MYTH OF THE WESTERN

MYTH OF THE WESTERN

New Perspectives on
Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative

Matthew Carter
© Matthew Carter, 2014

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsvi

Introduction1

PART ONE
1. A Good Man with a Gun 29
2. A Fine Good Place to Be 77
3. Rethinking Revisionism 114

PART TWO
4. What Counts as History and Whose History is It? 163
5. Actors Transcending the Darkness 194
Conclusion219

Bibliography228
Index242
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have enjoyed the advice and support of a great many colleagues, friends
and students in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the
University of Essex. I am grateful to all those whose ideas and opinions have
undoubtedly made it into this book under the guise of my own opinions. Sadly,
I cannot rightly recall who said what and when; I can only offer a general
thank you and hope that this will suffice. A specific thank you should go to Jeff
Geiger for all his help during the preparation of this book.
I am greatly indebted for the advice, criticism and encouragement given to
me by David Musselwhite. David, you read every word when you did not have
to, and it breaks my heart knowing that you did not live to see it realised. I can
only hope that you would have been proud of me. I must also acknowledge
my colleague and friend John Cant for all the fruitful and engaging discus-
sions; for his brilliant observations on the Western and a great many other
things besides. Whatever insights this book can lay claim to, he can lay claim
to most of them first. John, I owe you a great deal. I am, of course, grateful to
my parents for all their love and support, and for generally giving me the best
upbringing I could have hoped for. I am happy to mention Sophie Cansdale,
Shohini Chaudhuri, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Richard Gray, John Haynes,
Geoff King, Ildiko Olah and Andrew Patrick Nelson, all of whom have helped
me in numerous ways over the years. I also would like to thank Gillian Leslie,
Jenny Peebles and Rebecca Mackenzie of Edinburgh University Press for
making the publication process run so smoothly.
Finally, I want to thank Caja Dan, my partner, best friend and the love of my
life, without whom all this would be meaningless anyway.

A shorter and modified version of Chapter 4 was first published as ‘“I’m

just a Cowboy”: Transnational Identities of the Border Country in Tommy
Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’, European Journal of
American Studies, Online, 1 (2012), and reprinted in Andrew Patrick Nelson
(ed.), Contemporary Westerns: Film and Television, 1990–2010 (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), pp. 149–69. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was

­vi
acknowledgements

first published as ‘“The Dismal Tide”: Shoring up the Fragments in Joel and
Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men’, Icfai University Journal of American
Literature, 2(3/4) (August/November 2009): 73–89.

vii
INTRODUCTION

I
As a consequence of decades of revisionist histories of the American West,
the traditional frontier themes of the ‘domestication of the wilderness’ and
‘Manifest Destiny’ have been largely discredited. Many analyses of the politics
of westward expansion have interpreted the process of ‘nation-building’ as
nothing short of imperialism motivated by economic forces; imperialism that
often resulted in wars of extermination against America’s indigenous popula-
tions. The established history of the American West was addressed in the light
of the narratives that became available as hitherto ‘silent’ groups – women,
African Americans, Native Americans and other racial groupings – insisted
that their presence ‘on the frontier’ be acknowledged and their voices heard. In
short, the established history came to be seen as not so much biased as wholly
mythic. The source of this mythology was a political discourse informed by
notions of Anglo-American racial superiority and American exceptionalism.
Together with a popular culture that demanded an heroic version of history,
such ‘frontier narratives’ flourished first in the dime novels and stage shows of
the late nineteenth century. But the principal medium whereby frontier mythol-
ogy was popularised in the twentieth century was, of course, the cinema. And
just as the grand narrative of the frontier had splintered under the weight of
historical revisionism, so too was the cinematic Western understood to be
anachronistic, leading to the common appellation ‘post’, as in ‘post-Western’.
Although the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a healthy
number of Westerns being produced, and this output shows little sign (so far)
of abating, the genre is generally regarded as a diminished form, its so-called
‘classical’ phase consigned to the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood’s past. Writing
in 2007, Los Angeles-based film journalist, John Patterson, declared that the
Western ‘is to all intents and purposes deader than Billy the Kid, Jesse James,
John Ford and Sam Peckinpah put together.’1 Patterson reiterates the common
assertion that has been made since the 1980s at least; namely, that the Western
was a ‘political casualty of the Vietnam [War]’, that the ‘overthrow of the

1
myth of the western

Western’s myths’ necessarily means that the Western itself had also ‘died’.2
The Western had been found guilty by many of perpetuating the myth of the
West; that is to say, the preconceived and erroneous notion that the settling of
the frontier was the sole preserve of Anglo-American men, where racial and
gendered ‘others’ served only to secure white male identity. The genre’s heroic
protagonist – the gunfighter – was now no longer viewed as the champion of
civilisation, but as a dangerous relic, his individualism and masculinity now
vilified rather than celebrated.
Furthermore, it is commonly accepted that the genre itself was largely
responsible for its own decline, whereby historical revisionism was reflex-
ively incorporated into a series of introspective ‘revisionist’ Westerns, which
attacked the ‘classical’ phase’s erstwhile triumphalism. In The American West
(2009), Karen R. Jones and John Wills sum up this popular shift in historical
opinion: ‘Progress read conquest, and the frontier became the “f-word” in
revisionist vocabulary.’3 Conjoined with more established terminology, the
genre that had once celebrated the American story of the coming of a ‘Garden’
of bountiful opportunity now depicted a ‘Desert’ of failed mythic promises:
historical trauma, racial conflict, liminal identities.4 The end logic of this argu-
ment essentially asserts that the Western participated in a self-defeating enter-
prise, which Stephen McVeigh describes in The American Western (2007) as
‘the destruction of the genre’s vital centre, even though the films [themselves]
are a part of that destruction’.5
With specific regard to historical revisionism in the Western, and in one of
the most accomplished contemporary studies of the genre that I have read,
Patrick McGee writes that his book From Shane to Kill Bill (2007), ‘partici-
pates in the shift away from the frontier myth in recent Western historiography
and film criticism’.6 This, he says, allows him to focus on the significant issues
of ‘class resentments’ and ‘social contradictions’ that are evident (although
largely disavowed) in contemporary US socioeconomic and political discourse.
Popular culture, on the other hand, has few such constraints and, as McGee
rightly suggests, it ‘never stops finding new ways of saying the unsayable’.7
Actually frontier mythology has never really ‘left’ the United States, although
the terms by which it is rendered or assessed may have changed. Neither has
the myth been absent from its popular culture, although equally its preferred
forms may oscillate in popularity and productivity, depending upon a given
period’s cultural perceptions and moods and the popularity of particular
genre cycles. Indeed, as far as many are concerned, the issues raised by the
myth survived the so-called ‘demise’ of the Western through migration into
other Hollywood genres, such as War, Action, and styles like film noir. (David
Thompson argues as much in relation to Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
and Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005).8) Likewise, sci-fi franchises like
Star Wars (1977–2005) and Star Trek (1966–) have been commonly inter-
preted (at least in part) as Westerns transposed into space.
That frontier mythology looms large in contemporary US popular culture

­2
introduction

is surely a truism, and a number of film scholars have recently taken account
of the ‘migration’ of the themes of frontier mythology from the Western into
numerous other Hollywood genres.9 McGee acknowledges the importance
of considering the pervasive nature of the myth in US popular culture forms
when he writes that, just because his analysis of the Western ‘participates [in
this] shift away from the frontier myth [it] does not mean that it leaves the
issue out of the account’.10 While this ‘shift’ is apparent and, indeed, forms a
valuable part of recent scholarship on the West and the Western, the political
appropriation of frontier mythology in response to the shocking events of 11
September 2001 – coupled with the current level of Western film production
– has encouraged me to foreground the sociocultural, historical and political
dimensions of the myth in my own study.
In Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (2010), Robert B. Pippin
argues simultaneously for the essentiality of the Western and frontier mythol-
ogy for analysing the psychological dimension of US political philosophy. He
claims that the Western is ‘about America and the self-understanding of rapid
American modernisation in the West in the nineteenth century’.11 He also
impresses upon the reader the serious consequences for the United States of
shaping historical memory by myth and of filtering the historical experience of
the West through the prism of popular culture:

It is also true of course that while these events are foundings they are
also the results of imperialist colonization or even wars of extermination.
Thus the way these societies remember or mythologize their foundings,
and their attempts to do so consistent with their own pacific, Christian,
and egalitarian self-image, will make for a serious and complicated
problem.12

It is because of similar sentiments that the so-called ‘mythological’ approach

to the Western – that is to say, the use of frontier mythology as a framework
or ‘language’ through which to ‘read’ the genre – has come under scrutiny
within film scholarship during the last decade or so. As Steve Neale suggests,
advocates of the mythological approach to the Western, ‘view the latter solely
as a vehicle for an unambiguous version of the former [and] stress the former’s
overarching characteristics . . . rather than the latter’s local features’.13
It remains true that strong threads of this approach persist in academic
studies of the frontier, and are tied to theories of the Western’s development
that insist that only revisionist Westerns criticised the myth. In Coyote Kills
John Wayne (2000), for instance, Carlton Smith reiterates the view that fron-
tier mythology promoted a kind of ‘cultural exceptionalism’ by which ‘pop
culture became the refractory point for oppressive colonialist allegories’.14
Where ‘traditional westerns have functioned as vehicles for an imperialist
ideology’, Smith argues, ‘revisionist’ Westerns from the 1960s onwards sought
to ‘critique’ this myth and expose ‘the way in which the West has always to

3
myth of the western

a large degree been a historical construction, mediated by colonial concerns,

and a violent response to difference’.15 Smith utilises post-modernist theory
in an attempt to interpret a contemporary set of ‘marginalised texts’ – both
literary and cinematic – against traditional narratives of Anglo-American ‘self-
definition [and] projected fantasy about the self’.16 Ultimately, he suggests that
‘the texts in Coyote Kills John Wayne . . . often give voice to an alternative
history, and indirectly expose the dynamics of a historical memory predicated
on forgetting’.17 In American Cinema in Transition (2011), Martin Holtz simi-
larly argues that the classical Western is ideologically conservative, and that
the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ Westerns of the late-1960s to mid-1970s can
be considered to be politically revisionist. His study seeks to analyse ‘a repre-
sentative corpus of Westerns in the two respective periods’, before going on to
argue (like Smith) that the Westerns of contemporary Hollywood (‘Hollywood
Now’) have developed towards critical self-reflexivity.18
The central aim of this study is to offer a series of alternative arguments
towards such popular interpretations of the Western. That is to say, I aim to
question the professed aesthetic and ideological–mythological functions of
the introspective categories: ‘classical’, ‘revisionist’ and ‘post’. I do not seek
to deny that such descriptives can be suitably applied to certain Westerns;
rather, I seek to argue that they do not speak for the whole genre, and are
inadequate terms for establishing a generic blueprint by which one can place
films chronologically. I ally myself with the growing belief in film genre studies
that attempts to discern ‘blueprints’, or formulas, often result in simplified
or erroneous misreadings of whole rafts of film texts that are forced to fit
what are essentially ready-made grids of reference. Intrinsic to such a line of
analysis is a disputation of the general critical acceptance of a given genre’s
historical trajectory. In the case of the Western, that it ‘evolved’ during the
course of the twentieth century from a rudimentary simplicity (the silent era)
towards formal, thematic and ideological coherence (‘classical’), and, finally,
towards introspection, fragmentation and incoherence (‘revisionist’) –
leading towards its demise (‘post’). Under direct scrutiny is the suggestion that
the classical Western is ideologically monolithic, that it always promoted a
specious myth-historical memory aimed at Anglo-American ‘self-definition’,
which justified a ‘violent response to difference’. At the same time, this study
questions the equally spurious assertion that revisionist Westerns always freed
themselves from traditional notions of masculinity, heroism and Anglo-male
bias.19
Of course, it should be noted that others have written on the Western
without adhering to such schemas, but these are very much in the minority.
Most notable of such scholars is Tag Gallagher, whose 1986 essay, ‘Shoot-
Out at the Genre Corral’, was one of the first to scrutinise the evolutionary
approach as it had been widely applied to the Western.20 Gallagher argued for
the cyclical nature of genres over any evolutionary pattern. He also pointed
out the contingent nature of any cultural–ideological meanings that may be

­4
introduction

read into various periods of Western film production, and denied that clas-
sical Westerns were necessarily more simplistic in their narratives than later,
more properly revisionist films. I will utilise Gallagher’s essay as a basis for my
own arguments in the chapters that follow, and try to expand upon his work
as, although his essay is both convincing and provocative, few contemporary
Western film scholars have utilised it to any great degree. In fact, most simply
do not mention it at all.
Questioning the evolutionary approach to Hollywood genres in general
has, of course, been established within the broader scope of film studies, most
notably by Rick Altman and Neale (mentioned above).21 Neale’s account is
perhaps the more compelling, and constitutes an excellent overview and critical
analysis of the last few decades of aesthetic and thematic approaches to genre.
He argues for a need to recognise ‘the transience of genres, to deprive them
of eternal or essential features, and to conceive these features instead as both
historically provisional and empirically diverse’.22 From remarks such as these,
we can situate Neale’s questioning of the evolutionary approach more broadly
in the ‘historical turn’ in film studies. This is to say, the growing proclivity
within contemporary film scholarship towards focusing on the specific contex-
tual detail of individual productions (particularly their industrial contexts), as
opposed to the use of teleological approaches or otherwise sweeping generali-
sations. Consequently, Neale’s study suggests that the ‘utility’ of Hollywood
genres with regard to historical shifts, changes in industrial practices, audience
consumption/tastes and ‘the socio-cultural contexts within which its films are
produced and consumed[,] . . . needs to be re-examined, and that there is thus
ample scope for more debate, more thinking and more research’.23
This study is intended as a contribution to such an overall approach. That
such a study is valuable can be justified on the grounds that it becomes appar-
ent that, despite Gallagher’s valuable opinions on the Western and despite the
broader developments in the field of genre studies, such as those provided by
Altman and Neale, some of the more recent critical studies associated with the
Western seem to have taken little notice of this development to the extent that
they seem to fall back into the more sweeping and simplistic generalisations
associated with the mythological and evolutionary approaches.24 Although a
comprehensive explanation as to why this seems to be the case is unlikely to
be possible, a partial explanation might be found in the above-mentioned per-
vasiveness of frontier mythology in US society. After all, the Western is where
these myths have been engaged with most directly in popular culture and for
the longest period of time. The myth is certainly often considered to be the
major thematic element in what the greater majority of Westerns are about,
so to speak.
I wish to make it clear at this point that I do not deny all charges made
against the Western. For much of what defines the genre has, undeniably,
grown out of the myth of the West, and over the years the Western certainly
has had a lot to answer for. However, I contend that, while it may have often

5
myth of the western

celebrated this grand narrative, the Western has just as often also reacted to
it. It did this by questioning the myth’s legitimating pretensions, disclosing the
darker currents of America’s frontier legacy, and offering up cautionary tales
for the cultural-hegemonic beliefs in American exceptionalism and Manifest
Destiny. In short, it highlighted the symptomatic hubristic condition of US self-
righteousness. In the very best efforts of the Western, and for every instance of
the veneration of socially redemptive violence in the form of ‘frontier justice’,
there exist counter-narratives that question and critique the sacred shibboleths
of the United States. And yet, as indicated above and as this study seeks to
further illuminate, a significant amount of academic criticism is still respon-
sible for perpetuating what I would term the myth of the Western. This is to
say, the general acceptance as fact that the Western can be adequately defined
in terms of a set of formulaic and thematic premises that can be easily identi-
fied and traced as the genre evolved by following its own ‘internal logic’, and/
or in accordance with shifts in sociocultural, political and historical attitudes
towards frontier mythology.
Indeed, when one looks more closely at a range of the most prominent
Westerns produced during the course of the twentieth century, it becomes
readily apparent that the pattern that seems to define the genre progressively
disappears, to be replaced by a mosaic of varied narratives that reflect not
only different times, but also different attitudes existing within any given time.
I propose to investigate selected aspects of this mosaic with the intention of
shedding new light onto the Western as a genre, and assessing how it can be
interpreted culturally, historically and politically.
That the Western genre is capable of justifying such a diverse wealth of
applied cultural analysis has already been considered by some notable film
scholars. This is perhaps best summed up by Philip French who, in 1974,
suggested that, thematically, the Western genre ‘is a great grab-bag, a hungry
cuckoo of a genre, a voracious bastard of a form, open equally to visionaries
and opportunists, ready to seize anything that’s in the air from juvenile delin-
quency to ecology’.25 But before we take up the intellectual substance of the
Western, it is necessary first to summarise the cultural, historical and politi-
cal premises on which the Western (and the majority of scholarship on the
Western) is said to be based, and to define in more detail the terms of analysis
that this study will use.

II
The formal and thematic origins of the Western can be traced back at
least as far as the novels of James Fenimore Cooper; in particular, to the
Leatherstocking tales. The protagonist of these novels, Natty Bumppo – the
original ‘man without a cross’ – is often regarded as the Western hero’s pro-
genitor; however, the time and location of the version of frontier mythology
that was to become the preferred focus of Hollywood’s West (one or two key

­6
introduction

instances notwithstanding) was not the eighteenth-century forests of Cooper’s

literary imagination, rather, it was to be the mid- to late nineteenth century
during the US appropriation and settlement of the vast North American
interior.
Voicing a typical opinion within Western film scholarship, Jim Kitses sug-
gests that the ‘raw material of the western’ is drawn from this historical period:

Hollywood’s West has typically been from about 1865 to 1890 or so . . .
within its brief span we can count a num­ber of frontiers in the sudden
rush of min­ing camps, the building of railways, the Indian wars, the
cattle drives, the coming of the farmer. Together with the last days of
the Civil War and the exploits of the badmen, here is the raw material of
the western.26

This temporal–spatial transfer amounted to nothing less than a paradigm

shift in the terms of the popular mythology that would explain the process of
westward expansion to US Americans as the nation stood on the cusp of the
twentieth century.27
The causal factors for this shift can be related, in large part, to the start of
an economic depression that was to affect most of the 1890s. This decade wit-
nessed a period of social upheaval that, at least in part, grew out of a growing
sense of panic and anxiety over the ‘closing’ of the frontier following a period
of unchecked expansion matched only by unchecked immigration. America’s
sense of itself as a place of equality and opportunity was being threatened by
the unprecedented rise of a corporate–industrial society in which growth had
created wealth, but not general prosperity. Industrial monopolies and business
cartels emerged to exploit the market, and fuelled political protest and conflict
between labour and capital, and many in the United States became nostalgic
for a simpler vision of America. This led to the deliberate construction of
the myth of the West towards the end of the nineteenth century by a number
of interrelated and mutually interdependent artistic, historical and political
personalities.

William Frederick Cody

Standing prominent among these personalities was the figure of William F.
Cody, aka, ‘Buffalo Bill’, whose much-celebrated show ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World’ toured the United States
and Europe from 1883 to 1916.
During its incredible run, Cody’s ‘Wild West’ fused history with riotous
legend in a series of action-packed extravaganzas that enthralled and ‘edu-
cated’ audiences with spectacles of ‘Cowboys and Indians’. Also included
were re-enactments of recent historical events, chiefly ‘Custer’s Last Stand’,
which typically segued into fantastical braggadocio fiction as ‘Buffalo Bill’

7
myth of the western

acted out the killing and scalping of an ‘Indian’ in a vengeance act entitled
‘The First Scalp for Custer’. There were also various supporting acts, such as
horse racing, stunt riding and marksmanship. The whole spectacle typically
concluded with an action-packed ‘Indian’ attack on the ‘historical Deadwood
Stagecoach’, with ‘Buffalo Bill’ riding to the rescue.28 Essentially, the Wild
West fuelled the public’s imagination for a violent frontier filled with merciless
savages and brutal outlaws, and then fed its desire for a hero to tame it.
Through a fortuitous encounter with the journalist Ned Buntline (real name,
Edward Judson), Cody had been a dime novel character and stage actor in fron-
tier melodramas since the 1870s. But the Wild West was an entertainment enter-
prise like no other. Exploiting the new era of mass communication technologies
through advertising campaigns and even product-branding made ‘Buffalo Bill’
an internationally recognised symbol, what we would call a ‘superstar’ today.
Richard Slotkin points out that the Wild West even became ‘“recognised” by
“Governments, Armies and Nations” [achieving] something like diplomatic
recognition’.29 Joy S. Kasson describes the peculiar cultural significance of the
Wild West on the public’s perception of America’s frontier history:

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, as the Indian Wars faded
into the past and the Great Plains began to open for settlement and
tourism, the Wild West represented by Cody’s show came to be under-
stood by its audience as a nostalgic recreation rather than a representa-
tion of the world of the present . . . Yet the Wild West created a special
kind of memory landscape. It had the ability to persuade viewers that
the past it depicted was their past, something they had viewed with their
own eyes.30

The Wild West stands as an example of the complex relationship that

American popular culture has with the frontier, encompassing within its broad
range the myth of the West, the sponsorship of a particular cult of celebrity
and the promotion of a triumphalist version of frontier history. Perhaps of
most significance was the cultural status it gave to the cowboy. As a profes-
sional cattle drover, the cowboy was a marginal, even insignificant, historical
figure, but through Cody’s celebrity and the success and longevity of the Wild
West, he was given new appeal as a symbol of the frontier. As David Hamilton
Murdoch points out:

by the mid-1890s the cowboy was on the edge of drifting into obscurity.
Instead, he achieved immortality within a decade and became the final
version of the hero from the frontier . . . he became the focus of all the
ideas which were coalescing into the definitive myth of the West.31

In many ways, what we now regard as the Western was ‘born’ on the cusp
of the twentieth century through the appeal and impact of entrepreneurs like

­8
introduction

Cody. Kasson points out that ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had already assembled
the tropes and images of the American West into a convincing and popular
entertainment form [creating] the template early filmmakers could adapt
and embellish’.32 Slotkin claims that the Western’s roots ‘go deeper into the
American cultural past than those of any other movie genre . . . The West
was already a mythologized space when the first moviemakers found it.’33
The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), contentiously described by
George N. Fenin and William K. Everson as ‘the first Western’, undoubtedly
drew upon the popular appeal of the Wild West. Supplanting the stagecoach
attack with the outlaw’s hold-up of an express train, the film’s use of the devel-
oping cinematic techniques of close-ups and editing brought a new sense of
immediacy to Cody’s well-established action and adventure formula.34 Cody
himself attempted to incorporate the Wild West into the medium of film when
he starred in a three-reel biopic of himself entitled, The Life of Buffalo Bill
(Paul Panzer, 1912). Kasson again:

The new medium of film gave the impression of ‘real life’ to scenes that
were also highly dramatic; in holding these claims in balance and creating
a convincing impression of shared memory, this early film sketched the
contours that would define the film western for a half-century.35

Hers is an opinion shared by the majority of scholars writing on the Western:

in creating a romanticised version of the nineteenth-century American West,
the cinematic Western is, to a large extent, responsible for the erroneous idea
that many people still have of that period.
Of course, Cody and his promoters were not solely responsible for the popu-
larity, much less the credibility, of the myth of the West or the Western. The
heroic version of the frontier story was contemporaneously given intellectual
substance in the field of professional historiography by a young historian from
Wisconsin.

Frederick Jackson Turner

It is generally considered that, in addition to disseminating the myth’s ideo-
logical premises, the Western allowed for the clear articulation of an historical
thesis. This thesis was famously delivered by Frederick Jackson Turner at a
meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), held at the World’s
Columbia Exposition in Chicago on 12 July 1893. Interestingly, on the same
day as Turner’s address, Cody’s Wild West staged an unofficial performance
outside the grounds of the Exposition, even extending special invites to AHA
delegates (an invite that Turner declined).36
Turner insisted upon a direct relationship between successive frontiers
in Anglo-American expansion across the continent, and of the consequent
development of a uniquely American democratic civilisation. In what are now

9
myth of the western

famous and often quoted words Turner illustrated what, for him, was evident
in the title of his thesis, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’:
‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance
of American settlement westward, explain American development’.37 By this
Turner actively sought to rupture popular consensus among his academic con-
temporaries, whose common advocacy lay with those such as Herbert Baxter
Adams who believed in an evolutionary link between American institutions
and their Anglo-Germanic ancestors in Europe. By stressing the differences
rather than the similarities between Europeans and Americans, Turner was
dispensing with so-called Teutonic ‘Germ Theory’ and, instead, promoted the
frontier as a point of origin.38
Although not met with rapturous applause at the moment of its delivery,
Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ (as it came to be known) undoubtedly captured the
popular mood, subsequently becoming something of an ideological touchstone
for many Americans on the cusp of the twentieth century. As with Cody and
the Wild West, Turner’s placing of the subject of the frontier at the forefront of
the national consciousness came at the very moment it was coming to an end
as a palpable geographical phenomenon.39
Of course, Turner’s version of history did not materialise out of the ether
any more than did Cody’s. What can be said of it is that it galvanised a
great proportion of contemporary popular, political, religious and historical
opinion. Slotkin alerts us to the protracted legacy of the ‘Frontier Thesis’, sug-
gesting that many of the ‘elements’ of Turner’s address ‘already belonged to
the complex of traditional ideas that had accumulated around the idea of the
“Frontier” since colonial times, including the concept of pioneering as a defin-
ing national mission’.40 This ‘national mission’ relates to the overwhelmingly
agricultural nature of the initial resulting economy of frontier settlement, and
led to the equally overwhelming and long-held belief in America as the ‘Garden
of the World’.41
The notion of the Garden as a cultural ideal is, of course, not unique to
North America as a whole or to the United States in particular. It stems
from biblical mythology, itself a version of the wider ‘myth of the pastoral’
to be found in classical and other mythologies, rooted in societies for which
agriculture was the principal economic activity. These ideas informed those
who most effectively expressed the ideals of the new republic; most famously,
Thomas Jefferson, whose defining moment as US president was to ensure the
vast Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. Jefferson believed that American
land was now ‘so extensive that the cupidity of a thousand generations would
not be sufficient to exhaust it’.42 He proclaimed the ideal American citizen to
be the independent yeoman farmer, and the West as the place where countless
numbers of settlers could find ‘free land’, employing axe and plough to create a
‘natural democracy’. The myth of the ‘American pastoral’ was born. However,
Jefferson had profoundly miscalculated, as ‘during his own lifetime it was
already apparent that the arable land available east of the 100th meridian was

­10
introduction

well on its way to being completely “taken up” and developed’.43 The pretence
of pastoralism was once more severely tested in the mid-nineteenth century.
During the American Civil War, the industrial North defeated the agricultural
South, and by the close of that century, the United States had firmly established
itself as an industrial world power.
Written nearly a century after the Louisiana Purchase, Turner’s thesis
offered little suggestion of a ‘frontier-less’ future. Having placed so much
emphasis upon its democratising influence – that is, its fostering of the
individual exploitation of economic opportunity (‘economic individualism’)
through the development of ‘free land’ – Turner could not account for the
survival of democracy now that the frontier was gone. Instead of looking
towards the future, Turner cast his gaze towards the past, and with an evident
nostalgia for this Jeffersonian idealism mournfully consigned the frontier’s
agrarian values to the past. This move is reflected in the pessimistic tone with
which Turner concludes the Frontier Thesis: ‘Each frontier [furnished] a new
field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past . . . But
never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves . . . the frontier has
gone.’44
Turner’s assertion that ‘the great shaping force of American life was now
gone’ contributed in no small way to the proliferation of a neo-Malthusian
sentiment throughout many areas of US society. ‘The essay was not just an
original historical synthesis of the American past’, argues David M. Wrobel,
‘but a classic expression of frontier anxiety.’45 At its most successful the
Frontier Thesis professed to legitimate the vicissitudes of the American
‘national character’, or ‘national identity’, and Turner situated this theoretical
composite firmly in relation to the frontier during the course of national pro-
gress. In doing so, he articulated a major historical theme that many scholars
have discerned in the Western genre:

This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion west-
ward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity
of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character
. . . In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave – the
meeting point between savagery and civilisation.46

In spirit the Frontier Thesis marries a theory of national development with

the philosophical underpinnings of Manifest Destiny, throwing its aca-
demic weight behind this great fait accompli of national predestination.
In the nineteenth century, the United States’ conception of itself as a force
for good was married with a belief in the inevitability of expansion. This
triumphalist version of Anglo-America was fully endorsed by Turner, who
saw ‘the need of a history of the continuous progress of civilisation across
the continent’.47 Turner firmly established the West as the crucible where
America’s exceptionalist mission – which had begun in 1620 with the

11
myth of the western

Puritan John Winthrop’s ‘City on a Hill’ sermon – was played out, its end-
game realised with the ‘closing of a great historic movement [in] American
history’.48
Thus envisaged, the Frontier Thesis served as an historical document,
giving a secular gloss of legitimacy to the overt religiosity of Manifest Destiny.
For this reason, the aggressive expansion into the West following the end
of the Civil War was not to be understood within terms of imperialism. In
expanding the nation, the pioneers were participants in the very momen-
tum of history itself, working to fulfil America’s exceptionalist mission. As
free citizens of a uniquely constitutional government, these living examples
of economic individualism advanced the ideals of freedom and democracy
over a ‘barbaric wilderness’ environment. If some of his contemporary
scholars balked at his maverick approach to historical practice, Turner’s
formulation of a national character was rarely questioned in any concerted
fashion during the historian’s own lifetime. Indeed, as John Higham is
quick to remind us, as far as Turner and his academic disciples were con-
cerned, ‘the distinctive character of the nation was presupposed rather than
argued’.49
The flaws in the Frontier Thesis as a work of historiography are, of course,
plain to see. In 1950, Henry Nash Smith was one of the first American histo-
rians to point them out. ‘The agrarian emphasis of the frontier hypothesis’,
he suggested, ‘has tended to divert attention from the problems created by
industrialisation for half a century during which the United States has become
the most powerful industrial nation in the world.’50 Not surprisingly, criti-
cisms voiced by modern scholars focus less on Turner’s lack of vision for the
future than they do on his blatantly ethnocentric approach. Much like Cody’s
Wild West in this regard, the Frontier Thesis forwards Anglo-Americans as the
actors in the great drive west; albeit Turner’s heroes are the pioneering farmers,
taming the wilderness with the ‘plough’ rather than Cody’s cowboys taming
it with the ‘gun’. Turner’s idea of the frontier as a crucible is, to most modern
scholars, tantamount to Creationism. His selective brand of history had little
time for the racial ‘melting pot’ from which all serious historians now accept
modern America was forged. For instance, there is scant attention paid to the
role played by women on the frontier; less still to the Chinese immigrants who
laboured on the railways, or the Hispanic and African Americans, the latter
of whom we are informed, ‘comprised one third of all range riders’ during the
cattle industry’s brief flourishing in the late nineteenth century.51 Additionally,
criticism abounds with regard to Turner’s dismissive categorisation of the
Native American as part of a declining savagery, a ‘common danger, demand-
ing united action’ on the part of the nation to remove.52 According to Smith,
‘the virtual non-appearance of Native Americans in Turner’s narrative indi-
cates the extent to which [his] conceptions of a singular American “national
character,” were predicated on an absence’.53 The significance of such elisions
become clear if we consider that the grand narrative of frontier settlement

­12
introduction

as an Anglo-American story depended upon ‘cultural exceptionalism and

dominance [which] could only be asserted and defined against the liminal, the
historically silenced’.54
Despite these obvious flaws, it would be folly to dismiss the cultural signifi-
cance of the Frontier Thesis outright. As McVeigh and others have suggested,
‘through the agency of writers like Turner . . . the West was becoming a set of
symbols that constituted not history, but an explanation of history, and in that
sense a myth’.55 And one must always take ‘national myths seriously as a force
in history’.56 In this respect the Frontier Thesis proved itself to be more politi-
cally and culturally accurate than it was historically correct. This is to say,
it presented an ideologically desirable (for Anglo-Americans at least) idea of
America, rather than a ‘real’ history of America; yet, having successfully inte-
grated itself into a significant proportion of the cultural mindset, it effectively
became that history.
The ‘effectiveness’ of the Frontier Thesis upon US culture is attested to by
the subsequent multitude of academics, politicians, artists, novelists and jour-
nalists who, ‘[i]n their allegiance to the Turnerian view of history . . . fuel[led]
the connection between national identity and frontier theory’.57 One of the
longest-lasting effects of Turner’s historical philosophy was the fact of the
expansion of US hegemony beyond its own continental borders. Naturally
this was not seen within terms of imperialism, as the professed belief was one
of humanitarianism and social progression: the bringing of democracy and
freedom to the ‘darker regions’ of the world. Such nation-building preten-
sions have been repudiated by much contemporary historiography, as well
as cultural and political discourses, but to this day there are those who still
believe, to one degree or another, in America’s exceptionalist mission on the
international stage.

Theodore Roosevelt
In many ways Theodore Roosevelt is the critical political factor in validating
Turner’s Frontier Thesis. Roosevelt, the man who would become president of
the United States in 1901, sought in the last years of the nineteenth century to
elevate the Wild West cowboy to the status of national emblem. In so doing,
he crucially helped to expand the concept of Manifest Destiny to embrace
international conquest.
Roosevelt, himself a keen amateur historian, traded off his own real-life
status as a cattle rancher in Dakota and drew on both Cody’s Wild West and
Turner’s Frontier Thesis in order to shape his own vision of the national char-
acter.58 His input into the creation of the myth of the West opposed Turner
much less than it complimented him for his celebration of agricultural settle-
ment. Although a great many of his political pamphlets and historical essays
predate Turner’s by some years, Roosevelt was quick to perceive the coalesc-
ing power of the Frontier Thesis, famously congratulating his professional

13
myth of the western

counterpart for putting ‘into shape a good deal of thought that has been float-
ing around rather loosely’.59 However, for Roosevelt it was not the yeoman
farmer, but the cowboy who was to become the hero of frontier settlement.
Through the cowboy he sought to assert a positive symbol of national identity
in an age of rapid industrialisation, economic instability and growing social
anxiety. Roosevelt sought to transform the image of the robust cowboy into
an heroic symbol of unfettered individualism, galvanising mythic values for
a modern industrial age. For him these ranch hands were ‘as hardy and self-
reliant as any man who ever breathed – with bronzed, set faces and keen eyes
that look all the world straight in the face without flinching’.60
The masculine ethos of the cowboy was emphasised most vividly in
Roosevelt’s 1888 pamphlet, ‘Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail’: ‘The whole
existence is patriarchal in character. It is the life of men who live in the open
. . . who go armed and ready to guard their lives by their own prowess,
whose wants are very simple and who call no man master’.61 In many ways,
the cowboy was Roosevelt’s symbolic response to the conundrum posed by
Turner’s frontierless future. The agrarian values of the West would at least live
on in spirit through the honest values of the lone rider of the range: ‘he is the
grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilisation from before
whose face he must disappear’.62
It was during the Spanish–American War of 1898 that Roosevelt’s own
heroic persona began to resonate most profoundly, and it was where the role
of the United States in the ‘world community’ was to be defined most delib-
erately in terms of frontier mythology. Fighting in Cuba with his own cavalry
troop, significantly named after Cody’s ‘Congress of Rough Riders of the
World’, Roosevelt self-consciously initiated his own national celebrity, which
was enthusiastically taken up and ran with by his political allies and the numer-
ous journalists who covered the conflict. The successes of Roosevelt’s Rough
Riders in Cuba – immortalised by his friend, the artist Frederic Remington in
the famous (but wholly mythical) ‘Charge of San Juan Hill’ – worked to con-
tinue Roosevelt’s ideological association with the economic imperatives and
political agendas that sought to extend the concept of ‘westward’ expansion
overseas. From this perspective, the frontier was not so much ‘gone’ as it was
transposed onto foreign military ventures; these new ‘foreign wildernesses’
would provide the necessary conditions for producing all that was good in
American manhood. (Not insignificantly, Cody even incorporated Roosevelt’s
exploits in Cuba into the Wild West: ‘ditch[ing] “Custer’s Last Stand” as the
finale set piece for the 1899–1900 season in favour of re-enacting the charge
up San Juan Hill. The show . . . lionised Roosevelt as the ultimate cowboy hero
abroad.’63)
Roosevelt’s own historical magnum opus was probably the multi-volume
The Winning of the West (published between 1899 and 1906). If the 1890s
saw the justification of overseas expansion as a continuance of the perceived
benefits of the existence of a frontier of sorts, Roosevelt’s most significant

­14
introduction

work of historiography adumbrated on an equally sinister and attendant atti-

tude. McVeigh illuminates that ‘for Roosevelt, westward expansion was an
epic of racial conflict [and] a clear articulation of American exceptionalism’.64
In the prevailing cultural mood of the time, it was generally understood that
the natural individualist tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon race had, through its
own biological gifts, been given the necessary conditions under which to flour-
ish. These were, in Turner’s words, ‘the existence of an area of free land’ that,
in Roosevelt’s opinion, the Anglo-Saxon race had earned the right to settle
through conquest.
Where Turner had essentially elided the Native American, Roosevelt,
like Cody, placed the continent’s aboriginal inhabitants at the forefront of
his version of frontier history. These distinctions are aptly summarised by
Slotkin, who informs us that ‘Turner’s work is remarkable for the degree to
which it marginalises the role of violence in the development of the Frontier’;
conversely, ‘for Roosevelt the history of the Indian wars is the history of the
West’.65
For many film scholars, a general consensus can be discerned, suggesting
that the Western combined Roosevelt’s ‘war centred and racialist historiogra-
phy’ with Turner’s ‘socio-economic analysis’.66 Jones and Wills have suggested
that, in fact, the ‘gun’ superseded the ‘plough’ as the primary symbol of the
frontier in the Western:

Hollywood promoted a carbine version of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s

1893 frontier thesis . . . Where Turner had envisioned the farmer as hero,
Hollywood instead forwarded the gun-toting cowboy as a symbol of
Western (and national qualities) of individualism, justice, freedom and
self-reliance.67

This suggests that Hollywood ‘encouraged audiences to see their heritage

through a cowboy’s gun barrel’, and thus engendered the culture of a ‘gun-
fighter nation’ (to borrow the title of Slotkin’s book). Jones and Wills claim
that the genre ‘fed into a distinctly violent myth, a Wild West imagining
whereby out of conflict came civilisation’.68
At its darkest, Roosevelt’s take on the history of the American West pro-
moted racialist theories of Anglo-Saxon superiority and the necessity of wars
of extermination against the Native Americans. For him, Anglo-Saxon ascend-
ancy constituted nothing less than the ‘most striking feature of the world’s
history’.69 This attitude clearly follows on from the violent cultural legacy of
Cody’s Wild West more than it does from Turner’s Frontier Thesis. But what-
ever one’s prognosis, it remains clear that the sociocultural, political and his-
torical influences from which the myth of the West was shaped are themselves,
deliberately, interrelated and interdependent.

