You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
I belong to the last generation of Americans that grew up with Western heroes.
When I was young, the most visible pop culture heroes were cowboys. It’s hard to imagine today, but in the late 1950s and 1960s, there were at least 48 television Westerns, including Bat Masterson, The Big Valley, Bonanza, Death Valley Days, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Maverick, My Friend Flicka, Rawhide, Rin Tin Tin, The Roy Rogers Show, The Virginian, Wagon Train, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Wells Fargo, The Wild Wild West and Wyatt Earp.
Yet by the 1970s, all that had slipped away. After the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War, it was hard to admire gunfighters or battles with the Indigenous peoples. The Western frontier, once a symbol of hope, escape and freedom, has been transformed into a landscape marked by a shrinking population, dying farms, ghost towns and nuclear waste.
I want to write today about the mythic West and how painters, photographers and filmmakers shaped the West of our collective imagination and, in turn, influenced public attitudes and policies.
No one has written more eloquently about the mythic West than Richard Slotkin, the Wesleyan University historian and cultural critic who recently retired. As Slotkin has shown in such books as Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, Gunfighter Nation and, most recently, A Great Disorder, artists and purveyors of popular culture played a central role in the creation of this nation’s foundational myths and their works profoundly influenced this country’s identity.
I was moved to write this post by a recent South African play, a “wildly original,” “mind-blowing,” “brutal reimagining” of the myth of the American frontier, told from the perspective of the Indigenous population, enslaved African Americans, Chinese and European immigrants, miners, cowboys, Protestant missionaries, and women of all backgrounds, including church ladies and haggard prostitutes.
“A bold interrogation of history and its impact on the present,” Dark Noon is “brutal and rawly authentic,” “undeniably bold and daring,” but also “surreal” and “disjointed.” A take on the title of the iconic Gary Cooper Western, the performance is as much about South Africa’s history as the United States’—told from the perspective of those who were displaced, exploited and victimized.
The seven South African actors, who don blond wigs and wear white talc on their faces, speak periodically in Zulu or Xhosa. The play challenges the typical boundaries of the theater, blending the digital, the visual, the auditory and sensory through a series of montages and monologues, minstrel-like sequences and dance-like movement.
Making extensive use of meta-theatrical commentary, live video feeds and audience participation and interweaving the comic, the cartoonish and a host of Western stereotypes with shocking and deadly serious gunplay, the play offers a powerful commentary on the American tendency to mythologize and romanticize its past. Yet even though the play depicts the frontier as a site for colonial violence and white supremacist imperialism, it doesn’t come across as preachy or didactic. It’s too playful for that, with its musical allusions to the Village People and Peggy Lee and its symbolic references to Coca-Cola, Chinese takeout and football, pitting settlers versus Natives. More Sergio Leone than Dances With Wolves, the play is a discomfiting counterpart to Hamilton: an absurdist tale of trauma and racially motivated, psychopathic violence, unlike anything you’ve seen.
Dark Noon offers a dramatic counterpart to the history that Slotkin—and such historians as Richard W. Etulain, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Gaylyn Studlar, Jane Tompkins, Robert Warshow, Elliott West, Richard White and Will Wright—have written. Their books, too, dissect the popular myths and symbols that concealed the violence and greed that undergirded American expansion and that legitimized the ruthless exploitation of Western resources and people.
Slotkin is especially interested in how images of stalwart pioneers, courageous lawmen, intrepid Indian fighters and cowboys as latter-day knights on horseback were constructed, disseminated and consumed and how these images colonized the American imagination, even as the United States became a modern urban, industrial, corporate nation-state.
It’s noteworthy that Charles Schreyvogel, whose paintings of Western towns and cavalry charges heavily influenced cinematic images of the Wild West, drew most of his pictures from a rooftop in Hoboken, N.J., while Owen Wister, author of the Western classic The Virginian, was a Philadelphia lawyer. As Slotkin shows, the frontier West was largely the imaginative creation of Northeasterners and Europeans, which served to meet many of their psychological and ideological needs.
The era of the cowboy, spanning from the late 1860s to the late 1880s and peaking in the 1870s and 1880s, was relatively brief—far shorter than the eras of the lumberjack, the whaler or the circus, which never exercised as great a hold on the popular imagination. Beginning with the rapid post–Civil War demand for beef, this era ended abruptly, due to the “Great Die-Up”—the severe winter of 1886–87, which devastated the cattle industry—and the introduction of refrigerated railroad cars and barbed wire and conflicts between cattlemen and farmers, which made open-range cattle drives impractical.
Yet, thanks to dime novels and Wild West shows, a highly romanticized view of the frontier West emerged, offering escapism and adventure during a period of rapid industrialization, urbanization and industrial consolidation. From the late 19th century into the 1970s, the West of the imagination would exercise a powerful grip on this country’s self-image.
Unlike the historic West, which was more culturally diverse and urbanized than the East or Midwest, the mythic West emphasized rugged individualism, heroism and clear moral dichotomies. The imagined West relegated women and people of color to secondary roles, whereas historically, these groups played significant roles in shaping the West. Whereas the imagined West focuses on gunfights and cattle drives, it largely overlooked farming, trade and industry.
