Westerns

Films through History

Janet Walker, Janet Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135204693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

The cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, schoolmarms and barkeeps of Western films have wholly transformed our ideas about the reality of the American frontier. Westerns is the first book to consider seriously the historical meanings and functions of the Western film genre. In Westerns, leading scholars unpack the ways in which the form has embellished, mythologized, and erased past events. Contributors explore the mythic Wild West envisioned by Buffalo Bill Cody, the revisionist aims of recent westerns like Posse, Lone Star, and Dead Man, and how the genre addresses key issues of biography, authenticity, race, and representation. Included is an introduction by Janet Walker.

part one
historical metafiction: the 1990s western

one
generic subversion as counterhistory

mario van peebles’s posse

alexandra keller

Although all Westerns are concerned with history, no one goes to the movies for a cynical history lesson. Audiences don't want history's messy facts; they want its meaning.

—John Mack Faragher, "The Tale of Wyatt Earp," Past Imperfect

As historian Richard Slotkin has rioted, the relation between myth and genre is one of content and form.¹ Genres are formally familiar ways to transmit certain widely held—sometimes widely contested—cultural meanings, which coalesce as myths. The western genre as Andre Bazin's "American film par excellence'² has also long been American myth par excellence. Before 1980, a western could be "affirmative" like My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1947), or Shane (1952), supporting ideas of "regeneration through violence,"³ the centrality of the individual, the inevitability of progress, the pleasure and Tightness of capitalism, the necessity of force and law, the primacy of a community of men. Or it could be "critical" like High Noon (1952), Cheyenne Autumn (1954), or Little Big Man (1970), condemning violence, eschewing the one-dimensional hero for a more complex figure (even a "psycho"), denouncing the genocide of Native Americans. Either way, the films were sincere; there was little questioning of the necessity for the western itself.

In its 1990s resurgence, however, the western reemerged under distinctly different conditions, specifically those of postmodernism. Two significant marks of postmodernism are generic destabiiization and the questioning of traditional myths and master narratives. That is, under postmodernism, the form-content relationship often can be radically altered. The crucial difference in the westerns revitalization, then, is this: the western can no longer take its central position, or even its very existence, for granted. Almost every western made in the 1990s has to justify itself as a western.⁴

Any mention of postmodernism inevitably invites and incites anxiety about what, precisely, postmodernism is. There are two fundamental modes of analysis vis-a-vis the "P word," one critical of it and one celebratory, albeit in a cautionary fashion. The first tradition, initially articulated by sociologist Jiirgen Habermas sees post-modernism as a willful renunciation of Enlightenment traditions, of which modernism was a progressive extension, and in the face of which postmodernism is a reactionary repudiation. Habermas sees postmodernism as awftrnodernism, a neoconservative negation of the modernist project that, as he sees it, was itself deeply suspicious and critical of dominant institutions and modes of expression. In a more rigidly Marxist mode, Fredric Jameson likewise criticizes postmodernism's refusal of universal representational codes in favor of nostalgic pastiche, "an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history."⁵ For its critics, then, postmodernism ironically signals at least one universality: the inability to think historically.

The second perspective, represented by Linda Hutcheon, Hayden White, and Charles Russell among others, notes the radical potential of postmodernism to renegotiate our relationships to long-standing master narratives and dominant ideologies. Against criticism from both neoconservatives like Hilton Kramer and neo-Marxists like Terry Eagleton that postmodernism is inherently apolitical, Hutcheon notes, "Postmodern art cannot but be political, at least in the sense that its representations—its images and stories—are anything but neutral, however 'aestheticized' they may appear to be in their parodic self-reflexivity. While the postmodern has no effective theory of agency that enables a move into political action, it does work to turn its inevitable ideological grounding into a site of de-naturalizing critique."⁶ It hardly need be said, however, that when examining any individual postmodern trait, object, or event, these two "schools" of criticism tend to function far more on a continuum than as opposing modes of thought.