15
myth of the western

III
As already suggested, the aim of this study is to refigure established critical
consensus with regard to the evolution of the cinematic Western genre. As
such, I provide less a critique of Western films themselves than I do a critique
of the established scholarly readings of them. Also as suggested above, con-
temporary film genre studies provide a vital springboard into affecting such a
critique. To reiterate some of these sentiments, as Neale suggests in Genre and
Contemporary Hollywood (2002), genre is ‘a multi-faceted phenomenon’. He
continues thus:

Genres can be approached from the point of view of the industry and its
infrastructure, from the point of view of its aesthetic traditions, from the
point of view of the broader socio-cultural environment upon which they
draw and into which they feed, and from the point of view [sic] audience
understanding and response.70

Other studies of genre have declared similar findings. For example, in New
Hollywood Cinema (2002) and in one of the few specific references to
Gallagher’s ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral’, Geoff King writes:

Genres are not only shaped by internal processes of development. They

owe many of their characteristics at any particular moment to broader
social, cultural and industrial factors . . . Film history suggests that genres
undergo various cycles rather than any linear process of evolution. More
questioning or self-conscious versions of genre films can be associated
with particular periods, but this is the result of particular contextual
factors rather than any automatic or in-built dynamic.71

We might consider this statement in direct relation to the Western. However,

and again as suggested already, despite the convincing arguments for the ‘mul-
tifaceted’ nature of Hollywood genres illuminated by scholars such as Neale
and King in recent years, claims for the evolution of the Western – those which
draw off older, teleological approaches – continue to be in evidence in contem-
porary Western film scholarship. Such claims are often married to the equally
questionable assumption that the so-called classical Western wholeheartedly
endorsed the Cody–Turner–Roosevelt frontier narrative, rather than inter-
rogate its ideological function. Equally, the evolutionary approach suggests
that Westerns from the mid-1960s onwards did little else but interrogate this
function. Furthermore, a belief still holds that, in a so-called post-Western age,
the genre has given over to pastiche to such a degree that all it can do is rehash
traditional forms for the sake of nostalgia, or else remake itself within terms
of a degraded, self-defeating – even self-hating – and utterly diminished form.
In the chapters that follow I shall develop my critique. The study is divided

­16
introduction

loosely into two parts spread over five chapters, each of which deal with the
genre’s supposed ‘classical’, ‘revisionist’ and ‘post’ phases. Each chapter fea-
tures detailed case studies that offer critical analyses of both individual films
and of existing scholarship related to them, as well as to more general aspects
of the Western genre as a whole. While it is structured chronologically, this
is not to suggest acceptance of evolutionary schemas. Indeed, undermining
patterns of development rather than supporting them, probing for narrative
complexity rather than identifying narrative uniformity, are among this study’s
primary aims.
Although it claims to be representative, given the sheer number of Westerns,
the range of themes the genre encompasses, and the approaches that have been
taken to the study of the genre, this book does not (and cannot) claim to be
exhaustive. Such attempts have been made in the past. But this is not such a
book. Rather, it is intended as a contribution to the scholarly debate on the
Western, and should be regarded as such. It does not, therefore, provide an
expansive survey of the genre as much as it scrutinises existing Western film
genre scholarship. For that reason, while this study provides a great depth
of coverage, a greater deal of material is inevitably left out. For instance, it
places little emphasis on the silent era Western; not entirely because of the
unfortunate fact that only a small percentage of them still exist, but because
this study’s critical emphasis is on responding to the so-called ‘decline of the
Western’ from its classical period onwards. (Some mention is made of a small
number of applicable pre-Second World War sound films.) Though ample
scholarship exists on this period of the Western, I hope this selective study
adequately demonstrates that there is much yet to be explored. Rather than
attempting a detailed analysis of the contemporary post-Western, the second
part of this study – comprising Chapters 4 and 5 – offers an introduction into
an exciting new cycle of production in the genre: the contemporary-set ‘border’
Western. Finally, offering an overall analysis of the Western’s relation to fron-
tier mythology together with its historical function is important, because for
the majority of Western film scholars the genre is a form driven by myth at
the expense of history. The approach taken in Myth of the Western therefore
offers readers a greater understanding of the historical significance of the genre
and – despite the numerous assertions of its demise – of its continuing artistic
and cultural relevance.
Chapter 1 begins by discussing the terms by which the classical Western
has been typically analysed in terms of its promotion of the myth of the West,
along with the assumption that any pretence to historical dimension that this
phase of the genre may possess is subsumed under an overriding mythologi-
cal function. Defining key terms is the subject of the first section of Chapter
1. Drawing across a wide range of Western film scholarship, it describes the
Western in relation to genre evolution theories and their political-allegorical
variants. A case study that reads Shane (George Stevens, 1953) formally and
thematically within terms of genre studies and the classical Western brings

17
myth of the western

together the interrelated generic and sociocultural issues raised in this first
section: heroism, individualism and the community, and the concept of the
American national identity. A discussion of the classical Western’s attitude
towards the conquest of Native America is also initiated; it typically being
defined through the Turnerian descriptive of ‘the meeting point between sav-
agery and civilisation’.
The second part of Chapter 1 draws extensively on genre studies to provide
a detailed critique of evolutionary approaches and of the classical schema. It
does more than simply articulate the limitations of existing accounts; it offers
a direct challenge to the premises upon which they rest. This section addresses,
first, the arbitrary nature in terms of application of the formal attributes of
the classical label. Then, it argues that this act of description constitutes the
deliberate construction of categories by a process of selection and exclusion,
distortion and effacement. Identified is a challenge to the proclaimed simplic-
ity of the classical Western, both in its supposed adherence to triumphalist
versions of frontier history and in its relation to genre evolution theories.
Chapter 1 thus concludes by arguing that Shane contains a series of counter-
historical aspects within its narrative that suggests that the film’s sociocultural,
political and historical dimensions are far more apparent and, indeed, far more
complex than allowed for in classical schema or evolutionary and mythologi-
cal readings.
Chapter 2 begins by discussing Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) in relation
to two interrelated themes that will frame its terms of debate: the ‘captivity
narrative’ and the Western’s methods of articulating Anglo-American sociocul-
tural attitudes towards Native America. Its first aim is to offer a brief history
of the captivity narrative and how the issues raised by it have been variously
represented in popular culture. In The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), the cul-
tural currency of the Rooseveltian ‘race war’, combined with the themes of
abduction and captivity, raise issues about the role played by racial difference
in structuring the myth of the West, as well as the nature of the Western’s role
in disseminating this mythology. The genre’s portrayal of Native Americans
is rethought in this section, arguing for the existence of a more complex con-
sideration than is often attributed to either The Searchers specifically, or the
classical Western more generally. These arguments are taken up in brief discus-
sion of John Ford’s ‘Cavalry Trilogy’ and some of the so-called ‘pro-Indian’
films of the period. These Westerns – along with The Searchers – are discussed
alongside more contemporary films that boast sympathetic portrayals of
Native Americans; chiefly, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1991). The
purpose of this discussion is not to refute racist charges against the Western,
but to provide a counter-argument to the evolutionary paradigms that identify
socially progressive patterns in the genre’s portrayal of the Native American.
In other words, those claiming, over time, the existence of ever-more liberal or
revisionist depictions of Native Americans as a general rule.
The second part of Chapter 2 considers The Searchers’ complex depiction

­18
introduction

of both the hero and the pioneer community he nominally protects. In this
respect, it develops some of the arguments outlined in Chapter 1, suggesting,
once again, that the historical dimension of the classical Western is, indeed,
complex and overt, requiring further critical re-evaluation. First, symptomatic
readings of the historical significance of The Searchers are outlined before
making the case for the existence of another, overlooked, dimension to its
historical significance – one relating to its temporal setting. If read in this way,
themes of miscegenation, captivity and race war, as channelled through the
psychology of the film’s hero, also relate to nineteenth-century notions of the
American national identity in relation to Native Americans. While certainly
not devoid of prejudice, The Searchers, by acknowledging imperialist conquest
masked as historical progress, highlights Anglo-America’s complicity in the
genocide that lay behind the myth of the domestication of the wilderness.
Overall, this chapter suggests that, along with all its flaws, The Searchers offers
a powerful critique of the myth of the West, making it clear that the myth’s
values – and those who embody them – are beyond redemption.
Chapter 3 begins by providing a critical analysis of the asserted historical
development of the revisionist phase of the genre. The commonly held view is
that, from around the early 1960s onwards, the Western’s best efforts became
increasingly self-conscious and self-critical. This was seen in both the formal
development of its own classical plot formulas, and in a critical shift in cultural
attitudes towards its informing mythologies. As The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance (John Ford, 1962) is often considered to be the locus in the shift away
from classicism, this chapter begins by scrutinising its deconstruction of the
myth of individualist heroism as a specifically – and often asserted – r­ evisionist
trait. After Liberty Valance, a slew of films have typically been forwarded
as opening up the floodgates on such issues as violence, gender, race and the
darker aspects of Anglo-America’s ‘triumphant’ march across the continent.
The typical view held that such films consciously raised issues concerning their
own status as Westerns, and of the genre’s historical role in the construction
of erroneous cultural attitudes and belief systems. Seen from this perspective,
the West as depicted in the classical Western is largely a distortion of the ‘real’
experience of the frontier, while the so-called revisionist Western acts as an
historical corrective.
The second part of Chapter 3 moves towards the close of the twentieth
century. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992) is often held up as an exemplar
of the revisionist Western; moreover, as the example of the end logic of the
genre’s supposed formal and ideological self-critique. First is a contextual
review of scholarship on Unforgiven, most of which fixes the film’s chronology
firmly in the genre’s pessimistic ‘late’ period. Most analyses of Unforgiven tend
to assume a set of classical generic codes and motifs that the film either success-
fully repudiates through a conscious semiotic and thematic revisionism, or else
ends up succumbing to by the narrative’s climax. This chapter scrutinises both
approaches. It also critiques McVeigh’s revisionist analysis of Unforgiven,72

19
myth of the western

offering the counter-argument that, despite its pretensions, Unforgiven is

far less revisionist (or post-modernist) than he suggests. Comparing it with
older films, such as Stagecoach, High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1950), The
Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950), and Shane and The Searchers, this chapter
refutes the common revisionist contention that, over time, the optimistic vision
that typified the frontier communities of the classical Western becomes darker
and more complex.
Whereas Chapters 1, 2 and 3 share an overall thematic thread in seeking to
undermine evolution theory through recourse to famous and much-discussed
Western films, Part Two – Chapters 4 and 5 – brings us up to the current century
and seeks to deal with the so-called post-Western through the analysis of two
contemporary films set along the Mexico–Texas border: The Three Burials of
Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and No Country for Old Men
(Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007). I argue that both films engage with an array of
generic Western themes and tropes in order to provide complex articulations
of the history, geography and legends of the American southwest. Equally, and
in stark opposition to Shane, The Searchers and Unforgiven, neither film has
(so far) received much in the way of scholarly attention.73 Within the context
of the theme of cultural hegemony and the growing academic field of trans-
nationalism, these final two chapters argue for the continued sociocultural,
political, and historical value of the Western against assertions that the genre
is somehow ‘dead’, and that the post-Western exists as some kind of post
mortem of the genre itself.
Chapter 4 begins by analysing the work of the New Western historians,
notably that of Patricia Nelson Limerick. Specifically, it considers her attack on
Turner’s Frontier Thesis and her attempt to replace it with the more complex
term, la frontera, as the defining paradigm of the historical West. It explores
the extent of Three Burials’ scrutiny of the myth of the West, suggesting that
the film deconstructs the concept of a homogeneous and stable American
national identity. Three Burials critiques America’s ‘dominant fiction’ – this
time in relation to Hispanic America – through its narrative focus on the
borderlands. It reveals that myths abound on both sides of the border – of all
borders; furthermore, that what the ‘wetbacks’ depicted in the film are chasing
is their own myth of the United States.
The chapter concludes with a philosophical discussion of the inextricable
status of myth and history. In this sense it develops the previous analyses of
The Searchers, Liberty Valance and Unforgiven, addressing the question: what
actually counts as history? Ultimately, I suggest that Three Burials offers a
compelling and critical examination of the way in which the myth of the West
has shaped the concept of national identity along racist and gendered lines; at
the same time, it demonstrates the Western’s long-standing capacity to oppose
such a conception.
Chapter 5 develops Chapter 4’s concerns describing the borderlands setting
of No Country for Old Men as a term of both geographical and ideological

­20
introduction

reference. It also develops the theme of America’s national identity in relation to

the Western. It does this through recourse to The Searchers, as well as to more
recent films with a contemporary setting, such as Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996).
No Country has been regarded by the few critics and journalists who have
discussed the film as an example of a post-Western. This chapter scrutinises
this appellation, providing a short account of the supposed development of the
Western in this direction from around the time of Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963).
The chapter then discusses the allegorical significance of No Country in (de)
constructing the cultural rhetoric behind early twenty-first-century US foreign
policies, specifically those in Afghanistan and Iraq. While certainly not com-
prising the whole of No Country’s significance, a discussion of these issues
does provide an inroad into one of this study’s primary focal points: the figure
of the Western hero. The hero provides the lens by which the chapter observes
how No Country assesses the role of myth in history and its sociocultural
role in the contemporary world. Overall, the chapter argues that No Country
utilises the Western’s generic conventions in order to affect a critique of the
cultural–ideological influence that the myth of the West still holds over the
political trajectory of the United States in its self-assumed role as the world’s
figurative lawman.
That this selection of films under discussion is neither exclusive nor exhaus-
tive seems too obvious a point to mention; however, given the nature of my
criticisms, it needs to be addressed. The films provided as each chapter’s main
case study do provide me with representative examples of what have been
termed the ‘classical’, ‘revisionist’ and ‘post’-Western phases of the genre. That
these films also provide me with suitable ‘fences’ upon which the narratives of
other significant Westerns can be placed and discussed in context further justi-
fies my selection of them as suitable films for analysis. (In truth, I could have
chosen a dozen or so other films, and a further dozen beyond that.) Overall,
I shall argue that these films help us to re-engage in a fuller discussion of the
Western genre, the history of the American West and of the continued conse-
quence of the adherence to myth in contemporary US culture.

Notes
 1. John Patterson, ‘Whatever Happened to the Heroes?’, Culture section, The
Guardian, 16 November 2007, p. 6.
  2. Ibid., p. 6.
  3. Karen R. Jones and John Wills, The American West: Competing Visions (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 5.
  4. I borrow the terms ‘Garden’ and ‘Desert’ from Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land:
The American West as Symbol and Myth (London: Harvard University Press,
[1950] 1978).
  5. Stephen McVeigh, The American Western (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), p. 155.
 6. Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), p. xv.

21
myth of the western

  7. Ibid. See also p. xvi.

  8. David Thompson, ‘The Cowboy’s Last Stand’, The Independent on Sunday, 30
April 2006, p. 8.
  9. See, for example, Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the
Blockbuster (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), esp. pp. 1–69. See also McGee, From
Shane to Kill Bill, pp. 235–44.
10. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. xv.
11. Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of
Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010), p. 21.
12. Ibid., p. 21.
13. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 135–6.
14. Carlton Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary
Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 2000), p. 3.
15. Ibid., p. 16.
16. Ibid., p. 6.
17. Ibid., p. 11.
18. Martin Holtz, American Cinema in Transition: The Western in New Hollywood
and Hollywood Now (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 1–5, quote on p. 4.
19. A selected list of the conventional evolutionary critical accounts that I shall scru-
tinise in the chapters that follow are in chronological order: Robert Warshow,
‘Movie Chronicle: The Westerner’ (1954), reprinted in Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 655–67; André Bazin, ‘Évolution du western’,
Cahiers du Cinéma, 55 (December 1955), reprinted in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies
and Methods, vol. 1: An Anthology (London: University of California Press,
1976), pp. 150–7; Jack Nachbar (ed.), Focus on the Western (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974); John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 2nd edn
(Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, [1971]
1984); Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of Myth (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1975); Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres:
Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981).
20. Tag Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the “Evolution” of
the Western’ (1986), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 262–76.
21. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Neale, Genre and
Hollywood.
22. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, p. 217.
23. Ibid., p. 5. See also Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory
and History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998) and Steve Neale
(ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2002),
esp. pp. 27–48.
24. Strong threads of genre evolution theory evident in more contemporary scholar-
ship can be found in the following studies, some of which are discussed during the
course of this study: Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier
in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
[1992] 1998); Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity
in the Hollywood Western (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997); John G. Cawelti, The
Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1999); Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne (2000, mentioned above);
Will Wright, The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory (London:
Sage, 2001); McVeigh, The American Western (2007, mentioned above); McGee,
From Shane to Kill Bill (2007, mentioned above); Jones and Wills, The American

­22
introduction

West (2009, mentioned above); Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki (eds.),
The Philosophy of the Western (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press,
2010).
25. Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: Viking, 1974),
p. 24.
26. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah –
Studies of Authorship in the Western (London: Secker & Warburg/British Film
Institute, 1969), p. 8
27. Westward expansion is itself potentially a kind of myth that uses Manifest Destiny
as a means to mask US imperial interests elsewhere: south towards Mexico and
further ‘West’ into the Caribbean and the Pacific. For more on US imperialism, see
Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
28. For a detailed account of the origins of Cody’s celebrity, and of the Wild West
itself, see Joy S. Kasson, ‘Life-Like, Vivid and Thrilling Pictures: Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West and Early Cinema’, in Janet Walker (ed.), Westerns: Films through History
(London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 109–31. My descriptive of the typical aspects of
the Wild West draws directly from her, pp. 113–18. For the cultural significance
of the Wild West, see also Corey K. Creekmur, ‘Buffalo Bill (Himself): History and
Memory in the Western Biopic’, in Walker (ed.), Westerns: Films through History,
pp. 131–51; William G. Simon and Louise Spence, ‘Cowboy Wonderland, History
and Myth: “It ain’t all that Different in Real Life”’, in Walker (ed.), Westerns:
Films through History, pp. 89–108; and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 63–88.
For a detailed account of the international appeal of the Wild West, see Robert W.
Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World,
1869–1922 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
29. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 82. See also Janet Walker (ed.), ‘Introduction:
Westerns through History’, in Westerns: Films through History, pp. 1–24. Walker
notes that during a European tour in 1895 the ‘Wild West Show’, which comprised
‘600 men, 500 horses, 11-acre mobile showground, and 23,000 yards of tent
canvas [and needing] 52 train cars to travel’, toured ‘131 sites in 190 days, cover-
ing 9000 miles’. She also tells us that ‘the German Army was ordered to study the
operation’.
30. Kasson, ‘Life-Like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures’, pp. 116–17 (emphasis in origi-
nal).
31. David Hamilton Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Cardiff:
Welsh Academic Press, 2001), p. 62.
32. Kasson, ‘Life-Like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures’, p. 117.
33. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 234.
34. George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the
Seventies (New York: Penguin, [1973] 1977), p. 47.
35. Kasson, ‘Life-Like, Vivid, and Thrilling Pictures’, pp. 118–19.
36. For an in-depth discussion of Cody and Turner, see Richard White, ‘Frederick
Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill’, in James R. Grossman (ed.), The Frontier in
American Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 7–67.
37. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’
[1893], in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History [1920]
(Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, [1920] 1986), pp. 1–38, quote on p. 1.
38. For an account of ‘Germ Theory’, see Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson
Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973),
esp. pp. 64–6. Billington outlines the general historical consensus around 1870–80,
which held ‘that the Aryo-Teutonic peoples who had occupied the Black Forest of
Germany in the days of Tacitus had developed the democratic institutions later to
be shared by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.’

23
myth of the western

39. Turner’s delivery of the ‘Frontier Thesis’ came less than three years after the
National Census Bureau for 1890 had declared the frontier officially closed.
40. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 30.
41. Smith, Virgin Land, ch. 11, ‘The Garden of the World and American Agrarianism’,
pp. 123–33.
42. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age
of Industrialisation, 1800–1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
[1985] 1994), pp. 79–80.
43. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
44. Turner, The Frontier in American History, pp. 37–8.
45. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from
the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993),
p. 36.
46. Turner, The Frontier in American History, pp. 2–3 (emphasis added).
47. Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner, pp. 83–4.
48. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 1.
49. John Higham, ‘The Future of American History’, Journal of American History,
80(4) (1994): 1289–309, quote on p. 1295.
50. Smith, Virgin Land, p. 259.
51. Jones and Wills, The American West, pp. 93–4.
52. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 15. We may also note that Smith’s
Virgin Land, although it seeks to update and correct Turner’s Frontier Thesis, simi-
larly makes scant mention of Native Americans, only passing references to a series
of ‘bloody Indian wars’ (p. 15).
53. Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne, p. 2.
54. Ibid., p. 2.
55. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 26; see also Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation,
p. 61.
56. Higham, ‘The Future of American History’, p. 1297.
57. Jones and Wills, The American West, p. 39.
58. Selections of Roosevelt’s historiography and political philosophy are: American
Ideals, and Other Essays, Social and Political (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1897);
The Winning of the West, 6 vols (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900); The Strenuous
Life, from The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in Fourteen Volumes (New York:
P. F. Collier, 1901); and The Rough Riders (New York: Da Capo Press, [1902]
1990). For an excellent biography of Roosevelt, see Edmund Morris, Theodore
Rex (New York: Random House, 2001). For Roosevelt’s views on the cowboy, see
Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the Whitehouse: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics
of Desire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
59. Roosevelt’s salutary remark has been widely quoted. As referenced chronologically
in the works I have thus far cited, see Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner, p. 130;
Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 29; McVeigh, The American Western, p. 25; Jones
and Wills, The American West, p. 50.
60. Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (New York: Century,
[1888] 1899), p. 9. Roosevelt, discussed in McVeigh, The American Western,
p. 17.
61. Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, p. 6, discussed in Lee Clark Mitchell,
Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), p. 25.
62. Roosevelt, Ranch Life, p. 25, discussed in Murdoch, The American West, p. 72.
63. Jones and Wills, The American West, p. 97.
64. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 20.
65. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 55 (emphasis in original).
66. Ibid., p. 60.

­24
introduction

67. Jones and Wills, The American West, p. 61.

68. Ibid., p. 61.
69. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. 1: From the Alleghanies to the
Mississippi, 1771–1783 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 1.
70. Neale, Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, p. 2.
71. Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), p. 131.
72. McVeigh, The American Western, pp. 202–12.
73. For the most recent analysis of Three Burials at the time of writing, see Camilla
Fojas, ‘Hollywood Border Cinema: Westerns with a Vengeance’, Journal of
Popular Film and Television, Special Issue: The Western, 39(2) (2011): 93–101.
For No Country, see William J. Devlin, ‘No Country for Old Men: The Decline
of Ethics and the West(ern)’, in Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki (eds),
The Philosophy of the Western (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press,
2010), pp. 221–41. As Devlin’s essay’s title suggests, his analysis broadly follows
an evolutionary trajectory of declining ethics in the genre, arguing that the ‘heroes’
get darker, harder to distinguish from the villains than they were previously. (In
my opinion, he takes too simplistic a view of earlier Westerns.) In discussing
No Country he writes: ‘we can no longer apply the terms “good” and “bad” to
the “guys” opposing one another – and this shatters the order we recognise and
assume in every western film’ (p. 236).

25
PART ONE
1. A GOOD MAN WITH A GUN

‘A man has to be what he is, Joey. You can’t break the mold. I tried it
and it didn’t work for me. Joey, there’s no living with . . . with a killin’.
There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong it’s a brand, a brand
sticks. There’s no going back.’

I
George Stevens’ Shane (1953) is a fairly tight adaptation of the 1949 novel
by Jack Schaeffer, and has become celebrated as an archetypal Western, as
the classical Western, in fact, an overtly mythic distillation of the historical
migration of Anglo-American pioneers into the Wyoming Basin. Shane is set
in the dying days of the West, mere months before the Superintendent of the
US Census for 1890 would declare the frontier no more. It was, of course, this
event that prompted Turner’s compelling need to mark the ‘significance’ of
the ‘closing of a great historic movement [in] American history’.1 It is often
thought that with Shane the genre is ‘recognised’: Northrop Frye’s concept
of literary Romance, of a mortal hero who is, nonetheless, marvellous in his
actions and superior to those around him, is combined with a profound sense
of elegy of the passing of the agrarian frontier, usurped by the encroachment
of urban-technological modernity.2
In this reading, Shane celebrates the ‘Winning of the West’ and the emergent
civilisation at the same time as it mourns the loss of the sense of freedom and
individualism that the frontier had supposedly engendered. Of course, such an
ideological paradox is not peculiar to the Hollywood Western. It has its roots
firmly embedded in a long tradition of popular American frontier literature
and poetry, including the likes of Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore
Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson. ‘For more than a century’, Leo Marx
informs us, America’s ‘most gifted writers have dwelt upon the contradiction
between rural myth and technological fact.’3 Such a contradiction manifests
itself in the figure of the Western hero. While ultimately siding with ‘progress’,
the hero remains ambiguous in his attitude towards civilisation, preferring

29
myth of the western

instead the realm of wild nature with whose essence he feels a (false) sense of
harmony. ‘When such a hero dies’, writes Douglas Pye, ‘it creates the sense of
a spirit passing out of nature, coupled with a melancholy sense of the passing
of time, the old order changing and giving way to the new.’4
It is commonly argued that, by the late nineteenth century, the wilderness
as the index of American social ‘reality’ was being replaced by the industrial
cities. The West and the wilderness were now perceived as nostalgic remnants
of a lost freedom, and this, of course, made them into concepts more popular
than ever. First, I shall offer a description of this type of frontier narrative as it
has been read into the Western. I do this insofar as the classical appellation has
been defined and reinforced over the years by a large number of film scholars
and cultural historians writing on, or referring to, the genre. Such scholars
discuss how the classical Western’s formulaic structures have become mani-
fested as a series of visual and thematic tropes that have come to ‘speak’ the
language of the genre, as it were. Such tropes, it is alleged, also came to ‘speak’
a nation’s history, advancing a ‘national iconography’ and work to construct
American national identity.
The Western genre has provided an authoritative voice to such a degree that,
as far as many were (and still are) concerned, the Western is American history.5
I shall show how film scholarship has read myth as history by ‘discovering’
these tropes in the genre and discuss how these tropes have been discerned in
the narrative strategies of Shane. Additionally, I shall show how these fictional
representations have been causally related to the triumphalist versions of US
history (together with the various other forms of mythic expression) that I
discussed in the Introduction. The sustaining premise behind my selection
of Shane as an appropriate film for analysis can be justified on the following
grounds. First, as its allegedly straightforward narrative structure is so often
seen to typify the genre, its suitability for the application and articulation of
classical Western tropes seems both logical and, moreover, obvious. Secondly,
the classical definition of Shane offered by most formula analyses works
together with the theory of genre evolution. I aim to use Shane as a primary
text in order to affect a critical response to both of these approaches.
As a generalised notion, and as indicated in the Introduction, genre evolu-
tion theory has been taken up by a significant number of film scholars, and it
is necessary at this point to offer a more detailed analysis of this approach to
genre. It argues for the existence of an increased sense of introspection, self-
awareness and self-reflexivity within the formal tropes of a given film category:
first, as it establishes itself chronologically in a given period; and, secondly, as
it develops formulas, tropes, plot types. That is, as it coalesces into a recognis-
able genre. According to Thomas Schatz, this is evidenced most profoundly in
the Western by tracing the depiction of what he calls the ‘changing hero’. In
this reading, the hero’s reasons for assisting the frontier community, in fact,
his attitude towards society in general, evinces a ‘growing incompatibility
with civilisation’.6 But the hero does not lose his romantic edge as, according

­30
a good man with a gun

to Schatz, ‘he strikes a romantic pose even in the face of extinction’.7 This
pronounced formal development is typically combined thematically with a
growing sense of cultural pessimism and increased narrative instability.
Overall, it is said that a mood of disillusionment afflicts the evolution of
the Western. This development apparently came to dominate Hollywood
film production as a whole by the late 1960s. The reasons posited for this are
largely cultural and, according to Steve Neale, depend upon a mistreatment
of ‘genres simply as vehicles for “capitalist” (or the “dominant”) ideology’.8
Despite what Neale highlights as the obvious problematical issue of assuming
the vehicular nature of Hollywood genres, what Ed Buscombe has described
as the ‘the economic and artistic imperatives of Hollywood’ ensured that this
approach to film studies has retained a sustained influence in Western genre
criticism.9 Specifically, this influence is felt in most analyses of Shane, especially
in its relation to the study of diachronic changes within the Western genre as
a whole.
The specific sociological causes often put forward for the evolution of the
Western from the celebratory classical to the more pessimistic ‘anti’ or revi-
sionist phases of the genre relate directly to domestic and foreign turbulence
in cultural, political and ideological movements and counter-movements in
the United States beginning in the 1960s. American idealism was severely
undermined in this period by a series of high-profile assassinations, outbursts
of racial antagonism and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. It is sug-
gested that this cultural ‘turn’ came to be reflected in the Westerns produced
during this period, leading to darker narratives, ambiguous heroes, and revi-
sionist attacks on the triumphalist, Anglo-American version of US history that
classical Westerns were said to champion. When viewed from such a perspec-
tive, Shane seems like a relic from an older, more optimistic past; a time before
the erosion of confidence in a shared national purpose.
The political-allegorical reading (whereby a given film was seen to have
more to do with the era in which it was produced than it did with the era in
which it was set) has become increasingly popular. The following example is
from John H. Lenihan:

The Vietnam War subsequently shifted debate from the issue of how best
to respond to alleged communist expansion to the question of America’s
own expansionist impulses . . . From the end of World War II through
the 1950s, Westerns increasingly reflected contemporary yearnings for
peaceful co-existence by emphasising the desirability of negotiating
with, instead of militarily destroying, enemy forces . . . until the sixties,
when Westerns adopted much of the cynicism and dissent generated by
America’s policies in Southeast Asia.10

It should be noted that political-allegorical approaches to the Western are not

automatically beholden to a relationship with genre evolution theory. As Alan

31
myth of the western

Williams has rightly pointed out, when it comes to Schatz’s interpretive schema,
the erroneous assumption is that ‘it is not the filmmaking system or the social
context that has changed, but the genres that have evolved’.11 The pervading
view on this, as summarised by Janet Walker, is that ‘although informed by
an historical consciousness’, genre theories such as those offered by Schatz,
‘do not purport in the final analysis to be historical studies’.12 Walker sug-
gests that, within this schema, the historical function of the Western becomes
­‘antiquated . . . usurped by formal and ideological issues’.13 This is not a view
of the genre to which Walker subscribes. For her, above all else, ‘the western is
a profoundly historical genre’.14
While the overall emphasis of evolution theory remains introspective genre
developments over and above any specific change in historical context, this
approach does share much in common with the political-allegorical approach.
Both draw similar conclusions as to how and why the genre evolved in the way
that it did. These similarities are perhaps best summed up by Michael Coyne
in what he describes as ‘the crucial relationship between era and artefact’.15
Coyne’s main focus is on ‘an interpretive analysis of the social or political
message underlying selected prestigious Westerns’.16 Writing in 1997, Coyne’s
own prognosis of the ‘relationship between era and artefact’ is severe, ending
as it does with the terminal proclamation that ‘as a central force in the culture
of contemporary American society, the Western is never coming back’.17 The
main reason posited is the Vietnam War. As far as Coyne (alongside numerous
others) is concerned, this conflict ‘made mockery of long-cherished national
concepts of invincibility and righteousness, and the Western was a casualty of
the accompanying cultural fallout’.18
Relating his political-allegorical readings to genre evolution theory, Coyne
outlines his genealogy of the Western’s ‘birth and death’ in organic terms:

It strikes me that the genre in fact ran a course parallel to human life,
with the difference that its birth and death cannot be exactly determined,
whereas specific crucial areas of human experience which are frequently
gradual and ongoing can, in the Hollywood Western, be pinpointed
meticulously: onset of maturity (Stagecoach); increase of sexual aware-
ness (The Outlaw); first full-blown sexual experience (Duel in the Sun);
work (Red River); approach of middle age (The Gunfighter); assumption
of greater responsibility (High Noon); disillusionment and midlife crisis
(The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance); and intimations of mortality
(most notably The Wild Bunch and The Shootist). Thus the genre’s life
cycle has now run its course.19

It is clear that Vietnam remains pivotal to such political-allegorical read-

ings. Coyne even goes as far as to insist that ‘Vietnam has killed the Western
twice. The first time, the war in Vietnam debilitated the cinematic myth of
the West. The second . . . the cinematic myth of the Vietnam experience is

­32
a good man with a gun

gradually supplanting the Western as America’s most resonant historical

moment.’20
Likewise, the ‘relationship between era and artefact’ remains ‘crucial’ to
Schatz’s evolution approach, specifically his attempt to discern an overall
pattern of development within the genre. Despite shying away from overtly
political-allegorical readings of films, implicit in his analysis is the suggestion
that, in progressing towards self-conscious formalism, the Western ineluctably
became embroiled in sociopolitical and historical issues. Thus, Schatz writes:

As an element of our national mythology, the Western represents

American culture, explaining its present in terms of its past and virtu-
ally redefining the past to accommodate the present. The image of the
Western community in Hollywood movies tends to reflect our own
beliefs and preoccupations, and the Western’s evolution as a genre results
both from the continual reworking of its own rules of construction and
expression and also from the changing beliefs and attitudes of contempo-
rary American society.21

In his opinion, such an evolutionary trajectory manifests itself in formal devel-

opments within the Western, from early rudimentary narrative transparency to
eventual complexity and ambiguity:

[During] the genre’s gradual evolution . . . It had grown from a naive,
simplistic foundation ritual to a sophisticated formula in which American
history and ideology – and the Western genre itself – could be reflected
upon and examined in detail.22

Overall, most advocates of either the political-allegorical reading, and/or genre

evolution, tend to adhere to John G. Cawelti’s assertion that the revisionist
narrative–ideological developments in the Western were due to an inability of
the frontier mythology underpinning the genre to deal with the traumatic reali-
ties of the post-Vietnam War era.23 Another such adherent was Jack Nachbar.
In terms similar to Coyne, Nachbar describes the disintegration of the ‘entire
Western formula’ by the 1970s:

Like terrified shotgun riders on a Wells Fargo stage blasting away at

shadows, the creators of contemporary Western movies are nervously
aiming their genre in several directions at once. And like pellets from that
shotgun, the Western formula is spreading out into a wide and confusing
pattern.24

As a sustained critique of these attitudes provides the focal point of Chapter

3 of this study, I shall stave off in-depth discussion on this topic for the
moment. Right now I want to consider aspects of the classical Western, and

33
myth of the western

the question begging an answer here in relation to Shane is: to what extent is
the so-called classical Western so overtly triumphalist or simplistic in either its
formal, political-allegorical or historical content?
This question can be related to theoretical issues in film genre studies writ
large. For instance, Janet Staiger argues against the commonly held assump-
tion that ‘Old Hollywood’ (or ‘Fordian Hollywood’) films are somehow ‘pure’
and more ‘easily arranged into categories’ than those of the so-called ‘New
Hollywood’ (or ‘post-Fordian Hollywood’).25 ‘It is one thing to claim, as
Cawelti does’, she writes, ‘that genres are transforming in the early 1970s. It
is another to propose that post-Fordian cinema is typified by its hybridity.’26
Such an arbitrary distinction as Staiger highlights could easily be related to
the equally arbitrary distinction between the formal and thematic differences
asserted between classical and revisionist Westerns. The argument that earlier
Westerns – c. 1930–60 – are instances of a somehow more ‘pure classical
genre’, is to suggest narrative simplicity and even mono-ideological naivety.
Likewise, to assert that Westerns of the New Hollywood era elicit ‘trans-
formation, deterioration, or hybridization of a pure essence or origin’, is to
be supportive of genre evolution theory’s erroneous belief in the Western’s
‘growth, flowering, and decay’.27 Neale criticises Schatz for considering genres
as ‘closed and continuous rather than intermittent systems’. This, he argues, ‘is
why [Schatz] rarely acknowledges the existence of hybrids’.28 Neale continues
by suggesting that ‘the repertoire of generic convention available at any one
point in time is always in-play rather than simply re-played’. This, he suggests
in further criticism of Schatz, ‘is why it is so difficult to define genres in any-
thing other than basic terms’.29 Staiger argues likewise, insisting that, Fordian
or post-Fordian, ‘Hollywood films have never been pure’.30
As indicated above, Shane’s very status as a locus classicus of the genre
enhances its suitability for providing a critical response to the proponents of
both the classical reading of the film itself and of the Western’s evolution as
a whole. The counter-conventional reading that informs the latter part of this
chapter takes its cue from Staiger and Neale, and acts as a reaction against
established theoretical positions. As for Schatz’s suggestion that early cin-
ematic Westerns were ‘naive’ and ‘simplistic’ before evolving into a ‘sophisti-
cated formula’, I contend that, despite a convincing surface appearance, such
an argument does indeed amount to little more than conjecture. Furthermore,
it depends upon the wilful omission of ambiguous aspects of form, character,
plot and narrative in many of the most celebrated classical films, or the total
elision of still others from the theoretical equation. This is done presumably in
order to best suit the argument that later, or revisionist, Westerns are somehow
darker, richer and more complex than their more properly ‘pure’ classical
predecessors. In order to offer an adequate deconstruction of these attitudes,
however, it is first necessary to outline the artistic, theoretical and cultural
factors that have, and still do, inform such an influential and suggestive
approach to the genre. To which end, I now offer a classical reading of Shane.

­34
a good man with a gun

II
At the conclusion of Shane, the eponymous hero rides off, wounded and alone,
and into the figurative ether of the frontier wilderness. He has just defeated
Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), a professional gunfighter and one of the film’s
principal villains. And as he departs, the buckskin-clad Shane remains as
majestic and as mysterious as the Teton Range from which he first emerged;
his status as Western legend firmly secured. This image is consistent with the
tone of Schaeffer’s novel: ‘He was the man who rode into our little valley out
of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back
whence he had come and he was Shane.’31
Shane tells the story of how this iconic drifter ends up protecting a small
Wyoming valley homesteading community from a brutal cattle baron called
Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer). Typically, the classical reading sees the film’s
ostensible historical inspiration – Wyoming’s 1892 Johnson County War,
where corporate cattlemen threatened brutal conflict against the region’s
homesteaders in defence of their economic interests – as merely derivative,
transposed, or even reduced, to a personal conflict between Ryker and a small
group of homesteaders. However, at the very least, the historical backdrop
provides a catalyst driving the narrative action forward.
Desperate to fulfil a newly acquired government beef contract, Ryker means
to dispossess the homesteaders (whom he regards as little more than ‘squatters’
on ‘his’ range) by any means necessary. His first efforts are aimed at Joe Starrett
(Van Heflin), the unofficial spokesperson for the homesteaders. However,
when his verbal intimidations (and even attractive bribes) fail, he hires the
deadly Wilson to ensure his interests. Events soon escalate when Wilson incites
Starrett’s friend, Frank ‘Stonewall’ Torrey (Elisha Cooke Jr), into drawing
his gun, goading him with insults about his being ‘Southern Trash’, before
remorselessly gunning him down on the steps of Grafton’s Saloon. In classical
terms, this moment establishes Wilson as a sadist, a quick-on-the-draw villain
who savours his execution of Frank. A professionally skilled hero is required
to defeat him. Shane, who up until then had forsaken the ‘gun’ for the ‘plough’
by taking up work as a ‘sodbuster’ for Starrett, reluctantly commits himself to
deadly action in defence of the homesteaders’ plight. Learning from reformed
Ryker cowhand, Chris (Ben Johnson), that ‘Starrett’s up against a stacked
deck’, Shane forcibly prevents Starrett from going to confront Ryker over
the range dispute, noting that although he might be ‘a match for Ryker’ he is
certainly ‘no match for Wilson’. Shane once again takes up his six-gun, bids
a tender farewell to Starrett’s wife Marian (Jean Arthur), and begins the slow
ride towards town.
The climactic shootout at Grafton’s has since become iconic: following a
tense standoff, in what seems like a heartbeat Wilson draws, but Shane is
faster, and the force of his bullet drives Wilson’s body to the saloon wall; he
quickly spins round, dispatching Ryker, and, before leaving, seeing to Ryker’s

35
myth of the western

brother Morgan (John Dierkes), whose concealed rifle had been trained on
Shane all along. In one fatal instance, Shane has eradicated the villainous
elements of the town and made the valley safe for the homesteaders, a place
where children like Joe and Marian’s son Joey (Brandon De Wilde) can, in the
words of Shane, ‘grow up to be strong and straight’.
Cawelti once wrote of such an heroic intervention as an ‘epic moment’,
which was fundamental to the classical Western formula.32 This mythically
constructed scenario, which highlights a major structuring opposition within
the Western, typically sees the savage forces of the wilderness threaten an
embryonic frontier civilisation, with the hero standing ever-ready to intervene
on the pioneers’ behalf, a stalwart sentinel ‘poised against the threat of law-
lessness or savagery’.33 An important adjunct to the epic moment, to its very
narrative functionality, was the so-called ‘code of the West’, the format for
which was arguably established at the turn of the twentieth century by the
novelist Owen Wister. In The Virginian (1902), Wister described a set of chiv-
alrous attitudes and actions to which his eponymous hero would abide. A close
friend of Roosevelt’s, Wister is largely credited for bringing the politician’s
version of frontier history into the field of popular literature. The tone of The
Virginian was one of romantic nostalgia for the mythic values of the passing
frontier, a culturally elitist morality tale aimed at the modern finance capital-
ist: ‘If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind
the times. Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have found him
old-fashioned.’ For many scholars, writing years later, it was these very char-
acteristics that came to embody the spirit of the heroes of Hollywood’s ‘silver
screen’: ‘the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our
soil’.34
The ‘code’ was, of course, another constructed fiction and, like the epic
moment, a part of the myth of the West. Through it a paradigm was estab-
lished that worked to synthesise the genre’s combined promotion of civilised
values, such as community and law, with its simultaneous, yet often antitheti-
cal, promotions of individualism and its celebration of violence. According
to Cawelti, the code achieved this synthesis by insisting that the hero ‘rarely
engages in violence until the last moment and [that] he never kills until the
savage’s gun has already cleared his holster’.35 In consonance with this, Robert
Warshow once suggested that the Western ‘offers a serious orientation to the
problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else in our culture’.36
His analysis was one of the first to link ‘the values we seek in the Western’ with
a coded use of force:

Those values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on his
thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and even
that he ‘believes in violence’. But the drama is one of self-restraint: the
moment of violence must come in its own time and according to its
special laws, or else it is valueless.37

­36
a good man with a gun

According to Warshow, the protagonist of the Western is in control of himself.

He uses violence only when provoked and, ultimately, in defence of his vision
of himself as a man of honour. For Cawelti, the hero’s code and the epic
moment (where an ‘advancing civilisation met a declining savagery’) worked
to provide ‘a fictional justification for enjoying violent conflicts and the expres-
sion of lawless force without feeling that they threatened the values or the
fabric of society’.38 Violence as a moral force therefore became central to the
classical Western formula.
A formal analysis of the shootout in Shane will help to illustrate how these
concepts have been applied to the Western. As Shane and Wilson standoff
against each other, the establishing shot is on Wilson as he draws his gun;
a reverse shot is immediately employed, revealing Shane reaching for his
holster. Presumably they both draw at the same instant (as two highly skilled
and experienced gunmen, seeking to draw first, that is, as quick as possible,
would surely be the only way for each to ensure the best chance of their own
survival), but the point to remember here is that, through a deliberate editing
contrivance, Wilson is seen to make a move to draw first. This has the effect
of positioning him as the aggressor, whereas Shane, drawing ‘second’ (only
faster) occupies the moral high ground. Hence, Shane ‘speaks’ the ‘language’
of the genre, and Shane’s slaying of Wilson and the Rykers (the epic moment)
equates the hero’s violence (his coded use of force) not with an act of aggres-
sion (which, ultimately, it is), but with an unavoidable and noble defence of the
values of American civilisation.
Transforming acts of aggression into a noble defence highlights a common
attitude in US society, and forms a major component of its assertion of its
dominant ideology, one that is particularly pertinent to the political-allegorical
reading of the Western. According to Coyne, the Western hero is ‘like the
nation’s idealised self-image, friendly, benevolent, peaceable and slow to anger;
yet once roused to violence he establishes his moral authority with a thorough
and often terrible finality’.39 Typically, the United States justifies its politically
sanctioned violence by referral to this notion. It makes its military aggression
different to that of other nations, rendering it exceptional within the concept
of the national character. Hence, the historical events most celebrated in US
society are not so much its military victories like Yorktown or Gettysburg
(although these events are certainly celebrated), rather they are its defeats like
the battle of the Little Bighorn, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and, most
recently (and contentiously), the terrorist attacks of 11 September. In the case
of the Little Bighorn (transformed by the myth of the West into Custer’s Last
Stand), an emphasis on the savage nature of the enemy’s violence – ­scalping,
decapitation, annihilation – transposes the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne
and Arapaho’s desperate defence of their ancestral homeland into an act of
unbridled aggression. It therefore has the effect of rendering, as with Shane’s
violence against Wilson and Ryker, invasive violence as a noble defence of the
values of American civilisation.