The appeal of the mythic West was straightforward. It represented freedom, open spaces, self-reliance and the possibilities of a fresh start. It offered heroic archetypes that embodied virtues like bravery and integrity and a clear moral narrative, free from the ugly reality of slavery. For all of its escapist and nostalgic qualities, the imaginative West continues to influence various aspects of American culture, from fashion and art to automotive branding. Even today, vast swaths of the public love Western art, like Frederic Remington’s, which critics dismiss as pedestrian, tacky and tasteless, crude, clichéd, contrived and clumsy.
For much of U.S. history, the public responded enthusiastically to images of the Western frontier. The West embodied unspoiled nature, an environment where men could free themselves from the constraints of civilization, overcome alienation, achieve wholeness and commune with nature. This conception of the West not only shaped this country’s national myths, self-image and cultural and political imagination, but foreigners’ views of America.
Western art and film raise difficult issues of interpretation. To what extent did their images serve to justify conquest and exploitation while obscuring the hardships and injustices of western expansion? To what degree were these works responsible for promoting a “caveman” ideal of masculinity that many of us find unsettling: that a real man is strong and silent, self-controlled, invulnerable and stoic, laconic and taciturn, but also tough, defiant and fearless, distrustful of women, and capable of fierce violence?
Certainly, the mythology of the Western frontier does not withstand critical historical scrutiny. It portrayed the defeat of the Plains Indians as an inevitable price of progress. It almost wholly ignored the Mexican presence, except to portray Mexican American women as highly sexualized señoritas. It whitened and glamorized downtrodden cowboys and ignored the harsh realities of cowboy life. It portrayed the Western landscape as a garden of Eden, a paradise of plenty, a place of hope, opportunity and a fresh start—overlooking the dust storms, the droughts and the economic and environmental disasters that made life on the Plains a constant struggle.
By portraying American history as a conflict between advanced and primitive people for the control of the West’s resources, this genre drew attention away from the conflict among social classes and associated progress with the conquest, displacement and subjugation of nonwhites.
For almost a century, the quintessential American hero was the gun-toting cowboy, with his high-crowned hat; tall-heeled, pointed-toe boots; and rawhide-trimmed buckskin. Representing the ideals of rugged individualism, forthrightness, independence and a love for freedom, the cowboy stood in stark contrast to the perceived corruption and effeteness of Eastern elites. The Western landscape, characterized by its towering mountains, expansive skies and endless plains, served as the mythic stage where the nation’s fantasies unfolded—where good triumphed over evil, Eastern bankers and their corrupt land agents were vanquished, and nonwhite threats were subdued.
The Western hero arose at a particular historical moment: at a time of rapid industrialization, urbanization and immigration, when the actual Western frontier was disappearing. As Slotkin has shown, these developments provoked an identity crisis, as political and economic elites and intellectuals feared the loss of the values that had supposedly made the nation great and began to search for new frontiers. It was then that the public found a mythic hero in the cowboy.
This identity crisis had several dimensions. First, as the 20th century dawned, many Americans were afraid that men had lost their virility and vigor. Birth rates were falling. Economic independence declined as fewer men became independent farmers, artisans and shopkeepers. The urban environment seemed to soften men. The Boy Scout handbook of 1910 lamented that the “robust, manly, self-reliant” American boy had been transformed into “a lot of flat-chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality."
A further threat to masculinity came from changes in women’s roles, as growing numbers of women entered male workplaces and colleges, took part in sports, demanded the vote, and attacked male-only bastions of recreation such as the saloon and the pool hall. In this context, many men sought to reassert their masculinity through sports (including prizefighting) and wilderness adventures. Men who failed to meet a manly idea were derided as timid, cowardly, effete and effeminate—as sissies, as a new word put it.
The Great Depression of the 1930s precipitated another crisis of masculinity. By stripping many men of their productive role, financial failure produced a deep sense of humiliation. Westerns once again became popular, with the Western hero exemplifying self-confidence and self-reliance. Although World War II might seem to have brought this crisis to an end, in fact male anxieties intensified. During the ’40s and early 1950s, many films, like Double Indemnity, were filled with weak-willed men manipulated by amoral women. There was intensifying anxiety that in corporate society, the organization man had been neutered and feminized.
The late 20th century witnessed yet another masculinity crisis, as women’s increased sexual independence and personal and sexual freedom and increased earning power transformed the institution of marriage and eroded male dominance in everyday relations between the sexes. One response was proliferating images of hypermasculinity, embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme. No longer, however, was masculinity symbolized by the Western hero—but by other kinds of action heroes: fearless soldiers, aggressive big-city cops and violent avengers.
The very first American film to tell a story, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903, was a Western. Silent-era Westerns quickly established the genre’s classic and hurtful caricatures and stereotypes: the heroic sheriff, the dastardly outlaw, the good and the bad Indian, and also a host of damaging stereotypes that reinforced harmful notions about racial purity, sexual double standards and the supposed impossibility of harmonious mixed-race identities, including the villainous Mexican and the violence-prone “half-breed.” Over 4,000 Westerns were made between 1926 and 1967—a quarter of all the movies—and for three decades, from 1939 to 1969, the Western was Hollywood’s most consistently popular and widely produced action film.
