I’ve long been a fan of primary resources when it comes to learning about history. Particularly when it comes to the American West—in fact, I’ve compiled an entire Goodreads list of memoirs, diaries and letters relating to the pre-1920 West, of which I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface myself. There’s nothing like reading a personal account by someone who was really there—and next best is good fiction by an author who actually experienced the time and place they wrote about.
Of course it’s wonderful for research, if you’re a writer. But after spending some years reading this kind of material, I’ve gradually become aware of an additional side-effect: you begin to develop a sensitivity to false notes struck in more recent historical fiction and in film. Not just blatant errors like anachronistic speech or inaccurate clothing and weapons—subtler things like underlying attitudes, depictions of cultural and societal norms, ways of thinking and reacting, which you realize seem quite foreign to the experience of the people who wrote those earlier memoirs and novels.
I recently had a “lightbulb moment” on this topic as it relates to the Western genre.
Ever since I became a real enthusiast for Western fiction and history, there has been one question puzzling me: what happened to the Western? Though there are periodic claims of a resurgence, and people are still writing books and making the occasional film, let’s face it: the Western as a genre does not exist in the way it once did. It is not widely popular with the masses of readers, and it is not viewed in the same way as it once was. And I wanted to know why. After a lot of thinking and puzzling, the best I could come up with were a pair of companion theories. One, over-saturation—after decades of widespread, pervasive popularity, the Western simply wore out its welcome, eventually swamped by the legions of cheap “shoot-’em-up” imitations that obscured the best of the genre and gave it a bad name. Two, the cultural and moral upheavals of the 1960s, which changed the prevailing American worldview so drastically that the Western, largely rooted in traditional American values, was battered by revisionism and political correctness and could no longer survive in the mainstream.
That’s the best I could figure, but I was never wholly satisfied with those conclusions. Something was missing. And then one day recently, a conversation with my mother about the destruction of American literature, coming on the heels of reading Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ essay “The West That Was,” made something click in my head. The Western didn’t die a natural death, nor was it defeated by force in the 1960s. The Western was destroyed from within, and evidence of steps in the process can be seen in some of the most popular and well-crafted Western films of the mid-20th century.
I’ve always been aware that period films show the influence of the decade in which they were made, from the cut of the costumes to the attitudes reflected in the screenplay. In fact, I once wrote a blog article on how the influence of the Great Depression can be seen in the B-Westerns of the 1930s. I now believe that what killed the Western was a gradual assimilation and reflection of the values of the 20th-century decades in which the films were made and books were written—until by the onset of the 1960s it was ripe to vanish into the sea of revisionism that wiped out its last resemblance to the West that writers like Rhodes knew.
What I have in mind now is to sort out some of the thoughts that led me to this conclusion, over an informal and likely rambling series of posts, using examples from Western film compared to some of that early literature. Titles I’m thinking of covering include The Tin Star (1957), High Noon (1952), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Yellow Sky (1948), and possibly more. I may even catch up on a couple of films I haven’t seen yet, for the purposes of comparing them to their source material. I don’t have a planned schedule and I may very well go off on tangents, but I hope you’ll come along for the read (very bad pun) and find some food for thought along the way.
Subsequent posts:
Part I: The Tin Star (1957), High Noon (1952), and the Myth of the Cowardly Townsman
Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and the Pitfalls of Half-Told History
Part III: Four Faces West (1948), 3:10 To Yuma (1957), and the Problem of the Quasi-Accurate Adaptation
Part IV: Yellow Sky (1948) and the Ambivalence of Film Noir
Conclusion
image: “Stray Man Heads Home” by W.H.D. Koerner
I’d read and enjoyed a few of Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ books before, but this collection really increased my appreciation for him as a writer and a chronicler of the West. The stories and essays in The Rhodes Reader showcase all the best hallmarks of Rhodes’ writing: his command of the English language pure and simple, his gift for delightful and often hilarious dialogue and wordplay (akin to my old favorite O. Henry), and his thorough personal knowledge of the New Mexico landscape and of cowboy and ranch life. I almost feel like I could head for New Mexico with this book under my arm and be able to find my way around.