A series of bite-sized musings on the history of the American West (and its portrayal in film and literature).
A few months ago, some interesting discussion on Twitter about genre tropes got me thinking again about the prevalence of the quick-draw gunfighter trope in Westerns—one of the signature elements of the genre that seems to be least based in fact but most popular in film and fiction. This time I found myself looking not just at the fact of it, but the “why,” and came up with a theory about it which I fondly imagine to be original (but I’d be very interested to know if anyone else has reasoned on these lines).
My theory: the preoccupation with the quick-draw gunfighter is, on some level, a fascination with the concept of a man having the power of life and death (literally) at his fingertips.
At its most basic, a story’s villain having this power makes him seemingly invincible, creating high levels of danger and suspense—while in a more complex story, a morally good or conflicted character with this power becomes the subject of conflict over how (or whether) he ought to use it. Most gunfighter Westerns are ambivalent about this, with the hero’s gunfighter skills being necessary to save the helpless ordinary folk from the villains, while at the same time those very ordinary folk—and sometimes the gunman himself—deplore his possessing those same skills. The classic example of this is Shane, of course, and in some slight degree the movie version of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
In such stories the man with the power of life and death is often presented as an outcast, a “marked man” simply because of that power, not even necessarily his own moral character. This problem is either resolved by his remaining an outsider and riding off into the sunset, unable to become part of the community he rescues, or by his forswearing the use of his powers in order to join it. I wonder if one could say the former resolution expresses the belief that power itself is morally evil, while the latter leans more toward the idea that only the improper use of it is evil (yet still not going all the way in this direction, since the gunman is required to hang up his guns to achieve his happy ending).
It’s also interesting to ponder that the gunfighter plot, while to some degree engaging with the idea that force or even violence is necessary to protect the innocent from wrongdoers and civilize a wilderness, edges round it a bit by putting all the forceful or violent action in the hands of a character who is at least partly outside that civilization—a sort of “necessary evil for thee but not for me” situation. A man who is already morally suspect or tarnished handles the dirty work—even if he’s allowed to reform afterwards.
It’s an intriguing paradox: a fascination with the power over life and death, but an apparent compulsion or obligation to depict power in itself as morally suspect. There’s a lot of interesting food for discussion there, I think. But that is as far as we will go for the moment.
image: “A Fight For the Cabin” by Harold von Schmidt
Previously: Outlaws and In-Laws