Once the western allegedly disappeared, a certain elegiac rhetoric pervaded criticism about it. The comprehensive first edition of The BFI Companion to the Western proclaimed its task tenable in part because the western had passed into history as surely as had the West. As Richard Schickel wrote in that book's introduction, "[the western of the 1980s] always turns out to be either a conscious ... or unconscious ... parody, teaching us a surprising thing: that the western is (or was) a very fragile form... ."⁷ In his review of that volume Peter Riskind noted, "It is ironic, but perhaps fitting, that a book like The BFI Companion to the Western becomes possible only when its subject is dying or dead, and thus a fit specimen for cultural archeologists."⁸ Slotkin's own prognosis for the western was grim. "Westerns made since 1975 generally show a weakening sense of genre—a failure ... to creat[e] . .. the illusion of historicity that is so central to the genre," he wrote. "To be sure, many of the ideological stances, mythical structures, and plot structures have reappeared in other film genres, for example, the police and the science fiction film. But this merely testifies to the continuity of the myth and ideology of American culture, not to the durability of genre. If Westerns do come back, it will be because someone has been able to duplicate John Ford's achievement of connecting the special language of the Western to a story and a set of images that—with absolute economy of form—will represent for us our true place in history."⁹ The form of the western, then, rather than its content, was moribund. In other words, the demise of westerns had more to do with how the stories were told than what the stories were saying. But the diverse natures of 1990s westerns seem to say that the how and the what are not so discrete.

Slotkins concern with "our true place in history" resonates profoundly in the newest crop of westerns, for even in their diversity, a significant number of recent westerns show a marked preoccupation not only with their own generic value as westerns, but also with the discourse of history itself, and their relation to it. A large number of the most recent westerns, including Dances with Wolves (1990), Walker {1987), Wyatt Harp (1994), Tombstone (1993), Posse (1993), Wild Bill (1995), and Lone Star (1996), foreground their concerns with history either through their narrative or aesthetic strategies, or both. In this essay I want to suggest that this concern with history, be it affirmative or critical of traditional notions of historical discourse, is one of the strongest characteristics of contemporary westerns, and that one of the clearest places to see this trait is in the lone western made in the 1990s from an African-American perspective, Mario Van Peebles's Posse.¹⁰

Posse can be situated toward the critically progressive end of a continuum of historically engaged westerns, all of which are revisionist in one way or another; this continuums two polemical boundaries are Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves and Alex Cox's far lesser known Walker. I want briefly to explain precisely how each of these westerns sets up its particular paradigm of history, and how that affects the film's claims to revisionism.

A caveat: westerns under postmodernism are probably more diverse in their approaches and agendas than they used to be, and it is crucial to remember that just because a western is made in the postmodern era it need not be a postmodern text any more than all art made after cubism is modern by default. Walker is the scathing biopic of American adventurer William Walker, his movement well beyond the geographical frontier of the United States, and his takeover of Nicaragua in the mid-nineteenth century. It is clearly not chronologically part of the onslaught of post—Dances with Wolves westerns, but it merits inclusion because it reminds us that, though Dances with Wolves (and subsequently Unforgiven [1992]) without a doubt encouraged the production of more westerns, its critical and financial success cannot singlehandedly be credited with revitalizing the genre any more than Heaven's Gate (1980) can be blamed for killing it off. There are risks in periodizing 1990s westerns strictly in terms of the numerical calendar. Just as American film of the 1970s is often considered to have started with the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde| so we might consider that the first recognizably 1990s western, Walker, was actually made in 1987. Moreover, though its disappointing box office doesn't reflect it, Walker, shot in Nicaragua with the participation of the Sandinista government, was as highly anticipated as Dances with Wolves, and its production was thoroughly covered in American mainstream media, including the New York Times and Newsweek.