37
myth of the western

The sociological use of violence as it is depicted in the Western as an aspect

of the hero’s code has been analysed in-depth by Jane Tompkins. Tompkins,
a feminist literary critic (and unashamed Western fan), claims that ‘[w]orking
on Westerns has made me aware of the extent to which the genre exists in
order to provide a justification for violence’.40 She further remarks that, in the
United States especially, ‘[v]iolence needs justification because our society puts
it under interdict – morally and legally, at any rate’.41 She suggests that this
justification is teased out during the course of most Western narratives (includ-
ing Shane’s, where the hero is goaded and insulted repeatedly) to ‘the point
where provocation has gone too far’. And in this instance, ‘retaliatory violence
becomes not simply justifiable but imperative: now, we are made to feel, not to
transgress the interdict against violence would be the transgression’.42 It is from
similar such observations that Cawelti declared the Western’s ‘most obvious
and recurrent theme [to be] the moral necessity of violence’.43 He insists that
‘Shane’s killings are presented in such a way that violence is not only seen to
be inevitable in relation to the plot – since the rancher will not give up his open
range except over his dead body – but morally right and even transcendent.’44
The paradox of the epic moment, therefore, can be summarised thus: the fatal
violence of the gunfight, although illegal in the eyes of the laws of civilisation
is, nevertheless, acknowledged as necessary for the foundation of law upon
which civilisation is to be built. (Of course, the lingering cultural–ideological
resonances of a Western like Shane are not lost on most contemporary film
scholars; nor is it likely that would they have been lost on most audiences back
in 1953 when Shane was thrilling cinemagoers across the United States. The
right to bear arms in defence of one’s person and property as enshrined in the
Constitution is as powerful (and controversial) a belief today for many in the
United States as it would have been back in the 1950s, certainly no less so than
on the late-nineteenth-century Wyoming cattle frontier and during the Johnson
County War.)
Perhaps the most meticulous account of the classical Western formula
comes from Will Wright. His two influential structural studies of the Western,
Six Guns and Society (1975) and The Wild West (2001), offer respective
and related analyses of the genre’s cinematic mode and of the power of the
myth of the West (what he terms ‘Wild West mythology’) in contemporary
US society. In Six Guns, Wright interrogates the relationship between indi-
vidual film texts and the culture that produces them. Specifically, he focuses
on the Hollywood Western and the twentieth-century United States. He
correctly identifies this culture as existing within a market-based economy
of mass industrial production and consumption. He also correctly identifies
Hollywood cinema as a product inextricably related to both aspects of this
culture. Therefore, his study is primarily a socioeconomic one in which the
Western is understood as a mythic distillation that acts as a ‘communica-
tion from a society to its members’.45 In The Wild West, Wright extends his
socioeconomic approach by incorporating a history of social contract theory

­38
a good man with a gun

in America. Wright complements his earlier argument – that Westerns function

as modern-day myths for contemporary American society – by suggesting that
‘[m]yths always offer instructive, entertaining models of appropriate social
actions, actions that are compatible with dominant institutions’. Furthermore,
that these ‘dominant institutions’ are ‘based on the [market] idea of rational
individuals’.46 In the case of Wild West mythology, it is Wright’s contention
that such a cultural story offered a ‘vision of civil society [that] legitimated
market ideas, the ideas of freedom and equality, [and] the idea of private
property’.47
At once forgoing a complex psychological approach to the genre, Six Guns
offers up a general theory that observes the Western maintaining a direct,
uncomplicated relationship to both the film spectator and a particular period’s
dominant ideology. Drawing on the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-
Strauss, together with Vladimir Propp’s formalist analyses of the plot func-
tions of fairytales, Wright compiles a list of what he understands to be the key
variations in the Western’s plot structure.48 These variations are then caus-
ally related to cultural, economic and ideological shifts in modern American
society:

[There exists] a clear pattern of change [within] the structure of the myth
correspond[ing] to the conceptual needs of social and self-understanding
required by the dominant social understandings of [a given] period; the
historical changes in the structure of the myth correspond to the changes
in the structure of these dominant institutions.49

Hence, tied to socioeconomic shifts, the Western undergoes a process of evolu-

tion from the ‘classical plot’ to the ‘vengeance variation’, the ‘transition theme’
and, finally, the ‘professional plot’, which apparently typified generic output
in the mid- to late 1960s. The socioeconomic correspondence of the respective
genre ‘periods’ are outlined thus:

[T]he classical Western plot corresponds to the individualistic concep-

tion of society underlying a market economy . . . the vengeance plot is
a variation that begins to reflect changes in the market economy . . . the
professional plot reveals a new conception of society corresponding to
the values and attitudes inherent in a planned, corporate economy.50

(The ‘transition theme’ is, apparently, ‘more logical than temporal [and]
includes three films in the early fifties’.51) Wright goes on to identify a series of
plot structures as integral component parts of the myth of the West. ‘For analy-
sis’, he writes, ‘we can reduce each story to three sets of characters: the hero,
the society, and the villains.’52 Combined with this is his insistence on a series
of four basic binary oppositions through which the Western genre is alleg-
edly structured: ‘inside society–outside society’, ‘good–bad’, ‘strong–weak’

39
myth of the western

and, most pertinent to all structural studies of the Western, ‘wilderness–­

civilisation’. This last is adapted from structuralism’s ‘nature–culture’ master
binary under which the ‘three sets of characters’ can interact within any given
film text at any given sociohistorical moment. Of course, such a figuration
is not limited to Wright or the Western. His insistence on structuring binary
oppositions together with his conception of the genre’s evolution is well sup-
ported in academic circles, and has long provided producers of popular culture
in the United States with a comfortingly simplistic base from which to develop
popular ideas of heroism. Within this paradigm, the narrative resolution of the
nature–culture binary typically realises the protagonist’s ‘transcendence of the
world of experience’ following the ultimate triumph of ‘good over evil . . . light
over darkness’.53 As already mentioned, this figuration is typically associated
with the tradition of literary Romance. It is essentially utopian in that it seeks
to perform a redemptory function. That is, for Frye, lifting man ‘clear of the
bondage of history’.54
Jim Kitses insisted that Frye’s mode of literary Romance was central to
the Western, ‘insist[ing] on the idealisation of characters who wielded near-
magical powers’.55 Kitses also follows Frye’s definition of archetypes, and his
analysis of the genre is fully consonant with the spirit of literary Romance,
providing ‘the movement of a god-like figure into the demonic wasteland, the
death and resurrection, the return to a paradisal garden’.56 When interpreted in
this manner, Shane and Wilson represent archetypes, and when Shane defeats
Wilson it can be equated to good triumphing over evil at the most rudimentary
(and Manichean) level.57
Kitses’ analysis of the genre predates Wright’s study by a few years; nev-
ertheless, it strikes a chord with the latter through its similar utilisation of
basic structural oppositions. Kitses privileged the opposition, wilderness–­
civilisation, as the master binary and combined auteur theory with structural
analysis, drawing all opposing concepts under this grand rubric in what he
termed a ‘structuralist grid’. Schatz similarly relates Kitses’ and Wright’s
structuralist model to Shane, interpreting it as ‘a virtual ballet of oppositions
[where] “open range” and fenced-in farmland manifest the genre’s nature/
culture opposition’.58 Schatz’s reading is supported by the political-allegorical
approach of Lenihan, who declares that Shane’s ‘sad departure’ from the valley
at the end of the film ‘reflects the classic Western’s dichotomy between heroic,
free individualism and the more enduring but constraining social order’.59
This classical view of Shane has been reasserted by Ruth Griffin in her 2007
essay, ‘Writing the West’.60 Following her own detailed analysis of Wright’s
theories, Griffin claims that ‘the essence of Shane’s narrative . . . can be com-
fortably mapped onto the classical plot category thereby working to reinforce
its generic credentials’.61
It is hardly surprising that Wright considers Shane to be an exemplar of the
‘classical plot’, as ‘the classic of the classic Westerns’ no less.62 According to
Wright’s Six Guns schema, this stage of the genre constitutes the dominant

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a good man with a gun

narrative mode of films produced from around 1932 to 1955. Plots typically
involved ‘a hero who is somehow estranged from his society but on whose
ability rests the fate of that society. The villains threaten the society until
the hero acts to protect and save it.’63 In The Wild West, Wright extends the
sociological function of this mythic individual, showing how this symbol of the
national character developed over time. He identifies him as a ‘market hero’
in the Rooseveltian mode, a Progressive Anglo-Saxon who ‘emerged from the
wilderness to build a civil society’:

He symbolised freedom and equality, the end of class privilege, the end of
sacred duties. He first appeared in early America as a scout in the eastern
forests, knowing the Indians and blazing trails. He became most cultur-
ally resonant, however, and most mythically famous, when he changed
to the lonesome cowboy wandering the Wild West.64

Within this central formal and thematic premise, Wright identifies a number
of semantic narrative units, the ordering of which determine the basic syntac-
tic structure constituting any given film or group of films. Within the ‘classi-
cal plot’ category these are said to include (but are by no means exhausted
by): ‘The hero enters a social group’, ‘The villains threaten the society’, and
‘The hero defeats the villains’.65 Ostensibly, these semantic units are easily
grafted onto the narrative of Shane, and it is Wright’s overall contention that
the ‘classical plot . . . defines the genre’, and that all the other plot types, the
‘vengeance’, the ‘transition’, the ‘professional’, are ‘built upon its symbolic
foundation and depend upon this foundation for their meaning’.66 Wright
effectively suggests that the classical Western constitutes a generic yardstick,
with Shane as its exemplary instance, the inference being the existence of a
touchstone, a ‘pure’ Western.
Both film scholarship and recent historiography have tended increasingly to
equate the classical Western’s formal structures, together with its moral justi-
fication of individualistic violence, to those of an ideological sentinel seeking
to legitimise through paeans to nationalist brands of freedom, democracy and
economic individualism; the Anglo-American conquest of the North American
continent and the dispossession of the Native Americans (aspects of which the
classical Western is typically seen either to justify or to elide). This is certainly
the view taken by Coyne, who states that ‘Westerns typically enforced white
centrality’.67 Despite the occasional efforts of the genre to correct racial bias,
Coyne maintains that such narratives were constructed ‘as problems for white
America to solve’, ultimately suggesting that ‘the Western remained a creature
and a reflection of white America’.68 In The American West in Film (1985),
John Tuska provides us with the most vitriolic attack on the genre’s racism,
especially with regard to its treatment of Native Americans: ‘I would hope
that we may once and for all put to rest that killing “mythical” Indians is only
so much “newspeak” for enjoying genocide.’69 He insists that in general ‘the

41
myth of the western

Western film as it has been made deserves the strongest censure which can be
brought to bear for the lies it has told’.70
Tompkins suggests another form of genocide undertaken by the genre; one
which relates directly to Tuska’s and is apt for the kind of visual language
peculiar to the cinema. She contends that, in constructing ‘mythical Indians’,
the Western partook of a cultural elision of the real Native American so ruth-
less and so extensive that she felt compelled to leave them out of her analysis
altogether:

My unbelief at the travesty of native peoples that Western films afford

kept me from scrutinising what was there. I didn’t want to see. I stub-
bornly expected the genre to do better than it was, and when it wasn’t,
I dropped the subject . . . I never cried at anything I saw in a Western,
but I cried when I realised this: after the Indians had been decimated
by disease, removal, and conquest, after they had been caricatured and
degraded in Western movies, I had ignored them too. The human beings
who populated this continent before the Europeans came and who still
live here, whose image the Western traded on – where are they? Not in
Western films. And not in this book, either.71

On the other hand, most of those writing on the Western (and the histori-
cal West for that matter) have convincingly argued that Indians are always
symbolically present in Westerns – if only as degraded caricatures – and that
this symbolism is fundamental to any serious study of the genre. For instance,
Cawelti remarks that: ‘[t]he role of savage is more or less interchangeable
between Indians or outlaws since both groups are associated [in the genre]
with lawlessness, a love of violence, and rejection of the town’s settled way
of life’.72 Leslie A. Fiedler reiterates such an assertion when he writes that ‘the
Redskins are present always by implication at least – even in the shootdown
. . . when the paleface in a White Hat, beating the paleface in a Black Hat to the
draw, symbolically kills the wild Indian in us all’.73 It is therefore clear, if only
on the most prosaic of levels, to read into the homesteader’s dispute with the
Ryker brothers and Shane’s duel with Wilson, this implied symbolic presence
of the ‘Redskins’.
Less prosaic is the emphasis Tompkins places on the genre’s gender bias.
For her, the main structuring binary in the Western is not that of wilderness–­
civilisation, but that between male and female – which we might term mas-
culinity–femininity. In support of this assertion, Lee Clarke Mitchell argues
that within the Western ‘cultural meaning emerges through binary oppositions
patterned on the cultural distinction of simple sexual difference’.74 Perhaps
unsurprisingly, this sexual difference is predicated upon an active, dominant
masculinity over a passive, submissive femininity.75 ‘The Western answers the
[nineteenth century] domestic novel,’ argues Tompkins. ‘It is the antithesis of
the cult of [Christian] domesticity that dominated American Victorian culture

­42
a good man with a gun

. . . Westerns either push women out of the picture completely or assign them
roles in which they exist only to serve the needs of men.’76 Furthermore,
Tompkins argues that it is typical of most Western narratives that ‘not only
does the man do exactly what the woman has begged him not to do, but she
takes him back after he has done it’.77 This argument is apparently illustrated
in her reading of Shane. Moments before the film’s climactic gunfight, Marian
Starrett ‘dissolves into an ineffectual harangue . . . unsuccessfully pleading
with her man not to go into town to get shot. When the crunch comes, women
shatter into words.’78 Here Tompkins is insisting upon part of the tradition
laid out (once more) by Owen Wister: that of the good woman who, despite
her initial, seemingly intractable reservations, eventually acknowledges the
social need for the hero’s violence, just as Marion seems to accept what Shane
has to go and do in her husband’s stead.79
The racist and sexist charges made against the Western have been drawn
together recently by Kitses, who adds monopolistic capitalism to the charge-
sheet, suggesting that: ‘[t]he recasting of the frontier as a border between the
powerful and the dispossessed, men and women, whites and people of colour
has unearthed other meanings for the form’.80 He finds that much contempo-
rary scholarship has acted as a corrective to the ‘ideologically innocent criti-
cism of the past’, and (in this respect he is echoing Tuska) he finds the genre
‘guilty of bad faith’.81 The gendered and racial bias of the classical Western
highlighted by Tompkins and Coyne, respectively, is summed up by Kitses’
suggestion that ‘the feminine in the genre exists only to validate masculin-
ity as the dominant norm. Encounters with the Indian, regardless of whether
the latter is seen as savage or noble, ultimately function only to secure white
identity’.82
Of course, Wright links racism to his own analysis. In The Wild West he
describes how, during the late nineteenth century, popular social Darwinist
theories of ‘racial inferiority’ were culturally linked to economic theories of
market rationalism. ‘They [Native Americans] are failures at rationality’, he
writes, ‘and in terms of the Indian as symbol, that failure is based on race.’83
Ultimately, Wright suggests that the same market exigencies that justified
slavery were similarly utilised as an excuse in order to justify the Anglo-
American conquest of the West: ‘The savage/civilised distinction, then, could
be used to justify conquering and killing non-whites for the sake of market
expansion (rational destiny).’84
So, if Shane is indeed formally indicative of the classical Western, and fur-
thermore, if the classical Western as a whole drew upon mythic structures in
order to assert an ideological position that sought to glorify the history of post-
Civil War US expansionism in such a fashion, then the ethical implications of
this phase of the genre become rather ominous indeed. Put simply, it dictates
that women must be subordinated to masculine authority, and that the wilder-
ness and the racial other must be civilised, or else eradicated by morally justi-
fied and religiously ordained violence. Not only is this deemed an historical

43
myth of the western

necessity, it is a necessity that is inexorably tied to the progress of western

civilisation as a whole, and to the very foundations of American democratic
civilisation in particular.
Richard Slotkin has comprehensively examined the importance of myth
(specifically, frontier mythology, racialism and violence) in the culture, history
and politics of the United States. In Gunfighter Nation (1992), he records the
myth’s importance to the complex ideological meanings to be found in the
formal and thematic structures of the Hollywood Western. Slotkin considers
myths as historically contingent (rather than archetypal, generated by either
‘the nature of things’ or ‘the nature of language’) and as working to assert
dominant ideologies through metaphor rather than logic, their language figu-
rative rather than scientific. He also emphasises the psychological dimension
of myth that, despite Wright’s contention that it is ‘static’, is considered as a
socially determined function, as well as being an important plot structure or
subgenre of the Western. Akin to Wright, however, is Slotkin’s belief that myth
essentially ‘disarms critical analysis by its appeal to the structures and tradi-
tions of storytelling’.85 Thus, he writes:

Myths are stories drawn from a society’s history that have acquired
through persistent usage the power of symbolising that society’s ideol-
ogy and of dramatising its moral consciousness – with all the com-
plexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain. Over time,
through frequent retellings and deployments as a source of interpretive
metaphors, the original mythic story is increasingly conventionalised
and abstracted until it is reduced to a deeply encoded and resonant set
of symbols, ‘icons,’ ‘keywords,’ or historical clichés. In this form, myth
becomes a basic constituent of linguistic meaning and of the processes of
both personal and social ‘remembering.’86

Slotkin relates this definition of myth to US cultural perceptions of the history

of the American frontier, painstakingly chronicling how it was expounded
upon ‘in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics
produced over a period of three centuries’.87 (It is worth noting that Wright
takes no account of such a vast pre-cinematic legacy.) Asserting an effective
ideology out of these ‘various genres of mythic expression’ was a formula that
ensured widespread social and political support for promoting the ‘progress’ of
Anglo-American civilisation over a succession of receding frontiers.88 Slotkin
suggests that this mythology should be understood as the major impetus behind
such popular concepts as the ‘redemption of American spirit’ and the unique
national character (identity), together with the powerful nationalist ideologies
of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. All of which came together
to form what Slotkin calls the ‘language of American myth’; permeating
national policy, historical narratives, and ‘reflected in the forms and practices
of commercial culture-producers’, including, especially, Hollywood Westerns.89

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a good man with a gun

In remarks that are consonant with those of both Cawelti and Fiedler,
Slotkin informs us that violence was a key ingredient in the mythology of
the American frontier; especially symbolic violence against the Indian. He sug-
gests that in ‘each stage of its development, the Myth of the Frontier relates the
achievement of “progress” to a particular form or scenario of violent action’,
or ‘savage war’, which was aimed against the ‘non-White natives for whom the
wilderness was home’.90 Hence, for Slotkin ‘the Frontier Myth is divided by
significant borders, of which the wilderness/civilisation, Indian/White border
is the most basic’.91 He goes on to chart how such a ‘scenario of violent action’
became crystallised in the popular culture of the early republic through the
figure of Daniel Boone (the heroic outrider of Manifest Destiny), whose legend
sets the terms of the mythology that would explain the process of westward
expansion for successive generations of US Americans. Slotkin explains that
this process typically involves an exile from civilisation through ‘a scenario of
separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state’, and
how this contact with nature, with the domain of the savage, causes regen-
eration of the spirit and earthly fortune. Ultimately, he who ventures into the
wilderness becomes an agent for the further advance of civilisation against the
wilderness. Slotkin terms this mythic process ‘regeneration through violence’.92
As suggested in the Introduction, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking
tales provide us with oft-cited pre-cinematic examples of these ideological
trends. Through these popular novels, Cooper provides the reader with a
progressive explanation of the course of Anglo-American history. Although
their generic status as literary Westerns remains highly contentious, Cooper’s
contributions to frontier mythology do in fact bear thematic comparison with
the classical reading of Shane. For instance, the opening paragraphs of The
Pioneers (1823) extol the project of Manifest Destiny:

[P]laces for the worship of God abound with that frequency which
characterises a moral and reflecting people . . . The expedients of the
pioneers, who first broke ground in the settlement of this country, are
succeeded by the permanent improvements of the yeoman, who intends
to leave his remains to moulder under the sod which he tills, or, perhaps,
the son, who, born in the land piously wishes to linger around the grave
of his father. Only forty years have passed since this territory was a
wilderness.93

At the end of the novel, Leatherstocking leaves the pioneers behind, moving
ever-westwards; the ‘man without a cross’, the advance guard of Anglo-
American civilisation: ‘This was the last they ever saw of Leatherstocking . . .
He had gone far towards the setting sun – the foremost in that band of pioneers
who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent.’94
Thus concludes Cooper’s definitive statement of 1823. Such words find imme-
diate resonance in Shane in the scene immediately following Frank’s funeral.

45
myth of the western

Against their professed decisions to abandon the valley in the face of Ryker’s
now murderous tactics, and with the stalwart support of Shane, Joe implores
the homesteaders to stay and defend their farms:

We can have a regular settlement here, we can have a town, and churches,
and a school . . . We can’t give up on this valley and we ain’t gonna do
it. This is farmin’ country, a place where people can come and bring up
their families. Who is Rufus Ryker or anyone else to run us away from
our own homes? He only wants to grow his beef and what we want to
grow up is families, to grow them good and grow up strong, the way
they was meant to be grown. God didn’t make all this country just for
one man like Ryker.

This scene resonates with a sense of the homesteaders’ God-given right to

civilise the wilderness. As Joe is speaking, the camera cuts first to a medium
shot of Marian dutifully standing by her husband’s side in a symbolic gesture
of familial unity and feminine subordination. It then cuts to a close-up shot
of young Joey’s face, gazing up at his father and Shane, and we, the audi-
ence, might wonder too about the son ‘born in the land’, who, when the time
comes, ‘piously wishes to linger around the grave of his father’. Such a speech
(together with the supportive input and very presence of Shane) rouses a sense
of community among the harried and disgusted homesteaders. Its invocation
of God automatically forges a link with the ideological precepts of Manifest
Destiny, echoing the writings of journalist John L. O’Sullivan, whose own
definitive statement came in 1845, the year the United States annexed Texas:
‘Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for
the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.’95
Such alleged narrative simplicity is evocative of the ‘conjuring trick’ that
Roland Barthes ascribes to the proper functionality of myth.96 According to
Barthes, ‘myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in
it, things lose the memory that they were once made’.97 Myth therefore sim-
plifies, engaging the ideological in a purifying process of ‘eternal justification’
that ‘abolishes the complexity of human acts’, ultimately reducing them to
a simplistic and ‘harmonious display of essences’. In other words, a binary,
either/or, ‘good’ versus ‘evil’.98 In this way, the ideological operation becomes
naturalised, comes to be understood not as a social construct, but rather as ‘a
statement of fact’. And Barthes insists that, once integrated into a culture suc-
cessfully, the validity of myth ‘goes without saying’.99
With this in mind, I turn once more to Cawelti’s analysis of Shane. He
explains how the hero’s ‘return to his role as gunfighter is clearly represented as
an act of revitalisation and redemption in which, through an act of violence, the
hero saves the . . . homesteaders and becomes one with himself’.100 Here we find
clear consonance between the film and the novel. Schaeffer’s first-person narra-
tive describes Shane moments before the shootout in explicitly existential terms:

­46
a good man with a gun

Belt and holster and gun . . . These were not things he was wearing or
carrying. They were part of him, part of the man, of the full sum of the
integrate force that was Shane. You could see now for the first time that
this man, who had been living with us . . . was complete, and was himself
in the final effect of his being.101

It is for reasons such as this that Shane has so often been highlighted by film
scholars as an archetype of the genre’s cinematic mode: a fully-conscious distil-
lation of the myth of the West supported by the cultural import of the hero’s
code, the epic moment, the wilderness–civilisation binary, and the myth of
regeneration through violence.
More recent scholarship has seen such views on the film continue, with Rick
Worland and Edward Countryman even going so far as to declare Shane the
‘most Turnerian of Westerns’.102 Griffin for her part suggests that ‘Shane can
be seen to . . . re-play the western as America’s foundation myth, one that is
rooted in the notion of Manifest Destiny.’103 She reads the ‘evolutionary trajec-
tory’ of Manifest Destiny into the film’s narrative:

[It] begins with a wilderness inhabited by native inhabitants who have

no God-given right to the land (according to the concept of Manifest
Destiny). The wilderness is subsequently tamed by gunfighter heroes
(Shane, both in his mysterious past and later when forced to defend the
Starretts) and so made safe for the process of settlement (the Starretts,
who do have a God-given right to settle the land) prior to frontier closure
and the subsequent onset of ‘civilisation’ (land enclosure and the growth
of domestic communities).104

Taking a broad perspective on the film, one could indeed read the valley home-
steaders as Turner’s ‘outer edge of the wave’, attempting to realise an agricul-
tural miracle at the moment of transition between ‘the cattle-raiser’ (Rufus and
Morgan Ryker) and ‘the pioneer farmer’ (Joe Starrett, Frank Torrey, etc.).105
To reiterate Joe’s legitimating summarisation of this social transition: ‘He
[Ryker] only wants to grow his beef and what we want to grow up is families
. . . the way they was meant to be grown.’ In Turnerian terms, the link would
seem clear: Ryker does not work the land and, being engaged in the outmoded
and ecologically wasteful enterprise of free-grazing, he has no connection
with it other than its monetary value. In mythic terms he is an affront to the
civilising values of economic individualism that Turner saw as a foundation
of the unique American democracy. He is, in this most vital of aspects, anti-
Turnerian, anti-democratic and, therefore, anti-American.
From theories and interpretations such as those outlined above one can
understand how the great ideological compound of frontier mythology acted
as a catalyst that glorified national expansion into the West; how it high-
lighted these mass migrations as integral components in the realisation of an

47
myth of the western

exceptional American national character. According to this supposition, it fol-

lowed that the modern literary and cinematic Western genres grew from these
nineteenth-century traditions to firmly establish the idea of homo americanus
in the cultural mindset of the modern United States.106 This it did by character-
istically articulating the myth within terms of nation-building, and behind this
ideological construct lay a belief in the moral necessity of violent confronta-
tion between the savage forces of the wilderness (like Ryker and Wilson, who
threaten the embryonic nation) and the torchbearers of civilisation (like Shane,
whose regression into the wilderness provides them with the means to win the
fight to realise it).
As far as some scholars were concerned this mythic figuration, long
enshrined in American ideology and given its supreme voice by the cinema,
was simplified almost to the point of contempt during innumerable repetitions,
configurations and re-configurations. By the 1950s, this attitude was already
apparent in some of the earliest film scholarship available on the Western. One
of these scholars is Warshow, whose essay I have already mentioned. Indeed,
when he bemoans Shane’s ‘aestheticising tendency’107 one feels that what he
is really complaining about is that the film’s mythic agenda is, if anything, too
pronounced. Warshow writes that in Shane ‘[t]he legend of the West is virtu-
ally reduced to its essentials and then fixed in the dreamy clarity of a fairy
tale, with the hero . . . hardly a man at all, but something like the Spirit of the
West’.108 For Warshow, Shane stood guilty of ‘violating the Western form’
precisely because of an over-identification with frontier mythology, yield-
ing ‘entirely to its static quality as legend’.109 In advancing such sentiments,
Warshow’s work aligns itself with another pioneering film scholar of the time,
André Bazin, who was the original advocate of the theory of genre evolution.
Bazin put forward the concept of the ‘superwestern’ as the logical evolution
of the genre following the ‘introduction of new elements . . . social or moral
theme[s]’ after the Second World War.110 Such elements he theorised on ‘nega-
tive grounds’ as some ‘additional interest to justify [the Western’s] existence
– an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest, in
short some quality extrinsic to the genre and which is supposed to enrich it’.111
For Bazin, Shane is the ‘ultimate in “superwesternization”’. That is to say, the
myth no longer provides the source of the Western, here ‘the theme of Shane
is the myth’.112 Bazin bemoans this new trend of sociological and historical
import into the apparent ‘perfection’ of the pre-Second World War Western
form, and remarks disparagingly that, with Shane, ‘George Stevens set out to
justify the western – by the western’.113
By today’s standards, both Warshow’s and Bazin’s analyses seem restrictive
and unduly formalistic, as if the Western (or any other genre for that matter)
ever stood exempt from the import of ‘sociological, moral, psychological,
political, or erotic’ concerns. Such concerns were, according to Tag Gallagher,
always apparent in the cinematic Western from the outset and did not signify
anything like an evolution, or paradigm shift within the genre:

­48
a good man with a gun

Any news event or fashion trend – labor actions, bloomers, Apaches, pro-
hibition, female suffrage, Balkan crises, and a myriad of forgotten issues
of the day – were zealously incorporated not only into westerns but into
whatever genres were currently popular, the western hero and the nature
of his struggles altered accordingly.114

Despite Gallagher’s corrective, such an ‘unhappy preoccupation with style’ as

Shane stands accused of by Warshow is neither a redundant critical concern,
nor lost on more contemporary scholarship.115 For instance, Bob Baker
highlights that, in retrospect, the ‘problem with Shane is the systematic, self-­
conscious way that George Stevens sets about it – a self-consciousness that,
in the climate of the times, [even just] a decade on, contrived to diminish the
movie and its director’.116
Despite such objections, it remains that the more common analyses of Shane
follow the Turnerian paradigm that I have thus far outlined. As we have seen,
this reading typically sees the narrative drive become a synecdoche, whereby
one can interpret the homesteading Starrett family – Joe, Marian and their
young son, Joey – as symbolising the germ of pioneering American civilisation,
as reincarnations of de Crèvecoeur’s ‘western pilgrims’, only in this case trans-
planted from the late-eighteenth-century Hudson Valley to the late-nineteenth-
century Wyoming Basin.117 Thus interpreted, Shane becomes the means of
elaborating an entire social system: the unique American democracy realised
on the frontier through a common belief in the redemption of the spirit and the
realisation of economic individualism.
An important caveat: we should bear in mind that, as a product of popular
culture, Shane is unlikely to be an exact reconstruction of any historical thesis
(Turner’s own poetic style notwithstanding). The Frontier Thesis lacked a suit-
able hero figure for the popular imagination to latch onto, therefore, lone gun-
fighter figures like Shane and concepts such as regeneration through violence
probably owe more to Cody’s Wild West and to Roosevelt’s validation of the
cowboy as a new type of American hero. It stands to reason, therefore, that the
Turnerian reading alone does not explain Shane. Although largely adhering to
his chief maxim – that it was the creation of a civilisation from a wilderness
that forged the most prized national characteristic of economic i­ndividualism
– it is significant to note that Shane’s hero is not the yeoman farmer, nor even,
strictly speaking, a member of civilisation. Shane might give pretence to the
effort, but he is, in the final instance, not for farming. He is always an out-
sider, adhering to the first two of Wright’s ‘classical plot’ functions: ‘The hero
enters a social group’ and ‘The hero is unknown to the society’.118 However,
the Starretts are able to tame the wilderness only because of Shane – a sort
of Emersonian transcendental figure – the ‘good man with a gun’, as Slotkin
refers to him.119 ‘The West (and the future of America)’, Lenihan concurs,
‘belongs to the peaceful, ordinary citizen-settler, but it could not have been
won without men like Shane.’120

49
myth of the western

There is another important cultural influence contributing to the power of

both the myth of the West and the cinematic Western: frontier painting. It is
well-known that Frederic Remington was a close friend of Roosevelt’s, and
produced hundreds of illustrations and lithographs for the latter’s political
pamphlets, as well as for numerous other journals, newspapers, galleries, etc.
Remington’s popular artistry celebrated the endeavours of various cowpunch-
ers and frontiersmen, capturing mythic heroism in cinematic-like poses during
a pre-cinematic age. He particularly emphasised movement and landscape,
aspects that would soon transmute into the visual signifiers of the cinematic
Western. To further this link, Mitchell suggests that another frontier artist,
Albert Bierstadt, created paintings that ‘reflect[ed] the crowding together of
contextual fragments’ whereby,

The viewer is challenged by that excess into a kind of scenic unpacking,

an unfolding of the paintings’ mixed descriptive moments into relatively
consistent temporal successions that resemble nothing so much as the
unreeling of film. Scenes that appear simultaneous on canvas are trans-
formed by their unusual perspective and conjunction, as if requiring a
narrative explanation that only cinematic sequence can provide . . . Just
as writers were developing materials for the Western, Bierstadt manufac-
tured a ‘West’ in which fictional plots could unfold.121

With specific regard to Shane, Mitchell writes that ‘the combination of

Tetons and Technicolor automatically transmutes landscape into a Bierstadtian
spectacle’.122
Like most of the more memorable Westerns, Shane comes across as a com-
bination of these cultural–historical antecedents, which can be laced into the
Turnerian reading. It would appear that Shane himself recognises his own
fate in the ‘procession’ of Turnerian social epochs. In a telling scene moments
before the shootout at Grafton’s, Shane informs Ryker that his time of ‘doin’
things is over’. Ryker’s retort is blunt and to the point: ‘My time!? What about
yours, gunfighter?’ Shane replies by saying that the only difference between
them is that, ‘I know it.’ Here Shane displays its intertextuality. The hero is
certainly suggestive of a Rooseveltian reading, with him being destined to
fade away once the frontier has been settled. Such a reading posits Shane, like
Leatherstocking and Boone before him, as a symbolic champion of Manifest
Destiny. At the same time, Shane has a fraught and troubled relationship with
that same civilisation. And as with Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Shane has been
viewed as a ‘man without a cross’; a pathfinder, who straddles the divide
between civilisation and savagery, between law and outlaw, between painful
historical abstractions and utopian desires for the future American democracy.
As a writer of frontier tales, Cooper remains significant to any serious dis-
cussion of the twentieth-century Western if only for his role in the develop-
ment of this basic narrative structure. But he also introduced a literary trait

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a good man with a gun

that would come to define the hero’s persona in relation to the wilderness–
civilisation binary: that of ambiguity. The spirit behind this ambiguity is one
that places the hero at odds with the very civilisation that will, through his
heroic efforts, ultimately come to supplant the wilderness through the hero’s
destruction of the savage forces contained within it. For Slotkin, ‘Cooper’s
ultimate concern in the Leatherstocking tales is the problematic character of
the frontiersman.’123 He suggests that it was Natty Bumppo’s ‘troubling blend
of European, American, and Indian elements that made him both a figure of
promise and a nightmare to Cooper’s contemporaries’.124 From this we can
infer that the hero was perceived as the agent of civilisation, and yet, like the
very forces of savagery to which he is opposed, he threatens that civilisation
with atavistic regression, a return to an undemocratic and uncivilised state of
nature. As Fiedler rightly reminds us, despite Natty’s ultimate status as torch-
bearer for the inevitable arrival of civilisation, the ‘world of nature’ – ergo, the
wilderness – is all too often ‘preferred to civilisation’.125
Transferring all this back to Shane, the classical reading would have it that
Shane is a benign superhero who makes the valley safe for agriculture and
settlement, and, in the words of Wright, ‘gives up his status as gunfighter and
saviour and chooses instead the dark night and the cold mountains’.126 Indeed,
the closing moments of the narrative echo the tragic realisation that Warshow
(despite his objections to the film) informs us is felt by most Western heroes.
‘As the reign of law settles over the West’, he writes, ‘he is forced to see that his
day is over; those are the pictures that end with his death or with his departure
for some more remote frontier’.127 Thus is the end logic of the classical Western
paradigm asserted as elegiac, if not overtly tragic (although one struggles to
find a more moving scene than that in which Shane bids farewell to Joey). To
reiterate Lenihan, ‘[Shane’s] sad departure that concludes the film reflects the
classic Western’s dichotomy between heroic, free individualism and the more
enduring but constraining social order.’128

III
The thesis adumbrated above is convincing enough that placing it under
a critical microscope is no easy task. While I do not doubt the validity of
certain of its aspects, the classical reading is merely one interpretation among
many that can be applied to Shane. I have already suggested one potential
limitation regarding the problematical nature of the hero and his relation-
ship with the civilisation that he serves. Indeed, probing behind the self-
generated folklore surrounding Shane, one uncovers ambiguities and fissures
(un)contained within the narrative that open other possibilities for critical
analysis. In their turn, these inherent contradictions help us to question the
proclaimed simplicity of that problematical and unsubstantiated categorisa-
tion, the classical Western. This is so in its adherence to triumphalist versions
of frontier history (be they Turnerian or Rooseveltian), prescribed narrative

51
myth of the western

formulae, dominant myth ideologies, and in its relation to the theory of genre
evolution.
The counter-conventional reading of Shane that follows relates directly to
John Ford’s much-celebrated Western, The Searchers (1956). As I offer an
analysis of this film in Chapter 2, I shall confine myself for now to stating
only that Ford’s film is significant when placed in relation to Shane. This is so
because in The Searchers the paradigm of the redeemer hero is ferociously dis-
sected, suggesting that the relationship held by Westerns of the so-called classi-
cal period to their informing myth ideologies – or historical referents, for that
matter – is rarely (if ever) reducible to a simplistic reflection or endorsement of
dominant cultural, social or political trends.
In his study of the Western, Mitchell proposes an analytical method that
resists ‘the temptation of grand master narratives’.129 For him, the popular
Western genre often combines ‘compelling issues in an exhilarating narrative
mix’.130 Contrary to the approaches of Slotkin, Coyne and Lenihan, he adds
that this ‘combination cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of political
allegory or social fable, of straightforward mutation of current anxieties into
plots that stage or assuage them’.131 Mitchell does not refute the political-
allegorical connection completely – his study is, after all, concerned with the
genre’s complex responses to historically shifting patterns of gender politics
during the twentieth century – but he refuses to identify this response in terms
of simplistic binarism, or as the constitutional theme above all others. This is
to say, Mitchell refuses to interpret the genre solely in terms of a masculine
reaction against ‘the advent of America’s second feminist movement’. This is
despite the fact that, as he sees it, ‘the genre’s recurrent rise and fall coincides
more generally with interest aroused by feminist issues, moments when men
have invariably had difficulty knowing how manhood should be achieved’.132
Such a singular theoretical position, which would conceive of Westerns as
instances of a wider cultural desire to ‘marginalise and suppress’ the femi-
nine in favour of an assertion of masculine identity, is closer to Tompkins’
approach to the genre;133 instead, Mitchell proposes that successful Westerns
‘won favor by sustaining multiple interpretations’.134 Furthermore, by assert-
ing the multiplicity of potential meanings that an individual film can simulta-
neously entertain, he also exposes the potential limitations in genre analyses of
the kind practiced by Wright and Schatz. Accordingly, he argues that ‘we need
to explore not only the blunt plots so characteristic of texts but rather all the
strange textures, the contours and grains, the idiosyncrasies that draw our eyes
away from the center to unlit places where their power resides’.135
Such sentiments derive from the analytical approach known as ­deconstruction,
which was made popular as a critical approach to literature with the advent
of post-structuralism in the late 1960s. Deconstruction acts as a theoretical
tool whereby the sort of binary oppositions asserted by structuralist analy-
ses can be undermined or, rather, texts can actually be shown to undermine
themselves by virtue of what their narratives exclude. According to Terry

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a good man with a gun

Eagleton, deconstruction works to expose the ideological machinations that

lay behind the either/or mentality encapsulating a rigid, intractable structuralist
duality:

Structuralism was generally satisfied if it could carve up a text into binary

oppositions (high/low, light/dark, Nature/Culture and so on) and expose
the logic of their working. Deconstruction tries to show how such oppo-
sitions, in order to hold themselves in place, are sometimes betrayed into
inverting or collapsing themselves, or need to banish to the text’s margins
certain niggling details which can be made to return and plague them . . .
The tactic of deconstructive criticism, that is to say, is to show how texts
come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic; and deconstruc-
tion shows this by fastening on the ‘symptomatic’ points, the aporia or
impasses of meaning, where texts get into trouble, come unstuck, offer to
contradict themselves.136

According to Staiger, a ‘poststructuralist thesis would, of course, argue that

every text inherently displays what it is not’, and that we are alerted to the
existence of so-called ‘structuring absences’ (that is, ‘what a text cannot say but
says in spite of itself’), instances of ‘intertextuality’ and ‘over-­determination’,
all of which shape the meaning of every text.137
Staiger’s account ultimately draws from the writings of Michel Foucault.
Foucault’s work is concerned with what he calls ‘discursive formations’.
These are described as vast configurations of knowledge, providing culturally
specific and historically contingent sets of rules which govern societies. For
Foucault, social power is exercised through such discourses, which determine
and articulate cultural attitudes, dominant ideologies, and the various forms
and institutions of knowledge; they also determine and govern the criteria of
‘truth’. However, because such a notion is inextricably bound up in the exer-
cise of power, Foucault reasons that there can be no legitimate grounds for
proclaiming absolute truth. In a display of his intellectual debt to Nietzsche,
Foucault suggests that no discourse is ever absolutely true; it is either more
or less powerful than the competing discourses against which it asserts itself.
Within such systems, perspective substitutes truth and each discourse produces
its own version of reality (that is, discursive formations produce ‘realities’
rather than reflect them). Inevitably, within such formations of power there
exist those discourses that are considered illegitimate and that seek to operate
outside of the rules governing ‘official discourse’. As a result, such discourses
are suppressed, their voices marginalised or silenced by the dominant dis-
course. However, without discursive formations we could not say anything,
since, for Foucault, there is no perspective outside the social process; therefore,
effective social change must be sought introspectively, through the discursive
formations themselves. In his own writings, Foucault sought to undermine the
legitimacy of established discourses by illuminating the elided discourses that

53
myth of the western

necessarily lay suppressed within them, famously declaring that the ‘manifest
discourse is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not
say; and [that] this “not-said” is a hollow that undermines from within all
that is said’.138 Such a statement lies at the heart of post-structuralist theory,
and its relevance to deconstructive criticism is clearly apparent: its primary
tactic being a reading of the text ‘against itself’, in order to expose the textual
unconscious (the ‘not-said’) that may be directly contrary to the text’s surface
meaning.139
I shall now adapt this schema to the Western genre. As one example, I would
like to reiterate a frequently argued perspective: that the heroic version of
frontier history that the classical Western espoused served to marginalise, or
even silence, the voice of the Native American. In such a reading, the Indians
have become conspicuous by their very absence, threatening to ‘return and
plague’ the narrative from the ‘text’s margins’, and, ultimately, cause us to
question the historical validity of the official discourse of the frontier.140 We
could even argue that the very process of labelling Shane a classical Western
(that is, as part of a fictional-wing that purportedly asserts an ideology that
promotes a peculiarly Anglo-American version of history, one which glori-
fies and legitimates the expansionist policies of the United States) necessarily
causes such a category to become inherently unstable and to (un)consciously
undermine itself from within, ultimately creating a sense of narrative confusion
that exposes the ‘not-said’ of the film’s ostensible ideological meaning. For if
Shane is an archetypal Western – one that utilises the recognisable tropes of the
genre in order to render overt its informing mythological influences – then, as
an inevitable by-product of this intent, a post-structural reading would have it
that the film cannot but express the ideological contradictions and ‘structuring
absences’ that it might otherwise might seek to contain.
The result of this, according to Forrest G. Robinson, is ‘invariably an unsta-
ble compromise between assertions of prominent social and political ideals,
on the one hand, and unsettling glimpses of lapses from those same ideals,
on the other’.141 Robinson analyses this ‘unstable compromise’ in relation
to a number of prominent popular literary Westerns (including Schaeffer’s
Shane), suggesting that their plots betray ‘a persistent pattern of doubleness,
or self-subversion, in which conflicting moral perspectives compete for pre-
eminence’.142 Robinson suggests that an unconscious ‘self-subversive tendency’
works against the conscious narrative meaning of the text, working ‘to under-
mine what it appears so clearly to approve’.143 He further suggests that such
texts have endured in the popular imagination ‘because they give us a window
on major cultural embarrassments, and because they open it no more than half
way’.144 Robinson puts it to us that ‘we are compelled to return to these subtly
mingled narratives precisely because we never see them fully through’.145
I argue that a number of counter-ideological, ‘self-subversive’ tendencies
exist in Shane. It is my firm belief that the so-called classical Western often acts
to highlight and contextualise ideological contradictions in the sociocultural,

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a good man with a gun

political and historical themes with which it engages, rather than merely to
assimilate or elide them as some have suggested. I argue that Shane holds
an ambiguous textual relationship with dominant ideologies; specifically, as
embodied in the figure of the hero – Shane himself and the ‘unlit places’ of
his mysterious persona. Initiating with a general critique of both the classical
category and genre evolution theory, I shall draw upon recent scholarship to
offer another interpretation of Shane, not one that claims to supersede any
other perspective, but merely one that offers another interjection into the study
of the Western’s ‘exhilarating narrative mix’.

IV
Aside from the intertextual complications that Staiger highlights in relation
to specific genres, the concept of a classical Western is far from helpful even
when judged on its own terms. This is so because it attempts to impose objec-
tive judgements upon a body of films that are actually derived from nothing
more than an assemblage of subjective opinions. In ‘Genre and Critical
Methodology’ (1974), Andrew Tudor highlights the paradox in attempting
to define film genres in this fashion. In so doing, he exposes the limitations of
formalist analyses such as those offered by Warshow and Bazin, and of con-
temporary structuralist projects such as Wright’s:

To take a genre such as a ‘Western’, analyze it, and list its principal char-
acteristics, is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of
films which are ‘Westerns’. But they can only be isolated on the basis of
the ‘principal characteristics’ which can only be discovered from the films
themselves after they have been isolated.146

It is precisely this sort of subjectivity (and, more properly, idiosyncrasy, as

all such classificatory systems are, ultimately, created rather than objectively
‘found’) that allowed the diverse narrative structures and formal styles of The
Virginian (1929), Stagecoach (1939) and Shane to be regarded as classical by
Warshow, Bazin and Wright, respectively. This same subjectivity allowed for
Warshow’s criticism regarding Stagecoach’s ‘unhappy preoccupation with
style’, while allowing Bazin to laud the very same film as ‘the ideal example
of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection’.147 It is also the same
sort of approach that gave Alan Lovell the ‘evidence’ he required in putting
forward John Ford’s My Darling Clementine as ‘the perfect example of the
classic Western . . . rather than Stagecoach’.148 However, Kathryn C. Esselman
convincingly suggests that ‘there is no one kind of true Western’. She com-
pounds this sense of idiosyncrasy in a somewhat facetious fashion when she
declares that, ‘the search for the true Western is a little bit like the search for
the perfect woman, always doomed to frustration by the reality of human
nature’.149 The same point is made more decisively by Gallagher. In relation

55
myth of the western

to how one defines classical Westerns, Gallagher points to the rather conten-
tious nature of labelling Westerns according to certain formal characteristics
and plot motifs before placing them in a chronological framework within an
overall schema of generic evolution:

A film is considered ‘classic’ when it matches a critic’s paradigm of the

ideal western. But the paradigm is entirely arbitrary, with the result that
there is some disagreement about which pictures are ‘classic’ and which
have evolved astray. Warshow, for example, is intent on showing how
the 1943 Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman), the 1950 Gunfighter
(Henry King), and the 1952 High Noon (Fred Zinnemann) transformed
the primeval western into a vehicle for social criticism, in comparison
with Victor Fleming’s naively archetypal 1929 Virginian. Thus he found
an ‘unhealthy preoccupation with style,’ an ‘aestheticising tendency,’ in
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946),
and Shane (George Stevens, 1954) that he felt ‘violat[ed] the Western
form.’ Later genre critics regard the last three pictures as ‘classic’ and
regard as ‘self-conscious’ movies such as The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance (Ford, 1962), Hour of the Gun (John Sturges, 1967), Chisum
(Andrew V. McLaglen, 1970), and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah,
1969).150

Gallagher argues that the Western has always been a complex genre, consid-
ering it axiomatic that perhaps ‘older westerns, like olden times, will always
strike the modern mind as less complex, less amoral, and above all less vivid –
particularly when the modern mind feels it unnecessary to examine the past in
any detail’.151 We may take the silent-era Westerns as a pertinent case in point.
I have already mentioned Gallagher’s contention that silent-era Westerns
were shaped by and responded to contemporary sociopolitical issues, and it
seems that their formal composition was equally rich and complex. Although
Gallagher concedes to offering only a ‘scant’ survey of this period of film
production, he claims that ‘[w]ithout exaggeration, clichés were already an
issue’.152 Thus he writes:

Self-reflexivity in the early teens was often evident as well in the form of
films within films: characters frequently fall asleep and dream, friends
deceive friends with elaborate masquerades (put-on kidnappings and the
like), Remington paintings (as in Ford’s 1918 Hell Bent) come alive in
an onlooker’s fantasy – all methods of critiquing generic conventions.153

In sum, Gallagher contends that ‘little evidence has been brought forward
to support the theory that there has been growing “self-consciousness” – or
any other sort of linear evolution – in and specific to the western’.154 Alan
Williams also counters Schatz’s belief that a progression ‘from straightforward

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a good man with a gun

storytelling to self-conscious formalism’ is evident in the Western’s develop-

ment as a genre.155 He writes:

One can find self-conscious Westerns, such as [Douglas] Fairbanks’ Wild

and Woolly [John Emerson, 1917], as early as the late-teens. In fact, the
entire mid-to-late silent cinema seems remarkably ‘formalistic,’ which is
possibly one reason why it is wholly absent from Schatz’s book.156

In relation to categories arbitrarily defined and then ‘fixed’ within a ­historical–

chronological evolutionary pattern of development, these approaches by
Tudor, Gallagher and Williams, as I have highlighted them, act as a corrective
to those formula analyses that claim to discern, define and then categorise the
Western genre’s deep structures. As Gallagher insists, attempts to classify indi-
vidual Westerns within a broader generic corpus (specifically within an evolu-
tionary schema) result, all too frequently, in ‘rich lodes of ambiguity [being]
overlooked in order to bolster a specious argument that “classic” westerns are
simple and naive’.157
Such charges have been rightly levelled at the sort of psychological impov-
erishment practiced by Wright in his structural study of the Western. Tuska,
for one, is highly critical of Wright’s approach, where he finds ‘the actual plots
of the films he selected to illustrate [the] basic plot types do not fit into his
categories at all without all manner of exceptions and unconventional inter-
pretations’.158 In sentiments that echo Tudor’s objections to genre classifica-
tion, Tuska finds that ‘Wright encountered an insurmountable problem . . . in
trying to force all the Western films he labelled “classical” into this definition
as a category’.159 He reminds us, for instance, that the final two of Wright’s
plot functions for the classical Western – ‘The society accepts the hero’ and
‘The hero loses or gives up his social status’ – often fail to fit the very films that
Wright himself has labelled classical.160
One can easily apply such criticisms to the narrative structure of Shane.
First, ‘The society accepts the hero’. According to Wright, one of the initiatory
‘classical plot’ functions insists that ‘the society does not completely accept
the hero’, and that his eventual acceptance is won by his making the society
safe after his defeating of the villains.161 Coyne has it that ‘Shane’s alienation
stems from his own emotions rather than rejection or marginalisation by the
community’.162 However, in my opinion, Shane is never really accepted by
the homesteaders. They eye him with suspicion and treat him as an outsider
throughout. Not only is he made to feel alienated from their clandestine meet-
ings (in one instance, he stands outside in the rain until Marian takes pity
on him and takes him inside the farmhouse), but upon rumour of Wilson’s
arrival in the valley (all ‘pow-wow’ with Ryker) things take a darker turn.
The revelation that Shane knows who Wilson is (or, at the very least, he has
heard of him) compels one of the homesteaders to question him in an accu-
satory tone, ‘You seem to know a lot about this kind of business, Shane?’

