing games takes as much virtual as material form; children's interactive game-playing increasingly happens in cyberspace with computer screens where many of the distinctions that former distribution media made between fantasy and reality are now scrambled.

The main reason kids don't play Cowboys and Indians as much concerns less physical or virtual spaces than the space in their heads; children today imagine other subjects for game-playing. Modem society and its toy consumer industry provide perhaps a far greater range of opportunities and tools for imaginative play. So, there is another, wider and arguably more important fictional space from which the Western has been displaced from the popular imaginary. This includes, as Richard Slotkin has suggested (1992, p.636), the disciplines of space fiction and science fiction, which are set in an imaginary future rather than in the imaginary past of the Western.

Like the Western, this outer space is centrally set on a frontier - 'the final frontier' as Star Trek's Captain Kirk has it - and is far less known than the inner space of the Western. What might be going on beyond earthly dramas is a popular subject for contemporary fiction because there are stories yet to imagine about a physical space beyond it. Though Western fiction survives, its centrality has diminished because the fiction it imagines is predicated on a national frontier geography whose history is now largely settled. While America was still making itself, the Western had stories to tell, but when America emerged as a global force, matters of its own destiny diminished, and this was the destiny that many critics argue the Western centrally debates. Once America 'found' its modern identity, the Western became history.

Fictional forms are affected by changes in the cultures that produce them. As America's cities became gradually more dramatic spaces during the twentieth century, so the Western's rural landscape competed with: the cityscape in new genres like the musical, the gangster and crime film. Later, the rise of suburbia would produce its own psychodramas in cycles such as the slasher and yuppie horror film. America's frontier also extended beyond its own territories with its participation in twentieth-century conflicts overseas (Europe in two 'World' Wars, the Cold War, combat in Korea and Vietnam, the Middle East and myriad eisewheres). Over time the idea of the American West as a dramatic space has been superseded by new generic spaces of war and conspiracy and in the displaced imaginary of new fictional genres like science fiction.

This movement from genres set in the past to contemporary and futuristic genres was encouraged by film industrial advances in special effects, computer-generated imager)' and plastics technology. The ways in which alien lands and creatures could now be imagined and destroyed made the graphic possibilities of the West appear more limited. For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, the Western was a generic site of technology-led advances in film form. However, the slow-motion ballets of blood-splattered death in a Western such as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) gave way to further developments in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the body-morphing in science fiction films like The Fly (1986), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and The Matrix (1999). Developing sophistication in military technology also changed the iconography of action fiction in such a way that the potential armoury of science fiction made the six-gun, the Winchester repeating rifle and even the Catling gun of the Western appear as primitive as the single-shot musket. For the Western, then, its historical frame lacks the modernity of more recent action genres, and its settled familiarity makes it now an historical form. An audience for the action film remains, but the Western has become more an American equivalent to the British empire or heritage film in the sense that its generic associations are with the past.

Gender, Race and Social Class in the Western

The story I told earlier of a childhood game makes it possible to see beyond an individual memory to significant political as well as cultural changes in the Western's meaning. As the use of the pronoun he suggests in assigning roles, my game was invariably played by boys. The girls available for play in our street were largely excluded from it and as commonly drew the line at joining in. There were no roles explicitly for females, clothes got dirty, and it was competitive and endlessly repetitive. And 'Who dies best?' is perhaps not a crucial feminine concern, though why it might be a male one is an intriguing question. Maybe these were qualities of boy-culture that implicitly sidelined girls. The game connects to the Western as a fictional genre more widely in that the Western has historically privileged stories centring on men, offering limited and exceptional roles for women. Women play roles which are conventionally secondary to male action such as 'saloon girls' and 'squaws', romantic foils for men, but only rarely heroes in their own right. The rise of feminism and its increased female self-consciousness in the second part of the twentieth century has provided fictional spaces for women to become central action protagonists, from the heroes of Alien (1979) and Tomb Raider (2001) to the villains of Single White Female (1992) and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1991) (Tasker, 1993), Such new female-centred action films appearto expose the Western as a more limited gendered space, a space of male action.

At the same time, this game was played not just by boys but by white boys. Although there was a role for an Indian, there were no Indians to join in. Real 'Indians' were to come later, though not from the Americas but from the Indian subcontinent, often as refugees from East Africa, to join racial 'others' of Afro-Caribbean descent in a racially diverse neighbourhood. But if any among these ethnic groups had been there, would they have seen a role for themselves any more than the white females?