Taken as a pair, Dances with Wolves and Walker elucidate two limit cases of New Western Historicism, both seemingly liberal revisionist.¹¹ Dances with Wolves is a nostalgic revision, which uses traditional realist historical and narratological modes. Walker is a reflexive revision, which uses postmodern aesthetic tropes such as pastiche to construct a more discursive and ironic historical mode. To briefly bring us back to Slotkins myth-genre distinction: Dances with Wolves plays on the familiarity of the western form (and Hollywood's traditional conceit that there is no distinction between form and content) to revise and critique the content of the western myth. But it does almost nothing to problematize the form of that myth. Walker starts from the more Brechtian assumptions that form and content have a frictive, unstable relationship, and that the proposal that their relationship is unproblematic is one of the most powerful rhetorical maneuvers of traditional westerns. The film therefore treats genre revision and myth revision as indivisible projects.

Postmodernism, marked as it is by blurred boundaries, including those between theory and practice, enables films to be made that are themselves acts of historiography as much as they are acts of (non)fictional narrative. For the western, especially, this is a radical shift from its own tradition. For at the same time as the western stakes its claims to authority in a discourse of historical specificity, accuracy of detail, and nostalgia, these very discourses simultaneously lay claim to a universalizing, transhistorical (perhaps even ahistorical) power, a totalizing approach to narrative rhetoric. Westerns have tended to engage in mythography far more frequently than historiography—and in the main they still do. But western mythology is set in a pseudohistorical framework that often camouflages its mythographic project. This is achieved through realist strategies of narration that conflate the historical and the discursive such that they "narrate past events in such a way that events seem to narrate themselves."¹² If westerns had no real relationship to historical discourse, they would hardly have the power they do. But the relationship is far more complex than the genre itself typically suggests.

Indeed, the easy conflation of history and myth in the western has given it an extraordinary ability to define American identity through a dual appeal to a framework of "fact" (the geospecifics of the West, the particular temporal framework) and "abstraction" (the concepts that are hung on this mise-en-scene, such as self-reliance, community, free enterprise, individualism and so on). Philip French has argued that "the one thing the Western is always about is America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past."¹³ But if it has always been a revisionist genre it has not, until relatively recently, wanted to announce itself as such. The western's most traditional and austere forms of revision (e.g. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962], Fort Apache [1948]) have taken extremely localized and specific stories and proposed reinterpretation almost entirely within the hermeneutic framework presented by the film itself. These narratives close with an understanding that even if the official version of history is false, the notion of official history is a valuable one, and worth maintaining. Even now, such films as Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp reaffirm the necessity of myth over fact. At the end of Wyatt Earp, Wyatt (Costner) and Josie (Joanna Going), on a boat bound for Alaska, encounter a young man who tells the story of his uncle, whom Wyatt Earp saved in what appears to be a very dramatic way, true to the Earp legend. When Earp admits to Josie, "Some people say it didn't happen that way," she replies, "Never mind, Wyatt. It happened that way." This is the closing couplet of the film. The couple takes an active role in validating the myth. This "proactivity," to give it the nineties twist it warrants, is also an accurate reflection of the couple's postfrontier self-mythification.

Subsequent forms of revision, such as the cycle of Vietnam-influenced westerns in the 1970s, are counteractive, which is to say that in the process of debunking the standing rnythohistory they seek to put a countermythohistory in its place (cf. Little Big Man [1970] and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson [1976]). The center of the genre was supplanted by the margin, but the margin then became the center. What marks the western genre's move into full-blown postmodernism, is a sense, in many of these films, that there is no center (though, as Lone Star suggests, this does not mean that there is no longer any place to which to be marginalized). This has the effect of looping the genre right back to its traditional maneuver of conflating myth and history but with a crucial difference: the aesthetic and narrative strategies employed, particularly intertextuality and pastiche, often highlight and expose the potential artificiality of the distinction between history and mythology. That is, history is no less capable of ideological stupefaction than is mythology.

What postmodern historiography (and metacinematic historical narrative) does that previous forms of historiography and historical film narrative do not is distinguish and foreground the difference between history and the past. To put it another way, whereas Andreas Huyssen claims that postmodernism consigns historical discourse to "the dustbin of the obsolete episteme, arguing gleefully that history does not exist except as text,"¹⁴ Linda Hutcheon (responding directly to Huyssen) proposes that postmodernism, "in arguing that history does not exist except as text ... does not st...