The Afterlife of the Hollywood Western

Pete Falconer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781137546708
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137546715
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines the Western genre in the period since Westerns ceased to be a regular feature of Hollywood filmmaking. For most of the 20th Century, the Western was a major American genre. The production of Westerns decreased in the 1960s and 1970s; by the 1980s, it was apparent that the genre occupied a less prominent position in popular culture. After an extended period as one of the most prolific Hollywood genres, the Western entered its "afterlife". What does it now mean for a Hollywood movie to be a Western, and how does this compare to the ways in which the genre has been understood at other points in its history? This book considers the conditions in which the Western has found itself since the 1980s, the latter-day associations that the genre has acquired and the strategies that more recent Westerns have developed in response to their changed context.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. FalconerThe Afterlife of the Hollywood Westernhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54671-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Pete Falconer¹

(1)

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Pete Falconer

End Abstract

What Is James Bond Doing in the Old West?

A familiar image from the opening moments of Westerns is that of the rider (or riders) in the wilderness. This has been among the first things that we have seen in many Westerns over the years. The hybrid science-fiction Western Cowboys & Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011) gives us its version of this image, but not as an opening. What we are shown in the first five minutes of the movie, before we get to the rider in the wilderness, suggests a different relationship to the Western genre.

The film begins with a shot of the landscape, recognisably that of the American Southwest: rocky terrain, sagebrush, mountains in the background. The camera pans across this landscape until a man (Daniel Craig)—his name, we will learn, is Jake Lonergan—lurches up into shot, coming to sudden, panicked consciousness. The next few shots show us Jake’s confusion and uncertain relationship to his surroundings. The landscape is kept out of focus as Jake looks around, not seeming to recognise his environment. In the shots following his introduction, Jake remains visually separated from the indistinct haze around him. He does not seem to know how he came to be in his current situation; we see him registering, as if for the first time, the wound in his side and the futuristic cuff on his wrist. In the dirt in front of him is a black-and-white photograph of a woman, the first clear indication of the film’s period setting (Jake’s clothes, though dirty, are plain enough to avoid being obvious historical markers). It is later revealed that Jake is suffering from amnesia, and at this stage in the story has no recollection of who or where he is.

When a family of scalphunters appears behind Jake, they too are shown out of focus, extending the initial emphasis on Jake’s undefined relationship to the place in which he has found himself. The scalphunters, a father and two sons, mistake Jake’s cuff for a prison shackle and attempt to bring him in for a reward. Jake kills the three men in a sudden display of instinctive fighting ability. As he plunders their bodies for clothing and gear, putting on boots, a gunbelt, a waistcoat, a gun and finally a hat, Jake starts to take on a more recognisably Western appearance. It is only after Jake has been decked out in Western accoutrements that we are then given the familiar generic image of him as the lone rider in the landscape.

What we start with in Cowboys & Aliens is a character who, at least temporarily, does not seem to know how to be in a Western. The initial relation is one of uncertainty and estrangement, in terms of both place (as suggested in the visual separation of Jake from his surroundings) and time (we see the futuristic technology before we see the period photograph). That this is articulated through a major star—James Bond, no less—makes it seem all the more like a characteristic contemporary relation to the Western genre. The contemporary figure does not seem to belong to the world of the Western and must be reconstructed in the image of the genre before the film can proceed. It is not that the conventions of the Western are inaccessible to the movie; rather, they are not immediately to hand and need to be retrieved.

This book is about a way of understanding the Hollywood Western in recent decades: in the context of its “afterlife”. By “afterlife” I mean the period since the decline of the Western as a mainstream Hollywood genre, produced regularly and routinely in the popular American film industry. Westerns are still made in Hollywood and elsewhere, but for some time now they have appeared only intermittently, in isolated cycles and clusters. Between these flurries, there have been periods in which few new Hollywood Westerns have emerged—at times, none. After an extended period as one of the most popular and familiar Hollywood genres, the Western now endures in more peripheral and residual forms.

“Afterlife”, as a critical term, has been used to refer to the later contexts and incarnations in which works, figures or tropes have been revived, extended or transformed. Cultural afterlives can manifest in a range of ways, from specific allusions and appropriations, such as the unofficial merchandise through which fans declare ongoing connections to Thelma & Louise (Cook 2007, 1), to broader discourses like the “cultural tug-of-war” over defining and commemorating the legacy of Oscar Wilde (Wood 2007, 17). One common element, though, is a sense of retrospection; the concept of an afterlife is built on the contrast between previous and subsequent contexts. Helen Davies describes her book Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show as “a study of how the lives of nineteenth-century freak show performers have been revisited and reinterpreted by contemporary literature and culture” (2015, 3). This type of retrospective relationship, in which elements associated with the past are transposed into new contexts, is often central to discussions of afterlives.