Western films dealt with some of the biggest themes in American history: the seizure of land from its Indigenous inhabitants; the waves of emigration west by trappers, herders, ranchers, farmers and pioneers; the arrival of new technologies, including railroads, barbed wire and improved firearms; and the cultural conflicts between whites and nonwhite peoples.
For decades, the Western proved to be among Hollywood’s most flexible and, in a few notable instances, most sophisticated genres. The 1939 John Ford and John Wayne Western Stagecoach is not only about the physical dangers of the journey through an untamed frontier but bigger themes: class prejudices and social stratification, the tension between civilization and savagery, and the conflict between legal and moral justice, as well as the importance of solidarity in overcoming adversity and the possibilities of achieving redemption through acts of courage.
In part a Cold War allegory and a civics lesson, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic High Noon is, first and foremost, about moral courage and standing up for one’s principles and responsibilities, even in the face of danger and the citizenry’s moral cowardice.
Another collaboration between Ford and Wayne, the 1956 Western The Searchers, also raised important moral issues. This film explores the deep-seated racism and quest for vengeance that the protagonist harbors towards Native Americans as he obsessively pursues his niece, who has been abducted by Comanche Indians. The picture also raises questions about cultural assimilation, as the niece, who grew up among the Comanche, struggles between her adopted identity and her white settler roots.
Up until the 1960s, the frontier West embodied much that was considered best about the United States: its rugged individualism, democratic spirit and connection with nature. Then, suddenly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Western began to decline. First came the anti-Western, which critiqued the genre’s own myths, followed by the genre’s nearly complete demise.
Revisionist Westerns, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, sought to subvert the classic tropes and mythologies that had dominated Westerns for decades. Instead of glorifying the cowboy hero, the frontier spirit and manifest destiny, anti-Westerns presented a more cynical view of the American West.
By portraying the Western hero as morally ambiguous, flawed or even villainous, these pictures challenged the black-and-white morality of traditional Westerns and questioned the glorification of vengeance and justice through violence. Aiming for greater historical accuracy and realism, these films depicted the harsh realities of life in the West, including the violence, racism and exploitation that were glossed over in earlier Westerns.
Many revisionist Westerns, like Little Big Man (1970), used the depiction of a massacre of Native Americans to comment on the Vietnam War, drawing parallels between the atrocities committed in the American West and those in Southeast Asia.
These films questioned the use of violence as a means of resolving conflicts, a staple of traditional Westerns. By depicting the psychological and social consequences of violence, the revisionist Westerns encouraged viewers to reconsider the glorification of violent heroes.
By the 1970s, the Western’s popularity was in steep decline. The rise of new genres, such as science fiction, fantasy and superhero films, provided audiences with fresh narratives and spectacles that overshadowed the Western and captured the public’s imagination in ways that Westerns could not. There were, of course, a few exceptions, like Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974) and Billy Crystal’s City Slickers (1991), which use satire and comedy to critique the Western genre and its clichés. Kevin Costner’s extraordinarily popular 1990 film Dances With Wolves presented Sioux culture as an attractive alternative to the violent, exploitative and materialistic nature of the dominant American culture. Nevertheless, the age of the Western was kaput.
No longer do mass audiences respond to the plots and iconography of the Western. The reasons are obvious: present-day audiences tend to view the Western as racist and sexist at its core. The stereotypical representations of people of color are indeed abhorrent, while the irredeemably masculinist character of the genre strikes even many male viewers as objectionable. Then there’s the pacing—the slow-moving plots, the long silences and the barren landscape that bore today’s impatient, stimulus-hungry audiences.
The West of the imagination—a place where men were tested physically and morally and ultimately triumphed in taming a harsh wilderness—has been displaced by a very different vision of Western history, as a grim tale of conquest, exploitation and violence, where women and people of color were browbeaten, subjugated, exploited and abused.
Despite its decline, the Western genre has left a lasting legacy. Elements of Westerns can be seen in other genres, including space operas like Star Wars and modern action films. Much as Americans still wear blue jeans and drive Mustangs, Durangos and Silverados, the key plot conventions of the Western remain intact and have simply been projected onto new environments, whether violent inner cities or outer space.
In our pop culture–fueled fantasies, we still glorify the lone hero who confronts challenges and overcomes obstacles through personal strength, courage and ingenuity. We still think of justice as a personal quest rather than a formalized legal process, with the hero upholding a rough moral code, delivering vigilante justice where the law is ineffective or corrupt. Then there’s the sense that as society becomes more structured, individual freedom is lost; that true manliness involves physical strength, toughness, stoicism and bravery; and that violence is necessary to maintain order and promote the greater good.
Slotkin is, I think, right: the frontier myth still colors the way we look at ourselves and the world. We still think of ourselves as cowboys and pioneers, in touch with nature, with a special mission to save the world from evil. In spite of all that has changed, this foundational cultural myth and the tropes it spawned remain largely intact.