What the game implies is not only the gender identity or the Western but also its racial and ethnic identity. Many Westerns invoke an imperialist histoiy in which the westward movement of white travellers of European origin was made at the expense of a Native American population, reduced in numbers through successive military campaigns of genocide. The gradual acknowledgement during the twentieth century of America's foundation on the destruction of its indigenous peoples is emblematically measured in the way that the term 'Indian', which once described them, has been replaced by first 'American Indian' and secondly 'Native American'.

The problematic gender and ethnic relations in the idea of the foundation of the West make it no longer as culturally acceptable to make Westerns that ignore such transformations in the politics of gender and ethnicity. Such changes make it more difficult to imagine Western scenarios for audiences in modern cultures.

Is the Western dead, then, a thing of the past, in more senses than one? Is it a sectarian white male genre whose concerns are politically unacceptable in a modern age? It may appear odd to start a book on the Western with this exploration of the declining interest in its imaginative world, but I do so in part as a corrective to a greater optimism among many Western commentators, especially those central critics whose ideas I explore later (Buscombe and Pearson, Kitses and Rickman). Yet it must equally be acknowledged that, despite an evident decline in the number of Westerns made over the past thirty years, they continue to be made and to surprise with their dramatic possibilities. Rather than searching for reasons for a notable decline, it may be that social, cultural and political changes such as these will challenge the Western imaginary to renewal. Recent films suggest such a possibility, including conventional titles such as Tombstone (1933) and Geronimo: An American legend (1994), and more unconventional titles produced on the fringes of the Hollywood system, such as The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) and Dead Man (1996). Perhaps a reason for a continuing faith in the vital possibilities of the Western imaginary lies in my childhood game or, rather more this time, in further reflection on my memory of it.

One feature of the game that resonates for me, with hindsight, is its implied award system. To be the Indian in the game was a reward, not a punishment. This was an odd ideological choice for white boys growing up in a country where the only racial divisions that 'Indians' represented were fictional ones in Westerns. Furthermore, the reward was predicated not on success in action so much as in spectacle, in the aesthetics of display. Power was conferred on the Indian, the power to judge and control the choice of a replacement in the game.

In addition to this, the grounds for choice lay in how the soldier boy died. In this simplest of narrative events, it was the manner and display of death that was rewarded. This could be a spectacular fall from a height, perhaps lying still as death, or the arrangement of the body In death. Where is the pleasure and meaning in this apparent racial confusion and macabre spectacle of masculine display? Maybe there was a meaning the game had only for boys, a thrill in playing out an aspirant masculine grace that enabled them to connect with realms of aesthetic feeling (more crudely, with ideas about what is beautiful) more associated with the other gender. Since the climactic reward of the game was to become the, next killer of white men, there would be a certain play with ideas not only about gender identity but also about ethnic identity.

I attribute some biographical learning to Westerns. Westerns taught me that Indians could threaten white folk like me, but they also taught me that Indians were victims of white racism. Something of both ideas redounds in the game. Despite its undoubted association with white supremacy, the Western imaginary is also sufficiently flexible to allow a more complicated and contradictory relation to ethnic identity than a simple division between racial categories. Westerns appear to provide a fictional space to consider one's own identity in terms of racial and ethnic difference.

Confounding the simple, negative divisions between gender and ethnicity made earlier, what the game suggests now is that complex dramas of identity played out through the spectacle of action are bound up in the Western imaginary. What enables the Western to construct such playful explorations of gender and ethnic identity is perhaps the overdetermination of social position. Although any children could play it, this was a game invented not only by white boys but by working-class white boys. They were on the street because the impoverished conditions of home offered few amenities, attractions and pleasures in Britain's post-war economic depression. They were together because the peer group is always as formative a social agency as the family. They were bound together in a game that rewarded the representation of an oppositional minority politics and the display of gender aesthetics. They invented the game because of the pleasure its display of repeated action offered to a group of white working-class boys in exploring their own social position, through a fictional scenario of gender and ethnic relations. They used the Western imaginary to play out in symbolic form matters impinging on dieir own individual and group identities in stratified positions of social conflict.

While we played, the images in our heads were drawn not from any real West - we had few history books and historical images, and The West was not a topic on the school curriculum - but from the fictional West of Western films, comics and television series. This popular representation of die West is The West to most people, even in the American West today, and it affords an otherworldly, imaginary space of dramatic excitement, film star glamour and pictorial splendour.

The Western Imaginary and a Childhood Game

The meaning of the game for me now is bound up in this more complex meaning of the Western film as a genre fiction. The Western has been a formative cultural experience for generations of audiences who have drawn on its evocative and affecting images, characters, narratives and spectacle to make life pleasurable, rich and meaningful. Yet, as my exploration of a childhood game demonstrates, the Western bears co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Referencing Notes
• List of Photographs
• PART ONE - THE BACKGROUND
• PART TWO - THE FILMS
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index