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myth of the western

Another even goes as far as to equate all ‘gun-slinging’ with ‘murder’, sug-
gesting that, at the very least, the community is suspicious of Shane’s deadly
credentials.
Actually, it is only really Joey who fully accepts Shane for who he is,
perhaps because he does not really understand what Shane is, at least not with
the same depth as Marian. In reference to Shane’s vagueness about his own
mysterious (but inevitably violent) past, Marian says, ‘I think we know . . .
Shane.’ Indeed, while being undoubtedly sympathetic and even romantically
attracted to Shane, Marian is suspicious and despairing of his existential link
to the six-gun. This is evidenced when she catches Shane teaching Joey how
to shoot. Unconvinced by Shane’s declaration – ‘a gun’s just a tool, Marian
. . . as good or as bad as the man using it’ – she replies that ‘guns aren’t going
to be my boy’s life’. Further adding that ‘we’d all be better off if there wasn’t
a single gun in this valley . . . including yours’. Marian’s view on this issue is
made slightly puzzling by the fact that the opening sequence of the film depicts
Joey, young as he is, with rifle in hand stalking a deer outside the homestead.
(Presumably Marian and Joe are aware of their son’s playtime activities?) As
Joey aims the rifle, the deer he is tracking angles its head towards him, framing
the tiny figure of Shane emerging from the Tetons within its antlers. This per-
spectival alignment automatically associates this mysterious stranger with the
wilderness. We soon learn that Joey’s gun is not loaded – ‘Joey’s too young for
that’ – as Joe is quick to inform Shane; however, the idea of the United States
as a gunfighter nation is clearly in evidence here in this scene before Shane’s
arrival. Shane may well bring death with him in the form of the six-gun, and
Joey might be ‘too young’ for the moment, but the hard fact is that, from the
very outset, the child is being culturally indoctrinated, as it were, for a mascu-
line social trajectory with violence at its core.
Despite the common assertion, which has been reiterated most recently by
McGee, that Shane’s relation to the six-gun is problematic and ‘conflicted’, he
does seem to enjoy the sense of identity and social role that it gives him.163 As
Shane tells Joey before departing the valley for good, ‘A man’s gotta be what
a man’s gotta be. You can’t break the mold. I tried it and it didn’t work for
me. There’s no living with a killing. Right or wrong, it’s a brand, and a brand
sticks. There’s no going back.’ Such a statement is laden with a sense of pre-
destination, as if being a gunfighter – a ‘killer of men’ – is all Shane ever could
be. We might wonder, however, just how much Shane really did try to give up
his gunfighter identity. When he first encounters Wilson at Joe’s homestead
and later on in Grafton’s moments before the so-called epic moment, Shane
smiles at his adversary. These two brief moments are scarcely mentioned in
critical writing on Shane (except for Slotkin), much less discussed; however, to
my mind they hold significance. It is as if Shane is relishing the coming fight,
is edging for a chance to re-acquaint himself with his own past. After all, it
is his role as gunfighter that gives him an identity, a sense of history. (I will
return to the significance of Shane’s psychological motivation and his status as

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a good man with a gun

a political-allegorical figure later, but first I want to consider other aspects of

the classical reading in relation to Shane.)
While none of this exactly undermines Tompkins’ argument that the Western
‘exists to provide a justification for violence’, these aspects of Shane do indicate
that the film’s narrative does not hold so simplistic a relationship to the epic
moment, nor, indeed, to the hero’s code, as a classical reading would have us
believe. One could easily (and, quite probably, correctly) argue that Shane ulti-
mately improves the valley by eliminating the threat posed by the Rykers and,
therefore, the film adheres to Wright’s ‘classical plot’ and to Slotkin’s concept
of regeneration through violence. On the other hand, one could just as easily
point to the lack of effect that this violence has with regard to the ‘society
accept[ing] the hero’. In particular, we see no shots the homesteaders, of Joe
or Marian, after the epic moment in Grafton’s. In fact, Joe’s and Marian’s
involvement in the film ends after Joe’s fight with Shane (Joe is left concussed
and reduced to child-like dependency upon Marian, who nurses him tenderly).
The belief that the classical Western unambiguously reflected values and
themes central to dominant US ideology (that is, the belief that it symbolised a
triumphalist version of American progress) persists. Writing in 2009, Jones and
Wills followed Cawelti, Wright, etc. by suggesting that ‘the inevitability of pro-
gress resided in the backdrop to each [classical] Western’.164 As far as they are
concerned, this was the theme behind the narrative drive of Shane: ‘In Shane,
the gunfighter hero departed from town because he recognised that he was no
longer needed. The frontier was about to close and move on elsewhere, his
shooter skills consigned to a past era. A better future lay ahead.’165 Jones and
Wills see nothing beyond this interpretation. Like Schatz, their analysis of the
genre pertains to evolution theory, categorising films like Shane as ‘traditional
Westerns’ before making their account of ‘the demise of the Western’ which,
by the 1970s, ‘seemed out of touch with society’.166 For them, Shane was repre-
sentative of the classical Western, providing an ‘idyllic platform of Americana,
both nostalgic for the past and optimistic in its portrayal of national direction,
assur[ing] general confidence in the American experiment’.167 But how far does
Shane really adhere to such a generalised perspective, or blue-print?
I have already indicated the homesteader’s lack of reaction to Shane’s use
of violence, but equally there are no sequences indicating their making good
the valley for American settlement following his departure: no ‘churches’,
no ‘school’, and no framing device suggestive of any kind of Joe’s hoped-for
‘regular settlement’. Contrast this ambiguity for a moment with Ford’s version
of a bleak frontier township in My Darling Clementine. In the rough township
of Tombstone, the church – albeit only half-built – is prominent throughout,
symbolising the eventual emergence of a community-driven ‘regular settle-
ment’, of the emergence of a religiously ordained and legitimated American
civilisation. In Shane, there is no such visual analogue. (This is not to suggest
that Clementine unambiguously endorses the myth of the West, either.
Although Ford’s film is filled with images that signify civilisation – not least

59
myth of the western

the dedication of ‘the first church of Tombstone’ – Clementine also suggests

the myth’s darker side, whereby the spectre of death remains a constant on the
frontier; the church being only half-built.)
If Shane aimed to be so overtly triumphalist, that is, if it pertained to a
Turnerian thesis that sees the defeat of the savage forces of the wilderness as
tending towards emergent culture, democracy and economic individualism, if
‘a better future’ really ‘lay ahead’, then why is the audience denied its visual
realisation? Similarly, there is no evidence that Joey grew up to be ‘strong and
straight’. The last we see of him he is hopelessly calling after Shane, begging
him to ‘come back!’ What kind of society has Shane left behind him exactly?
What kind of civilisation is it that he has helped to create? If the frontier
depicted in Shane is to be read as a celebration of Turnerian economic indi-
vidualism, or if its homesteaders are to be considered as resembling some form
of Jeffersonian ‘natural democracy’ even, then what are we to make of this
conclusion? As Wright has it now ‘[t]here is no law for a hundred miles’, and
we know that the homesteaders have already proven their inability to thrive
without the intervention of a hero figure. Joey speaks more truth than perhaps
he realises when he tells Shane, ‘We need you.’168 Now the valley has no power
structure at all, no government, ‘no law’, none of the constituent elements
required for an emerging civilisation, and the Starretts, along with the other
homesteaders, are rendered helpless in the face of any potential future threat.
If we read these ideas into the text, then we do so through assumption only,
as, ultimately, the film’s attitude towards violence as a regenerative ‘tool’ is
held in ambiguity. As I have already mentioned, Wright suggests that ‘Shane
could, of course, stay in the valley and maximise the rewards of his power
and the farmer’s gratitude; but he gives up his status as gunfighter and saviour
and chooses instead the dark night and the cold mountains.’169 I have already
considered the ‘farmer’s gratitude’, or lack thereof, and I am willing to concede
that such a reading may be, in and of itself, contentious, speculative or even
insignificant. But to claim, as Wright does, that Shane ‘gives up his status
as gunfighter’ is to provide a distorted, even erroneous account of the film’s
plot.170 On the contrary, it is precisely because Shane cannot give up ‘his status
as gunfighter’ that makes his leaving the valley at the film’s conclusion a neces-
sity rather than a choice. His re-assumption of the role of the gunfighter – a
role he had never really abandoned – merely reasserts his basic incompatibility
with the social order that relies on his ‘power’ at the very same time that it dis-
avows it. The homesteaders may ‘need’ Shane, as Joey insists, but they cannot
admit to that need, else they would have to brand themselves hypocrites, and
acknowledge their reliance on ‘gun-slinging’ and their own complicity in acts
of ‘murder’.
If anything, and if one were forced to categorise Shane in this fashion, by
leaving the valley at the end of the film, Shane is acting more in line with the
hero of Wright’s ‘vengeance plot’ than he is with the classical formula. ‘Unlike
the classical hero who joins the society because of his strength and their

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a good man with a gun

weakness’, argues Wright, ‘the vengeance hero leaves the society because of his
strength and their weakness.’171 As we know, Shane does not ‘join the society’
at all; to my mind he is never a part of it. In the end he leaves, apparently in
accordance with the ‘vengeance’ plot type – because ‘his strength’ is incompat-
ible with ‘the values of society’.172 However, clearly this plot type does not
suffice as an explanation either. As I have previously indicated with Joey’s
‘pre-Shane’ familiarisation with a rifle, ‘the values of society’ do not preclude
violence, they embody it. Society’s disavowal of violence being a hypocriti-
cal element of the myth of American civilisation that the narrative of Shane
happens to expose. If one argues (as many have) that, in slaying Wilson and the
Rykers, Shane eradicates from society its savage elements and causes regenera-
tion through violence, the same progressive reading cannot so easily be applied
to Shane himself. As he rides off wounded (possibly dying) and alone, he has
absolutely failed to ‘give up his special status’, and it is this fact that ensures
both his personal failure and, ironically, the validation of his philosophical
musing to Joey that you cannot go back from a killing.
According to Wright, ‘in the classical plot only the hero is associated with
the wilderness’.173 He declares that it is this unique relationship with nature
that provides the ‘hero’s source of strength, both physical and moral; he is an
independent and autonomous individual because he is part of the land’.174 This
interpretation is also evident in Slotkin’s analysis of Shane. He suggests that
Shane be allegorically associated with nature, ‘an aristocrat of violence . . .
an alien from a more glamorous world’.175 He further suggests that Shane’s
reasons for helping the homesteaders ‘are chivalric and romantic’; however,
‘because Shane’s motives . . . are unique and arise from no visible history or
social background, they appear to be expressions of his nature, signs of a
nobility which is independent of history’.176 McGee also re-emphasises the
interpretation that Shane is without history:

Ultimately, a man without history has no real identity because identity

is a function of history, of the stories we tell about ourselves . . . when it
comes to Shane, no one seems to know anything for certain . . . because
he has no story that can explain his being.177

Again, Shane’s only palpable identity is as a gunfighter. The six-gun pro-

vides his only existential link to history, but it is a violent aspect of his own
and America’s past that must be disavowed if the nation is to succeed in the
domestication of the wilderness and realise its own exceptionalism. And if, like
Ryker, his ‘time is over’ and he cannot change, then he too must be swept away
by the tides of history.
Let us further consider Wright’s thematic association of the hero with the
wilderness in relation to the wilderness–civilisation binary, as well as Shane’s
relation to frontier history. Drawing directly from Wright, Mitchell discusses
the narrative theme of Shane’s association with the wilderness in terms of the

61
myth of the western

film’s formal construction. ‘Because Joey’s prepubescent angle of vision domi-

nates the film’, argues Mitchell, ‘characters are metonymically equated with
the spaces through which they move.’178 He continues:

Scenery imparts a mythic power that is accepted by Joey as natural,

explaining why Shane is the only figure filmed alone against the moun-
tains, the villainous Rikers [sic] never appear this way, and the farmers
only with Shane. So closely is this standard observed that when Shane
and Joe Starrett ride into town, the road they take faces the mountains,
while the Riker [sic] gang rides down the same road filmed from the
opposite direction. Other characters are likewise bound to identifying
locales – the saloon, the store, or simply (in the case of the homesteading
wives) buckboard wagons.179

I wish to take issue with this aspect of Mitchell’s analysis. Quite apart from the
irony of him utilising a ‘cinematic conceit’ first adumbrated by Wright (a man
whose approach to the Western Mitchell claims ‘suffers from theoretical inco-
herence’), his claim that the Rykers never appear framed against the moun-
tains is, in any case, incorrect.180 Rufus Ryker does appear framed against the
mountains. This slippage in his own analysis goes against Mitchell’s otherwise
correct insistence that ‘Wright’s exchange of isolated texts for a master plot
ends up confirming instead how much individual details always do matter.’181
In an erudite attention to the language of the cinema, Mitchell continues by
impressing the importance of the ‘the non-sequential minutia of scenery and
cinematography, the evocations of music and sound track, the idiosyncrasies
of casting, that also make for successful films’.182 By applying such a close
reading, one attentive to Shane’s ‘minutia of scenery and cinematography’, one
can deconstruct Mitchell qua Wright’s suggestion that ‘Shane is the only figure
filmed alone against the mountains’.
The scene under consideration is Ryker’s night-time speech to Joe at the
Starrett homestead. The occasion of its delivery is the evening of the Fourth
of July, following the valley’s Independence Day celebrations (from which
the Rykers are conspicuously absent). Unsurprisingly, the subject of Ryker’s
speech concerns the question of who has legitimate rights to the valley:

When I came to this country, you weren’t much older than your boy.
We had rough times. Me and other men that are mostly dead now. I got
a bad shoulder yet from a Cheyenne arrowhead. We made this country,
we found it and we made it, with blood and empty bellies. Cattle we
brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don’t bother
you much any more because we handled them. We made a safe range
out of this. Some of us died doing it, but we made it. Then people move
in who never had to raw-hide it through the old days. They fence off my
range and fence me off from water. Some of them plough ditches, take

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a good man with a gun

out irrigation water so the creek runs dry sometimes and I gotta move
my stock because of it. And you say we have no right to the range. The
men that did the work and ran the risks have no rights? I take you for a
fair man, Starrett.

As Ryker delivers his speech he is held almost entirely in a medium close-

up shot, clearly framing him against the stunning backdrop of the Tetons.
Therefore, not only is Shane not ‘the only figure filmed alone against the moun-
tains’, this scene suggests that Ryker – the ostensible villain of the piece – is
also to be ‘metonymically equated’ with the wilderness. To my mind, Ryker’s
physical position in this scene, combined with the content of his speech, makes
his association with the wilderness undeniable.
Joe’s reply is courteous but, ultimately, unsympathetic:

I’m not belittling what you and the others did, but at the same time you
didn’t find this country. There were trappers here and Indian traders
before you. They tamed this country. They weren’t ranchers. You talk
about rights. You think you’ve the right to say nobody else has got any.
That ain’t the way the Government looks at it.

The historical significance of this scene is played down by Slotkin, for whom
issues such as ‘rights’ and ‘progress’ are merely ‘palaver’ for what the film is
really all about. That is to say, the epic moment between Shane and Wilson,
and the civilising process of regeneration through violence. During the scene
between Ryker and Starrett, Slotkin writes that ‘the camera is watching Shane
and Wilson size each other up’.183 He continues:

They [Shane and Wilson] say nothing; they merely look and smile a
little smile. They know that the talk of rights and wrongs has become
­meaningless. . . . Violent force alone will settle the issue, and the gun-
fighters are the ones who best understand that truth. Ryker and Starrett
and their original objectives are reduced to mere premises from which the
action will arise, but the action itself will be entrusted to professionals.184

Slotkin interprets the debate over land rights between cattle baron and home-
steader as superfluous to the generic demands of the shootout between Shane
and Wilson. In other words, the film’s mythic function serves its generic
requirements and supersedes any historical dimension,185 which is here rel-
egated to ‘meaningless’ background noise.
‘The politics of “saving the valley” have now become “stylized” as well’,
insists Slotkin, ‘reduced to the formally necessary confrontation of two pro-
fessionals who belong to neither of the contending classes.’186 Slotkin is quite
correct in arguing that ‘the action itself will be entrusted to professionals [and
that] the gunfighters are the ones who best understand that truth’.187 This

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myth of the western

truism is pointed out earlier in the film in rather sardonic fashion by Wilson.
Sitting in Grafton’s, Ryker claims that ‘I like Starrett . . . but I’ll kill him if I
have to.’ Wilson quickly corrects him, ‘You mean I’ll kill him if you have to.’ I
do feel that Slotkin’s analysis tells only part of the story, however, and here is
where I would differ from him. Ryker’s ‘Independence Day’ speech and debate
over land rights with Starrett seem significant on multiple levels. To relegate
them as Slotkin does runs the risk of underestimating Shane’s potential for
‘sustaining multiple interpretations’. The film should be seen as simultaneously
pertaining to both generic and historical, or even counter-historical, interpreta-
tions. In formal terms, Slotkin’s suggestion that ‘the camera is watching Shane
and Wilson’, is not completely accurate as at least half of the shots that con-
stitute this scene focus on the discourse between Ryker and Starrett.188 Visual
emphasis is, at the very least, distributed equally between the film’s generic
function (Shane and Wilson) and its historical dimension (Starrett and Ryker).
I would even suggest that the scene of Ryker’s speech foregrounds a historical
theme. As I have already mentioned, Griffin has outlined the narrative of Shane
in relation to Manifest Destiny, and she has it that Ryker’s speech ‘effectively
encapsulates Turner’s vision of progress, the stages by which America was
won and which the western genre charts so evocatively’.189 She suggests that
here can be seen ‘the standard trajectory of western settlement, from mountain
men and trappers to ranchers and town tamers’, with the eventual succession
of the homesteaders, ‘to the pinnacle of “civilisation”, land enclosure and the
settlers’.190 In my opinion, Shane’s attitude to frontier history is more complex
than the classical reading allows for, and there is a counter-historical thread
one might pick up. I return again to the subject of Ryker’s speech. Consider
such a scene: a convincing monologue delivered by the villain that, as Mitchell
astutely reminds us, is ‘based on values otherwise clearly associated with
Shane’.191 Mitchell does not exploit this ‘fissure’ within the narrative, beyond
suggesting that ‘Riker’s [sic] night-time speech in defence of his rights . . . is
oddly persuasive’, but I believe that he has missed a point worth discussing.192
What I propose is that this scene discloses the darker aspects of the history of
nineteenth-century US expansion. For one, Ryker’s defence of his hard-fought
position in the valley, together with his contention that the homesteader’s ‘fence
off my range and fence me off from water . . . plough ditches . . . so the creek
runs dry’, places him, ironically enough, as victim. His existential link to Shane,
the hero, is clear in this regard as historical ‘progress’ is forcing him, like Shane,
to recognise that his ‘time of doing things is over’. I wish to make clear that I
am not suggesting that Shane and Ryker be read as one and the same, or even
two sides of the same coin; Ryker is not a hero, not the ‘dark half’ of Shane, but
while he may lack an heroic capacity neither is he completely unsympathetic.
He is a threatening bully, but he is also a man who is threatened by others and
whose entire way of life is at risk. (It is worth noting that all this comes before
Ryker’s adoption of murderous tactics, that is, before Wilson kills Frank, so our
sympathies are somewhat aroused at this point.)

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a good man with a gun

Baker has argued that, despite this exchange between Ryker and Starrett,
Shane mitigates our sympathies for Ryker, arguing that ‘the audience is to
some extent headed off from arbitrating the semi-legalistic conflict of settlers
versus ranchers or the rights and wrongs of the Homestead Act and instead
corralled into the easy ethical framework of peaceful settlers versus terroris-
ing ranchers’.193 His main reason for thinking this is the implication that the
Rykers are both without wives and children. With this lack established in the
narrative, ‘the way is open for a clear-cut resolution of the story: a clutch of
dependent Rykers would certainly make for an anomalous ending’.194 Baker is
not wrong, of course, but I argue that there are other elements simultaneously
in play. Mitigated or not, Ryker’s appeal to Starrett gives the lie to Wright’s
contention that ‘in classical Westerns, no villains are sympathetic, no heroes
or society is unsympathetic’.195 Actually, the location of individual characters
within these structuring oppositions is complex. We might recall that Wright
takes little to no account of the psychological complexities of character moti-
vation. For him, the hero and the villain are at opposite ends of a binary divi-
sion, fixed as mythic archetypes. It becomes apparent, however, that such an
interpretation does not apply to the narrative of Shane. The result is a distorted
reading that fails to accommodate a rich, in-depth analysis of either the hero
or, in this case, the villain. On yet another level, while Starrett’s rebuke to
Ryker may well ape Turner’s Frontier Thesis, this does not mean that the film
necessarily endorses this version of history. In indicating that the ‘trappers’ and
‘Indian traders’ were the ones that tamed the country first, Starrett is inadvert-
ently acknowledging the inevitability of his own demise once ‘the frontier has
passed by’.196 He too will become a victim of this deterministic view of histori-
cal ‘progress’, cast aside with the coming of the industrial era, where corporate
‘agribusiness’ was to replace the individual homesteaders.
The history of the spread of agriculture into the West is plagued by an irony.
It was widely believed that the huge agricultural production it would generate
would lead to corresponding increases in the wealth of individuals (economic
individualism) and of the nation as a whole. In fact, the effect was the opposite.
Over-production was so great that world prices for grain and other crops col-
lapsed, and US agriculture passed into the hands of corporate monopolies, as
only very large-scale operations could compete. In their belligerence towards
one another, Ryker and Starrett are symbolically prefiguring this historical
exploitation of the land and its resources which resulted in environmental,
social and economic disaster. The over-grazing and over-production of arid
soils, of course, eventuated in the 1930s Dust Bowl. It can be argued that
Ryker inadvertently hints at environmental despoliation when he complains
that, even with their low-level farming, the homesteaders sometimes cause the
creek to run dry, forcing him to move his stock.
Another significant counter-historical aspect of the narrative relates to the
racial aspects of frontier settlement. Ryker’s reference to his ‘bad shoulder’,
the result of a ‘Cheyenne arrowhead’, tacitly acknowledges that Turner’s

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myth of the western

proclamation of so-called ‘free land’ was a misnomer from the start – the
product of a wilfully deliberate historical deceit. For under the vast rubric of
Manifest Destiny the constructed fiction of ‘free land’ sought to assuage any
guilt regarding the expropriations and conflicts with the Native Americans.
The land had, of course, never been free and was instead acquired as the result
of a series of brutal and protracted military conquests. It is certainly ironic,
but perhaps all too predictable, therefore, that neither Ryker nor Starrett –
­‘cattle-raiser’ nor ‘pioneer farmer’ – miss a stitch upon the mention of ‘Indians’
in their dispute over who has the legitimate ‘right to the range’. In fact, as
McGee astutely observes, ‘even more than Ryker does, Joe assumes that the
conquest of the West was a form of natural progress’. Consequently, Joe
‘shows no sympathy for the Native Americans who occupied and used the land
before any of these so-called Westerners appeared on the scene’.197
Of course, the ‘revelation’ that the land was never free can hardly be claimed
to be a latent aspect of the Western. Turner may have made only scant ref-
erence to the Native American, but this attempted elision from the official
history of the frontier cannot rightfully be claimed to apply to Hollywood’s
West. The fate of the Native Americans is often regarded as an unpalatable
fact that returns to plague US culture, but in actuality even so-called classical
Westerns usually acknowledge quite openly the acts of conquest required in
the founding of modern America: Ryker’s ‘bad shoulder’ together with his
contention that a ‘safe range’ was achieved only through ‘blood and empty
bellies’ constitutes instances of such an acknowledgement. The expropriation
of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands is a thematic constituent
of Shane’s articulation of the national character, of American national identity.
Shane also lays bare this unpalatable fact: ‘Law and Order’ and the domes-
tication of the wilderness is in fact the result of a ruthless social Darwinian
struggle for power between competing interests. The claim of ‘Rights’ comes
down to the application of force and, as McGee notes, ‘violence [is] the ulti-
mate basis of social power’.198 Violence permitted the new Americans to tame
the West, it is what allows Ryker to assert his authority over the valley, and it
is what allows Shane to take that authority from him. Therefore, the generic
violence of the shootout – the epic moment – in Shane foregrounds an histori-
cal dimension, rather than sublimates it under the function of myth.

V
We come now, finally, to an analysis of Shane himself – his psychological moti-
vation and political-allegorical dimension. McGee is persuasive in his sugges-
tion that the hero recognises the fundamental opposition between ‘the values
of community and the values of power’, and how this is manifest in the ‘visual
composition’ of the film.199 However, we have seen how the survival of the
community depends on power at the same time as it disavows the agent of that
power. Central to this issue is Shane’s shootout with Wilson. Aesthetically,

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a good man with a gun

the stark realism of the moment, which sees actor Palance’s body being jerked
backwards (courtesy of an elaborate harness) by the force of Shane’s bullet,
is undercut by the scene’s inherent melodrama. On his ride to town, Shane is
photographed from a distance, silhouetted against the Tetons. Symbolically
dressed in tasselled buck-skins, he emerges out of the wilderness as a cinematic
re-imagining of Daniel Boone. Victor Young’s musical score does nothing to
diminish this metatextual description of Shane. It plays over the sequence and
slowly rises to an arresting crescendo as the hero nears Grafton’s. When he
finally enters the saloon filtered lights darken the already murky interior, and
low-angled shots increase Shane’s and Wilson’s stature. Such visual effects
are suggestive of noirish, even expressionistic tones, which complement the
initial deathly silence as Shane squares-up to Wilson. Wilson leeringly smiles
at Shane, Shane smiles back – a smile indicating that Shane will enjoy this epic
moment of ritualised violence.
Peeking unseen through the saloon doors is young Joey Starrett. I have
already mentioned how some scholars have argued convincingly that the film’s
narrative is structured around his perspective. This is either literally, as when
Shane first arrives in the valley, or if not through strict point-of-view struc-
tures, then the boy is present in most of the significant scenes. Structuring the
majority of the narrative around Joey’s gaze is important when considering the
film’s contradictory effects, especially in relation to Shane’s character. Slotkin
suggests that emphasising the boy’s perspective has the result of ‘abstracting
and stylising every person and action . . . looking through history to find a
mythic archetype’.200 Similarly, Mitchell reasons that both the film’s realism,
and its deliberate emphasis on mythological tropes, ‘result[s] from the film’s
investment in Joey’s gaze’.201 He further suggests that this ‘sense of preadoles-
cent consciousness’202 helps ‘to explain why violence seems required and yet is
so often deferred’.203 It also adds to spectator desire and expectation:

From the beginning, [Joey’s] aimless gaze at Shane’s body arouses a

longing for action – ‘Bet you can shoot. Can’t you?’ – followed by
impetuous queries and exclamations that prompt the viewer’s longing
as well: ‘Aren’t you goin’ to wear your six-shooter, Mr. Shane?’ . . . ‘Let
me see you shoot, Shane.’ The repeated deferral of Joey’s desires prompts
a regressive response in the viewer, whose own generic expectations are
stymied yet sharpened by curbs on the boy’s consciousness – as if we
were being co-opted into wanting the exhibition of violence that the
genre always promises. When violence finally does erupt, its presentation
only confirms a child’s mixed perspective, appearing at once realistically
brutal and yet magically inconsequential.204

Mitchell’s assessment of Shane is firmly based in a study that has as its overall
objective the divination of a ‘common strategy’ in early Cold War Westerns.
The section I have drawn from for the above quote, Chapter 7: ‘Sentimental

67
myth of the western

Educations’, argues that Joey’s purpose in the narrative is to provide a ‘juve-

nile condensation of impulses toward both the real and the mythic’ by relating
the film to the post-Second World War sociocultural issue of ‘how a boy is
to become a man’.205 To this he adds issues of fatherhood, cultural initiation
and the nuclear family, to which Shane, in however diminished a way, is inter-
preted as an ‘external threat’.206 This threat is visualised in the film by two
moments in the narrative when Shane reaches for his gun. The first is when he
spins to draw on Joey upon hearing the boy open the breach on his empty rifle.
The second moment is when Marian drops some pans in the kitchen; Shane’s
first instinctual reaction is to reach for his holster. When he realises there is no
threat he looks around at the Starrett family and bows his head in shame. This
import of the threat of violence and danger into the domestic realm alerts us
to the possibility that Shane has the potential to be a disruptive force to the
Starrett family (the microcosm of frontier community), and that he does not
really belong in the civilised domain.
For Joey, Shane can be said to represent the desired father figure the boy can
never have, an ego-ideal for a male child on the verge of adolescence. McGee
suggests that ‘Joey functions as the allegorical embodiment of a generation
of young boys who have been imprinted with this phantasmic idealisation of
masculine identity and violence.’207 This identity was another aspect of the
national character for, in Coyne’s political-allegorical reading, Shane is read
in terms of an ideal national image (one that the younger generation can look
up to and identify with), and that he is clearly an ‘instance of the American
hero who is keen to avoid trouble if possible but who ultimately finds he
must resort to violence’.208 Coyne has it that Shane be read in the context
of the Cold War, where Ryker represents a charismatic authoritarianism
(Soviet communism) threatening the democratic principles of the homestead-
ers (American capitalism), ‘with Ladd’s Shane as [the] personification of the
sleeping giant in the age of atomic weaponry’.209 For Marian, Shane could be
seen to represent the ideal embodiment of a figurative heroic husband: a char-
ismatic type so far beyond the existential constraints of her actual husband,
the dependable but plainly ‘average’ Joe. This is suggested (perhaps unwit-
tingly) in the subtext of Joey’s final call to Shane: ‘Mother wants you! I know
she does!’ Coyne makes an interesting point that ‘a curious expression crosses
the boy’s face [as if he realises] the significance of what he has just said’.210 It
is at this moment that ‘Joey loses both his boyhood hero and his childhood
innocence’.211
Most commentators insist that Shane is far too honourable to act on his
own attraction to Marian, and they are probably right, however, it is curious
to note that a man who resolutely refuses to be goaded into violence until
it is literally unavoidable erupts with rage at mere insinuation. Following
Shane’s refusal to accept Ryker’s lucrative offer to come and work for him
(‘whatever Starrett’s paying you I’ll double it!’) he asks of him, ‘What are
you looking for?’, Ryker pauses and then smiles sardonically, ‘Pretty wife

­68
a good man with a gun

Starrett’s got.’ Shane explodes, ‘Why, you dirty, stinkin’ old man!’ Coyne
suggests something similar when he proposes that Wilson is ‘the dark side’
of Shane, and that Shane’s slaying of Wilson constitutes an act of repres-
sion.212 Making reference to the attraction between Shane and Marian, he
asserts that it is such an amoral familial disruption that Shane seeks to repress
by his fatal actions: ‘[Shane] could disrupt the Starretts’ marriage; for Shane
has the potential to be either Galahad in Camelot or the serpent in Eden.’213
Even Starrett remarks with a somewhat melancholic tone that, should he meet
his end fighting Ryker, he knows that Shane could look after Marian and
Joey better than he ever could. In other words, he knows that Shane could
literally supersede him as father of the family, and that (on some level at
least) this may even be a desired outcome for him and his family. Tompkins
hypothesises about how this (un)conscious wish-fulfilment might have panned
out:

When Joey calls out at the end of Shane, and the call echoes, ‘Come
back, Shane!’ we want Shane to come back just as much as he does. But
suppose Shane had come back and had gotten Marian Starrett away
from Joe, Sr. What would it have been like to live with him? Shane was
a man of few words, mysterious, catlike, sexually appealing, with some-
thing a little deadly in the background . . . What would it have been like
to spend long days with this edgy, introverted person, with hair-trigger
reflexes and an undigestible past? How much did Shane like living with
himself?214

These are all interesting aspects of Shane’s psychological motivation, especially

when considered in conjunction with Joey’s plea for Shane to ‘Come back!’
But, of course, Shane cannot ‘come back’ for, as we have seen, his very pres-
ence threatens to disrupt not only the marital sanctity of the Starrett family,
but also the whole social order that the homesteaders symbolically represent.
Pressing the political-allegorical reading further, one could tease out another
aspect of Shane’s character which is not befitting his role as all-American
hero. There is a strong possibility that Shane may well be a violent outlaw on
a self-imposed path of redemption. As McGee relates, in his past Shane may
well have been ‘a gunman for hire to someone like Ryker, a servant to power
and property. Something brought about a change, and more than likely it
was an act of violence that disrupted Shane’s perception of himself and the
world.’215
It is telling that redemption for such a figure can come only through exile
and (possibly) death. In any case, Shane’s departure from the valley in the
film’s final shot allows us to muse over a deeply complex narrative with an
even deeper ambivalence regarding that narrative’s attitude towards both its
hero and triumphalist brands of frontier mythology.

69
myth of the western

Notes
   1. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’
[1893], in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson,
AZ: University of Arizona Press, [1920] 1986), pp. 1–38, quote on p. 1.
  2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1957). Frye, discussed in Douglas Pye, ‘The Western (Genre and Movies)’
(1977), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 203–18, quote on pp. 204–7.
  3. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 354.
   4. Pye, ‘The Western’, p. 207.
   5. For an example of this assertion, see Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann,
Bud Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah – Studies of Authorship within the Western
(London: Secker & Warburg/British Film Institute, 1969), p. 8.
  6. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio
System (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 58.
   7. Ibid., p. 59.
   8. Steve Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’ (1995), reprinted in Grant (ed.), Film Genre
Reader III, pp. 160–84, quote on p. 179.
   9. Edward Buscombe (ed.), The BFI Companion to the Western (London: British
Film Institute, 1988), p. 13.
  10. John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, [1980] 1985), pp. 24–5.
  11. Alan Williams, ‘Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?’ Quarterly Review of Film
Studies, 9(2) (1984): 123–4. Williams, discussed in Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’,
p. 173.
  12. Janet Walker (ed.), ‘Introduction: Westerns through History’, in Westerns: Films
through History (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 5.
  13. Ibid., p. 5.
  14. Ibid., p. 10.
 15. Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the
Hollywood Western (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), p. 13.
  16. Ibid., p. 13.
  17. Ibid., p. 189.
  18. Ibid., p. 189.
  19. Ibid., p. 189.
  20. Ibid., p. 191.
 21. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 58.
  22. Ibid., p. 64 (emphasis added).
  23. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 1999), pp. 143–6. Cawelti, discussed in
Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’, p. 179.
  24. Jack Nachbar (ed.), ‘Riding Shotgun: The Scattered Formula in Contemporary
Western Movies’ (1973), reprinted in Focus on the Western (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 102.
  25. Janet Staiger, ‘Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre
History’ (1997), reprinted in Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III, p. 185.
  26. Ibid., p. 195. A similar point is made by Rick Altman in relation to genre theory.
Altman suggests that the fact of genre hybridity ‘is typically forgotten for genres
created in the past, leaving us with what seems like an uncomplicated genre iden-
tified by a single name.’ Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute,
1999), p. 149. See also Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 139–46.

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a good man with a gun

 27. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton: Harvester

Press, 1982), p. 88. Jauss, discussed in Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’, p. 173.
 28. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, p. 211.
  29. Ibid., p. 219.
  30. Staiger, ‘Hybrid or Inbred’, p. 185.
  31. Jack Schaeffer, Shane (London: Bantam Pathfinder, [1949] 1963), p. 119.
 32. See John G. Cawelti, ‘Savagery, Civilisation and the Western Hero’ (1971),
reprinted in Nachbar (ed.), Focus on the Western, pp. 57–63. See also Michael
Marsden, ‘The Modern Western’, Journal of the West, 19 (1980): 54–61.
  33. Cawelti, ‘Savagery, Civilisation and the Western Hero’, p. 58.
 34. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (Oxford: Oxford
Paperbacks, [1902] 2009), p. 7.
 35. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, p. 40.
 36. Robert Warshow, ‘Movie Chronicle: The Westerner’ (1954), reprinted in Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory
Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 654–79, quote on p. 666.
  37. Ibid., p. 667.
  38. Cawelti, ‘Savagery, Civilisation and the Western Hero’, p. 57.
 39. Coyne, The Crowded Prairie, p. 76.
 40. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 227.
  41. Ibid., p. 227.
  42. Ibid., p. 228.
 43. John G. Cawelti, ‘Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture’, Critical
Inquiry, 1(3) (1975): 521–41, quote on p. 526.
  44. Ibid., p. 526.
  45. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of Myth (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1975), p. 16.
  46. Will Wright, The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory (London:
Sage, 2001), p. 2.
  47. Ibid., p. 3.
 48. See especially Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, [1962] 1966); Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans.
Laurence Scott (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, [1928] 1968).
 49. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 14.
  50. Ibid., p. 15.
  51. Ibid., p. 15.
  52. Ibid., p. 40. These three plot structures are discussed in greater detail in Cawelti,
The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, pp. 29–45.
  53. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 8–9.
 54. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 347.
 55. Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Bud Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, p. 15.
  56. Ibid., p. 20.
 57. For an example of Shane being read in this manner, see Ed Andrechuck, The
Golden Corral: A Roundup of Magnificent Westerns (London: McFarland,
1997), pp. 40–7.
 58. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 55.
 59. Lenihan, Showdown, p. 18.
 60. Ruth Griffin, ‘Writing the West: Critical Approaches to Shane’, Literature
Compass, 4(1) (2007): 24–47.
  61. Ibid., p. 38.
 62. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 34.
  63. Ibid., p. 15.

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myth of the western

 64. Wright, The Wild West, p. 3.

 65. Wright, Six Guns and Society, pp. 41–8.
  66. Ibid., p. 32.
 67. Coyne, The Crowded Prairie, p. 5.
  68. Ibid., p. 5.
 69. John Tuska, The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western
(London: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 260, see esp. ch. 16.
  70. Ibid. p. 260.
 71. Tompkins, West of Everything, p. 10.
 72. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, p. 35.
 73. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1968), p. 140.
  74. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 138.
 75. For a deconstructionist reading of this gender binary in literature, see Hélène
Cixous, ‘Sorties’ (1975), reprinted in David Lodge and Nigel Wood (eds),
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, [1988] 2000), pp.
263–71. For how this gender binary has been appropriated and articulated in
Hollywood narrative cinema, see Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’, Screen, 16(3) (1975): 6–19.
 76. Tompkins, West of Everything, pp. 39–40.
  77. Ibid., p. 144.
  78. Ibid., pp. 61–2.
  79. For specific reference to Wister’s The Virginian, see Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and
Death in the American Novel (London: Penguin, [1960] 1984), p. 259.
 80. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint
Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, [2004] 2007), p. 21.
  81. Ibid., p. 21.
  82. Ibid., p. 21.
 83. Wright, The Wild West, pp. 158–71.
  84. Ibid., p. 168.
 85. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, [1992] 1998),
pp. 5–6.
  86. Ibid., p. 8.
  87. Ibid., p. 10.
  88. Ibid., p. 6.
  89. Ibid., pp. 24–6.
  90. Ibid., p. 11.
  91. Ibid., p. 14.
 92. Ibid., p. 12 (emphasis in original). For a more detailed account of the Daniel
Boone legend in frontier mythology, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through
Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, new edn
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), esp. pp. 21–2 and ch. 9.
  93. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York: Signet Classics, [1823] 1964),
pp. 13–14.
  94. Ibid., p. 436.
 95. See David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Manifest Destiny (London:
Greenwood Press, 2003), p. 23. See also pp. 132, 137, 175–6, 200.
 96. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, [1972]
1993), p. 142.
  97. Ibid., p. 142.
  98. Ibid., p. 142.
  99. Ibid., p. 143 (emphasis in original).

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a good man with a gun

100. Cawelti, ‘Myths of Violence’, p. 539.

101. Schaeffer, Shane, p. 101. Cawelti also makes this observation in ‘Myths of
Violence’, p. 539.
102. Rick Worland and Edward Countryman, ‘The New Western, American
Historiography and the Emergence of the New American Westerns’, in Edward
Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays
on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p. 195, fn. 5.
103. Griffin, ‘Writing the West’, p. 28.
104. Ibid., p. 28.
105. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 1. See also pp. 2–3, 12.
106. For elaboration of homo americanus, see Johan Gultang, ‘The Meanings of
History: Enacting the Sociocultural Code’, in Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Meaning and
Representation in History (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 98.
107. Warshow, ‘Movie Chronicle’, p. 664.
108. Ibid., p. 664.
109. Ibid.
110. André Bazin, ‘Évolution du western’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 55 (1955), reprinted
in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, vol. 1: An Anthology (London:
University of California Press, 1976), pp. 150–7, quote on p. 153.
111. Ibid., p. 152.
112. Ibid., p. 153.
113. Ibid., p. 153.
114. Tag Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the “Evolution” of
the Western’ (1986), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III,
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 262–76, quote on p. 266.
115. Warshow, ‘Movie Chronicle’, p. 664.
116. Bob Baker, ‘Shane Through Five Decades’, in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye
(eds), The Movie Book of the Western (London: Studio Vista, 1996), pp. 214–20,
quote on p. 215.
117. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York:
Oxford University Press, [1782] 1998), p. 44.
118. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 41.
119. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 396.
120. Lenihan, Showdown, p. 18.
121. Mitchell, Westerns, pp. 69–70.
122. Ibid., p. 194.
123. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 493.
124. Ibid., p. 493.
125. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 192. On Cooper’s significance
to frontier mythology, see Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, ch. 13; Edwin
Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1965), ch. 1.
126. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 47.
127. Warshow, ‘Movie Chronicle’, pp. 657–8.
128. Lenihan, Showdown, p. 18.
129. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 12.
130. Ibid., p. 8.
131. Ibid., p. 8.
132. Ibid., p. 152.
133. Tompkins, West of Everything, p. 39.
134. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 12 (emphasis in original).
135. Ibid., p. 13.
136. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, [1983]
1995), pp. 133–4.

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myth of the western

137. Staiger, ‘Hybrid or Inbred’, pp. 188–9. Staiger also makes useful reference to
Thomas O. Beebee’s assertion that any act of genre classification is ‘always
already unstable’, due to the fact that ‘a ‘single’ genre is only recognizable as
difference, as a foregrounding against the background of its neighboring genres.’
And as a consequence of this, an individual text typically ‘involves more than
one genre, even if only implicitly’. Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre:
A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1994), pp. 27–8. Beebee, discussed in Staiger, ‘Hybrid or
Inbred’, p. 189.
138. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, [1969]
2002), p. 28.
139. This is, of course, dealing on an individual level with what Foucault is concerned
with on a wider sociopolitical and cultural–historical level. ‘In attempting to
uncover the deepest strata of Western culture’, writes Foucault, ‘I am restoring to
our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is
the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet.’ Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock,
[1966] 1970), p. xxiv
140. As I shall argue below, the voice of the Native American haunts the narrative of
Shane in a not insignificant measure.
141. Forrest G. Robinson, Having it Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular
Classics (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 3.
142. Ibid., p. 3.
143. Ibid., pp. 2–3. He argues, for instance, that Jack Schaeffer ‘gives no evidence of
glimpsing the penetrating critique of male hegemony that [the novel] Shane so
brilliantly performs’, ibid., pp. 2–3.
144. Ibid., pp. 2–3 (emphasis in original).
145. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
146. Andrew Tudor, ‘Genre and Critical Methodology’ (1974), reprinted in Nichols
(ed.), Movies and Methods, vol. 1, pp. 118–26, quote on p. 121 (emphasis in
original).
147. Warshow, ‘Movie Chronicle’, p. 664. Bazin, ‘Évolution du western’, p. 151.
148. Alan Lovell, ‘The Western’ (1967), reprinted in Nichols (ed.), Movies and
Methods, vol. 1, pp. 164–75, quote on p. 169.
149. Kathryn C. Esselman, ‘From Camelot to Monument Valley: Dramatic Origins of
the Western Film’ (1974), reprinted in Nachbar (ed.), Focus on the Western, pp.
9–19, quote on p. 13.
150. Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral’, p. 264.
151. Ibid., p. 263.
152. Justification for a ‘scant’ survey becomes apparent when one considers the condi-
tion of artefacts from this period of film production. According to Nachbar, as
of 1974, ‘the American Film Institute estimates that less than 20 percent of silent
films are in existence’, and that, among Westerns, the ‘percentage of loss is prob-
ably even higher’. Nachbar (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Focus on the Western, p. 8.
153. Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the genre Corral’, p. 266.
154. Ibid., p. 264.
155. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 38.
156. Williams, ‘Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?’; Williams, discussed in Neale,
‘Questions of Genre’, pp. 123–4.
157. Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral’, p. 272.
158. Tuska, The American West in Film, p. 14.
159. Ibid., p. 14.
160. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 42.
161. Ibid., pp. 41–8.