The notion of an afterlife provides us with one way of looking at the Western genre in recent decades. The genre can be seen as an object associated with the past, subject to forms of revival and retrospection. Indeed, as I have previously argued, these associations have sometimes been difficult to avoid in more recent Westerns, which “have come to be regarded […] as revivals of a once-popular genre that is understood to have come to an end” (Falconer 2015, 180). The initial sense of distance between the contemporary star and the Western in the example from Cowboys & Aliens reflects a version of this perspective. Despite the characteristically Western setting, the conventional trappings of the genre are given a more gradual and deliberate introduction than we would expect in Westerns from earlier eras. Part of this likely to be a consequence of the film’s mix of genres; it is employing the Western genre in a consciously different fashion, in combination with science fiction. Nonetheless, the implication seems to be that, however the genre is to be used, it must first be revived. In this book, I will be examining some of the ways in which the Western has been revived in recent decades, the aspects of the genre that have been retained or adapted and the latter-day associations that it has acquired.

What Happened to the Hollywood Western?

The Hollywood Western has never come to a definitive end, but the period in which Westerns were produced in large numbers and maintained a prominent collective profile has been over for some time. The status of the Western as a representative Hollywood genre has rightly been contested (Neale 2000, 133) but the genre was a significant part of the Hollywood repertoire for many years. According to the statistics in The BFI Companion to the Western, Westerns accounted for between 20 and 35% of Hollywood features produced between 1935 and 1959 (Buscombe 1993b, 427). Over 100 Westerns were produced each year from 1935 to 1943, and again in 1948 and from 1950 to 1952 (ibid., 426). Although series and B-Westerns contribute to the large annual totals in this period, Steve Neale also notes “the unusual numerical prominence of A-Westerns […] in the 1940s and 1950s” (2002, 27). Neale argues that the Hollywood Western went into long-term decline after its final peak in the 1950s (ibid.) and the BFI Companion figures bear this out, showing that the number of Westerns produced annually fell by 90% between 1957 and 1977 (Buscombe 1993b, 426). To help establish a context for more recent Westerns, it is worth looking further at the genre’s material decline and subsequent fortunes.

The decline in the quantity of Westerns partly reflects the wider decline in the number of features produced in Hollywood after the breakdown of the studio system, a 41% drop between 1957 and 1967 (Buscombe 1993b, 427). However, we can also see a decline in the proportion of Westerns, which did not return to over 20% of Hollywood features after the 1950s (ibid.). This suggests a specific decline for the Western beyond that seen in the surrounding industry. Neale argues that, between the early 1960s and the early 1970s,

…the Western’s numerical decline was either periodically halted or periodically masked by the production of television series such as The Virginian and Bonanza, by the impact of the Italian Western and by the visibility, notoriety and critical or financial success of a number of cycles and films. (2002, 28)

Despite the decline in the quantity and proportion of Hollywood Westerns at the beginning of the 1960s, the still-recent peak was sufficiently high, and the elements noted by Neale were sufficiently prominent for the genre to retain a significant popular presence for some time afterwards.

The BFI Companion’s statistics for the quantity and proportion of Westerns produced each year come to an end in 1977 and 1967, respectively, but Andrew Patrick Nelson provides some further figures for the Westerns released between 1969 and 1980. These are derived from the lists in Phil Hardy’s (1983) reference work on Westerns, published under several different titles (the version I have is The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: The Western). Nelson presents two additional sets of annual figures, one for all the Westerns listed by Hardy and one that tries to approximate the number of conventional Hollywood feature Westerns by omitting “all foreign, television, sex, and hybrid Westerns” as well as “movies with contemporary settings” (Nelson 2015, 62). Although it is not always clear which films Nelson has excluded on this basis, both sets of figures suggest a similar pattern for the 1970s. The Hardy/Nelson statistics show that the decline in the annual production of Westerns becomes much more pronounced between 1972 and 1974: a fall of 67% based on all movies from Hardy’s lists or 79% based on Nelson’s “US” figures (2015, 63). The figures pick up a little in 1975 and 1976, but never fully recover. The number of Westerns released remains in single figures—compared to the triple figures of the genre’s earlier peaks in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s—from either 1977 (all movies) or as early as 1973 (the “US” figures) (ibid.). Both sets of figures indicate an overall decline in the production of Westerns of around 80%...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Rhetoric of Genre
• 3. “Fixing” the Western
• 4. The Wild West and the Dirty South, or, by Their Teeth Ye Shall Know Them
• 5. Once Upon a Time
• 6. Old Men and Old Movies
• 7. The Western’s Greatest Hits
• 8. Hybrids and Transpositions
• Back Matter