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a good man with a gun

162. Coyne, The Crowded Prairie, p. 74.

163. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 10.
164. Karen R. Jones and John Wills, The American West: Competing Visions
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 235.
165. Ibid., p. 235.
166. Ibid., pp. 231–40.
167. Ibid., p. 235.
168. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 47.
169. Ibid., p. 47.
170. In Wright’s schema, a necessary function for the ‘classical plot’: ‘The hero loses
or gives up his social status’.
171. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 59.
172. Ibid., p. 59.
173. Ibid., p. 121.
174. Ibid., p. 189.
175. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 400.
176. Ibid., p. 400.
177. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 6.
178. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 194.
179. Ibid., p. 194 (emphasis added).
180. Ibid., p. 11. See also pp. 305–6 and fn. 12.
181. Ibid., p. 11.
182. Ibid., p. 11.
183. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 398.
184. Ibid., p. 398.
185. Slotkin terms this the ‘progressive epic’. Ibid., p. 398.
186. Ibid., p. 399.
187. Ibid., p. 398.
188. Not forgetting little Joey, of whom there are numerous cut-away shots, and to
whom Ryker even addresses part of his speech, an appeal to the next generation
of settlers – ‘How about it, son?’ Thus, from ‘Joey’s prepubescent angle of vision’
we see Ryker’s association with the wilderness as much as we do Shane’s.
189. Griffin, ‘Writing the West’, p. 31.
190. Ibid., p. 31. Turner writes: ‘Stand at the Cumberland Gap and watch the proces-
sion of civilisation, marching single file – the buffalo following the trail to the salt
springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer
– and the frontier has passed by.’ The Significance of the Frontier in American
History, p. 12.
191. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 195.
192. Ibid., p. 195
193. Baker, ‘Shane through Five Decades’, pp. 218–19.
194. Ibid., p. 219.
195. Wright, Six Guns and Society, p. 55.
196. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 12.
197. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 12.
198. Ibid., p. 11.
199. Ibid., p. 14.
200. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 397.
201. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 195.
202. Ibid., p. 196.
203. Ibid., p. 195.
204. Ibid., p. 195.
205. Ibid., pp. 206–7, 218.
206. Ibid., p. 202.

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myth of the western

207. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 18.

208. Coyne, The Crowded Prairie, p. 76
209. Ibid., p. 76.
210. Ibid., p. 74.
211. Ibid., pp. 74–5.
212. Ibid., p. 75.
213. Ibid., p. 75.
214. Tompkins, West of Everything, p. 128.
215. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 16.

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2. A FINE GOOD PLACE TO BE

‘Fetch what home? The leavings of Comanche bucks sold time and again
to the highest bidder with savage brats of her own?! Do you know what
Ethan will do if he has a chance? He’ll put a bullet in her brain. I tell you
Martha would want him to.’

I
During the climactic chase sequence in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) there
occurs a moment which is crucial in the film’s status as a Western. It speaks
of the genre’s relationship to frontier mythology and of the myth’s significance
in shaping the cultural attitudes of both the nineteenth-century and mid-
twentieth-century United States. With ambushing Apaches closing in on the
stagecoach and with its beleaguered occupants running low on ammunition,
Southern ‘gentleman’, Hatfield (John Carradine), is seen pointing his pistol at
Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), a white woman and recent mother who is praying
for rescue. Before Hatfield can shoot his last bullet into Mallory’s brain he is,
himself, mortally wounded by an Apache rifle shot. A close-up shows the pistol
falling from his grip, while the oblivious Mallory continues praying. Almost
immediately following this near-death experience, and as if in divine answer to
her prayers, the US Cavalry arrive to drive off the attacking Apache and rescue
those aboard the stagecoach.
The cultural significance of this scene for the Western is to be found in
the long-held belief that one is better off dead than falling into the hands of
‘Indians’. The very thought of a white woman (especially) being captured by
‘savages’ – of suffering ‘a fate worse than death’ – is cinematically referenced as
far back as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). This example from
Stagecoach exists as but one such articulation of this fear of the racial ‘other’.
Contemporary audiences might well balk at the racist implications of this
scene. By today’s standards Hatfield’s intended action, undoubtedly motivated
by his culture’s fear of the Native American ‘other’, comes across as somewhat
perverse. However, from the moment of the arrival of European settlers into

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the New World, such fears became formalised in the ‘captivity narratives’ that
have continued to feature heavily in American literary output. The captiv-
ity narrative was developed in response to the experiences of white captivity
among Native Americans in colonial America. These narratives existed long
before the Western genre came into being, and it is highly likely, therefore,
that Ford was drawing on a long-standing and ideologically ingrained societal
awareness to make this scene from Stagecoach not only dramatically engaging,
but culturally intelligible. According to Slotkin, the captivity narrative mythol-
ogises the historical confrontations between Anglo and Native American
cultures. In Regeneration through Violence, he suggests that it provides ‘a
variation on the great central myth of initiation into a new world and a new
life that is at the core of the American experience’.1 He further argues that:
‘[f]rom the moment of its literary genesis, the New England Indian captivity
narratives[s] . . . reduce[ed] the Puritan state of mind and world view, along
with the events of colonisation and settlement, into archetypal drama’.2 From
the very outset, the issue of race was ingrained within captivity narratives; it
both constituted and, moreover, justified them. Thus, Slotkin writes:

The culture and literature that we call American was borne out of the
confrontation between cultures that embodied two distinctly different
phases of mythological evolution, two conflicting modes of perception,
two antagonistic visions of the nature and destiny of man and the natural
wilderness.3

This ‘confrontation between cultures’ set the tone for the rhetoric of a ‘race
war’ between European settlers and Native Americans that would concern the
various forms of Anglo-American cultural expression. As I have mentioned
in Chapter 1, Slotkin insists that the so-called ‘Indian wars’ constitute the
‘original generic form of the Frontier Myth’.4 In terms of popular culture he
explored this idea through the concept of regeneration through violence. I
have already engaged with the complex ways in which the cinematic Western
has interacted with this mythic concept along with the domestication of the
wilderness through my analysis of Shane, and it would certainly be erroneous
to think that popular culture forms and, indeed, the popular imagination itself,
has dealt with the ‘confrontation between cultures’ unambiguously.
It is often said that the wilderness and its occupants caused European settlers
to ‘project onto the Indians [their] own latent desires for freedom, sensuality,
and escape from the spiritual rigours of the Christian community’.5 Therefore,
such fears as those manifested in the Anglo-American figure of Hatfield are
expressive of an ideological fear symptomatic of, as Arthur M. Eckstein
explains it, ‘how quickly the [captivity narrative] tradition became character-
ised by anxiety caused by white captives’ surprisingly easy “conversion” to
Indian ways’.6
This unacceptable attraction to the lifestyle of the racial other may well

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a fine good place to be

account for the on-going appeal of the captivity narrative in popular culture,
and for the construction of the powerful myth of Native American savagery as
a means to counter it. The historical phenomenon of ‘willing conversion’ surely
contributed to the designs evident in the nineteenth-century United States that
sought to subjugate or annihilate Native Americans and their ‘unfettered’
cultures. The destruction of the Indian in literary and cinematic expressions of
the captivity narrative was, according to John G. Cawelti, ‘also symbolically a
destruction of the captive’s own feared desires for lawlessness and the lascivi-
ous freedom of the wilderness’.7 Slotkin suggests that, for the Puritan settlers of
the seventeenth century, such destruction constituted nothing short of an act of
‘exorcism’, whereby European settlers’ desires to succumb to the temptations
of the wilderness ‘are treated as if they were representations of the id, being
sought out and recognised only that they might be repressed or destroyed’.8
Hence, the overriding cultural attitude in the face of this socioreligious anxiety:
‘The cross is thrust upon the Christian – to love it, accept it, and be saved; or to
rail against it and perish. The situation of the Puritan soul, for all its outward
security, is thus extremely precarious.’9
This notion of the ‘precarious’ state of the Anglo-American soul has a
particular thematic resonance in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Here the
complexities of the captivity narrative, and its ambiguous and contradictory
representations in popular culture, are brought to the fore in what many con-
sider to be his finest Western. The cultural currency of race war and the captiv-
ity narrative are here exploited by Ford in order to ask pressing questions about
the role played by race in structuring the myth of the West, and of the Western
genre’s role as a product of popular culture in disseminating this mythology
to twentieth-century audiences. The overriding thematic concern that many
scholars have identified in The Searchers appears to be the opposing of ‘blood
kinship’ to a culture of kinship by adoption, where originary concerns over
racial purity are surmounted through a culture based on racial interaction and
tolerance. In both instances, the historical issue of race as a major component
of American national identity is brought into stark relief. Equally ambiguous
and contradictory is the film’s interpretation of the Western hero who, as
Douglas Pye points out, ‘is both monstrous and John Wayne’.10 The film posits
an ambiguous hero through highlighting his symbolic links to Anglo-America’s
Manifest Destiny; specifically, his mythic role in the race war so crucial in the
narrative of the domestication of the wilderness. I shall develop my argument
for how The Searchers relates to these aspects of the trope of the hero during
the course of this chapter. First, I aim to provide some exposition and analysis
through which I can identify the complex nature of The Searchers’ relationship
with issues of race, and how we can situate the film within the Western genre
as a whole.

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myth of the western

II
Overall, much has been written on The Searchers and, invariably, not all of
it is consistent, in agreement or even accurate. A case can be (and, indeed,
has been) made that The Searchers is an over-determined film, and I do not
(and cannot) propose to deal with all the published criticism here, let alone
all the film’s themes and nuances of plot. I shall, however, adumbrate some of
the most prominent or ‘representative’ perspectives during the course of this
chapter.
As indicated in Chapter 1, Roland Barthes tells us that myth serves an ideo-
logical purpose by flattening history, simplifying its complexities and reducing
them to a binary between opposing forces, typically that of Good against Evil.
In the case of the myth of the West, its purpose is as a justification of Manifest
Destiny. Within the terms of this myth, the ancestral European pioneers are
religiously legitimated as the forces of Good, coming to represent American
exceptionalism, democracy and economic individualism. They were, in other
words, the vanguard in the onward march of civilisation. Conversely, the
Native Americans are typically cast as the Evil that resists the forward march of
the pioneers and, therefore, they oppose the very momentum of history itself.
Many film scholars have interpreted the Western itself as championing
this project, providing a palatable and exciting ‘myth of origins’ by which
the United States can readily interpret its own past. For example, Richard
Maltby conflates frontier mythology and the Western genre to argue for a
‘Western myth [that] made available a rhetoric[al] discursive framework by
which a national self-image of the self-righteousness of Manifest Destiny could
be maintained.’11 In this understanding of the genre, Native Americans are
reduced to mere ‘props’, as Tompkins calls them, generic tropes emptied of any
historical signification beyond that of legitimating Anglo-American conquest.
In other words, they become either representations of that otherness that the
dominant culture both need and fear, or else, in accordance with Slotkin’s
account of the Puritan mindset, metaphors for that within themselves that they
wish to repress. Either way they never represent ‘real’ Native Americans, but,
rather, symbolic ‘Indians’. Pye concurs with this view, suggesting that, despite
the fact that the,

history of the Western is littered with movies that attempt to develop

liberal perspectives on the historical treatment of native Americans . . .
the racism that is inherent in the traditions of the genre makes almost any
attempt to produce an anti-racist Western a paradoxical, even contradic-
tory, enterprise. It is, in effect, impossible to escape the genre’s informing
White supremacist terms.12

However, such an argument depends upon conceding to the cynical belief that
the Western is American history.13 By this I mean the assumption that the ‘real’

­80
a fine good place to be

history of the frontier has long been sublimated to the Western genre, which
exists essentially as a conduit for mythology parading as history: the myth of
the West. The belief here is that the Western exists almost as a simulacrum,
a self-reproducing narrative that provides its own source of meaning, at once
depicting several attendant myths, namely, regeneration through violence,
the domestication of the wilderness, and the emergence of the ‘Garden of the
World’ from the ‘Great American Desert’; ultimately providing an audio-visual
analogue, a paean, if you will, to Anglo-centric historical narratives such as
those provided by Turner and Roosevelt.
Maltby goes even further, suggesting that myth precedes historical narra-
tive in such a way that the two become indistinguishable.14 This follows his
claim that ‘[t]he history of the West is in a sense a subgenre of the western, and
revisionist history a subgenre of that’.15 If Maltby is correct, then the historical
validity of any discourse concerning the frontier is destined to be stymied by
the omnipresence of an indelible and insurmountable mythological discursive
formation. Maltby is in many ways persuasive, yet Slotkin has argued that the
opposite is the case. He suggests that frontier mythology actually provides the
source of the Western genre. That is to say, the myth existed long before
the Western and will outlast it, its terms transferable to other modes or genres
of cultural expression. In Slotkin’s view the Western exists as but one genre by
which to express Anglo-America’s myth–ideology systems. Implicit in this line
of argument is the potential for a historical revision of the racism underpinning
the myth that is beyond being a mere ‘subgenre’ of the history of the West, or
even of the Western genre itself.16 However, Slotkin doubts the ability of the
Western in this task. His deterministic political-allegorical thesis in Gunfighter
Nation concludes with the belief that, due to its Anglo bias, and ever since the
cultural–political fallout following the Vietnam War, the Western genre has
ceased to be the popular culture form through which this historical revisionism
will be expressed. (He actually concurs with Maltby and Pye in this respect.)
Like so many other scholars, Slotkin believes that the Western is essentially
Anglo-centric and has long since lost its explanatory power with regard to
making American history comprehensible to US citizens.17
Slotkin’s analysis of the genre is certainly compelling, but perhaps overly
fatalistic. As I have attempted to show in Chapter 1 through my analysis of the
interacting historical and mythic narrative themes of Shane, there is no guaran-
tee that the individual films that make up what we call the Western genre will
regurgitate the myth of the West entirely from an Anglo-American perspective.
And even if they do, they rarely do so in a straightforward, unproblematic
manner. Post-structuralist analyses have taught us that so-called ‘resistive’
narratives and ideological agendas that muddy the clear waters of the myth
can, more often than not, be found in most Westerns. And yet, far from under-
mining the power and significance of the genre, this complex articulation of
the myth’s ideological purpose, often manifested through a sense of what I
have termed ‘narrative confusion’, actually enhances its status as a platform

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myth of the western

for ideological and historical debate. In other words, the Western can exist as
a vehicle for a radical critique of the myth’s ‘White supremacist terms’, and
thereby work to expose the sinister underbelly of the paradoxical ideological
machinations that promoted Manifest Destiny.
Often a narrative is confused to the degree that a single film text can be
said to exist simultaneously as both promulgator of the dominant ideological
discourse and as consciously expressing its antagonistic counter-ideological
narratives. Myth and anti-myth, if you will, thus become one and the same
thing (to lesser or greater degrees, of course). This proposition follows the
suggestion made by Susan Kollins that ‘the Western [is] a genre structured
by competing and contradictory impulses [whereby] the concept of a purely
faithful or fully critical text loses its explanatory power’.18 Such a perspective,
which does away with the terms classical and revisionist, may indeed account
for the completely opposing conclusions that many scholars have come to in
their analyses of The Searchers.
Ford’s most prominent Westerns tend to be instances of such extremely
complex texts. Indeed, it can be said that they stir far more debate among film
scholars than they do consensus. Regarding the depiction of Native Americans,
his films undoubtedly stand guilty of some of the charges levelled by scholars
such as Maltby and Pye, but these alone never tell the ‘whole story’. Ford’s
Indians are contradictory and inconsistent figures (as I shall go on to discuss
below, it is this aspect of The Searchers that proves to be one of the most dif-
ficult to interpret), and yet the ongoing desire to discern socially progressive
patterns of meaning within the genre as a whole has also caused some of his
films to be misinterpreted. As one example of this, I refer to a 1998 essay by
Jacqueline K. Greb titled, ‘Will the Real Indians Please Stand Up?’ Within an
evolutionary schema Greb seeks to discern an ever-more liberal attitude in
Ford’s treatment of Native American culture. When it comes to assessing the
three films of his so-called ‘Cavalry Trilogy’, Greb writes that: ‘[in Fort Apache
(1948)] John Ford “confronts Indian culture on its own terms” . . . Captain
York, played by John Wayne, not only shows respect for Cochise, played by
Miguel Inclan, but he also treats him as an equal’.19 Few would argue with this
assessment; however, it is the next sentence with which I wish to take issue. ‘In
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande (1950)’, Greb continues, ‘Indians
gain more culture, normal life experiences, human traits.’20 Greb provides no
justification for this comment, and if one looks even briefly at Rio Grande,
the reverse seems to be the case. In this, the final film in the Cavalry Trilogy,
the faceless Apache antagonists (for here there are no Indian characters
in the manner of Inclan’s Cochise) attack a wagon train carrying women and
children (the wives and daughters of the cavalry regiment headed by Colonel
Kirby Yorke, played once more by John Wayne), and take them across the
Mexico–Texas border.
Again, we see here how the captivity narrative plays on Anglo-America’s
worst nightmares: women and children at the mercy of a savage race enemy are

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a fine good place to be

threatened with ‘a fate worse than death’. But here there is no attractive alter-
native culture or legitimate political concern as evident in Fort Apache through
Cochise’s dignified proclamation, delivered in fluent Spanish, to Colonel
Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) on display here. There is nothing of the sort
that would typify such ‘pro-Indian’ Westerns contemporary to Rio Grande
as Delmar Daves’ Broken Arrow or Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway (both
1950). Instead, and in an extraordinary turnaround by Ford, there is only a
justification for the fear of the racial other and a promotional stance towards
the theme of race war. Such a fear is realised when it is revealed that the all-
male group of Apaches have raped and murdered one of their captives before
crossing the border. In response Yorke initiates an illegal crossing of the Rio
Grande in order to save the remaining hostages. The renegade Apaches are
holed up in a deserted Mexican village and are generally depicted as aggressive,
drunken savages, intent on committing further atrocities against the defence-
less captives. The realisation of Anglo-America’s worst fears is avoided by
Yorke’s cavalry, who come to their rescue and wipe the Apache out to a man.
This annihilation of the other is presented in the film firmly within terms that
justify Manifest Destiny. At one point, US soldiers occupying a church even
use cross-slits in the windows as vantage points for shooting; thus visually
affirming the link between Anglo-America’s use of annihilatory violence and
the will of God.
On the one hand, then, and in two films from the same director, we are
presented with a sympathetic view of the plight of the Apache Nation (with
a hint towards liberal co-existence with the racial other) in the earlier Fort
Apache; on the other hand, representatives of the same Nation are depicted as
one-dimensional savages in the later Rio Grande, that is, as ruthless kidnap-
pers of white civilians and possessive of an overtly savage nature that justifies
their annihilation within the rubric of race war and the religious auspices of
Manifest Destiny. Perhaps Tag Gallagher sums it up best when he writes that
‘John Ford . . . is the worst possible paradigm with which to illustrate the
evolution of the western’.21 This is especially so when one bases this para-
digm on the existence of ever-more liberal, or revisionist, depictions of Native
Americans as a general rule.22
When it comes to The Searchers’ treatment of the captivity narrative and
of Anglo and Native American communities, things prove to be extremely
complex. The psychological motivation of the film’s characters (both Anglo and
Native American) extends to encompass the very cultural climate within which
the film was made. Indeed, the historical significance of The Searchers has often
been linked to the era in which it was produced rather than that in which it is
set. This has a profound effect on the allegorical significance of the Comanche.
Brian Henderson provides us with perhaps the most representative version
of such a reading. His 1981 essay, ‘The Searchers: An American Dilemma’,
utilises the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp to provide a
structuralist reading of the film. This, of course, places his study alongside

83
myth of the western

Will Wright’s Six-Guns and Society (discussed at length in Chapter 1). Unlike
Wright, however, who clearly erred in applying Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological
studies of myth and kinship unproblematically to modern commercial cinema,
and who neglected study of the psychological dimension of character motiva-
tion, Henderson both acknowledges Lévi-Strauss’ shortcomings and indicates
where his binarism and Propp’s formalism fail to account for aspects of The
Searchers’ plot. For instance, Henderson points out that considering Propp’s
analysis of folktales assumes that ‘the feelings and intentions of the dramatic
personas do not have an effect on the course of action in any instances at all
. . . [t]here is a Proppian problem in the film’s doubled hero: it is Martin who
kills Scar, recovers Debbie, and marries Laurie’.23 Additionally, where Wright
ignored certain instances of plot in numerous films so as to make them better
fit his overall evolutionary schema, Henderson’s analysis highlights certain
areas of theoretical concern (which is to the strength of his analysis rather than
to its detriment). According to Henderson, the film’s powerful appeal to audi-
ences can be explained by reference to the theories of Lévi-Strauss with regard
to the film as myth. ‘But if myth is viewed as a collective phenomenon’, he
writes, ‘then the power of myth can only be explained by reference to the com-
munity that responds to it . . . [t]he operation of myth – both its construction
from actual conflicts and its impact on audiences – always has to do with the
time in which the myth is told, not with the time that it tells of.’24 Most con-
sider it to be the case that films contribute to and adapt cultural perceptions in
the present, and Henderson’s reserved use of Lévi-Strauss concerns the latter’s
insistence that ‘myth operates by transposing the terms of the actual conflict
into other sets of terms, usually in the form of binary oppositions’.25
Thus is Henderson able to place The Searchers firmly within the US culture
of the 1950s with its concerns over race relations in the early years of the Civil
Rights Movement. However, the fact that (as even a scant observation of the
film would suggest) the various characters in The Searchers do not lie easily on
either end of any assumed binary is testament to the shortcomings of structur-
alist theory in its application to contemporary popular culture and, moreover,
to the powerfully complex and ambiguous statement that The Searchers makes
about race.26
If Henderson’s use of Lévi-Strauss is applicable, however, then he is per-
suasive in his claim that the power of The Searchers ‘becomes explicable
only if we substitute black for red and read a film about red–white relations
in 1868–1873 as a film about black–white relations in 1956’.27 To support
his argument, Henderson notes that Frank Nugent’s film script (written in
close collaboration with Ford) was being adapted and prepared from Alan
Le May’s 1954 novel during that crucial period between May 1954 and
May 1955 when the US Supreme Court was embroiled in Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka.28 It was ultimately decided during this period that
segregation in the schools of the American South be constitutionally outlawed,
thus furthering the United States’ movement away from its history of racial

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a fine good place to be

apartheid. Henderson’s political-allegorical interpretation becomes problem-

atic, however, if placed in the context of some aspects of the overall plot of The
Searchers, especially in relation to themes of captivity and race war.
The film is nominally set in Texas in 1868; although the moment it starts
we are confronted with the now famous buttes of Monument Valley, Utah.
Almost all the action in the film (like the greater majority of Ford’s Westerns)
is shot in this location, but the action in the film is supposed to encompass
much of the Texan southwest. The Edwards family – husband, Aaron (Walter
Coy); wife, Martha (Dorothy Jordan); teenage son, Ben (Robert Lyden); and
younger daughters, Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie (Lana Wood) – along with
their neighbours, the Jorgensens – Lars (John Qualen); his wife, Mrs Jorgenson
(Olive Carey); their son, Brad (Harry Carey Jr); and daughter, Laurie (Vera
Miles) – nominally herd cattle, but there is no grass anywhere to be seen; there
appears to be nothing that could sustain stock. This does support Henderson’s
contention that the film is to be regarded as myth. That is to say, The Searchers
gains its mythic status and meaning by being set in a metaphorical space:
between civilisation and wilderness, represented in the narrative by interior
and exterior spaces. The precarious state of civilisation is underscored near
the beginning of the film by the brutal massacre of the Edwards family carried
out by a band of Comanche. During the attack, both Aaron and Ben are
killed; Martha (it is inferred) is raped and then killed; both Lucy and Debbie
are abducted (it turns out that Lucy suffers the same fate as Martha not long
after her capture); the ensuing pursuit to recover Debbie lasts (depending on
which critic you read) between five and seven years. The two main ‘search-
ers’ are Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the estranged brother of Aaron, and
Aaron’s adopted son Marty Pauley. Marty is a young man of mixed race. He is
‘one-eighth Cherokee’, with the rest being ‘Welsh and English’. Marty’s racial
ancestry is, significantly, rendered ambiguous: ‘at least that’s what they tell
me’.
A straightforward (if dangerous) mission to recover a missing child becomes
much more complex when, following years of fruitless searching, it is revealed
that Debbie (now ‘of age’ and played by Lana Wood’s older sister, Natalie) has
assimilated into Comanche culture and has even married the man who led the
‘murder raid’ on her family’s farm, Chief Cicatriz (Henry Brandon), aka Scar.
When Ethan and Marty have their first encounter with the adult Debbie, she
states her disinclination to come back to the folds of Anglo-American civilisa-
tion. As a child she had hoped for rescue, but when Marty says that she should
come back with him to her people, as an adult she declares that the Comanche
‘are my people!’ As the narrative progresses, it also becomes alarmingly clear
that Ethan’s intentions towards Debbie shift. He does not aim to rescue her,
as originally planned, but is now intent on killing her. Ethan appears exas-
perated by Debbie’s betrayal of her race. In his mind, living with Scar and
the Comanche is, indeed, a fate worse than death. Hatfield’s fears for Lucy
Mallory in Stagecoach become realised here in The Searchers and consumes

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myth of the western

Ethan’s mind to a singular, psychopathic intent. As far as Ethan is concerned,

by becoming one of Scar’s wives, Debbie has lost her virtue and defiled the
memory of her dead mother.
Henderson reasons that since ‘there were very few anti-miscegenation stat-
utes regarding Indians at any time . . . the emotional impact of The Searchers
can hardly come from the issue of the kinship status and marriageability of
an Indian in white society in 1956’.29 Taken in the context of films produced
during this period that held less antagonistic views towards Native Americans,
Henderson’s political-allegorical reading is credible in its suggestion that The
Searchers speaks to and of its times. He argues that the film’s status as an
articulator of frontier mythology sublimates its historical function to its con-
temporaneous context. In other words, the period in which The Searchers was
produced constitutes its historical significance and the history of the 1868–73
Texas southwest is understood to be essentially mythic. However, Eckstein
(echoing the terms of Maltby) cautions that substituting black for red in this
fashion ‘once more annihilates the Native Americans, by taking [Indians] not
as themselves but as “empty signifiers”: Native Americans are denied their
own existence and become mere symbols of somebody else’.30
Joanna Hearne has suggested another way to interpret such films. She
reasons that the absence of ‘anti-miscegenation statutes’ did little to dissipate
long-standing US cultural prejudices towards Native Americans. Indeed, she
argues that so-called the ‘Termination policies’ of the 1940s and 1950s were
frustrated by ‘unfair wages, restrictive voting laws, stereotyped representa-
tions of Indians in the media, and other discriminatory practices’.31 All of
which suggested that ‘“mainstream” American culture would not welcome
full participation of native peoples as citizens’.32 She argues that films such
as Devil’s Doorway might well be ‘discussed as an allegory for early civil
rights’, but that, moreover, they often resonated ‘with the problems facing
returning Native American veterans after World War II, including references
to poor reservation conditions, chronic local prejudice, racist and outmoded
government supervision . . . and, most important, a federal assault on tribal
lands, sovereignty, and treaty rights’.33 In short, while Hearne concurs with
Henderson in that the historical significance of 1950’s Westerns is often to be
found in their contemporaneous context, she argues that the allegorical func-
tion should not be reserved for African Americans and that it works equally
well for issues affecting Native Americans. Such issues include ‘tribal identity,
sovereignty, and land rights that were central to federal Indian policy shifts in
the late 1940s and early 1950s’.34
Convincing as both these arguments are, one should not dismiss a film’s
temporal setting when considering its historical significance, and there are cer-
tainly more than a priori grounds for attempting to read The Searchers within
terms of the nineteenth-century frontier, therefore, inverting Henderson’s
terms by reading the film as a 1950’s retrospective attitude towards ‘red–white
relations in 1868–1873’. If read along these lines, themes of miscegenation,

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Indian captivity and racial conflict also relate to nineteenth-century notions of

American national identity in relation to the Native American other. Recent
studies, such as those provided by Hearne, imply that the issues raised in
the nineteenth century by westward expansion, particularly the resultant
interaction between US settlers and Native Americans, have not been laid
to rest; there have always been indications in popular culture that this is the
case. Although hardly a ‘pro-Indian’ Western, The Searchers does provide a
counter-narrative to America’s ‘dominant fiction’: an acknowledgement of
Anglo-American imperialist conquest masked as historical progress; hence, the
irony implicit in Mrs Jorgenson’s claim that the country will one day be ‘A fine
good place to be’.

III
That many Westerns deal with sexual interactions between Anglos and Indians
is surely testament to the continued cultural relevance of the captivity narrative
and of the complex way in which the genre articulates characteristic aspects of
the American national identity. Debbie’s desire to stay with the Comanche sug-
gests that The Searchers’ depiction of attitudes towards the Native American
is far more complex than a mere cinematic repetition of the captivity ­narrative
that casts them in the role of ‘savage’, more than simply realising Anglo-
America’s worst fears.
We may note several curious aspects of The Searchers’ narrative that mani-
fest the historical fact of miscegenation. For one, Marty’s mixed-race status and
Ethan’s overt hostility towards him: ‘Fella could mistake you for a half-breed!’
Regarding Debbie, Ethan denies Marty’s familial connection to her through
adoption into the Edwards family: ‘She’s your Nothing!’, and that adoption
‘don’t make you kin!’ What makes narrative confusion in this regard is the fact
that the Anglo-Americans, Aaron and Martha, have adopted this ‘half-breed’
with no consideration that his blood is ‘polluted’ in any way. He is, as far as
they are concerned, one of them. Further confusion is aroused by the fact that
it was Ethan who apparently found Marty as a child after his own family was
massacred by Comanches, and who subsequently brought him to his brother’s
home for adoption. Ethan plays down this connection with Marty. ‘It just hap-
pened to be me,’ he insists. ‘No need to make more of it!’ In another complex
revelation towards the end of the film, it is revealed that it was none other than
Scar himself who was responsible for the massacre of Marty’s family. Again,
this becomes significant when considering aspects of race and miscegenation
in The Searchers, and some critics have even suggested that Marty is actually
Ethan’s biological offspring and, therefore, a product of his own transgressive
sexual liaisons with the racial other.35 Although this cannot be proven, it is
interesting to speculate on; indeed, the film would appear to invite as much.
I suggest that we do see the speculation supported (on some level at least)
when Ethan confronts Scar face to face for the first time. In response to Ethan’s

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sarcastic remark that he ‘talks pretty good “American”, for a Comanch’,

insisting that someone (that is, a white person/captive) must have taught him,
Scar replies with mirrored sarcasm of his own, ‘You speak good Comanche,
someone teach you?’ The significance of this mutual belligerence is twofold.
On the one hand, it hints at miscegenation. Indeed, Scar’s alleged historical
inspiration is the Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. Quanah Parker was the
son of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was abducted by Comanches in 1836. Like
Debbie, Cynthia went on to marry her captor and did not wish to return to
white society, even following her ‘rescue’ by US soldiers several years later.
Like Quanah Parker, Scar has blue eyes and is possibly the offspring of an
Anglo-American and Comanche sexual union.36 He has undoubtedly learned
what English he has from his interactions with Anglo-Texans and his grasp of
Spanish from commercial dealings with Mexican traders like the flamboyantly
named Emilio Gabriel Fernandez y Figueroa (Antonio Moreno), who sets up
the first meeting between Scar, Ethan and Marty. On the other hand, Scar’s
response to Ethan highlights the fact that Ethan does indeed know a lot about
Comanche culture (that is, not just their language). This makes plausible the
suggestion that Ethan has had, at one time or another, intimate relations with
the objects of his racial hatred. Perhaps he has, indeed, had a Native American
wife in the past. Could this then have been Marty’s own mother? The idea
gains more credence if we consider the scene in Scar’s tent where Debbie
extends a lance hung with numerous scalps, victims of the Comanche’s own
race war. Ethan will later reveal to Marty that one of them (‘long and wavy’)
belonged to Marty’s long-dead mother. This is a more than curious narra-
tive oddity for, as Patrick McGee pointedly asks, ‘how could Ethan recognise
someone’s scalp unless he was on the most intimate terms with that person?’37
Of course, one cannot base an argument on this alone, but it does at least
give one pause to consider the nature of Ethan’s claim that he ‘found’ Marty
following a massacre. What is more suggestive is that, in highlighting the
interlaced cultural, economic and sexual interactions between Anglo, Mexican
and Native Americans along the borderlands, The Searchers highlights white
hypocrisy in its hero’s assertion of superior self-righteousness based on racial
purity. The Searchers disabuses us of the myth that such concrete distinctions
could be made between races, certainly not at this late stage of the history of
the American West.
Much of what I have suggested above is conjectural; however, one thing
seems, to my mind at least, certain. In The Searchers, while the fear of mis-
cegenation is of extreme thematic importance to a 1950’s US culture where
the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum, the same theme is also
central in its relation to frontier mythology, popular representations of the
late-nineteenth-century southwest, and the racism specific to that period in
America’s history. The film’s adoption (and adaptation) of the more contem-
porary theme of black–white relations (also red–white relations) is, in my
opinion, essentially combined with the historical themes of race war and the

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captivity narrative, itself derived of the ancient Homeric quest for the lost
female.38
So, how does one consider the characters of Ethan and Scar in relation
to each other? It has often been remarked that Ethan and Scar are two of a
kind: the central figures of a drama which represents the racial polarisation
that characterised the conflict between Anglo and Native Americans. And
yet, when The Searchers is read like this – with Ethan and Scar as two sym-
bolic avatars that represent the respective mythic tropes of civilisation and
­wilderness – certain issues are highlighted that cannot be so easily incorporated
into such binarism. Primarily, and as I suggested above, neither figure stands
clearly at either end of this dichotomy; either racially or ethically. To this
end, Slotkin puts forward Ethan as a person always at odds with civilisation.
Linking him thematically to Robert Montgomery Bird’s protagonist in his
1837 novel, Nick of the Woods.39 Slotkin suggests that, like the protagonist of
Bird’s novel, Ethan is an inversion of the ‘man who knows Indians’, the ‘evil
twin of Cooper’s Hawkeye whose knowledge of Indians engenders a profound
and undying hatred rather than sympathetic understanding’.40 Some commen-
tators have gone so far as to suggest that Ethan divorces himself from civilisa-
tion entirely because he becomes irredeemably savage following his eventual
scalping of Scar. Thereby, the traditional paradigm of the Indian’s association
with savagery is maintained and displaced onto Ethan, who appropriates it
and who must, therefore, remain a part of the wilderness.41
Another common and similar interpretation along these lines sees Scar as
Ethan’s ‘dark-half’, in Freudian terms, his id.42 This would be in keeping with
Slotkin’s assessment of the Puritan mindset as outlined above and, much like
Shane’s slaying of Wilson in Shane, the destruction of Scar and his warriors
has been understood by many as being constitutive of an act of both exorcism
and repression; primarily a repression of Ethan’s own anti-social and morally
unacceptable desires towards Martha and Debbie, but also of society’s exor-
cism of the racial other. This reading is persuasive, but the end logic of the psy-
choanalytic approach is extreme to say the least and sees the Edwards family
massacre as symbolically being carried out by Ethan’s id, as the realisation of
his nightmare wish fulfilment. That is to say, his unconscious self carries out
the annihilation of the family, the woman, and the domestic realm of civilisa-
tion that he desires, but can neither possess nor be a part of. Slotkin aligns
such an analysis with his own political-allegorical reading and, in the process,
illuminates some of the possible reasons providing the impetus for Ethan’s
expressed desire to kill the adult Debbie rather than save her; or, rather, to kill
her in order to save her:

From the start of the search, love and hate are confounded with each
other in Ethan’s mind. He loves Debbie not only as his niece but as
the only surviving daughter of his beloved Martha. But his feeling for
Martha has been twisted by guilt into the rage that keeps him solitary

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and at odds with his society. Now all that rage can be focused on Scar,
whose rape of Martha and destruction of Aaron’s family is a horrific,
nightmare enactment of Ethan’s repressed desire. By rescuing a pure and
unsullied Debbie from Scar, Ethan can symbolically expiate his own guilt
toward Aaron and in a sense redeem Martha’s sin as well, since her living
avatar will be a virgin daughter.43

Of course, it is highly unlikely that Debbie is ‘pure and unsullied’ by this point,
but when linked to the above suggestion that Ethan incorporates savagery into
himself this reading might explain why Ethan finally decides not to kill Debbie.
As summed up by McGee: ‘Ethan saves Debbie by sacrificing himself on the
alter of savagery when he scalps Scar . . . When Ethan picks her up in his arms,
Debbie ceases to be the grown woman who has lived with a buck and becomes
the little girl to whom Ethan gave his war ribbon.’44
Compelling as all this is, psychoanalytic readings incorporate their own
problems, and so-called ‘canned Freudian’ explanations of the film are hardly
in short supply. There are two big issues at play here. First, The Searchers dis-
places (if not dilutes) Ethan’s suffering at the hands of Comanches by making
it not his own family slaughtered – as is the case in Bird’s Nick of the Woods
– but that of his brother, Aaron. Although no doubt the advocate of such an
approach would suggest that this only adds to the illicit and pathologically
frustrated nature of Ethan’s desires, his forbidden love for Martha facilitates
the return of a repressed, murderous creature from the depths of his uncon-
scious mind to wreak unmentionable horrors upon that which he jealously
covets. Secondly, unlike Shane who does kill Wilson, Ethan does not kill Scar.
As Henderson and others have pointed out, it is Marty who kills Scar while
recovering Debbie from the Comanche camp. Surely then it is Marty who
takes over the role of hero, the protector of Debbie, while Ethan becomes more
and more a flawed, abject figure concerned only with revenge. In this reading,
surely Ethan’s desire for revenge is frustrated through the denial of mortal
combat with his dark-half? Or, as McGee suggests, by scalping Scar does he
actually eradicate Debbie’s transgression in his own mind? However, there is
yet another ‘snag’ here regarding formulaic plot trajectories: as Henderson
noted, it is neither Ethan nor Marty who find Scar’s camp. This crucially
‘heroic’ task falls to Mose Harper (Hank Worden), the nominal ‘fool’ of the
film, a man who admits to ‘playing crazy’ in order to escape from Scar’s camp
in order to alert, not Ethan, but Marty of the Comanche’s return. Is this signifi-
cant? Perhaps Mose believes that Ethan’s intentions towards Debbie are indeed
as diabolical as Marty fears.
The figurative holes created by such narrative confusion are not easily
negotiated by psychoanalytical readings, which while they may (or may not)
adequately explain Ethan’s motivations (if not Ford’s in creating such sinister
psychological complexity and narrative sophistication), they fail to adequately
explain the complex nature of the film itself. Nor, as we have seen, are such

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complexities happily incorporated into a formula analysis of the genre as a

whole. As if to exemplify this, and in what is surely a clear instance of how
far so-called Western genre conventions (such as Wright’s insistence that ‘the
hero defeats the villain’) remain entrenched in the critical psyche, Kathryn C.
Esselman gets the plot of The Searchers spectacularly wrong. In drawing her
own thematic comparison with Nick of the Woods, she writes: ‘Ethan pursues
and ultimately kills in personal combat the chief who had led the massacre of
his brother-in-law’s [sic] family and kidnapped his niece. The family included
the woman Ethan loved – his brother’s wife – so, like Nick, Ethan avenges
them.’45
In my opinion the film’s mirroring of Ethan and Scar seems to serve the
purpose of exposing the redundancy of such a mythic trope, as if there could
ever be so clear a distinction between civilisation and wilderness or, indeed,
between Anglo and Native Americans. Indeed, the strength of The Searchers
undoubtedly comes from its refusal to polarise in such a fashion. Such nar-
rative confusion as the film displays is precisely what makes The Searchers
significant in terms of placing it within the Western genre and in its relation to
the myth of the West. At one and the same time it appears to embody mythic
tropes and, through its use of generic tropes, holds them up to critical inspec-
tion. As such, claims to provide definitive explanations of character motiva-
tion, or, indeed, of aspects of the plot or of the film as a whole are always only
partial explanations, accompanied, inevitably, by significant and debilitating
caveats, deviations, misreading and conjecture.

IV
I shall now consider The Searchers’ attitude towards Native Americans more
directly. Primarily, I wish to take issue with the deterministic belief represented
by Maltby, above, that Native Americans in Westerns are to be consigned to
the status of ‘empty signifiers’. Such an argument is not surprising, however,
when one considers that it has often been said that frontier mythology gener-
ally sought to either disguise the fate of the Native Americans (to silence their
voice), or else to justify their demise under the vast rubric of Manifest Destiny.
Actually, the Western genre as a whole has dealt with this mythic–historical
elision in a number of intricate ways, and its attitude towards Native American
cultures is hardly univocal or ideologically monolithic; the incontestable fact of
unflattering stereotypes not withstanding. The myth itself cannot completely
silence the plurality of history. Melinda Szaloky rightly reminds us that ‘since
history is always anchored in what it has marginalised, omitted, or exorcised,
these silences are essential structural constituents of each story told about the
past and, thus, cannot be completely ignored’.46
Of course, the omission of the Native American is not a phenomenon that
can be rightfully applied to most Westerns. If we consider that well over a third
of all Westerns produced contain narratives that involve Indians directly, then

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we can understand that the Western embodies the theme of race war rather
than leaving it ‘marginalised, omitted, or exorcised’. One film’s take on this
theme is often an idiosyncratic matter and there are significant differences
between individual film texts. How then is The Searchers historically anchored
with respect to Native Americans?
Before attempting to answer this question, I wish to make clear that I do
not mean to forward The Searchers as a revisionist Western with regard to
its depiction of Native Americans. Nor do I aim to ‘save it’, so to speak, for
a liberal perspective; for it is certainly not a liberal film in the tradition of say
Devil’s Doorway or Broken Arrow. As already mentioned, the Western has
often had a paradoxical, inconsistent and sometimes deeply insulting attitude
towards Native American culture, and The Searchers is certainly no excep-
tion. Nevertheless, and as we have seen with essays like Greb’s above, numer-
ous scholars have attempted to discern a progressive pattern of development
towards the Native American as his image allegedly evolved from an erroneous
depiction of one-dimensional motiveless malignancy towards an equally erro-
neous proud and noble eco-friendly warrior in line with the counter-culture of
the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, the ‘good Indian–bad Indian’ dichotomy has
always remained as either an implicit or overt factor in Hollywood’s brand of
Native Americana. As Cawelti points out, since the earliest encounters in the
seventeenth century ‘there has always been a certain ambivalence about Native
Americans which manifested itself in divided portrayals of native peoples as
diabolical savages on the one hand and noble innocents on the other’.47 Such
ambivalence with regard to the Western’s construction of ‘Native American
identity’ is especially evident in the most overtly liberal examples of the genre.
To take a relevant example, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990)
is typically considered to be the film that exemplifies the socially progressive,
revisionist re-appropriation of the Native American into popular culture.
The film gives full characteristics and histories to its Native Americans, a
tribe of Lakota Sioux. It is filmed on location on the Great Plains, and the
Sioux are played by respected Native American actors like Rodney A. Grant
and Graham Greene. Moreover, it has them speaking in their native Lakota
tongue. It is true that this opposes Ford’s Comanche who, as Native American
scholar Tom Colonese correctly points out, bizarrely speak Navajo, which, he
rightly reminds us, ‘is not a small point to Indians’.48 But Costner’s vision of
the nineteenth-century frontier ultimately proves itself to be fully embroiled in
the polarisation of the Native American in popular culture and not, therefore,
necessarily a revisionist Western in its treatment of them.49
Janet Walker draws attention to this polarisation by highlighting the distinc-
tion that the film draws in its depictions of the Lakota, on the one hand, and
their ‘blood enemies’, the Pawnee, on the other. In one illustrative scene we see
a flashback to childhood memories of the white woman, Stands-With-A-Fist/
Christine (Mary McDonnell), who has been adopted and raised by the benevo-
lent Lakota. In brutal and disjointed sequences, and without any discernable

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motivation, we witness the Pawnee viciously attack and murder her family. We
hear her mother’s voice cry out to her as she flees the homestead for the wilder-
ness. (One could argue here that Costner gives visualisation to that which Ford
more unnervingly inferred with the Comanche ‘murder raid’ on the Edwards’
homestead.) As opposed to the human characteristics given the Lakota, the
Pawnee are depicted as cowardly savages, waiting for Christine’s father to turn
his back on them before cutting him down with their tomahawks.50 Walker
sees this as a continuance of an ‘earlier generic paradigm [where] long-held
stereotypes erupt through the thin crust of liberal sentiment, belying the film’s
pretence to present an enlightened picture of Native Americans’.51 Thus, the
film seeks to displace, rather than deconstruct, a culture of racial prejudice
towards the Native American; depicting a noble race in the Lakota, while
denigrating the Pawnee as natural savages. In Costner’s West, the historical
propensity of the Sioux as savage must be hidden from the viewer, displaced
onto the Pawnee as ‘bad-Indian’ if the Sioux as ‘good-Indian’ – as historical
victim and rightful defender of his territory – is to be envisioned.
In addition to Walker’s criticisms, I would go as far as to say that Dances
with Wolves is both ideologically and historically disingenuous. For instance,
the film’s only in-depth depiction of a Sioux wife indicates a monogamous
culture, whereas in reality polygamy was typically practised. The Searchers is
at least more honest in this aspect, with Scar having multiple wives. Moreover,
Dances with Wolves’ primary agent, Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner),
is still a white male hero. The narrative is structured around Dunbar’s diary
excerpts, delivered in the form of a series of voice-overs; the story still told,
therefore, from the Anglo-American perspective. It has to be said also that
Dunbar’s attitude strikes one as more befitting a late-twentieth-century
revisionist historian of the American West than it does the jaded nineteenth-
century Civil War veteran he is supposed to be. Furthermore, the Sioux were a
far cry from the ‘noble savages’ that Dances with Wolves depicts them to be.
In the 1700s, having themselves been driven west of the forests by Algonquian
tribes allied to French traders, the Sioux arrived on the northern Great Plains
and, armed with weapons traded for furs with the United States, immediately
attacked the warring Cheyenne and Crow Nations in a merciless decades-
long struggle for the Black Hills. Historians Robert V. Hine and John Mack
Faragher inform us that the whole history of the American West was charac-
terised by such a ‘collision of cultures’, and that, ‘by the late eighteenth century
[the Sioux had established themselves as] the most powerful mounted group on
the northern plains’.52
In spite of all this, Colonese praises Dances with Wolves for its historical
accuracy, arguing that, if compared with The Searchers’ Debbie, Stands-With-
A-Fist comes across as a ‘far more rounded character . . . integrated totally into
the [Sioux] community’.53 And yet, in a not-so-deft feint, Dances with Wolves
avoids full-on confrontation with the captivity narrative as Stands-With-A-Fist
was never, strictly speaking, ‘in captivity’, but rather benevolently adopted by

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myth of the western

the Sioux. She is simply with them as the story begins, we learn nothing of how
she escaped the Pawnee, how she came to be discovered by the Sioux, and very
little (beyond how she got her name) of what her early life with them was like.
The issue of miscegenation is also avoided in Dances with Wolves for, unlike
Debbie and Scar, the romance between Dances-With-Wolves/John Dunbar and
Stands-With-A-Fist/Christine is, in the final analysis, a sexual union between
two Anglo-Americans (Stands-With-A-Fist’s previous Lakota husband con-
veniently already dead before her character is introduced into the narrative).
Both The Searchers and Dances with Wolves do deal critically with the myth
of the US military as an heroic force for historical progress, although, perhaps
unsurprisingly, Dances with Wolves takes its critique further. As a curious
aside on this last point, the soldiers in Dances with Wolves are largely depicted
as irredeemably sadistic, murderous and stupid – ‘savage’ in other words –
and, at the same time, woefully inadequate in combat. The civilised–savage
dichotomy here has not been transcended at all, it has merely been inverted,
with the US military assuming the Indian role that Colonese insists is typical of
most Westerns: ‘the Indians aren’t just bad – they are, in battle, incompetent’.54
Rick Worland and Edward Countryman have sought to link more contem-
porary Westerns with a strong Native American presence to the revisionism
they see as apparent in recent historiography of the American West. With
specific reference to Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and
Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe (1991), Worland and Countryman champion
these film’s liberal-revisionist credentials. ‘The Mohawks of Black Robe and
Wes Studi’s Magua of Mohicans may be forest horrors of the sort that viewers
of older Westerns know only too well’, they write, ‘but in both cases there is
an explanation for what they do, rather than mere assertion that they are evil
by their very nature.’55 Yet just how far precisely is all this a revision of ‘older
Westerns’? Well, Magua’s reason for his incessant desire to murder Cora and
Alice Munroe (Madeleine Stowe and Jodhi May) is because his family suffered
terribly at the hands of their uncle, a British Army officer, Edmund Munroe
(Maurice Roeves). Together with his Huron followers, Magua will go on to
annihilate Munroe’s command and cut the still-beating heart out of his chest;
horror, indeed. With regard to Scar’s reason for his murderous rage, it is, as he
reveals to Ethan and Marty, in response to his ‘two sons [having been] mur-
dered by white men’. My point here is that Magua’s and Scar’s ‘explanation
for what they do’ is essentially the same (vengeance) and, as this brief thematic
comparison suggests, there is little indication of revisionism in either character.
I have already suggested that The Searchers cannot itself be labelled as either
a liberal or ‘cult of the Indian’ Western, that the consternating issues regard-
ing its erroneous depiction of the Comanche remain, and that Colonese and
others are certainly right to highlight them. But the point I wish to hold up
as significant for my concerns here is the fact that The Searchers refuses to
romanticise in the manner that Dances with Wolves does. I suggest that the
refusal of liberalist sentiment adds to the power of the film’s critique of savage

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aspects of Anglo-American civilisation. I will return to the significance of

Anglo-American savagery later, but first I want to consider other aspects of the
representation of Native American culture in The Searchers.
The Searchers proves itself to be a film that exposes the complex ‘collision of
cultures’ that Hine and Faragher insist constituted the long history of American
settlement in the southwest.56 They remind us that ‘the mounted warrior of
the plains – the ubiquitous and romantic symbol of native America – was in
fact not an aboriginal character at all but one borne from [this] collision of
cultures’.57 They describe how the Comanche, who lived on the fringes of the
Great Plains as an adjunct of the Shoshone, ‘adopt[ed] the horse [and] migrated
onto the plains, and over several generations they gradually moved southeast-
ward toward present-day Oklahoma and Texas’.58 In what they describe as
one of the many ‘fascinating ironies of frontier history, [the] first settlers of
the Great Plains during the colonial era were not Europeans but Indians’.59
The Comanches in particular ‘circulat[ed] within territories from five to seven
hundred miles in diameter [and] because of their ferocity they [like the equiva-
lent Sioux in the north] became legendary rulers of the southern plains, raiding
Indian and Mexican villages from the Mississippi all the way west to the Rio
Grande’.60 I have already referenced scholars who suggest Scar’s mixed-race
heritage as evidence of the complexity by which The Searchers deals with the
concept of race in structuring American national identity; this is opposed to
the Lakota of Dances with Wolves, who are seemingly racially ‘pure’ as well
as being culturally naive. Even as late as 1864, they are apparently ignorant of
firearms and, more amazingly, coffee; whereas cultural mixing seems evident
from the very outset of The Searchers. Consider Mose’s ‘Indian feather hat’,
Ethan’s ‘Indian rifle cover’, Marty’s bare-back horse riding and topless state
when we first encounter him, and, not to forget such foregrounded ‘subtleties’
as the ‘Indian weave blanket’ outside Aaron’s homestead (which is hanging
in the front of the Edwards’ ranch when Ethan first emerges from the desert).
All point to a hybridity of Anglo and Native American cultures that is entirely
absent from the supposedly revisionist Dances with Wolves.
If we now consider the murder of Scar’s two sons, which essentially acknowl-
edges Anglo-American atrocities during its own aggressive expansion into the
West, then we witness yet another layer of historical significance. Just as Hines
and Faragher inform us, the whites were not innocent parties in this ‘collision
of cultures’, and neither were the Indians. In The Searchers, the Anglo settlers
and the Comanche seem to be bound up in a social Darwinian war of annihila-
tion, comprising ever-degenerating spirals of massacre and counter-massacre.
The Searchers depicts the human cost of settling ‘free land’, land like that
which the warring factions in Shane will eventually dispute ‘legitimate’ owner-
ship of once this stage of frontier history is over.
At the same time, the group that suffers the most in The Searchers is still the
Comanche. What is a personal trauma for Edwards and the Jorgensen families
is, of course, a national trauma for Native Americans; implicitly or explicitly

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myth of the western

The Searchers acknowledges this historical fact. When considered from this
perspective, the film seems to exist as a resolute critique of triumphalist brands
of frontier history and its concomitant myth of the West; not to forget the
curative discourse of regeneration through violence. Nevertheless, some schol-
ars such as Jon Tuska insist that the film endorses the racial violence charac-
teristic of the history of Anglo-American expansionism. ‘The Searchers [is]’, he
declares, ‘one of the most viciously anti-Indian films ever made.’61 He goes on
to say that ‘Ford deliberately although erroneously portrayed Indian captivity
as generally driving to insanity most whites unfortunate enough to have under-
gone the experience’, and that ‘the entire film is in effect an argument in favour
of killing Indians as the only solution to the “Indian problem”.’62
The key issue one may take with Tuska’s analysis is the difficult fact that
Debbie is not driven to insanity by her ‘Indian captivity’. As Joseph McBride
and Michael Wilmington have it, Debbie, ‘like Martin . . . has accepted her
dual heritage. . . . Miscegenation has not destroyed her identity, but deepened
it.’63 Tuska responds to this very excerpt by reference to Martin’s ‘dual herit-
age’, suggesting that, to the contrary, it is because ‘Debbie has co-habited with
an Indian [that] at the end she could only be linked with a man who is, if not
morally, at least racially dubious.’64
Tuska is right to query McBride’s and Wilmington’s belief that Debbie’s
sense of identity has been ‘deepened’ by her life among Scar’s Comanche, as
there is little indication one way or the other whether she has ‘accepted’ it or
merely adapted to the situation as best she could. As Gaylyn Studlar suggests:

Although Debbie is ostensibly in a family (her Comanche one), Ford

never allows us to see any affective qualities that he normally associates
with happy domesticity . . . Like Dallas [Claire Trevor] in Stagecoach,
Debbie may accept her situation, but there is precious little proof that
she is contented in it.65

However, Tuska’s claim that Marty is ‘racially dubious’ seems, to me, to be

an untenable position to take, especially considering that Marty is primarily
‘linked’ with Laurie, who is of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic ancestry, and whom
he will go on to marry, presumably with the full consent of her parents who,
like his own adoptive parents, the late Aaron and Martha, do not regard him
as ‘racially dubious’.
With regard to Tuska’s other point, the ‘whites unfortunate enough to have
undergone the experience’ of captivity must be in reference to the women
recovered from a raid by US cavalry on a Comanche winter encampment.
Critics typically discuss this scene, and that of the climactic Ranger attack
on Scar’s camp, as referencing George A. Custer’s massacre of Cheyenne at
the Washita River in the winter of 1868. Perhaps the winter attack sequence
is more likely Ford’s reference of the Washita; indeed, the military band in
The Searchers plays ‘Gary Owen’, the song of the 7th Cavalry, which Custer

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famously had his band play during the Washita massacre. The regiment’s
guidon is also clearly visible at the cavalry headquarters and when the soldiers
herd Comanche prisoners along with bull-whips. It is at this point that Ethan
and Marty find the body of ‘Look’ (Beulah Archuletta), the Comanche woman
Marty had mistakenly married during a trade with some agency Indians (he
thought he was purchasing a blanket). He literally kicks her out from under
his blanket one night and Ethan roars with laughter as she falls down a hill.
A number of critics (including Tuska) have analysed the characterisation and
treatment of Look in such instances in terms of both racism and misogyny.66
Now, in the next scene this woman, treated as a commodity by both her own
people and the Anglos, has been murdered by US cavalry. Marty expresses his
disgust. ‘Why’d them soldiers have to go and kill her for, Ethan?! She never
done nobody any harm!’ Even Ethan shows signs of distress as he gently wipes
his gloved hand over Look’s hat and appears pale, upset even. The overriding
sense from both men (as well as, perhaps, for the audience) is that of shame
for having engaged or colluded in her earlier abusive mistreatment depicted in
comedic terms. Again, the narrative is unclear: how are we supposed to read
such a juxtaposition of sequences? These scenes surely dilute (at least) Tuska’s
declaration that The Searchers is ‘one of the most viciously anti-Indian films
ever made’.
Historically, Custer’s men gunned down the Cheyenne at the Washita River
without distinction, and of the estimated 103 victims, the majority are consid-
ered to have been women and children as most of the men were off hunting
buffalo at the time of the attack. Eckstein provides further illuminating insight
into this historical link, revealing that Frank Nugent’s version of the shoot-
ing script even included a follow-up scene in which Ethan meets none other
than Custer himself and berates him for allowing the massacre of women and
children. This confrontation was to be played out in full view of a group of
eastern journalists, thus undermining Custer’s heroic braggadocio of a ‘brave
battle’ with himself in the lead. Most insightful is Ethan’s remarks to the effect
that, ‘should any female white captives have been killed during the fighting . . .
they were probably killed by the panicky soldiers, not by the Indians’.67 This
is an astonishing thing to say, not because it appears in a so-called classical
Western, but because it is an accusatory remark made by Ethan, an unregen-
erate racist, towards Custer, the traditional symbol of US military heroism
and self-sacrifice.68 However, as this scene was ultimately cut from the final
edit, I shall not (and cannot) base my response to Tuska’s criticism of The
Searchers on it alone. According to Eckstein, the whole ‘Custer sequence’ was
ultimately discarded by Ford to assist in the ‘darkening’ of Ethan’s character
and to make the follow-up scene – Ethan’s encounter with the recovered white
women at the 7th Cavalry headquarters, which includes the now famous ‘John
Wayne look’ moment – more ambiguous.69 Ethan’s ‘look’ – intensified by the
camera’s slow-zoom towards his grizzled expression – is certainly enigmatic,
but seemingly embodies both hatred and pity towards the women. (Various

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scholars have regarded it in varying degrees of either emotion, but seldom both
together.)
Of the three visible white women recovered, one grins like an idiot as the
second woman clings to her like a baby. The third older woman appears to
pine hysterically after a lost child, being calmed only after a soldier hands her
a doll. ‘It’s hard to believe they’re white,’ the soldier says to Ethan. ‘They ain’t
white, not no more,’ he replies. ‘They’re Comanch.’ The scene would appear
to emphasise Ethan’s racism, however, it is not enough to assume that the
women’s perilous psychological state has been caused by their captivity alone.
Yet again, the film proves itself to be unclear. I suggest that the narrative con-
fusion evident in The Searchers makes it ultimately ambiguous as to what this
scene truly signifies in terms of a wider thematic or ideological stance on mis-
cegenation. As a consequence, it is not enough to suggest, as Tuska does, that
this scene explicitly indicates Ford’s personal racist views towards Indians and
to leave it at that. Pye considers this scene in more depth than Tuska, but ulti-
mately comes to the same conclusion. ‘We may be distanced here from Ethan’,
he writes, ‘but there seems little or no ambiguity in the presentation of these
women . . . there is no real support for a view markedly different from what
Ethan thinks he sees.’70 But if we take these women in the context of Debbie’s
experience of captivity, as surely we must, then we have to acknowledge that
the latter is not in a deranged state at all. What then, precisely, is it that has
driven these women ‘to insanity’?
To attempt an explanation (for I doubt a precise answer is possible), I would
like to take as my starting point the film’s penultimate scene: the Ranger attack
on Scar’s camp – in which the Comanche chief is ultimately killed and Debbie
recovered – then retroactively apply this sequence to the winter cavalry attack
– in which Look is killed and these white women recovered.
Slotkin describes the final sequence in some detail, reading it in terms of
US Cold War political terminology: a ‘surgical strike’ or ‘tactical fantasy’ in
which ‘Ford backs away from fully visualising the implied parallel between the
Ranger attack and the cavalry’s massacre of the Indians at the Washita’.71 He
summarises thus:

The Rangers charge at top speed through the village, firing left and right
as the 7th Cavalry did at the Washita – the composition of individual
shots in fact mirrors the image of Custer’s battle in popular prints and
posters . . . Yet in the battle itself we see only Indian men falling from the
shots, as if the Rangers had special powers to kill both comprehensively
and selectively. This tactical fantasy, coupled with Debbie’s rescue, indi-
cates the limits of Ford’s demystification of the savage war and rescue
myth.72

Slotkin is, in many ways, correct in his belief that Ford, ‘though rejecting race-
hatred and the spirit of extermination it begets, [nevertheless] accepts as valid

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. . . a more “meliorative” violence’.73 He argues that, since we see no ‘Indian

prisoners – not even women and children – in the comic after-battle scene
[in which the Revd Captain Samuel Clayton (Ward Bond) is stabbed in his
backside by an over-enthusiastic cavalry lieutenant]’, what we are essentially
presented with instead is a ‘paternal love’ on the part of Ford, who ‘conde-
scendingly recognises Look’s humanity, wishfully spares Comanche women
and children while slaughtering the men’.74 However, surely Look’s fate
undermines this notion of ‘tactical fantasy’ for we know already what Anglo-
Americans are capable of in the name of the domestication of the wilderness.
In light of the fact that the earlier cavalry raid does depict Comanche prisoners
being herded like animals into captivity, that we do not ‘see any Indian prison-
ers’ following the Ranger attack is, therefore, a chilling fact in itself. From this,
another level of signification can now be identified.
On the eve of the Ranger attack Marty fears for Debbie’s safety, protest-
ing to Clayton that, should the Rangers just go charging in, ‘they’ll kill her
and you know it!’ It is generally understood that Marty is referring to the
Comanche here yet, in light of the earlier cavalry attack with the indiscrimi-
nate and reprehensible nature of the killing, ‘they’ could just as easily mean
the Rangers themselves. Marty reasons that Debbie would likely be shot by
‘friendly-fire’ during the inevitably confusing melee. Ethan and Clayton both
reluctantly allow Marty to attempt to sneak into Scar’s camp in an effort to
rescue Debbie prior to launching a full-scale assault. But rescuing Debbie is
not their primary objective, and Clayton is quick to remind Marty that ‘there’s
more at stake here than your sister’. As Slotkin argues, ‘the rescue simply does
not mean as much to them as it does to Martin. [Ethan and Clayton] still
believe that the destruction of Scar is more important than the rescue of the
captive.’75
I have mentioned Slotkin’s suggestion that the Ranger sequence constitutes
a ‘tactical fantasy’ of selective violence, however, Eckstein correctly points
out something that Slotkin fails to mention: Ethan ‘riding over an Indian
woman holding a baby’ moments before taking Scar’s scalp.76 It is true that the
woman is not killed (she immediately gets up and flees still holding her baby),
so Slotkin’s general assessment is hard to dispute. However, this ‘slippage’ in
what is essentially a ‘tactical fantasy’ of violence is surely enough to acknowl-
edge at least the potentiality of a more sinister outcome. That this potential
has already been realised (resulting in the reprehensible slaughter of innocents
like Look) surely supports this assertion. One can certainly suggest that the
slaughter of the Comanche seems to have been the primary aim. With the sort
of frenzied blood-lust that results in the murder of women and children, it is
not too far-fetched to imagine a similar scenario in which a white woman and
her baby are trampled by a cavalryman’s horse, only the outcome here was
more tragic, with the surviving mother reduced to an hysterical state. Again,
this is conjecture, yet I would suggest it entirely plausible that the woman’s
hysteria is caused, not by the experience of captivity, but rather by the violence

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myth of the western

inflicted on them by the US Cavalry, themselves only ostensibly aiming for the
rescue of such captives.
In avoiding the liberal sentiment of the ‘cult of the Indian’ Western, Ford,
as Eckstein suggests ‘left his Comanches as savages’.77 But in so doing, he
affected a penetrating and more honest critique of Anglo-America’s own pro-
pensity towards savagery. This critique is realised primarily through utilising
recognisable institutions of the Western canon – in this case, the US Cavalry
and the Texas Rangers – in order to undermine their heroic credentials and
thus undermine Anglo-America’s heroic version of frontier expansion and
settlement. This social critique is primarily realised, however, not through the
genre’s portrayal of Native Americans, but through a relentless introspection
of the figure of the white male hero – both in his mythic role as symbolic out-
rider of Manifest Destiny and as agent in the domestication of the wilderness.

V
In a film so full of complexity and contradiction, it is perhaps fitting that
its protagonist proves to be its most enigmatic element. The opening scene
of Ethan’s arrival (or return) to his brother’s homestead reveals through a
wonderful economy of style many complex aspects about his character and,
by extension, the complexities of American national identity. Like Shane
and many other Western heroes he emerges from the wilderness landscape,
appearing from behind a hillock as if out of the very ground itself; his asso-
ciation with the wilderness seemingly organic.78 He is an unreconstructed
Confederate soldier who never formally surrendered. Indeed, he still wears
his grey cavalry coat and verbally honours his oath taken ‘to the Confederate
States of America’. He is therefore associated with the ‘outlaw’ tradition of the
genre, and it is quite likely that he has recently robbed a ‘Yankee’ stagecoach,
as if, like former ‘bushwhacker’ Jesse James, he considers himself a Southern
guerrilla in a war that never ended. Just what Ethan has been doing in the three
years since Appomattox remains a mystery, but it is partly answered by way of
the medal he gives to little Debbie. The medal reveals him to have been a mer-
cenary fighting for the Mexican Emperor Maximilian, which, Slotkin informs
us, would be ‘a cause perfectly consistent with his racism’.79 Furthermore,
Ethan’s traditional heroic disdain for money is highlighted by his casually
tossing a bag full of ‘Yankee dollars’ to Aaron, while his unheroic hatred of
Native Americans is soon established through his openly aggressive attitude
towards Marty.
Overall, Ethan provides us with gallery of Western hero types. His past,
like Shane’s, is mysterious and a little bit deadly. Cinematic cues confirm that
he is clearly in love with his brother’s wife, Martha, and that she is clearly in
love with him, forging another thematic link to Shane’s and Marian’s mutual
but forbidden attraction. He is a threat to the domestic realm and brings
anti-social violence, illicit sexual desire and racism with him. To confirm the

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enigma, Ethan is an unregenerate racist, but is also the story’s hero, if a ter-
ribly flawed one. He breaks the so-called hero’s code on numerous occasions.
For example, he shoots people in the back (both Anglos and Natives), wilfully
engages in the mass slaughter of humans and buffalo, defiles the corpses of his
‘race enemy’, and seems intent on murdering his own niece. Pye argues that
such actions, together with ‘Ethan’s obsessive hatred of Indians and the idea
of mixed blood are presented in ways designed to distance us from him.’80 Yet
he also argues it both ways, suggesting that the film ‘allows no comfortable
identification with or disengagement from its hero’.81
As many commentators have recognised, one of the principal ways in
which we come to terms with Ethan’s dark character is that he is played by
Hollywood’s most celebrated Western actor. As Slotkin suggests, ‘Ford’s
casting of John Wayne deliberately invokes the star’s heroic on-screen persona
. . . Ethan’s point of view also determines the way in which much of the action
is seen.’82 It is because of this narrative alignment that it has ‘been easy to
mistake [as many have done] Ethan’s racism for John Ford’s’.83 Slotkin also
suggests that ‘the heroic associations of Wayne’s screen persona reinforce our
tendency to give Ethan’s actions the best possible interpretation’.84 And, fur-
thermore, in reference to the actor’s wider cultural significance:

Wayne’s ‘Ethan’ does not die or dissolve with the final fade-to-black:
he is re-absorbed into the on-going life of John Wayne-as-movie-star
and becomes part of an ever-growing heroic persona that would finally
make Wayne a ‘living legend,’ a cultural symbol whose role in public
mythology is akin to that of figures like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett,
and Buffalo Bill.85

Slotkin’s suggestion that, through our understanding of Wayne as a cultural

symbol, we are compelled to sympathise and, in many ways, rationalise
Ethan’s pathologies is convincing enough to some. Indeed, Wayne’s status
as a paradigmatic American hero could well account for those who associate
the Western solely with him, and who are therefore mistaken in the view that
Ethan’s racism is typical of the genre as a whole.86 Pye suggests that this dual
attitude towards Ethan is due to the inherent racism of the genre: ‘in wrestling
as a Western with the ideological and psycho-sexual complex that underlies
attitudes to race, [The Searchers] is working within almost intractable tradi-
tions of representation’.87 Actually, Ford skilfully positions Ethan in such a
way that his racist mania and obsessive quest to find Debbie illuminates the
prevalence and terrifying consequences of racism in American society and, par-
ticularly, its difficultly in overcoming its own fears over miscegenation. I argue
that the character of Ethan holds a mirror up to this systemic racism, working
as a corrective, therefore, to Maltby’s insistence that the Western exists as ‘a
discursive framework by which a national self-image of the self-righteousness
of Manifest Destiny could be maintained’.

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The majority of scholars suggest that, while The Searchers exposes aspects
of institutional racism, in the final analysis they reason that Ethan’s racism is
more extreme or, at least, more overt than that of white society. Still others
suggest that Ethan’s racism has no place whatever in Anglo-American civilisa-
tion and that this is why Ethan must be excluded from it at the end. In David
Grimsted’s opinion, The Searchers seeks to promote an American society
based on racial tolerance. In depicting its Anglo community as devoid of preju-
dice against Native Americans, he insists that ‘[e]ven at those points where
some Indian-hating would seem humanly logical, Ford turns anger elsewhere
. . . Ford’s society in the film, rather than racist, is notably free of racism even
where circumstances would lead one to expect it.’88 He argues that, through
Ethan, Ford depicts ‘racism [that] grows from personal rather than social
pathology’, and that ‘Ethan’s racism is what cuts him off from the rest of the
family/society’.89 Grimsted also sees Ethan in sympathetic terms, arguing that
his ‘flaws are made shocking but Ford lets us know, mostly through the quiet
shots that punctuate his fury, [his hatred’s] deeply humane connections’.90
Expunging Ethan from civilisation at the film’s end, symbolised by the final
fade to black, is therefore expressive of an idealised society. Ethan’s racism,
although a necessary, even humane, product of race war, is not welcome in
the kind of civilised nation that the United States likes to think of itself as
being. The baton, as it were, is being passed on to the figure of Marty: himself
a product of miscegenation and whose unproblematic integration into Anglo-
American civilisation will be symbolically ‘rubber-stamped’ by his marriage
to Laurie. The coming of a society based on racial tolerance and kinship by
adoption, rather than obsessions about kinship by blood appears to have been
achieved here, on the frontier, Turner’s and Roosevelt’s crucible of modern
American democratic civilisation.
I would like to suggest now that this ending is itself, a myth. Furthermore,
that the film renders this myth in ironic terms, exposing it as a false conscious-
ness, a dangerous delusion.91 It is here that the powerful ideological critique,
the ‘counter-narrative’ of the nation offered by The Searchers, comes into frui-
tion. As I have already detailed, The Searchers illuminates the powerful issue
of race in structuring American national identity. On an immediate historical
level, Ethan is a returning soldier who fought for the racist, slave-holding
South in America’s great fratricidal Civil War. The difficult historical issue
of reconstruction and re-integration of the secessionist states and of those
who fought for them is thus embodied in the hero from the outset. The film’s
supposed location in the ‘sovereign State of Texas’, together with Ethan’s
subsequent role as a hired mercenary, gives further persuasive support to
this reading. Also, the homesteaders refer to themselves as ‘Texicans’ rather
than Americans; a consensual united identity within terms of post-Civil War
reconciliation is thus rendered extremely precarious. However, far from
offering a simplistic reduction of sociohistorical contradiction and complex-
ity, recapitulated as myth, and with a resolved conclusion tantamount to

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social fantasy (that is, that Debbie is reincluded into white civilisation at the
end of the film), The Searchers wilfully embodies these contradictions and
uses the hero as a symbol through which to problematise the mythic terms
by which civilisation is founded. That is to say, it is through Ethan that the
film exposes America’s disavowed racism, and the myth of a cultural geog-
raphy that distinguishes its civilisation from the wilderness in the form of
idealised, racially tolerant familial communities like the Edwards and the
Jorgensens.
Ethan’s slaughter of the buffalo provides me with my first illustrative case
in point. This scene has typically been understood as a shocking instance of
Ethan’s personal racism and of his descent into madness. Certainly, the scene is
constructed to signify as much, with a maniacal, wide-eyed Ethan firing repeat-
edly into the herd in order to scatter it and deny winter food to the Comanches,
violently striking Marty to the ground when he tries to stop him. Grimsted
contends that this scene ‘illuminates well Ford’s dramatisation of “personal”
racism’ and that Ethan’s ‘shooting at the buffalo was clearly a gesture of fury
at the costs and frustrations of the [racial] conflict’.92 Furthermore, he con-
tends that ‘it was far from an exterminating plan like that which was briefly
US Cavalry policy, or its casual enactment as white man’s sport’.93 I do not
doubt Ethan’s personal pathology; however, the placement of this scene within
the narrative as a whole suggests something altogether more sinister and
wide-ranging than Grimsted allows for. Ethan is interrupted by the sound of a
cavalry bugle and we cut immediately to the aftermath of the aforementioned
massacre of the Comanche (where Ethan discovers Look’s body). Pye is surely
right when he suggests that this juxtaposition ‘marks eloquently the way in
which Ethan’s racial hatred is repeated at the institutional level in the geno-
cidal actions of the US Cavalry’.94 But there is, despite Grimsted’s dismissal,
a further and more direct level of historical significance in Ethan’s animal
slaughter.
During this period of Anglo-American expansion, hunters and trappers were
engaged in a systematic extermination of the buffalo herds all along the Great
Plains. The result was a booming economy for frontier settlements, individuals
and trading companies alike; conversely, the effects on the Native American
tribes of the Great Plains were irreversibly catastrophic. In his 1970 book,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown references federal government
representative, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s public response to this
wholesale slaughter: ‘Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exter-
minated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilisation to
advance.’95 Sherman’s response is shocking and reveals that a policy based
on both cultural and literal genocide – as denoted in The Searchers by this
juxtaposition of slaughter – flowed directly from Washington in terms utterly
commensurable with the ideological precepts of Manifest Destiny. In depicting
this terrible story, The Searchers can be said to reveal human and environmen-
tal costs as well as the irony implicit in the domestication of the wilderness;

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a societal critique, therefore, rather than solely the result of one individual’s
‘fury’ and ‘frustration’.96

VI
I shall conclude my discussion on The Searchers with the scene that is most
suggestive of societal racism. The scene in question immediately follows
Laurie’s abortive wedding to comical ‘hick’, Charley McCorry (Ken Curtis),
in which Charley and Marty literally fight over her. When Marty informs an
exasperated Laurie that he will leave her again the following day, still intent on
‘fetching’ Debbie home, she suddenly explodes at him:

Fetch what home? The leavings of Comanche bucks, sold time and again
to the highest bidder with savage brats of her own?! Do you know what
Ethan will do if he has a chance? He’ll put a bullet in her brain. I tell you
Martha would want him to.

Pye convincingly suggests that ‘Laurie’s hideous outburst locates the disgust
and loathing of miscegenation not simply in Ethan but at the heart of the
White community. Ethan is, in this respect at least, not an aberrant but a repre-
sentative figure.’97 In his more recent analysis, however, Grimsted sees it differ-
ently. He suggest that, although Laurie’s ‘words are as snarlingly vicious as any
of Ethan’s . . . they don’t have the same impact’.98 This, he reasons, is because
her racist tirade is placed in the context of her desire for Marty, a desire that
for years has been frustrated by his refusal to give up on the search for Debbie
and settle down with her. ‘We know they are really voiced out of love of part-
Indian Martin – to keep him home,’ he argues. ‘She says them to hold a man
whose racial ancestry bothers her and her family not a jot.’99 He concludes
by arguing that ‘no one feels a touch of surprise when Laurie joins in leading
Debbie – and Martin – back into the sheltering community’ represented by the
Jorgenson homestead.100
Interpreting the film in terms of gender politics, Studlar similarly suggests
that ‘Laurie’s hate-filled speech reveals her desperation to keep Marty home
from what she regards as a pointless search for someone now beyond the pale
of white society’s norms.’101 While agreeing with the personal context within
which Grimsted interprets Laurie’s outburst, Studlar refuses to justify it as he
does, aligning Laurie instead ‘with masculine values that reduce female worth
to sexual and racial purity’.102 She goes on to remark:

Laurie would initially seem to represent the generic ideal, the sexually
innocent, sympathetic woman who brings civilisation to the frontier. But
Laurie becomes the voice of patriarchal sexual norms that condemns the
captive female who assimilates – culturally and sexually – into Indian
society.103

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Laurie’s outburst automatically re-ignites the issue of female captivity, and it

seems to me that the film’s overall interpretive attitude towards the captivity
narrative hinges, to a large extent, upon how one contextualises her words.
For Studlar, to ‘say that Martha would want Debbie dead is, as Marty (and
the audience) immediately knows, a misinterpretation of Martha Edwards’s
values’.104 She insists that, while ‘the white woman’s sexuality may be what is
at stake in the Western’s conventional war between white “civilisation” and
red “savagery” . . . Ford demonstrates in The Searchers [that] the claims of
the genre for the meaning of female purity can be held up for scrutiny, even
for a film in the classical mode’.105 Obviously, I dispute Studlar’s suggestion
of a ‘classical mode’ in respect of The Searchers, but her assessment that the
film works ‘in critiquing racism . . . through the framework of “feminised”
values [specifically those of Martha as a structuring absence] that are brought
into open conflict with the established generic appeal of “masculine” values
associated with violence and vengeance [as represented by Ethan]’ are very
persuasive.106 On the other hand, it seems incredible that Grimsted could
suggest that Laurie’s outburst is based solely on Marty’s ‘naive interpretation
of Ethan’s stance’.107 He writes that ‘Laurie’s speech functions in the narra-
tive not to condemn her, much less her family/community, for sharing Ethan’s
racial hate, but to help convince the audience that Ethan may really attempt to
kill Debbie.’108
Marty’s naivety relates directly to Grimsted’s insistence that Ethan never
intended to kill Debbie and that we, the audience, only think that he will due
to our alignment with Marty’s gross misreading of the events that structure
most of the latter part of the search. ‘Nowhere in the film’, he argues, ‘does
Ethan say or suggest he plans to kill Debbie.’109 To me, this reading seems
absurd and, therefore, Grimsted’s attempts to explain away two significantly
related moments in the plot in accordance with this view are unconvincing.
The two moments in question are when Ethan and Marty first encounter
Debbie outside Scar’s desert camp, and later in the film when Marty appeals
to Clayton to let him go in ahead of the Ranger attack in order to rescue her.
In the first scene, Ethan draws his gun on Debbie and orders Marty to ‘step
aside’. Grimsted argues that ‘we really have no indication of whether [Ethan]
intends to shoot her or to try to keep her from running away. Again, Ford lets
Martin – arms outstretched in front of Debbie and face terrified – impose his
fears on us.’110 Actually, Debbie is saved from Ethan only by a timely arrow
fired by Scar. It strikes his shoulder, spinning him around, his gun shot (a shot
that he had already committed to firing) harmlessly embedding itself in the
desert sand. The second moment immediately follows Marty’s protestation: ‘If
we go charging in there they’ll kill her and you know it!’ Ethan’s response is
to say, ‘That’s what I’m counting on.’ To me the nature of Ethan’s intentions
seem rather unambiguous here; however, Grimsted attempts to explain this
away by suggesting that, while Ethan says that ‘he counts on the raid killing
Debbie, and Martin chastises him for it . . . he actually shows no personal

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wish to do it – only brief opposition to Marty’s plan to slip into Scar’s camp
to rescue Debbie’.111
Overall, I believe Grimsted is right in how he positions Laurie’s outburst
within the context of her frustrated relationship with Marty; however, I do
not agree that the film itself endorses such a position. Equally, like Studlar, I
doubt that The Searchers pertains wholeheartedly to the masculine ideologi-
cal paradigm of chaste female ‘purity’. If Laurie represents a mythic ideal of
womanhood, then she must also symbolise the future of American civilisation
following the settlement of the frontier. One could link Laurie to Ethan in that,
if the myth of the domestication of the wilderness represses the historical fact
of Anglo-America’s originary crimes (both against nature and the aboriginal
populations themselves), then the figure of Ethan marks a return of this histori-
cal repressed. Therefore, Ethan’s crimes mirror those of Anglo-America – the
US military, the Rangers, the hunters and the pioneers who settled the ‘free
land’ – and expose their (largely) unacknowledged complicity in expropriation
and genocide. Equally, Laurie’s outburst strikes out from the heart of white
civilisation, confirming that civilisation’s willing complicity in such crimes.
Indeed, it exposes Anglo-American hypocrisy in denying this aspect of them-
selves and placing it all onto the shoulders of a figure like Ethan before brand-
ing him abject, singular, an aberration.
McGee extends the theme of Ethan’s moral burden to encompass the related
socioeconomic factors existing as a historical and ideological function within
the narrative. He argues that ‘the apparent innocence of the Edwards and
Jorgenson families hinges on Ethan’s assumption of the burden of shame for
the sin of primitive accumulation; their legitimacy depends on his lawlessness,
their sexual propriety on his transgressive desire’. Furthermore, that ‘Ethan
Edwards embodies the contradictions at the origin of the capitalist culture of
the United States.’112
On the one hand, then, as McGee informs us, Ethan ‘expresses the racism
that historically justified the primitive accumulation of capital in the form of
expropriated land [from the Native Americans] and labour, particularly the
labour of slaves’, while, on the other, he cares nothing for monetary wealth
and, more importantly, by ‘finally bringing Debbie back to the enclave of the
family, he gives birth to a racially mixed community from which he must be
symbolically excluded’.113 But surely, with Laurie’s explosion of racism against
Debbie, the myth of overcoming kinship structures based on blood for one
based on adoption and tolerance is destroyed in The Searchers. Eckstein and
others have uncovered sufficient evidence to suggest that Ford purposefully
‘darkened’ Ethan’s character, but why include this racist tirade from Laurie
unless he was trying to make an equally powerful point about Anglo-America’s
hypocritical attitude to its own racist stance?114
Perhaps the enigma of Ethan Edwards and, by extension, The Searchers
as a whole, can be at least partly explained by how Slavoj Žižek defines a
functioning ideology. Žižek suggests that ‘an ideological identification exerts

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a fine good place to be

a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not

fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it . . . is the very
form of ideology, of its “practical efficiency”’.115 He puts forward the term
‘trans-ideological kernel’ to explain how, if an ideology is to ‘seize’ a culture,
‘it has to batten on and manipulate some kind of “trans-ideological” vision
which cannot be reduced to a simple instrument of legitimating pretensions to
power’.116 If I read him right, then he suggests that, for an ideology to function
effectively, one must be, to a certain extent, ignorant of its operating mecha-
nisms. This feeds well into Barthes’ naturalising function of myth which, itself,
can be adapted to the ideological purpose of the myth of the West. That is, of
course, the attempt to justify the project of Manifest Destiny and to promote
the myth of the domestication of the wilderness, regeneration through violence
and American exceptionalism.
Since this mythic ‘vision’ of the history of the founding of the United States
cannot operate if ‘reduced to a simple instrument of legitimising pretensions
to power’, it must engage with sentiments of national identity, group solidar-
ity, justice and the greater sense of belonging to a community. These are the
results of an ideology that actively seeks to disavow that which sustains it,
and that necessarily relies on a disavowing or thwarting of those aspects that
forms its key component. Equally, Žižek argues that ‘an ideological edifice
can be undermined by a too literal identification, which is why its successful
functioning requires a minimal distance from its explicit rules’.117 Ethan lacks
a sense of this ‘minimal distance’, whereby his overt and incessant racism and
violence becomes unacceptably abject, becomes disturbing, or even dangerous
to a civilisation when made public or explicit. However, at the same time it
forms a necessary but unacknowledgable element of its cultural–­ideological
functionality. For Žižek, an ideology’s power mechanism relies on this
self-censorship, ‘it relies on a mechanism which is operative in so far as it
remains censored’.118 What we can identify in The Searchers is the emergence
of this censored functionality: in Ethan, in the narrative’s linking of his actions
to US policies (the slaughter of Comanche and the destruction of their cul-
tural ties to the buffalo herds) and its instruments of power (the Cavalry, the
Rangers), its contradictions of a Christian religiosity married to war (the figure
of Revd Captain Clayton), and, perhaps more revelatory, the racist invective
delivered by a representative of the domesticity of the settled wilderness –
Laurie herself. With all this in mind, it seems incredible that the ‘winning of
the West’ as it is described by Ford in The Searchers could be understood as
anything but ironic.
In the film’s final movement Debbie is returned by Ethan to the folds of
Christian civilisation in the form of her new home at the Jorgenson’s ranch. In
light of what I have argued above, we may well ‘feel a touch of surprise’ when
Laurie joins her in entering the house with her part-Cherokee groom-to-be.
Debbie looks fearfully around at her new surroundings and becomes shrouded
in an ambivalent darkness which hides the traditional warmth of the domestic,

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myth of the western

interior space. Personally, I wonder for the outcome of her reintegration into a
white community that disavows its own prejudices and, like the representative
Laurie, fails utterly to overcome them. Ethan stands outside, holds his arm in
that oft-cited gesture of pain; perhaps this is the pain of a man who is, at one
and the same time, a savage racist and a man who embodies so much civilised
compassion that he cannot, finally, bring himself to murder little Debbie. He is,
therefore, a figure who openly embodies the contradictions and hypocrisies of
a community that pointedly ignores both its need for him and its own racism,
and who he turns his back on in the final fade-to-black.

Notes
  1. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier 1600–1860, new edn (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
2000), p. 179.
   2. Ibid., p. 94.
   3. Ibid., p. 25.
  4. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, [1992] 1998),
p. 461.
  5. John G. Cawelti, ‘Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture’, Critical
Inquiry, 1(3) (1975): 521–41, quote on p. 538.
  6. Arthur M. Eckstein, ‘Introduction: Main Critical Issues in The Searchers’,
in Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman (eds), The Searchers: Essays and
Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 2004), p. 10.
   7. Cawelti, ‘Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture’, p. 358.
  8. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 179 (emphasis in original).
   9. Ibid., p. 104.
  10. Douglas Pye, ‘Double Vision: Miscegenation and Point of View in The Searchers’,
in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western (London:
Studio Vista, 1996), p. 229.
 11. Richard Maltby, ‘A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians’, in
Cameron and Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western, p. 39.
  12. Pye, ‘Double Vision’, p. 229.
  13. The phrase ‘the Western is American history’ has been used, critiqued and paro-
died by numerous film scholars. See, for example, articles by Andre Bazin, Jim
Kitses, Richard Slotkin and Janet Walker.
  14. Maltby, ‘A Better Sense of History’, p. 39.
 15. Ibid.
 16. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 10.
  17. Ibid., pp. 624–63.
  18. Susan Kollins, ‘Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and
the Contemporary Western’, Contemporary Literature, 42(3) (2001): 557–88,
quote on p. 560.
  19. Jacqueline K. Greb, ‘Will the Real Indians Please Stand Up?’, in Gary A. Yoggy
(ed.), ‘Back in the Saddle’: Essays on Western Film and Television Actors
(London: McFarland, 1998), pp. 129–44, quote on p. 132.
  20. Ibid., p. 132.
  21. Tag Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the “Evolution” of
the Western’ (1986), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed), Film Genre Reader III
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 262–76, quote on pp. 272–3.

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a fine good place to be

  22. For more in-depth analyses of the depiction of Native Americans on film, which
includes an interesting analysis of Fort Apache, see Michael Valdez Moses,
‘Savage Nations: Native Americans and the Western’, in Jennifer L. McMahon
and B. Steve Csaki (eds), The Philosophy of the Western (Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press, 2010), pp. 261–91.
 23. Brian Henderson, ‘‘The Searchers’: An American Dilemma’, Film Quarterly,
34(2) (1980/1): 9–23, quote on p. 10.
  24. Ibid., p. 10.
 25. Ibid.
  26. Henderson does acknowledge that Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist insistence on binary
oppositions does not bear up well under contemporary theories of popular
culture. Hence, he writes: ‘Lévi-Strauss’ binarism . . . has been much attacked.
The consensus now seems to be that binarism fits some situations well but as a
universal principle of the formation of culture it is untenable.’ Ibid., p. 12.
 27. Ibid., p. 19. Michael Coyne makes a similar political–allegorical point, see
The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), p. 70. John H. Lenihan similarly assesses Native
Americans in Westerns of this period as allegorical representations of African
Americans. See Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the
Western Film (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, [1980] 1985), pp. 23–81.
 28. For an in-depth study of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka within the
context of the Civil Rights Movement, see Waldo E. Martin Jr, Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1998).
  29. Henderson, ‘Double Vision’, p. 19.
  30. Eckstein, ‘Introduction: Main Critical Issues in The Searchers’, pp. 1–47, quote
on p. 9.
  31. Joanna Hearne, ‘The “Ache for Home”: Assimilation and Separatism in Anthony
Mann’s Devil’s Doorway’, in Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Conner (eds),
Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History
(Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), pp. 126–60, quote on
p. 137.
  32. Ibid., p. 137.
  33. Ibid., p. 126
  34. Ibid., p. 127. Steve Neale forwards a similar argument. He suggests that ‘what
is occluded in the substitution of “red for black” in the reading of 50s and 60s
pro-Indian and Indian Westerns is not just the possibility of any discussion
of contemporary Native Americans and of contemporary relations between
native Americans, Euro-Americans and the Euro-American government, but the
possibility of any address to the particular, indeed, unique position of Native
Americans vis-à-vis Euro-American liberalism, vis-à-vis segregation, vis-à-vis
integration and vis-à-vis civil rights in the late 40s, the 50s and the early 60s.’ See
Steve Neale, ‘Vanishing Americans: Racial and Ethnic Issues in the Interpretation
and Context of Post-War “Pro-Indian” Westerns’, in Ed Buscombe and Roberta
E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London:
British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 8–29, quote on p. 11.
 35. Peter Lehman considers this along with the possibility that Debbie herself is
Ethan’s biological offspring from an affair with Martha. He does not forward
these as definite, merely considers them as possibilities. See Lehman, ‘“You
Couldn’t Hit It on the Nose”: The Limits of Knowledge in and of The Searchers’,
in Eckstein and Lehman (eds), The Searchers, pp. 239–65, quote on pp. 246–7.
  36. Some would put Scar’s blue eyes down to the fact that he is played by Henry
Brandon, an Anglo-American actor of Germanic descent, and would say no more
beyond Hollywood’s racially biased casting policies at that time. Nevertheless,

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myth of the western

I owe the insight about Scar’s blue eyes to Gilberto Perez’s review of Robert
Pippin’s, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard
Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2010). Perez writes: ‘we see that [Scar’s] eyes are blue. Not, as may be sup-
posed, because Hollywood Indians are played by white actors – that wasn’t Ford’s
practice. Scar’s eyes are blue for a good reason: they tell us that the Comanche
chief is part white . . . Ford does not explain, he just shows: he wants Scar’s blue
eyes to give us pause.’ Gilberto Perez, ‘House of Miscegenation’, London Review
of Books, 32(22), 18 November 2010, pp. 23–5. On Quanah Parker as Ford’s
historical inspiration for Scar, see James F. Brooks, ‘“That Don’t Make You
Kin!”: Borderlands History and Culture in The Searchers’ (pp. 265–89), and Tom
Grayson Colonese, ‘Native American Reactions to The Searchers’ (pp. 335–43),
both in Eckstein and Lehman (eds), The Searchers. For an excellent biography
of Quanah Parker and the Comanche Nation, see S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the
Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanche Tribe
(London: Constable & Robinson, 2010).
 37. Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), p. 102.
 38. For discussion of The Searcher’s Homeric links, see two essays by Martin M.
Winkler (ed.), ‘Tragic Features in John Ford’s The Searchers’, in Classical Myth
and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 118–47,
and Martin M. Winkler, ‘Homer’s Iliad and John Ford’s The Searchers’, in
Eckstein and Lehman (eds), The Searchers, pp. 145–71.
  39. Robert M. Bird, Nick of the Woods; or, Adventures of Prairie Life (Hamburg:
Tredition Classics, [1837] 2007).
 40. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 462.
  41. For analysis along such lines, see Armando Jose Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth
and Identity in the American Western (London: Cornell University Press, 2002),
pp. 63–70.
  42. For what is perhaps the earliest version of this type of analysis of The Searchers,
where Scar is understood as Ethan’s ‘dark-half’, see Joseph McBride and Michael
Wilmington, ‘The Prisoner of the Desert’, Sight and Sound, 40(4) (1971): 210–14.
 43. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 466.
 44. McGee, The American Western, p. 107.
  45. Kathryn C. Esselman, ‘From Camelot to Monument Valley: Dramatic Origins of
the Western Film’ (1974), reprinted in Jack Nachbar (ed.), Focus on the Western,
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 9–19, quote on p. 13.
 46. Melinda Szaloky, ‘A Tale N/nobody Can Tell: The Return of the Repressed
Western History in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man’, in Janet Walker (ed.), Westerns:
Films through History (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 47–71, quote on p. 53.
  47. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 1999), p. 105.
  48. Colonese, ‘Native American Reactions to The Searchers’, pp. 335–43, quote on
p. 340. Although Ford’s Cochise in Fort Apache more accurately conducts his
meeting with the US military in fluent Spanish via an interpreter, in Rio Grande,
the Apache are largely unintelligible, making stereotyped ‘whoops’ and ‘hollers’.
More inconsistency.
  49. Ward Churchill, for instance, disparagingly re-titled the film ‘Laurence of South
Dakota’. See Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema
and the Colonisation of American Indians (Monroe, ME: Common Courage
Press, 1992); Churchill, discussed in Walker (ed.), Westerns, p. 248, fn. 5.
 50. Janet Walker (ed.), ‘Captive Images in the Traumatic Western: The Searchers,
Pursued, Once upon a Time in the West, and Lone Star’, in Westerns, pp.
219–53, quote on p. 222.

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  51. Ibid., p. 222.

 52. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New
Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 138–40.
  53. Colonese, ‘Native American Reactions to The Searchers’, p. 341.
  54. Ibid., p. 337 (emphasis in original).
 55. Rick Worland and Edward Countryman, ‘The New Western American
Historiography and the Emergence of the New American Westerns’, in Buscombe
and Pearson (eds), ‘Back in the Saddle Again’, pp. 182–97, quote on p. 186.
  56. Hine and Faragher, The American West, p. 138.
  57. Ibid., p. 138.
  58. Ibid., p. 139.
  59. Ibid., p. 138.
  60. Ibid., p. 139. See also Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon, passim.
 61. Jon Tuska, The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western
Genre (London: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. xix.
  62. Ibid., p. xix.
 63. Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, John Ford (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1974), p. 162.
 64. Tuska, The American West, p. 57.
  65. Gaylyn Studlar, ‘What Would Martha Want?: Captivity, Purity, and Feminine
Values in The Searchers’, in Eckstein and Lehman (eds.), The Searchers, pp.
171–97, quote on p. 191.
 66. Tuska, The American West, p. 57. See also Peter Lehman, ‘Looking at Look’s
Missing Reverse Shot: Psychoanalysis and Style in John Ford’s  The Searchers’,
Wide Angle, 4(4) (1981): 65–71; Lehman, discussed in Douglas Pye, ‘Double
Vision: Miscegenation and Point of View in The Searchers’, in Cameron and Pye
(eds), The Movie Book of the Western, pp. 231–2.
  67. Arthur M. Eckstein, ‘Darkening Ethan: John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) from
Novel to Screenplay to Screen’, Cinema Journal, 38(1) (1998): 3–24, quote on
p. 9.
  68. It was not until the 1970s and films like Little Big Man that Custer was portrayed
explicitly as an egotistical murderer; although Ford’s Fort Apache does attack his
legend and exposes the cultural collusion necessary in its promotion. His version
of ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ is, of course, the fictitious Colonel Owen Thursday’s
demise at the hands of Cochise’s Apaches. In fact, the whole ‘Custer sequence’
in The Searchers could be seen as Ford’s response to his own cavalry–­journalist
sequence at the end of Fort Apache; where, in the earlier film, John Wayne’s
character defends the myth of military heroism, his outburst here explodes it. For
discussion of how the Custer legend grew in the United States as a cultural symbol
of heroism and sacrifice, see Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the
Frontier in the Age of Industrialisation, 1800–1890 (Norman, OK: Oklahoma
Press, [1985] 1998).
  69. Eckstein, ‘Darkening Ethan’, pp. 9–13. Certainly, if Ford had retained the ‘Custer
sequence’ in which Ethan defends Comanche women and children, it would have
undermined the audience’s sense of anxiety in its fear that Ethan will go on to
carry out the horrific act of murder against Debbie.
  70. Pye, ‘Double Vision’, p. 233.
 71. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 471.
  72. Ibid., p. 471.
  73. Ibid. For example, the Washita massacre is envisioned with more honesty in Little
Big Man, where women and children are considered as ‘fair game’ by Custer’s
men who slaughter indiscriminately and without mercy in what, to all intents and
purposes constitutes a ‘free-fire zone’.
 74. Ibid.

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myth of the western

  75. Ibid., p. 470.

  76. Eckstein, ‘Introduction: Main Critical Issues in The Searchers’, p. 13.
  77. Ibid., p. 13.
  78. Richard Hutson makes a similar point with regard to the Comanche when they
encounter the searchers for the first fight sequence; they ‘appear to peel off the
rocky depths of the buttes [of Monument Valley] and march in processions that
echo the formations of the earth and rock’. See Richard Hutson, ‘Sermons in
Stone: Monument Valley in The Searchers’, in Eckstein and Lehman (eds), The
Searchers, pp. 93–109, quote on p. 105.
 79. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 470.
  80. Pye, ‘Double Vision’, p. 229.
  81. Ibid., p. 229 (emphasis added).
 82. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 463.
  83. Ibid., p. 463.
  84. Ibid., p. 473.
 85. Ibid.
  86. Undoubtedly, Wayne’s own right-wing, conservative politics helped to encourage
this misperception.
  87. Pye, ‘Double Vision’, p. 229.
  88. David Grimsted, ‘Re-Searching’, in Eckstein and Lehman (eds), The Searchers,
pp. 289–335, quote on pp. 313–14.
  89. Ibid., pp. 304, 313.
  90. Ibid., pp. 316–17.
  91. Like numerous other scholars, I am willing to concede that the film’s subtleties
may have been lost on most audiences in 1956, or even on many contemporary
viewers of the film.
  92. Grimsted, ‘Re-Searching’, pp. 329 fn. 19, 316.
  93. Ibid., p. 316.
  94. Pye, ‘Double Vision’, p. 229.
 95. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the
American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970), p. 265.
  96. Brown also suggests that, ‘of the 3,700,000 buffalo destroyed from 1872 through
1874, only 150,000 were killed by Indians’. In another historical link, Brown
informs us that, when the Comanche decided upon ‘a war to drive the white
hunters from the grazing grounds’, it was none other than Quanah Parker –
Ford’s alleged historical inspiration for Scar – who led ‘the Comanche warriors
into battle against the white hunters’. Ibid., p. 265.
  97. Pye, ‘Double Vision’, p. 230.
  98. Grimsted, ‘Re-searching’, p. 313.
  99. Ibid., p. 313.
100. Ibid.
101. Studlar, ‘What Would Martha Want?’, p. 187.
102. Ibid., p. 186.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., p. 187
105. Ibid., p. 192.
106. Ibid., p. 193.
107. Grimsted, ‘Re-Searching’, p. 313.
108. Ibid., p. 314.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid., p. 315.
112. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 103.
113. Ibid., pp. 103–4.

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114. Eckstein, ‘Darkening Ethan’, pp. 3–24.

115. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 21 (emphasis in
original).
116. Ibid., p. 21 (emphasis in original).
117. Ibid., p. 22.
118. Ibid., p. 25.

113
3. RETHINKING REVISIONISM

‘It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away all he’s got, and all
he’s ever gonna have.’

I
In a review published shortly after the release of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
(1992), Harvey R. Greenberg offers the following summary:

Unforgiven’s apocalyptic conclusion constitutes an insanely logical

outcome – and send-up – of the bellicose John Wayne machismo so fre-
quently celebrated by the genre . . . Unforgiven underscores how fragile
a reed is civilisation, with no hero on a white horse or in a cop car to
redeem the threat of humanity’s supreme undefendedness. The indomita-
ble thrust to push back the frontier, tame the wilderness, ‘build houses’,
seems pitiable or risible against this recognition . . . appears galactically
remote indeed from John Wayne triumphalist pieties.1

It is clear that Greenberg considers Unforgiven as a highly conscious response

to both the formal structures of the so-called classical Western and the genre’s
celebration of its most famous heroes: be they mythologised historical figures
such as Wyatt Earp, fictitious national allegories like Shane, or that most
curious and uneasy synthesis of the two – John Wayne. Critical responses
to Unforgiven have tended to fall into one of two broad categories. On the
one hand, there are those who, like Greenberg, evidently see in David Webb
Peoples’ gloomy script an apocalyptic repudiation of the classical Western’s
‘bellicose’ glorification of violence. On the other hand, are those like Daniel
O’Brien, who see the film’s eventual repudiation of its own ‘anti-violence’
logic – by collapsing back into a conservative glorification of ‘masculinity’
and ‘individualism’ – as expressive of the typical conventions of the genre: ‘a
man having to do what a man has to do’.2 Michael Coyne shares similar, if
more vitriolic, sentiments, which act as a summary of his overall position on

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rethinking revisionism

Eastwood’s efforts in the genre. Despite initiating a ‘dark, savage tale about
a reformed killer’, he writes, Unforgiven fails at the last hurdle where, at ‘the
final showdown, [it] degenerated into the same old High Plains Drifter/Pale
Rider nonsense about the man who cannot be killed’.3
Whatever one’s opinion, Unforgiven remains Eastwood’s most critically and
commercially accomplished Western to date, garnering four 1993 Academy
Awards, including Best Motion Picture and Best Achievement in Directing for
Eastwood. But where Greenberg sees the film as a revisionist triumph against
the classical Western and O’Brien sees an ultimately flawed narrative, both
are united in their placing the film in the genre’s revisionist phase. Whether
successful or not, Unforgiven represents a throw-down against the traditional
values of frontier mythology that, as far as the above critics are concerned,
have informed not only the narrative logic of most Hollywood Westerns, but
an ideology that for centuries has preached an heroic version of history.
I have already discussed how this mythology was expressed in various
formats over the course of three centuries, and how it coalesced into the myth
of the West on the cusp of the twentieth century. Briefly reiterated – through a
series of pamphlets, sermons, paintings, speeches, dime novels, etc., it typically
preached a belief in the inevitable progression of Anglo-American civilisation
ever-westward across the North American continent. Religious legitimacy for
this protracted series of conquests was achieved through the meta-narrative
of Manifest Destiny, which sought to foster belief in the young nation’s
exceptionalism: first, through the trials and tribulations of the ardent-hearted
yeoman farmer; and, latterly, through the heroism of the white male cowboy
or gunfighter as its principal agent of progress. Westerns typically featured
both these symbols of American exceptionalism, with the individualist hero
usually employing deadly force to protect the pioneering frontier community
from the threat posed by the savage forces of the wilderness.
Of course, it is the attempt to ‘tame the wilderness’ through such ‘triumphal-
ist pieties’ that Greenberg is referring to as being so ‘frequently celebrated by
the genre’. Evidently, for him Unforgiven realised an apotheosis of revisionism:
the end logic of a long process of mythic introspection and generic self-critique.
With Unforgiven, the Western had come a long way from Buffalo Bill rescuing
the Deadwood Stage from savage ‘redskins’ towards realising a stark rendering
of ‘humanity’s supreme undefendedness’.
For reasons that I shall discuss shortly, the precise beginning of the revi-
sionist phase of the genre is hard to pin down. However, the commonly held
view is that from around the early 1960s onwards the Western’s best efforts
became increasingly self-conscious and self-critical. This was seen in both the
formal development of its own classical plot formulas, and in a critical shift
in cultural attitudes towards its informing mythologies. John Ford’s The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is commonly mentioned as a progenitor of
revisionism. Although one can discern such criticism in much earlier films such
as Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), Ford’s own Fort Apache and William

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myth of the western

Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), it is a view that still holds currency.
For instance, Patrick McGee declares that Liberty Valance ‘brings to closure
the classic Western itself’.4
Following on from Liberty Valance, a slew of films have been put forward
as opening the floodgates on such issues as gender, race and the darker aspects
of Anglo-America’s ‘triumphant’ march across the continent. Seen from this
perspective, the West as depicted in the classical Western is largely a distortion
of the historical experience of the frontier. Focus on the Native American as
signifier for contemporary sociopolitical issues informed the narrative themes
of films such as Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) and Robert Altman’s
Buffalo Bill and the Indians; or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976). Such
cultural–ideological agendas were also accompanied in the field of exploita-
tion cinema, most notably in the Western with Ralph Nelson’s notorious film,
Soldier Blue (1970). Nelson bluntly (and somewhat confusingly) reworked the
Mylai massacre into a counter-cultural re-imagining of atrocities committed
by the US Cavalry against the Cheyenne during the 1870s. Belief in the idea
of such a new sense of generic self-reflexivity held that such films consciously
raised issues concerning their own status as Westerns, their own historical role
in the construction of erroneous cultural attitudes and beliefs, and the nature
of their relation to the myth of the West and towards contemporary events.5
These alleged generic insights were accompanied (at more or less the same
time) by advances in the field of academic historiography, chiefly by the pro-
ponents of what would eventually come to be known as the New Western
History. Led most notably by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick,
the New Western historians were sceptical of Hollywood’s capacity to develop
more balanced treatments of the West. For example, Limerick’s view of
popular cultural depictions of the late-nineteenth-century frontier is one of
open disparagement:

In the popular imagination, the reality of conquest dissolved into ste-

reotypes of noble savages and noble pioneers struggling quaintly in the
wilderness. These adventures seemed to have no bearing on the complex
realities of twentieth-century America. In Western paintings, novels,
movies, and television shows, those stereotypes were valued precisely
because they offered an escape from modern troubles . . . An element of
regret for ‘what we did to the Indians’ had entered the picture, but the
dominant feature of conquest remained ‘adventure’.6

Limerick’s remarks, although by no means unjustified, remain typical of a large

number of cultural historians whose attitude to the popular arts is dismissive at
best. In the case of the above quotation, it results in the reduction of the entire
formal and thematic scope of the Hollywood Western to that of an ideological
sentinel, proffering escapism and fantasy instead of holding a serious concern
for ‘the complex realities of twentieth-century America’.

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In the previous two chapters I have warned against such a view. Hollywood
and the popular cultural material it produces have often been unjustly reduced
in status to that of a servile accomplice to dominant ideologies. For one, if
we consider the common argument that Westerns have often had a great deal
to say about the period in which they were made over that in which they
are set (consider Brian Henderson’s analysis of The Searchers, for example),
then they automatically call into question Limerick’s assertion that the genre
merely ‘offered an escape from modern troubles’. On the contrary, as part of
an industrial mass-medium, cinematic Westerns cannot but be affected and,
to some extent, conditioned by ‘modern troubles’; their historical perspectives
unavoidably influenced by contemporary cultural, political and even economic
trends. The extent to which the cinematic Western wholeheartedly endorsed
either the triumphalist version of Anglo-American history or the dominant
contemporary ideologies prevalent at any given period remains, of course, a
matter of rigorous debate. It is a debate that transcends specific genre concerns
and is virtually as old as serious academic film criticism itself.
In 1967, Alan Lovell advanced the sociological concerns voiced by Robert
Warshow and André Bazin a decade earlier by raising the issue of ‘the problem
of the relationship between the Western and social reality’.7 Ultimately, and in
terms similar to Limerick’s assessment, Lovell asked the question: ‘do Westerns
distort reality, is their purpose essentially that of social propaganda[?]’.8 Such
a question was responded to that very same year by James K. Folsom, who
briefly ruminated on the Western’s potential for setting up ‘an alternate stand-
ard of values to the often shabby ones of modern finance capitalism’.9 This,
of course, recapitulates the generic binary between West and East, frontier
purity and eastern corruption, and Folsom mentions such films as One-Eyed
Jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961) and High Noon – where Sheriff Will Kane (Gary
Cooper) finds the town of Hadleyville ‘not worth defending’ – as socially
conscious critical texts.10 More pointedly, Folsom interprets the conclusion
of Shane, ‘where Shane rides away from the grubby town in which the action
of the film has taken place . . . [as] a statement of a similar theme’.11 It is in
this sense that Westerns are seen, not so much as nostalgic for a simpler past,
an ‘escape from modern troubles’, or necessarily ‘social propaganda’, but,
rather, as actively critical of the industrial–capitalist present. Folsom suggests
that, in fact, Westerns ‘often represent . . . a political point of view which is at
the very least profoundly suspicious of the development of modern American
democracy’.12
However, the conception of the Western as ‘social propaganda’ seems to be
a popular position, and one assumed most forcefully by Will Wright. We may
remind ourselves that Wright assumed a straightforward, one-way relationship
between the individual film text and the socioeconomic conditions of its pro-
duction. He asserted that ‘myth depends on simple and recognisable meanings
which reinforce rather than challenge social understanding’.13 However, I have
previously made clear in my readings of Shane and The Searchers that while

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Wright’s schema may hold true for oral folklore and tradition, it loses much of
its theoretical credibility (and coherence) when transposed onto a contempo-
rary and complex art form like film. In a review of Six-Guns and Society, Janey
Place remarks that ‘Wright fails to allow the relation between a society and its
popular culture the complexity which is necessary to its operation.’14 She goes
on to say that, although ‘[m]ovies both reflect the values and ideology of the
culture and are a means of reproduction of that ideology . . . [t]he ability of
popular culture to reflect and express a wide range of contradictions that arise
from the tensions of our socio-economic structure is awesome.’15 She insists
that Wright’s adoptive myth structural analysis fails to adequately account for
the complex industrial–commercial vicissitudes of cinema, finally suggesting
that ‘any attempt to locate the meaning of an entire basic myth may be naive,
regardless of the theory and method used’.16 One would be wise to keep such
sentiments in mind when considering any analytical approach to the Western
as some of the genre’s best efforts have questioned the glorification of national
expansion.
As I have already shown through analysis of The Searchers, ideological
contradictions are laid bare in its exposure and fierce critique of the racism
underpinning the rhetoric of nineteenth-century US expansionism. This intro-
spection occurs in The Searchers on both a formal and thematic level and has,
significantly, often been articulated in the Western genre as a whole through
the figure of the white male hero. As in the case of Ethan, the Western has often
held a mirror up to the myth of such heroes, undermining their status and, as a
consequence, questioning the very morality of the nation that they had come to
represent. Similar sentiments have been reiterated by McGee, who writes that
‘although the Western has often been described as a conservative film genre,
one that stresses extreme versions of masculinity and individualism . . . there
has always been another side to the Western, another shadow that it casts’.17
This being said, McGee essentially aligns himself with the theory of genre evo-
lution by insisting that this development within the genre is a consequence of
US civil and political strife during the late 1960s and beyond. The symptom
of which is that ‘the late westerns from directors like Sam Peckinpah, Sergio
Leone, Clint Eastwood, and others are more pessimistic than the films of the
classical period’.18
Most critical literature on Unforgiven (as exemplified by Greenberg and
O’Brien) fixes the film’s chronology firmly in this pessimistic ‘late’ period.
What few writers seem to scrutinise, however, are the very classical or revision-
ist conventions that are liberally applied to the genre with regard to its rela-
tion to frontier history and to cultural attitudes in contemporary US society.
There is typically assumed some kind of increasingly anti-mythological stance
and generic self-critique that developed from the early 1960s and prolifer-
ated as the twentieth century drew to a close. As a consequence of this, the
most prominent writing on Unforgiven tends to assume a set of traditional
or, rather, classical generic codes and motifs that the film either successfully

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repudiates through a conscious semiotic and thematic revisionism, or else ends

up succumbing to by the narrative climax.
As Unforgiven is so often held up as an exemplar of the revisionist phase of
the genre, moreover, as the end logic of the Western’s supposed formal and
ideological self-critique, it would be constructive to first contextualise such
a theoretical approach before beginning my own analysis of the film proper.
In what follows, I shall seek to briefly outline my general sentiments of the
Western genre beyond what has been outlined thus far and draw it onto the
sociohistorical moment of Unforgiven’s release. Specifically, by discussing
more properly classical Westerns I shall seek to continue my counter-argument
to the common revisionist contention put forward by Schatz and others that,
over time, ‘both the frontier community and its moralistic standard-bearers
are depicted in increasingly complex, ambiguous, and unflattering terms’,
along with the accompanying belief that ‘[t]he gradual fading of this optimistic
vision, more than anything else, characterises the evolution of the Western
genre’.19
To accompany this, I shall outline a 2007 analysis of Unforgiven offered by
Stephen McVeigh. Within the pessimistic logic of genre evolution, McVeigh’s
analysis draws on a political-allegorical approach to the Western in order to
relate, through a deconstructive comparison, Unforgiven’s narrative with that
of Shane’s. Ultimately, McVeigh offers up Eastwood’s film as ‘the postmodern
Western’.20

II
Previously I applied Tag Gallagher’s argument against genre evolution in order
to establish Shane and The Searchers as two reflective examples of the so-called
classical Western that questioned dominant mythological paradigms.21 That
is to say, they are two films whose narratives express what would come to
be known as revisionist traits. I argued that both films demonstrate narrative
confusion through the release of contending (often contradictory) sign systems.
In analysing these iconic Westerns, I sought to question the whole theory of
generic evolution insofar as it pertains to a tendency to utilise formal and
ideological-based distinctions that define individual films chronologically as
either classical, revisionist or, more increasingly of late, post-Westerns.
To further this line of critical enquiry, I incorporate into my analysis a theo-
retical contention put forward by Fredric Jameson. Jameson argues that any
‘cultural artefact’ is ineluctably connected with the historical circumstances
surrounding its inception, including its industrial–commercial production and
its social reception.22 From this we can suggest that, in the Western, the indi-
vidual film text ‘speaks’, as it were, through its ‘form’, obliquely articulating
the various ideological contradictions of its sociohistorical moment: variously
distorting, repressing and transforming such articulations, and exposing the
latent meanings behind any ostensible meaning promoted by the text.

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We can perceive already in Jameson a movement beyond the social and

formal reductionism of Wright’s structural analysis. Where Wright asserted
the existence of binary oppositions and patterns with the aim of establishing
unity, coherence and a fixed pattern of development within the genre, Jameson
highlights the potential in popular culture for textual disunity. As I have
shown, such a rigid approach as Wright offers reduces the oft-times rich and
ambiguous relationship between individual film texts and the socioeconomic
institutions from which they emerged to one of unproblematic ideological
reflection. This approach to the Western falls within what Altman and Neale
have both termed the ‘ideological’ approach to genre.23 According to Neale,
the ideological approach, ‘open to the charges of reductivism, economism, and
cultural pessimism’, refuses the very possibility that an individual film text
could resist dominant culture, much less articulate its ideological contradic-
tions.24 This led inevitably to formulaic and simplistic (mis)readings of whole
rafts of film texts. For Jameson, such indeterminate aesthetic qualities, so often
in evidence in artefacts of popular culture, are to be utilised as lenses through
which one can seek to clarify and lay bare a particular artefact’s political,
social and economic roots.
Jameson insists upon the priority of the ‘political perspective’ for the inter-
pretation of narrative, while simultaneously arguing that history rejects any
given attempt to represent it ‘totally’. Hence, the ideological manipulation
of history to suit particular individual or collective class, economic or other
­interests is, as a consequence, never complete, never as simple as Wright’s
approach would have us believe. (Jameson’s relation to Foucault here should
be apparent.) ‘[A] given artistic process’, Jameson contends, ‘is informed by
contradictory sign systems and, as sedimented content, it carries ideologi-
cal messages of its own, distinct from the manifest content of the text [and]
display[s] such formal operations from the standpoint of what [we] will call
the “content of form”’.25 The ‘content of form’ relates directly to another of
Jameson’s terminologies. It is similarly rooted in what he calls the ‘ideology
of form’.26 And this he defines as ‘the symbolic messages transmitted to us by
the coexistence of various sign systems . . . as a determinate structure of still
properly formal contradictions’.27 Here there is a ‘determinate contradiction
of specific messages emitted by the varied sign systems which coexist in a given
artistic process as well as in its general social formation’.28
By the time of the release of Shane and The Searchers, the most dominant
issues of the ‘social formation’ being asserted as ideology in the United States
concerned the cultural transition from post-Second World War to early-stage
Cold War sociopolitical environments. We are reminded here of Robert
Warshow’s ethical claim for the Western as offering a ‘serious orientation
to the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else in our
culture’.29 In making this claim, and despite his well-known reservations with
regard to the import of ‘social problems’ into the post-Second World War
Western, he thus identifies the genre as the major popular cultural expression

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of the modern American zeitgeist. It is from this premise that, years later,
Richard Slotkin could regard Shane, High Noon and The Gunfighter (1950)
as all having their roots in the post-Second World War phase of the genre he
calls ‘renaissance’ Westerns. He reasons this by their apparent ‘[addressing of]
. . . the complex of ideological problems that we may call “social justice”’.30
For Slotkin, this era heralded an increased sense of self-consciousness among
producers of Westerns, often resulting in overtly ‘stylised’ films whose princi-
pal narrative concerns were structured around the image of a lone male hero.
Sometimes this would manifest itself to the point of ‘fetishisation’, whereby ‘a
single element of the Western (e.g. prowess with a gun, or the gun itself) is iso-
lated from its original context and made the subject of exaggerated attention
and concern’.31 The suggestion here is that these films achieved this emphasis
by incorporating stylistic elements from film noir (and other urban detective
formats), with their particular narrative concentration on the personal psy-
chology and morally duplicitous motivation of their protagonists.
Slotkin’s suggestion that the Cold War Western adopts some of the formal
characteristics of film noir points towards hybridity within the genre and a
wider intertextual interplay within cinematic genres as a whole. Indeed, though
Gunfighter Nation is predominately about Westerns, Slotkin shows how other
genres (particularly the War film and the Epic) play off the structure of both
frontier mythology and the Western. In addition to this exaggerated mythical
image, and in accordance with the aspects of Jameson’s theoretical approach
I outlined above, Slotkin suggests that there was often a ‘consonance between
the formal character of the gunfighter’ and a wider ‘ideological content’.32 This
last was concerned with expressing cultural attitudes towards violence, both
through its expression and the situations that justified its use. Interpreted in
this way, the figure of the gunfighter becomes ‘an important symbol of right
and heroic action for filmmakers, the public, and the nation’s political leader-
ship’.33 Slotkin suggests that this ‘renaissance’ spirit caused, among the ‘best’
directors at least, a ‘highly developed sense of the genre as genre’, and he cites
Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950) as emblematic of this introspective
development.34 He describes Mann’s ‘organising of each episode . . . around
the theme or setting of a different subtype of Western, including the town-
tamer, the stagecoach journey, the outlaw Western, and the Cavalry/Indian
Western’.35 This is presented as evidence of ‘the self-conscious sense of genre
convention’ apparent as a new development in the post-Second World War
Western.36
While I do not deny the validity of Slotkin’s reading of Winchester ’73, could
not the same self-consciousness also be applied in equal measure, for instance,
to John Ford’s pre-Second World War Stagecoach? Stagecoach is, after all,
beholden to a similarly modernist sensibility as that of its post-Second World
War and Cold War counterparts. By self-consciously incorporating many
formal and thematic tropes from both feature Westerns and the raft of the
contemporary ‘B’ movies that preceded it (its ‘stagecoach journey’, attendant

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‘Cavalry/Indian’ chase, and its incorporation of the ‘outlaw Western’ with the
Ringo Kid’s revenge against the Plummer brothers in Lordsburg – a subplot
which, not incidentally, eventuates in some ‘town-tamer’ exploits of its own),
the same ‘sense of genre convention’ Slotkin attributes to Winchester ’73
applies to Ford’s Stagecoach in equal measure. It is curious to note, therefore,
that Slotkin writes of Ford’s ‘return to the Western genre’ with Stagecoach
as being ‘undertaken with revisionist intentions’, and that Ford ‘wanted to
develop and expand the latent capacities of the old form as a vehicle for cin-
ematic expression’.37 I agree with Slotkin’s contention that Stagecoach is an
example of generic self-consciousness, yet such a contention seems at odds
with his own insistence on an increased sense of the ‘genre as genre’ beginning
only after the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War.
Quite apart from this chronological glitch, Stagecoach’s commonly asserted
status as a classical Western also becomes questionable if we scratch under
the narrative’s surface and apply Jameson’s concept of the content of form. In
Schatz’s reading, the romantic union of the outlaw, Ringo Kid (John Wayne),
and the prostitute, Dallas (Claire Trevor), is essentially optimistic, as ‘the
uncivilised outlaw-hero and a woman practicing society’s oldest profession
have been united and go off to seek the promise of the American West’s new
world’.38 However, Gallagher alerts us to the significance of the fact that Doc
Boone (Thomas Mitchell) insists that, in being forced to flee the United States
for sanctuary in Mexico at the close of the narrative, Dallas and Ringo are
‘saved from the blessings of civilisation’.39 Actually, they are not permitted
to stay in Lordsburg by the town’s authorities. Despite Ringo’s heroism in
protecting the occupants of the stagecoach from Apache attack, and despite
Dallas’ help in delivering Lucy Mallory’s baby, they are branded outcasts –
personae non gratae – and forced to live an outlawed existence on the run in
Mexico. This is as opposed to being free to seek ‘the promise of the American
West’s new world’. For Gallagher this is hardly the ‘optimistic vision’ beneath
a superficial ‘veneer of cynicism’ that Schatz proposes.40
Perhaps Schatz’s terms could even be inverted, where a veneer of optimism
masks a particularly cynical vision, a complex and ambiguous apperception
introspectively based on past Westerns and on the contemporary socioeco-
nomic climate from which Stagecoach drew its narrative inspirations. To me it
seems difficult to discern optimism from the film’s conclusion. This is, indeed,
signposted from the outset of the narrative with Dallas initially forced out
of the township of Tonto by the Puritanical intolerance of the women of the
‘Ladies’ Law and Order League’, and ostracised from ‘polite society’. This
suggests the very opposite of Schatz’s interpretation where, in fact, the so-
called ‘promise of the American West’s new world’ is something categorically
denied both Ringo, ‘the uncivilised outlaw-hero’, and Dallas, the prostitute
‘practicing society’s oldest profession’. There is, therefore, an undoubted
irony in Stagecoach’s view of the ideology asserted through the myth of the
West, a subtle undermining of Greenberg’s assertion that, traditionally, the

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Western ‘celebrated’ the ‘indomitable thrust to push back the frontier, tame
the ­wilderness . . . “build houses”’.
In agreement with this hypothesis and in keeping with the spirit of Folsom’s
approach to the genre as outlined above, Lenihan writes:

Stagecoach actually conveys as much social criticism as did High Noon.

Ringo’s departure from Lordsburg and [the] ‘blessings of civilisation’ at
the film’s conclusion are as much a condemnation of society’s weaknesses
as was Marshal Kane’s departure from Hadleyville – a point that also
appears to have escaped John Wayne when he criticised High Noon’s
denigration of American heritage.41

Such ironic closing sentiments as Stagecoach displays suggest that a cynical

view of the coming of civilisation is discernable in Westerns of a much earlier
period than those produced during the first years of the Cold War; it is,
after all, a Depression-era film that critiques bureaucracy, banks and social
repressions. Ford’s film stands in defiance to Schatz’s argument that classi-
cal Westerns are essentially optimistic, let alone being narratively simplistic
or culturally ‘naive’. Stagecoach problematises the commonly held argument
that depictions of frontier civilisation in the Western steadily deteriorated as
the genre underwent a process of increasingly self-conscious introspective
revisionism. Such insights prove to be invaluable when engaging with a critical
reassessment of Unforgiven’s revisionist status, a status reaffirmed in 2007 by
Steven McVeigh.

III
As mentioned above, McVeigh explores the political-allegorical functions of
the Western at the close of the twentieth century. He also proposes that the
majority of prominent Westerns released from the early 1960s onwards were,
to one extent or another, revisions of Shane and its eponymous hero. He traces
a line of ‘transcendental’ Western protagonists, foregrounding their ideologi-
cal function, and grades them against Shane as heroic models for US political
leadership:

The character of Shane resonates in the culture and finds common

ground with Kennedy. In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, the
western generally, but Shane in particular, is subverted, the innocent
values lost, along with the possibility of heroic leadership and all of this
compounded by American involvement in Vietnam.42

He thus assesses Unforgiven in a revisionist vein, as an expression of ‘the

genre’s fragmentation’ in this tumultuous period. For McVeigh, ‘Unforgiven
. . . contains multitudes, and as such . . . attempts to speak to and of many

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different perspectives’.43 This is, presumably, in a way that earlier, more prop-
erly classical, Westerns do not. It is for these reasons that McVeigh makes his
claim for placing Unforgiven among those revisions of Shane that ‘resonat[e]
with the outlook of the New Western History’.44 He declares Unforgiven ‘the
postmodern Western’, a brutally introspective deconstruction of stock Western
types and the ‘archetype’ of Shane. ‘Shane is remade in the decades following
the original release,’ McVeigh insists. ‘But the question emerges, what kind of
Shane is produced?’45 He asserts Shane’s ‘timeless’ credentials, while simulta-
neously suggesting it as contingent upon changes in cultural attitudes, as an
‘updating of traditional mythic and generic patterns’.46
In attempting to establish the ‘difference that exists between the classic
Hollywood Western and these revisions of Shane’, McVeigh establishes a
paradigm that asserts either an elegiac mourning of past frontier ideals or a
nostalgic celebration of what has been lost. For him, this distinction also marks
the distinction between the ‘classic Hollywood Western’, which now appears
as ‘anachronistic’ in the post-Kennedy period, and the elegiac concerns of
the ‘new “Shanes”’, which ‘are born from a mourning for the loss of frontier
values’.47 For him, Shane’s overtly mythical aesthetic gives the film a transcen-
dental power:

The movie’s intention to place a mythical agenda over simple narrative

function, and the archetype that is the character Shane, means that the
film transcends its generic Western limitations and emerges as an impor-
tant American cultural artefact . . . [Shane] does not fit into an easy chro-
nology of the gunfighter mystique and it does not remain locked up in its
generic Western confines.48

McVeigh’s use of the term classical and his particular concentration on Shane
as ur-narrative – ‘a point of origin’ – remains, for me, unsatisfactory.49 Aside
from the dubious assumption here that narrative is a ‘simple’ function of the
film, McVeigh puts forward a contentious, but all too common, belief that
popular genres act as ‘limitations’ for creativity, surmountable only by a great
filmmaker or a visionary artist. After all, in asserting Shane’s status as ‘an
important American cultural artefact’ through this transcendence, McVeigh,
whether he intends to or not, is implicitly suggesting that other Westerns
simply fail to achieve this level of cultural significance.
McVeigh’s focus on Shane reduces the influence of such socially significant
and related films as High Noon and The Gunfighter from the theoretical equa-
tion. Along with Shane, Slotkin interprets these films as forming part of a loose
‘trilogy’ of ‘gunfighter’ Westerns, which emerged in the early 1950s. Not so
for McVeigh, for whom Shane is, ‘contrary to Slotkin’s depiction of it as the
third link in a chain of similar films, [an] original Hollywood Western’.50 He
continues by claiming that Shane ‘is a world away from even such exceptional
Westerns as High Noon and The Gunfighter’.51 What is most significant about

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the context of McVeigh’s analysis of Shane (and, by implication, Unforgiven)

is what he neglects to analyse. Foucault’s ‘not said’ returns here with a venge-
ance, as mention of that important film, The Searchers, is missing from his
argument. In fact, the film does not feature in McVeigh’s study of the Western
genre at all.
Omissions of important film texts aside, McVeigh’s interpretive schema fails
him even with respect to the films he discusses. The following excerpts from
The American Western make clear the procrustean nature of forcing films to fit
a developmental political-allegorical pattern of ever-pessimistic mythological
introspection and narrative evolution:

During Kennedy’s thousand days in the White House, there were no

cinematic attempts to revise Shane. There was not the cultural need to
investigate alternative models of leadership or heroism. A brief explora-
tion of the Western in the early 1960s demonstrates that the genre was
content to reflect, however fleetingly, contemporary social and political
concerns without questioning the figure of the leader.52

Such a ‘brief exploration’ McVeigh provides a mere two pages later, offering
his ideological interpretation of Liberty Valance:

If High Noon and Shane created models of heroic leadership that could be
discerned in Eisenhower and Kennedy, then The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance posed questions that Americans would come to ask of the nature
of heroic leadership, questions such as: on what do we base assumptions
about an individual? What happens if the individual becomes too power-
ful and abuses the power of the position or trust of the people?
  In construction, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is similar to
Shane. Both Shane and Stoddard [James Stewart] come to a community
and ultimately improve it through a series of violent episodes.53

Such a reading of Liberty Valance appears strange if one takes into con-
sideration McVeigh’s earlier assertions that, during the Kennedy admin-
istration, there was a lack of a ‘cultural need’ to criticise the figure of the
hero. And it must be noted that this film was released well over a year
before Kennedy’s assassination and, therefore, during his ‘thousand days
in the White House’, a time when, apparently, there was no ‘need to
investigate alternative models of leadership or heroism’. This contradiction
ruptures the smooth, self-reflexive revisionist chronology McVeigh would
otherwise seek to establish. Liberty Valance undoubtedly draws on many
Westerns, including Shane, though I doubt that their narrative ‘construc-
tion’ is as similar as is being suggested here. Indeed, the analyses of Shane
and The Searchers that I have already offered suggest that these ‘models of
heroic leadership’ were being self-consciously critiqued from within the genre

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myth of the western

decades before Kennedy was a major player in US politics, let alone elected
president.
I feel that McVeigh attributes too much credence to this political-allegorical
reading of Shane as a ‘plan’, or ‘model’, for heroic leadership that would
come to inform the popular myth surrounding Kennedy. This is especially so
if one considers how Slotkin’s own approach details how the ‘gunfighter’ plot
habitually slipped into the ‘revenger’ plot, towards even greater psychological
complexity of character pathology, and ‘was accompanied by the de-emphasis
(and for a while virtual abandonment) of the social/historical formulas of
motivation that had previously shaped Western scenarios’.54 In this particu-
lar narrative scenario, it is alleged that ‘the private dimension determines the
whole significance of the story’.55 While I do not entirely agree with this either,
I shall argue below that the narrative of Unforgiven concerns itself more with
this so-called ‘psychological’ or ‘revenger’ Western formula, which Slotkin
associates with the ‘outlaw’ mode of the genre, than it does with exposing –
much less deconstructing – a cultural symbol of heroic leadership modelled on
the figure of Shane.
Jon Tuska states that the political-allegorical interpretation of the genre
‘cannot ever really be verified: not by asking the director, the screenwriter,
other critics . . . When encountering them, you either agree or disagree; beyond
that . . . they are ultimately useless.’56 In this sense, one feels that McVeigh –
like Slotkin – tries too hard to read contemporary politics into Westerns. In a
review of Gunfighter Nation, New Western historian Richard White suggests
that the flaw in Slotkin’s approach lies in its very use of history:

[T]he historical techniques Slotkin deploys sometimes seem to amount

only to chronological serendipity . . . His tactic is to describe a political
situation and then show how a nearly contemporaneous movie is like
it or comments on it. This makes possible seemingly arbitrary com-
parisons between apparently unconnected events without demonstrating
any actual connections between their producers or a common popular
interpretation.57

The relevance of such a criticism, if applied to McVeigh’s analysis of Liberty

Valance, is clear where even such an instance of ‘chronological serendipity’
appears to be lacking.
I wish to make my position clear. I do not, like Tuska, refute that ideological
self-critique occurs within the genre as a result of changes in societal attitudes
and historical–political circumstances or, indeed, that the drawing of such
parallels is always serendipitous, as White suggests. Nor do I seek to deny
the fact that the Western (like any other cinematic genre) reinvents itself with
each successive generation, can be uncompromisingly introspective or that it
is anything other than ideologically labile. McVeigh, Slotkin, Coyne, etc. are
otherwise very illuminating in elucidating the oft-times rich and multifarious

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ways in which the genre responds to changes in sociopolitical circumstances,

and how it interacts with its informing mythic discourse. My major caveat
is just that, on occasion, arguments structured by the political-allegorical
approach seem too forced, suggestive of an (unconscious) ideological correla-
tion between producers of popular culture, policymakers in the United States
and historical events that is simply not borne out in the films themselves.
It is with the above issues in mind that I now offer my assessment of
Unforgiven. I investigate the film’s pretensions to historical, myth and genre
revisionism, and consider how far its narrative themes resonate with those
of the New Western History. Finally, I establish how far one can qualify
McVeigh’s assertion that Unforgiven stands as ‘the postmodern Western’ by
analysing the individualist hero in his role as gunfighter and the film’s articula-
tions of violence within the broader context of the genre as a whole.

IV
It is important to note from the very outset that Unforgiven is not, strictly
speaking, a revisionist Western, at least not in the manner prescribed by the
advocates of the New Western History. That is to say, it does not pretend to
offer a variant of the genre or a view of the late-nineteenth-century frontier
that is more historically accurate. (Of course, this is not the same as saying
that it bears no relation to history whatsoever.) As a consequence, many have
suggested that Unforgiven be read along intertextual lines. That is to say, as a
response to the Westerns of the past, the film asserts its own ideological stance
based to some extent on anti-myth. This type of approach makes no preten-
sions to objectivity; it just assumes a different mythic guise in order to respond
to that of the old. (This, of course, refers back to the discussion in Chapter 2
of the simultaneity of myth and anti-myth as is evident in The Searchers. The
extent to which this anti-myth, as is apparent in Unforgiven, is a deconstruc-
tion or outright repudiation of the myth it would seek to supplant, merely an
extension of it through different formal motifs, or a fundamental and systemic
part of the Western genre’s cultural–ideological dialectic is a matter of conten-
tion to which I shall respond during the course of this chapter.)
Unforgiven structures its narrative around the figure of lonely ex-gunfighter
turned pig farmer, William Munny (Clint Eastwood), a man who – so the
initial crawl informs us – is ‘a known thief and murderer, a man of notori-
ously vicious and intemperate disposition’. It situates itself in 1880 Wyoming
two years after the death of Munny’s wife Claudia. ‘Not at his hands as her
mother might have expected’, so we are told, ‘but of smallpox. That was in
1878.’ Despite initiating an historical allusion (the well-documented ‘Yellow
Fever Plague’ of that year), this event actually appears to serve within an exis-
tential context, one that has more to do with Munny than it does the broader
scope of the history of the West. Much like The Searchers did with Martha,
Unforgiven establishes the deceased Claudia as a nineteenth-century feminine

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ideal, a ‘structuring absence’, at least so in Munny’s mind, who on numerous

occasions claims that she ‘cured’ him of his past of ‘drink and wickedness’.
However, these initial anti-mythic sentiments are undercut by the establish-
ing shot of Munny’s Wyoming farmstead. Silhouetted against the romanticised
backdrop of an impossibly golden sky, it provides a stark contrast to the
avowedly unromantic information contained within the crawl. This shot’s
mythic nature is reinforced by the accompaniment of Lennie Niehaus’ nostal-
gic musical score. Much like the Edwards farmstead in The Searchers, with
its version of the popular Civil War song ‘Lorena’ playing on the soundtrack
and its Monument Valley backdrop set in 1868 ‘Texas’, Unforgiven’s opening
sequence makes clear from the very outset that the film is situated firmly in
mythic terrain.
Such mythic terrain is replicated throughout Unforgiven as glorious sunsets
silhouette the characters against stunning Wyoming and Alberta landscapes.
Masterfully rendered by cinematographer Jack N. Green, such shots are remi-
niscent of the painted canvases of Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and
Albert Bierstadt from whom such filmmakers as Ford drew their visual inspi-
ration for pictures like Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). In
Unforgiven, the landscape imports itself into the psychology of the characters
themselves, creating what we might call an ‘existential geography’. It also
serves a more prosaic function by providing a contrast to the sense of restric-
tion engendered by the film’s urban spaces.
First and foremost, however, in Unforgiven Eastwood revisits his own myth,
which had been cemented in the mid-1960s by a number of truly mythical
lead roles. In a fruitful collaboration with the Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone,
Eastwood’s star persona was established in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a
Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967). One
area of theoretical consensus on these Italian Westerns was their self-conscious
detachment from such notions as the domestication of the wilderness and
Anglo-America’s Manifest Destiny. With Leone, the notion of community
gave way to a fetishistic concentration on the favoured trope of the gunfighter.
Here the hero’s moral position in relation to the code was ambiguous to say
the least, and his isolationism and self-interest was often taken to the extreme.
Leone’s depictions of violence were brutal and comical in equal measure,
but they managed (more or less) to make a distinction between the hero’s
use of violence and that of the villain – a distinction that McVeigh insists is
absent from Unforgiven, where it ‘is impossible to decide categorically who
is good and who is bad’.58 Leone’s Westerns are often charged with reducing
to depthlessness the figure of the gunfighter and re-imagining him as some
kind of supernatural avenging angel: the atavistic Man with No Name. This
figure has no history, no past, no story. Any sense of history (either personal
or otherwise) is wilfully suppressed in favour of social fantasies of elaborate
and violent ‘fast-on-the-draw’ shootouts. It is this aspect in particular that led
many theorists to offer post-modernist readings of Leone’s work.

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Leone’s Westerns proved to be extremely popular in the United States, and

inevitably fed back into Eastwood’s Hollywood output. This gave the actor/
director a star persona with a very definite history from which to contextualise
his own career. By conflating two major aspects of the US cultural mindset –
the popularity of the Western and the accessible narrative conduit of frontier
mythology – Eastwood, like John Wayne before him, established himself as
a part of this culture, directing and/or starring in some truly iconic Westerns
such as High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Whales (1976) and Pale
Rider (1985). As a consequence of this, it would be difficult (I would argue
nigh-on impossible) to interpret the sad figure of Munny – ailing farmer and
knee-deep in pig shit – without an introspective reference to these films, as few
(if any) moviegoers could conceivably have watched Unforgiven without being
mindful of such a culturally significant cinematic legacy.
The first indication that the Western genre and the myth are being discussed
in Unforgiven is provided by the names of the characters, beginning with
Munny himself. Although I have not read it mentioned anywhere, Will Munny
seems to relate to the name Will Penny – a down-and-out westerner from a
1968 film of the same name.59 More significantly, William Munny is also a
very obvious allusion to William H. Bonney, more commonly known by his
alias, Billy the Kid – popular folk legend of the Lincoln County War. With the
possible exception of Jesse James, Billy is the mythical figure par excellence of
cinema’s Wild West. This attribution is accompanied by the presence of the
Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvet) – the young criminal braggadocio who is in awe
of Munny’s notorious legend as ‘the meanest goddamned son-of-a-bitch alive’.
It is the Kid who prompts Munny out of retirement for a $1,000 bounty and
who is clearly more fascinated with the idea of the gunfighter than he is with
financial profit.
The Kid is one of the characters through whom the audience can assess
Unforgiven’s statement on the power of the myth in mediating cultural–­
historical experience. Believing Munny’s brutal credentials through the strength
of rumour and hearsay alone, the Kid constructs an image of Munny much
akin to the way the audience constructs a popular–cultural image of Eastwood.
And much like our own perception, the Kid’s is hopelessly flawed (this is sug-
gested through the all-too obvious metaphor of the Kid needing eye-glasses).
By the time the Kid meets Munny, this ‘bad-ass’ image has set in his own mind,
much like Eastwood’s has in ours. It is in this regard that, upon meeting this
unobtrusive and apparently weak old man, his disappointment can be said to
mirror our own: ‘You sure as hell don’t look like no mean-assed son-of-a-bitch
cold-blooded goddamned killer to me!’
In addition to the Billy the Kid allusion, Munny’s surname could also be a
pun on money, a signification that would indicate the reasons for his violent
past, and his reason for taking on the proverbial ‘one last job’ with the Kid and
his old friend and partner-in-crime, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). McGee
provides perhaps the best account of this:

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Munny (Eastwood), Little Bill (Gene Hackman), and English Bob (Richard
Harris) all have names that allude to currency; and [that] the plot of [the]
film is driven by the desire for money and the need to defend or resist the
concept of private property that determines the value of everything.60

Although this hypothesis is strongly supported by the blatant economic inter-

ests of several of the characters in Unforgiven, I would ultimately side with
Carl Plantinga, whose own review of the film suggests that its overriding
concern is with depicting masculinity, in that ‘much of Unforgiven’s violence
stems from threats to male potency and power’.61 The majority of revisionist
readings of Unforgiven contend that it is the myth of the heroic avenger who
brings justice with his six-gun that is repeatedly ridiculed, and several separate
episodes within the narrative deal with masculinity in this regard. The starkest
of these occurs when Ned asks Munny if he has been with a woman since the
death of Claudia. Munny looks sheepishly to the ground and gives the slightest
shake of his head; the answer is evidently a no.
Many of the remainder of Unforgiven’s cast have standard Western names
– so standard in fact that they appear as clichés. Strawberry Alice (Frances
Fisher) is far from as sweet as her nickname suggests. She displaces her hatred
towards men for a lifetime of prostitution onto the two cowboys – Quick Mike
(David Mucci) and Davey Boy Bunting (Rob Campbell) – responsible for a
vicious assault on Delilah (Anna Thompson-Levine). It is Alice who becomes
the driving force behind raising the $1,000 bounty to place on the cowboy’s
heads and, in so doing, sets in motion the slow spiral of violence and revenge
that structures the narrative. Mike’s nickname is also significant in terms of
masculinity. ‘Quick’ could refer to his ability to draw a gun; however, in
relation to his ‘teensy little pecker’ that Delilah ridicules (thus prompting his
brutal attack upon her), it is more likely a reference to premature ejaculation.62
Finally, the name of (supposedly) professional gunfighter, English Bob – ‘The
Duke of Death’ – appears as a terrible cliché. Bob is initially accompanied by a
dime novelist, W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubenik), who is writing a biography
of the Duke’s ‘heroic’ exploits. As the film’s very own mythmaker, this irksome
hack compliments the Kid’s avid consumption of popular folklore. It is, after
all, Beauchamp who creates the fascinating stories about noble gunfighters and
who admits to ‘adding a certain “poetry” to the language’. (Beauchamp also
shares the Kid’s literal short-sightedness, sporting thick spectacles through
which he perceives and constructs his myopic view of the frontier.)
Much of the narrative’s action takes place in the fictional Wyoming town-
ship of Big Whiskey, which is run by Sheriff Little Bill Daggett. Daggett’s name
has also been seen as a pun on both money (the Dollar bill) and on manhood
(little ‘willy’). Indeed, one wonders why the bulky Daggett would be nick-
named ‘Little’ in the first place. This is especially so since he turns out to be
one of the narrative’s more genuinely tough and violent characters. Daggett’s
brand of law is indeed brutal, direct, and resides in the logic of deterrence: ‘No

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Firearms in Big Whiskey, Ordinance 14’. English Bob is the first of the would-
be assassins lured by the promise of ‘whore’s gold’ to arrive in Big Whiskey. He
arrogantly ignores the edict and is promptly surrounded by the Sheriff and his
armed deputies. Stripped of his pistols he is beaten to a bloody pulp by Daggett
who, in front of numerous shocked townsfolk and a terrified Beauchamp,
warns all would-be assassins to stay away from Big Whiskey:

I guess you think I’m kicking you, Bob. But it ain’t so. What I’m doing
is talking, you hear? I’m talking to all those villains down there in
Kansas. I’m talking to all those villains in Missouri. And all those villains
down there in Cheyenne. And what I’m saying is there ain’t no whore’s
gold. And if there was, how they wouldn’t want to come looking for it
anyhow.63

Just before being rode out of town, Bill returns Bob’s Colt .45, the barrel now
comically twisted in an obvious symbol of emasculation. Leighton Grist sug-
gests that Daggett’s brutal deconstruction of Bob’s masculine image is com-
pleted when Bob leaves, cursing the townsfolk, ‘his measured, “aristocratic”
speech is [now] replaced by peevish insults and a coarse Cockney accent’.64
As for Daggett, whether his name is merely a reminder of what initiates the
violent chain of events depicted in Unforgiven (that is, in relation to Quick
Mike’s insulted manhood) or is a comment on his own sexual impotency
remains unclear. However, it is important to note that Big Whiskey’s sheriff,
prone to such psychotic outbursts, is also an unmarried man who, without the
traditional domesticating image of the female, is building a house as unstable
as his temper.
Reading Daggett in this fashion supports Grist’s popular contention that
male violence in the film can be explained by a lack of sexual fulfilment.65 Such
is similarly suggested when, in an attempt to lure Logan into a share of the
bounty, Munny states that they had done killings for money in the past: ‘Yeah’,
replies the now settled Logan, gazing past Munny at his wife, ‘we thought we
was doin’ it for money.’ A broad observation of the film in this regard would
surmise that the sexually fulfilled Logan proves incapable of killing, whereas
the sexual unfulfilled Munny proves the opposite. This observation is borne
out in the narrative when Logan attempts to shoot Davey. Crouching from a
vantage point high above a valley, he has the cowboy clearly in the sight of
his Spencer rifle, but cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. As I shall discuss
in more detail below, the murder of Davey will be left to Munny, who has no
such moral scruples.

V
Big Whiskey itself is certainly foreboding and is worth discussing in relation
to Unforgiven’s revisionist status. Dark, murky and ramshackle, its denizens

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scurry about its mud-sodden streets, all the while cowering under a seem-
ingly unending barrage of thunderstorms. The principal economy seems to be
based on booze and ‘billiards’ at Greeley’s Saloon.66 It constitutes a repudia-
tion of Turner’s historical image of the pioneering community as vanguard in
the westward progress of Anglo-American civilisation. As Greenberg has it:
‘the railroad stops here.’67 On the whole, Big Whiskey goes some way towards
vindicating Slotkin’s contention that the ‘gunfighter’ narrative borrows the
stylistic elements of film noir for its dominant aesthetic. Here is the conclusion
of Greenberg’s revisionist descriptive:

No church is seen in Big Whiskey, nor God mentioned. The daunting

milieu presented by David Peoples’ script exists in a kind of moral pre-
history, where raw aggression is regularly answered by talion vengeance.
Macbeth and Lear are not far from the conception.68

Other scholars have understood Big Whiskey in intertextual terms, suggesting

that it follows in a similar vein to Eastwood’s other mythic frontier townships,
most notably the coastal settlement of Lago in High Plains Drifter. Lago is
a ramshackle community that houses corrupt and murderous citizens, and
whose buildings Eastwood’s mysterious avenger famously has painted red
and renamed ‘Hell’ following his instigation of a brutal, climactic massacre.
The Drifter is Eastwood’s first response to Leone’s direction of him as No
Name, although this time the metaphorical associations of him with death
have become literal. Jim Kitses suggests that, with Big Whiskey, as in ‘Leone’s
West, savagery has invaded the community’.69 Plantinga supports this view,
remarking that when the audience is first introduced to the township, ‘they find
a corrupt version of American society, driven by a capitalism blind to humane
values . . . [protecting] private property at the expense of human rights’.70 One
might be forgiven for seeing in all this a revisionist repudiation of the trium-
phal myth of the pioneering community. But we should ask the question: how
far does this aspect of Unforgiven really lend itself to an increased sense of
critical awareness of mythological values in the genre as a whole?
I have already discussed Stagecoach in relation to Schatz’s attempt to estab-
lish proof of an evolutionary model within the Western. We might remind our-
selves that he sees in its narrative an essentially positive view on the synthesis
between civilisation and wilderness. His overall formula assumes that a greater
sense of ‘optimism’ and social values is to be found in Ford’s earlier Westerns
like Stagecoach than they are in the ‘cynicism’ of later films like Liberty
Valance.71 As I have already suggested, however, the historical chronology of
a genre is no guarantee of linear shifts in cultural mood, much less of an evolu-
tionary schema. This has been argued to devastating effect by Gallagher, who
dismisses Schatz’s ‘extended’ but thoroughly ‘invidious’ comparison between
the two films’ depictions of civilisation as proof of any such evolution within
Ford’s corpus.72 Gallagher inverts the terms within which Schatz regards these

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two Fordian communities. He declares that in Stagecoach, ‘civilisation is cor-

rupting’, and, furthermore, that ‘in malodorous, dirty, sleazy Lordsburg and
Tonto, full of the mean, intolerant, aggressive people . . . one finds nothing of
the idealism, progressivism, and enlightenment shared by virtually everyone in
Liberty Valance’s Shinbone’.73 Such observations are partly justified when one
recalls Stagecoach’s townships in any detail: the mean streets of Lordsburg,
host to three brutal murders courtesy of Ringo, do not hold up too well to
Schatz’s assertion that Stagecoach ‘offers the promise of an ideal frontier
community’.74
Despite providing a more comprehensive view of Tonto and Lordsburg than
Schatz, Gallagher might well be accused of over-simplifying the community
of Shinbone to best suit his own argument. Indeed, it must be admitted that
it is difficult to marry his utopian vision of ‘progressivism and enlightenment’
with what we see on the screen. After all, Shinbone is a place where prospec-
tive visitors are mugged and viciously beaten on their way in via stagecoach;
where a comically inept Marshal (Andy Devine) is utterly powerless to prevent
Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his cronies from running wild; and where
the ostensible hero, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), seems quite content to let it
all go on without a singular care for the community of which he is nominally
a part. His willingness to shoot Valance over something as trivial as a steak
while turning a blind-eye to the thug’s brutal ‘stand and deliver’ terror tactics,
is surely testament not to a hero, but to a selfish individual in a similarly selfish
and lawless community.
It is not my intention here to intensely scrutinise these specific readings,
but offering brief comparative analyses of these frontier communities as they
are presented in two major Westerns from both the so-called classical and
revisionist phases of the genre, respectively, together with their relation to
Unforgiven’s Big Whiskey (not forgetting Drifter’s Lago), reveals two things
above all else. First, it gives further lie to the theory of the evolution of the
Western, specifically defined here through Schatz’s belief that ‘as the [Western]
formula was refined through repetition . . . the society becomes more insulated
and self-serving’.75 On the contrary, all the townships mentioned above – Lago,
Tonto, Lordsburg, Shinbone – appear to be ‘self-serving’, and Big Whiskey is
surely not as irredeemable as Lago. Secondly, these readings suggest that the
Western (as its best efforts make clear) is a genre acutely aware that the domes-
tication of the wilderness – the very mantra of triumphalist and progressive
frontier mythology – is never a straightforward process. Moreover, like the
community in The Searchers, they suggest that Anglo-American civilisation
itself is flawed. That it is, in other words, a fertile ground for engendering and
then propagating the sort of savage elements that it would otherwise claim to
have expunged following the settling of the frontier and denied through its
exceptionalism.
These descriptives as offered give weight to my suggestion that the Western
expresses the paradox that lies at the heart of the myth. That is to say, the

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frontier is both Garden and Desert. Savagery has not so much ‘invaded’ the
community, as Kitses suggests, rather, it was always already there, brought
along by the so-called emissaries of progress themselves. What Plantinga
describes as a ‘corrupt version of American society’ is not particularly a revi-
sionist corrective, therefore, it is an aspect of US history that the Western has
always articulated, sometimes only by mere implication, at other times, as in
The Ox-Bow Incident, where justice gives over to fascism in the form of a
lynch mob, it is rendered in explicit terms.
Although I have thus far argued for the existentialist nature of Unforgiven, it
is worth mentioning that both Kitses and Plantinga impress the ‘Americanness’
of the scene where Daggett beats Bob to a bloody pulp: it is Independence Day
with US flags lining the shop fronts along Big Whiskey’s main street, signifi-
cantly held in frame behind Bill, establishing him as the New World authority
against Bob’s Old World ‘Englishness’, which easily translates into cultural
‘otherness’.76 If, indeed, the Western is to be understood as a mythologised
version of US history in microcosm, and if the frontier communities under dis-
cussion here are anything to go by, then the genre’s attitude towards the birth
of the nation is none too flattering, expressed as it is on a basis of exploitation,
violent intimidation and theft.

VI
Foremost among the exploited in Big Whiskey are the prostitutes managed by
Skinny Desbois (Anthony James), proprietor of Greeley’s. Alice and the rest
of the prostitutes directly under her charge are regarded by all as Desbois’
property. After Delilah has been assaulted by Mike, Desbois shows Daggett a
‘lawful contract’, declaring that Delilah represents ‘an investment of capital’
that, as a result of injuries, now constitutes ‘damaged property’. Tuska relates
that history has taught us that ‘women on the frontier had to endure all sorts
of hardships’ and, in direct reference to the Western, suggests that ‘the kind of
personal fortitude it required has hardly been represented’.77 The depiction of
the prostitutes in Unforgiven would seem to indicate a nod in this direction,
and in fact Eastwood has been praised for foregrounding the plight of the
‘women of Big Whiskey’.
In appearing to take seriously the issue of the dehumanising of women, the
assault on Delilah is to be ‘regarded as a business matter pure and simple’.78
Daggett’s administered punishment – seven horses to be given as recompense
by Quick Mike and Davey Boy to Desbois, not Delilah – underlines this, and
is proposed after the saloon owner’s callous appeal to Daggett that ‘nobody’s
gonna pay money for a cut-up whore!’ The exchange between sheriff and pimp
holds the former in a close-up as he knowingly utters the word, ‘property’; thus
does Daggett pronounce a sacred shibboleth of the United States – the right to
private property. In this case, however, this property right is at the expense of
Delilah’s rights as an individual. She is regarded as a commodity, equivalent

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to a ‘ham-strung cow pony’, to be paid for by her attacker’s own commodities

in turn.
One could justifiably regard Alice’s outright refusal of Davey’s apparently
genuine effort at recompense (having already compensated Desbois as ordered
by Daggett, he offers his last, best horse to Delilah) as morally righteous. To
reduce the assault on Delilah to the amoral economic concerns of the male-
dominated power structure in Big Whiskey would be to legitimate the female’s
perceived commodity status. It is a suggestion that Alice deems to be an out-
right insult. ‘A pony!? She ain’t got no face no more and you wanna give her a
pony!?’ This alone does not make Unforgiven a feminist (let alone revisionist)
narrative, however, as Kitses rightly asserts, to see in this act ‘evidence of a
praiseworthy independence and nascent feminism is to overlook its conse-
quences’, which are that Alice is acting out of vengeance ‘for the most despised
of women’.79 Indeed, it soon becomes apparent that Alice’s vengeance is not so
much designed for Delilah’s benefit as it is for herself; a displacement of impo-
tent rage for all the years that men have abused and degraded her. When Alice
and the other prostitutes pool their money into the bounty, Silky (Beverley
Elliot) asks Alice, ‘If Delilah don’t care one way or the other, what’re you so
riled about?’ Alice retorts sharply, ‘Just because we let them smelly assholes
ride us like horses, don’t mean we gotta let ’em brand us like horses!’ Alice
may not be greedy for money and the commodity value of ‘property’, but the
vindictiveness of her intentions shows that she too fails to transcend the venge-
ful spiral of violence that engulfs the film’s male characters. Kitses condenses
her narrative purpose thus:

It is Alice’s thirst for blood that triggers the cycle of violence, the expand-
ing arc of savagery and death that structures the film’s action – the brutal
beatings and messy executions finally culminating in the . . . finale’s
slaughter. ‘We all got it coming’: the design of the film is to show how
violence begets violence, how the appetite for blood grows.80

Kitses continues in relation to Davey’s rejected offer of a horse with the

insightful observation that ‘Alice is aghast that such is being volunteered [but]
how much might such a fine animal be worth towards a new life for Delilah?
The question does not arise in the context of the thousand dollars the women
have amassed as a reward.’81 Both Kitses and Plantinga rightly draw attention
to this important episode in the narrative, and are probably correct in describ-
ing Davey’s offer of his best horse to Delilah as a genuine act of ‘penance’, but
in suggesting (as Plantinga does) that this is an offer that ‘the women angrily
reject’ is to provide an over-simplification of this scene’s significance.82 In a
similar misreading, Ed Andrechuck notes that, ‘even the prostitutes, especially
their leader Strawberry Alice and the disfigured Delilah react with their own
unforgiving sense of frontier justice by calling in the gunmen’.83 A detailed look
at the shot construction of this scene lends itself to a different interpretation.

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During the women’s refusal of Davey’s offer of ‘penance’, and between the
constant barrage of mud and shit that Alice cajoles them into pelting him with,
a series of cut-away shots focuses on Delilah and Davey. Neither Plantinga
nor Kitses mention these shots in their analyses, although they are, one feels,
fundamental to the meaning that both of them seek to draw from this scene.
The sequence of shots reveals that, significantly, Delilah is not involved in this
attack on Davey who, although not completely innocent, at least tried to hold
back Mike once he realised that the latter was cutting into Delilah’s face with
his knife. If Alice was acting out for her friend’s welfare then surely she would
respond as Delilah does, as Delilah seems to want, with a quiet and poignant
dignity whose obvious compassion rests with the forgiving rather than the
‘unforgiving’ that Andrechuck suggests. In fact, Delilah looks ashamed as a
number of quick shot/reverse shots establish a stolen glance between her and
Davey as the latter, guilt-ridden and humiliated, casts his dejected gaze toward
the ground and rides away. The next shot holds Delilah in a medium close-up
as she similarly averts her gaze from Davey’s receding figure, and turns to walk
inside the saloon and away from this depressing spectacle.
The role of women in Unforgiven is not technically restricted to the prostitutes,
although it is fair to say that, despite their dehumanised status as ‘property’, they
(more specifically, Alice) constitute the film’s only active female agency. One is
thinking here, specifically, of Logan’s Native American wife Sally Two-Trees
(Cherrilene Cardinal). If one points to the positives of Sally’s inclusion in the nar-
rative (as many scholars have), one must also point out the fact that she still does
not have a voice. She acts as a kind of thematic match to Claudia, a silent pres-
ence to her structuring absence, if you will, but not a character in and of herself.
For his part, Logan appears to need no real encouragement in deciding to leave
Sally and his pastoral idyll, preferring instead to head off with Munny on what
Sally seems to rightly recognise from the outset as a fool’s errand (giving Munny
her ‘evil eye’ glance and touching his rifle butt forlornly before he rides away
with her husband). And as he leaves, Logan is acting exactly as the genre (and its
audience for that matter) expects: his love for money/Munny, whichever, easily
overrides his love for his wife, to whom he never even bids farewell.
One should reiterate also that Alice wilfully imbricates what agency she
does possess with the male-dominated cycles of bloody revenge. Plantinga
asserts that the role of women with regard to issues of sexuality and power in
Unforgiven is explored from diverse perspectives:

[Woman is depicted as] the Redeeming Feminine (allied with nineteenth-

century evangelical Christianity), as prostitute and property, as threats to
male power and the male ego, as victims of patriarchal capitalism, and as
a utopian subgroup valorised for its communal practices.84

As discussed thus far, I concur with most of the ‘roles’ that Plantinga assigns to
women in Unforgiven. I would, however, seriously query his attribution to the

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women of the role of ‘utopian subgroup’. To be fair, Plantinga does concede

shortly after this statement that ‘the women of Unforgiven are either powerless
to prevent violence . . . or complicit in it’. He goes on to suggest that the film
‘considers the redemptive power of the feminine’ before dismissing this as a
‘possibility of real change’.85 Grist would disagree on this point, stressing that
Delilah be allied with Davey and the Kid as representative of a younger genera-
tion devoid of ‘the destructive attitudes of the older generation [representing]
in its margins . . . an implicit faith in the future’.86 To my mind the role of
female agency in the film is hardly revised from most of the more prominent
Westerns that preceded it. However, if any characters embody the attribute of
‘utopian subgroup’, then Grist is probably right in naming Delilah and Davey.
I argue, though, that such ‘faith in the future’ is not manifest in the narrative
and is purposefully placed at its ‘margins’. (To paraphrase Mitchell, we might
say – where this text’s power resides.)
Davey would appear to genuinely seek forgiveness and Delilah would seem
to genuinely offer it in her dignified refusal of vengeance. Despite largely
denying her a narrative voice, the film is at pains to include shots of her
scarred face that in many ways ‘speak’ her story. This is a point well made
by Grist, who writes that such a ‘device . . . lends her the function of a silent
moral chorus’.87 In fact, for every mention of revenge or spectacle of violence
displayed in the narrative, there is an accompanying cut-away shot depicting
Delilah, never approving, always despondent and sad. She is powerless, torn
between the gratitude she feels towards her fellow prostitutes and fear, both
of the male-dominated power structure of Big Whiskey and, indeed, of Alice if
ever she was to criticise her motives.
McGee also makes an interesting point when he writes that ‘Delilah’s facial
expressions . . . suggest that, without knowing how to articulate it, she is
looking for something else besides revenge, something [where] a different kind
of social relationship is possible.’88 Delilah had attributed something like ‘a
different kind of social relationship’ to Munny and his deceased wife (although
initially, of course, she assumes that Claudia is alive as Munny still speaks
of her in the present tense). This is suggested in Munny’s brief but poignant
exchange with Delilah, which takes place soon after his recovery from a violent
fever and an equally violent beating he sustains at the hands of Daggett. The
conversation between them hints at the possibility of romance as Delilah, con-
scious of her facial scars, shyly offers Munny a ‘free one’ as a down-payment
on the $1,000 reward. Although he has clearly been looking at her with desire,
Munny declines her offer (both Logan and the Kid have accepted similar such
down-payments with the other women already). Assuming that it is because
of her scars rather than his puritanical abstinence, Delilah covers up and looks
hurt, ‘I didn’t mean . . . with me.’ Munny immediately attempts to redress his
unintentional insult, ‘It ain’t like that at all. You’re a beautiful woman an’ . . .
if I was to want a free one, I guess I’d want you more than them others. I can’t
have no free one on account of my wife.’ By insinuating that his wife is still

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alive I suggest that Munny has precluded this possibility and, by extension,
Unforgiven’s narrative has precluded any such feminised ‘utopian subgroup’
as a site of potential social change.
The role of women in Unforgiven, like the film’s pretensions to so-called
ethnic revisionism – specifically, the African American Logan and, once again,
his Native American wife Sally – I relate to what Jameson describes as ‘the
artificial reconstruction of the voice’.89 Here Jameson alludes to narratives
typically repressed by the ideology of the dominant class: ‘the oppositional
voices of black or ethnic cultures, women’s and gay literature, “naive” or mar-
ginalised folk art, and the like’.90 According to Jameson, these oppositional
‘voices’ are ‘for the most part stifled and reduced to silence, marginalised,
[their] own utterances scattered to the winds, or re-appropriated in their turn
by the hegemonic culture’.91 It remains for ‘the individual text, the individual
cultural artefact [through the] pluralistic rediscovery of other isolated social
groups’, to rewrite ‘these utterances in terms of their essentially polemic and
subversive strategies’.92 This would, Jameson contends, ‘restore them to their
proper place in the dialogical system of social classes [and] restore vitality to
. . . the aesthetic realm’.93 My contention is that Unforgiven simply does not
do this, and actually ends up promoting what Jameson refers to as ‘cultural
universalisation’, which ‘implies the repression of the oppositional voice, and
the illusion that there is only one genuine “culture”’.94
My reasons for using Jameson here are primarily to offer a counter-­
argument to McVeigh’s post-modernist and evolutionary reading that suggests
that Unforgiven ‘contains multitudes’ and that it ‘attempts to speak to and of
many different perspectives’.95 For the most part, as far as I see it, Unforgiven
merely pays lip-service to the inclusion of erstwhile elided ‘voices’, while actu-
ally assigning them marginalised roles that allow only for the emergence of a
single discourse, that of the gunfighter as an instance of ‘cultural universalisa-
tion’; rather than saying it ‘contains multitudes’, we might say that it re-con-
tains multitudes. Of course, Unforgiven, like any other text, betrays itself in its
assertion of a single, ‘stable’ meaning, it is just that any such argument must be
read here against the grain, it is not organic to the text as it is with, say, The
Searchers, and it does not seem intentional on the part of the filmmaker (or
else, if that were the intention, then the film must be read as a failure). This is
hardly the example of introspective generic revisionism.
In my reading, the women exist only to serve the greater need of that
version of the mythic narrative with which Unforgiven concerns itself. Of
course, Logan, as an African American, is equally embroiled in the gunfighter
discourse. In this respect, the narrative displays the opposite of post-modern
plurality, attempting, as indicated, to re-contain multitudes. The marginalised
voice is, as a consequence, denied the subversive free-play typically associated
with a post-modernist jouissance. Indeed, for all the narrative screen-time
afforded women in Unforgiven, their voice remains surprisingly marginalised,
silenced or, as with Alice, ‘re-appropriated’ into the ‘hegemonic culture’ of Big

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Whiskey’s male-dominated power structure; their presence seeking to re-affirm

rather than undermine masculinity and the mythology of redemptive violence.
Let us further consider some of these assertions.
The concept of the Redeeming Feminine is worth discussing in relation
to Munny’s deceased wife. I have already mentioned that Claudia is estab-
lished in the narrative through her non-appearance as a structuring absence
for the ex-gunfighter (a woman who, in life, supposedly cured Munny of his
drunken violence). In this regard, and combined with his vigils at her grave-
side, Unforgiven’s Munny suggests a homage to Nathan Brittles (John Wayne)
in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Aside from this intertextual reference,
Munny is just as keen to impress Claudia’s redemptive powers on his two
young children. ‘Your departed mother, God rest her, showed me the error
of my ways’; and ‘remember how the spirit of your departed maw watches
over you’. However, unlike Brittles, and despite always speaking fondly of
Claudia, Munny never speaks to her, even when alone at her graveside. The 23
April 1984 shooting script with Eastwood’s revisions (eventually abandoned
in favour of Peoples’ original 1976 screenplay) bearing the title, The William
Munny Killings, is very revealing on this issue:

The headstone is under a couple of shade trees fifty yards from the sod
hut. Munny is sitting on a rock under the trees looking at the headstone
and he has on a cheap black suit now. He twists the hat, tormented . . .
and he starts to say something out loud but he can’t because men don’t
talk to stones. So finally he gets up, slumped in defeat, and he puts a little
bouquet of flowers on the grave and he turns away unhappily.96

Women in Unforgiven are largely assigned symbolic roles within a masculine

mythos. The image of the female Munny can idolise, whereas a real woman
proves to be a problematic issue. For instance, when Munny wakes from his
fever to see Delilah nursing him he declares, ‘I thought you was an angel.’ He
thereby identifies her as a religious idol, a Redeeming Feminine.
In another scene, Munny holds up a worn photograph of Claudia, regards
her image (more idolatry) and then observes his old Starr .44 pistol. He puts
down the photograph and picks up the gun, considering it intently. Like
Tompkins suggests of the Western hero in general, Munny has now ‘jetti-
soned’ the feminine in preference for the role of the gunfighter. Even parental
responsibility fails to persuade Munny to forgo a chance at reclaiming his old
identity. He is not for farm labouring, and his attitude to the pastoral realm
echoes Shane’s unconvincing line to Joey: ‘A man’s gotta be what a man’s gotta
be. You can’t break the mold, I tried it and it didn’t work for me.’ The point
here is precisely that the few words that either Shane or Munny utter in this
regard prove unconvincing; neither really tries to change and yet, in the course
of favouring the gunfighter identity, both narratives betray the inadequacies of
such a figure in general.

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Tompkins further underscores the genre’s apparent refusal of the feminine

through the image of Eastwood’s earlier role in Josey Whales. Here, the femi-
nine is conceived within terms of Evangelical Christianity:

[S]trength counts more than prayer . . . when Clint Eastwood sees the
homemade cross he has put on the grave of his son fall over, he picks up
a gun from the charred ruins of his house . . . and starts shooting mania-
cally at a tree, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten times, every
shot ramming home his rejection of Christian forgiveness as a way of
dealing with injury, and promising the audience more violence to come.97

Tompkins’ description of Whales, or, rather, Eastwood, for she makes no dis-
tinction between character and actor, provides a strong contrast to the initial
depictions of Munny (although I shall argue below that such a contrast is
eventually collapsed).
The lure of the weapon – the way of the gun – becomes too great an exis-
tential pull for Munny, who is in the torturous process of questioning his very
identity. In fact, it would appear that any possible hope of redress is wilfully
closed off in preference to the stable subjectivity promised by the simplicity
of the myth of the gunfighter. This is suggested from early on in the narrative
when, having initially rejected the Kid’s offer to go on the bounty hunt with
him to Big Whiskey, the camera holds Munny’s face as he gazes longingly after
the receding image of the Kid. And as the Kid disappears over the horizon
it can be said that, along with him, goes what Munny feels is his last, best
hope for his future: his past. In this, Munny is looking longingly into his past
because his future, surrounded by fever-ridden hogs and condemned to abject
failure, is evidently too depressing an eventuality to even contemplate. Munny
and, by extension, Eastwood, is now ‘just a broke-down old pig farmer’, and
that is simply too much for him (or us) to bear. So, far from a more progressive
narrative such as The Gunfighter, which sees the protagonist, Jimmy Ringo
(Gregory Peck), tragically discover all too late that his identity resides in the
importance of his family as his future, Munny seems tragically all too eager to
abandon his family in favour of his past and his own selfish needs.
Initially, Unforgiven seems intent on a providing a revisionist account of
the gunfighter through an ironic reversal of the more typical image of the
Eastwood hero. The first such moment establishes Munny’s woeful inadequacy
with his pistol. Inverting Whales’ brutal efficiency, Munny aims at a tin can
and misses shot after shot after shot before finally relenting and blasting it into
oblivion with a shotgun. Such pathetic displays of marksmanship, combined
with his parodic inability to mount his horse and his advanced years, all work
to emasculate the tradition of Eastwood’s star persona as it has been estab-
lished through a character like Whales or The Preacher. Munny’s emasculation
is such that even his children, all shame-faced, wonder aloud to each other
whether ‘paw really used to kill folks?’ The fact that the narrative seems at

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pains to undermine this image is one of the main reasons that caused so many
critics and scholars to hail its revisionist status. However, I argue that such
undermining is depicted in Unforgiven solely for the purposes of engendering
our desire for the return of the gunfighter. Munny’s post-gunfighter existence
is predicated on economic failure, a deceased wife, single parenthood and
fever-ridden hogs. As such, it does not posit a workable (much less attractive)
alternative to the myth of the gunfighter. In other words, and to borrow psy-
choanalytical terminology, it serves only to encourage the audience’s longing
for the ‘return of the repressed’, for the re-emergence of the uber-masculine
on-screen persona of Clint Eastwood. We desire the return of No Name,
The Preacher, Josey Whales, even the diabolical Drifter (even ‘Dirty’ Harry
Callaghan), anyone but the sorry figure cut by William Munny.
By abandoning farm and family, Munny is essentially abandoning the
woman’s ‘iron rule’ that has kept him ‘domesticated’. This surely confirms
my above suggestions that women be read as some kind of symbol, icons to
be either venerated or deplored, but never real, and all the while thoroughly
emasculating to a mythic manhood. So Munny wanders back into the wilder-
ness to, ironically, become the protector of another woman – Delilah, in her
symbolic role as the proverbial damsel in distress, the captive of savage villains.
The account of Delilah’s tragic episode with Mike is itself exaggerated
beyond all recognition, first by the Kid in an effort to entice Munny, and then
by Munny in an effort to entice Logan. The tales of her scars, although clearly
severe enough, escalate out of all proportion to their reality. This Chinese-
whisper effect is compounded by Munny, ‘Cut her eyes out, cut her tits off, cut
her fingers off . . . everythin’ but her cunny, I guess.’ This wilful collusion in
exaggeration provides an important foretaste of Unforgiven’s particular nar-
rative concern with the process of mythmaking: how fact is embellished and
transformed into myth even as it is unfolding. Plantinga pointedly notes that
‘when Munny and Ned actually meet Delilah and see that her wounds have
been greatly exaggerated, the two continue their killing plans nonetheless.
Apparently, their own momentum is enough to motivate them at this point.’98
(I argue below that the lack of effect that this revelation has on Munny, Ned
or the Kid relates to a concept of them being ‘stuck’ in the mythic roles already
prepared for them by the myths of the past.) Perhaps more explicitly, such
embellishment acts to justify in the minds of the bounty-hunters their plans
to murder Davey and Mike. ‘Well, I guess they had it coming’, becomes the
film’s most repeated and least convincing statement. It resonates with a typical
Westerner’s attitude: his love for the gun and the image of the gunfighter far
outweigh his love for a woman (who acts as a mere cursory reason for his
desire for violent actions).
We might also remind ourselves that Logan’s idyllic farmstead and wife (the
diametric opposite of Munny’s fever-ridden swine and dilapidated adobe hut)
similarly fails as impetus to discourage him from leaving for Big Whiskey with
his old partner. Logan is also clearly still in thrall to the image of the gunfighter

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of his youth. ‘You still got the Spencer rifle?’ Munny asks Logan. Logan grins
back at him and boasts ‘Yeah, an’ I could still hit a bird in the eye flying.’

VII
John G. Cawelti once famously stated that, if established in the correct manner,
the Western hero’s act of violence becomes ‘graceful, aesthetic and, even,
fun’.99 Unforgiven’s manner of depicting violence has, justifiably, received a
lot of scholarly attention and not all of it is in consonance, either with each
other or with Cawelti’s assertion that Western violence is ‘fun’. One scholar
who has hailed the film’s revisionist stance on violence is Scott D. Emmert.
Emmert includes Unforgiven in a group of Westerns where ‘violence affects all
the characters negatively; rather than an unambiguous solution, their complic-
ity in violent acts becomes a moral burden that the characters must bear’.100
Quite apart from the dubious assumption that violence in Westerns is typically
‘an unambiguous solution’ to issues raised in the narrative, Emmert’s assertion
that Unforgiven stands as an ideologically revisionist ‘repudiation of violence’
is not as convincing as it may at first seem.101
It is true that we might feel little sympathy when the Kid executes the
brutal and unrepentant Mike, ignominious as his fate is – unarmed and while
sitting on a latrine (which, in a perverse sense, might just be considered ‘fun’);
however, Munny’s murder of Davey is something else entirely. It emphasises
the point that Davey did not ‘have it coming’ at all. Any moral justification
for his killing is therefore removed. And it is with undeniable disappointment
that Delilah reacts upon learning of Munny’s and the Kid’s act of cold-blooded
murder. ‘I didn’t think they’d really do it . . . that kid . . . he’s just a . . . boy.
And that other one, Bill, being so true to his wife . . .’ Alice finally corrects
her misperception, ‘He don’t have no wife, not above ground, anyhow.’102
Unforgiven is certainly deliberate in making this one thing clear: Davey’s fate
is both protracted and painful to watch. It is established thematically through
his aforementioned offer of ‘penance’, and is articulated formally through the
shot construction of his death scene. As the camera lingers on Munny’s own
uncomfortable reactions to what he has just done, Davey’s forlorn cries for
help echo throughout the Bar-T canyon. The Kid, beginning to doubt the very
myths of heroism through which his understanding of the world is mediated
and, in an effort to convince himself as much as anybody else, cries out, ‘Yeah.
Well. You . . . you shouldn’t of cut up no whores, you son-of-a-bitch!’
In consonance with Emmert, Grist elaborates further on the issue of violence
in Unforgiven:

This emphasis on the disturbing nature of violence contests its more

familiar generic representation. While most Westerns deal with the
ideological motivations and consequences of violence, far fewer examine
the destructive reality, the actual effects of violent acts. Since the sixties,

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violence in the Western has been represented with differing degrees of

explicitness, but the intention has rarely been to convey pain.103

Grist alludes here in particular to the blood-drenched films of Sam Peckinpah

and to Eastwood’s earlier collaborations with Leone, where, as I have already
suggested, violence was often amplified and excessive so as to appear comic
or even ‘fun’. By contrast, Grist considers violence in Unforgiven as ‘brutal,
dreadful, squalid: anything but noble or ennobling’.104 Such an account, of
course, assumes a pure archetype of the hero’s code that Unforgiven purpose-
fully deconstructs. Moreover, it also assumes that such a thing ever existed
within the genre in the first place. On this issue, Plantinga correctly notes
that ‘only the most simplistic Westerns . . . draw an unproblematic distinc-
tion between the hero’s good violence and the villain’s bad’.105 He then cites
(among others) The Searchers as an example of narrative complexity, praising
the film for its ‘examination of the hero’s motives and/or his use of violence’.106
Grist’s account of the killings of Mike and Davey, and his assessment of
Unforgiven’s overall attitude towards violence up till this point, is supported by
McVeigh who, as I have already mentioned, reads Unforgiven as a post-modern
deconstruction of the archetypal narrative of Shane. I have also mentioned
how he insists that Shane, of all the descendants of what Slotkin terms ‘renais-
sance’ Westerns, marks the most radical shift in the depiction of the gunfighter.
Accordingly, Shane is the first of the existential heroes who ‘establishes himself
in the role’, and whose own chivalrous values became progressively undermined
within the genre – ‘along with the possibility of heroic leadership’ – in the wake
of Kennedy’s assassination.107 And such pronounced cultural pessimism was,
according to McVeigh, ‘compounded by American involvement in Vietnam’.108
I suggested above that I feel this interpretation gives too much credence to the
conjectural assumption of a prophetic political–­ideological connection between
Shane and Kennedy. If anything, I feel Unforgiven more likely has its thematic
roots in that derivative of the renaissance Western that Slotkin termed ‘psy-
chological’, more to do with the personal traumas of a film like Raoul Walsh’s
Pursued (1947), than it does with the wider historical issues of US settlement
that concern a film like Shane. According to Slotkin, the psychological Western’s
main focus was on the motivation of the protagonist and was ‘accompanied by
the de-emphasis of the social/historical formulas of motivation’.109 This inter-
pretation is supported by Kitses, who suggests that ‘Eastwood’s ultimate iconic
meaning generally has to do with an image of masculinity rather than national
ethos, with a fusion of the dirty Westerner and Dirty Harry, figures in an exis-
tential landscape.’110 He also reinforces masculinity as the narrative’s catalyst,
suggesting in a wilful play on Freud that Unforgiven’s chief axiom might just be
‘masculinity and its discontents’.111
By its climax, Unforgiven’s plot has also segued into the ‘revenger’ plot.
This plot type typified the narratives of the Westerns directed by Anthony
Mann, and Kitses informs us that ‘[c]haracteristically, the Mann hero is a

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revenge hero’.112 Thus, it is with Mann’s existential heroes rather than Stevens’
introspective Shane that we can forge the strongest thematic-narrative link, or
a ‘point of origin’ as McVeigh has it.113 In a further link with Munny, Kitses
remarks on ‘the schizophrenic style of the [revenge] hero, the violent explo-
sions of passion alternating with precarious moments of quiet reflection’.114
This is not to say that this descriptive does not apply to Shane, for indeed it
does; it also fits numerous others, Ethan Edwards especially. My point of con-
tention is the singular nature of McVeigh’s assertion of Shane as a ‘point of
origin’ for the Western and for the films that followed its release.
Furthermore, McVeigh’s over-emphasis on an ideological analysis based
on political allegory has the effect of underplaying Unforgiven’s own sense of
generic intertextuality, which is (paradoxically) something that he claims for
his reading. Indeed, it is where his analysis is at its strongest:

The only positive aspect in the whole cycle of violence is the Schofield
Kid’s breaking out from it when confronted with its reality. This is
another element of the deconstruction of Shane, or more precisely Joey.
The Kid is fascinated by stories of the ‘Old Days’ in a way reminiscent of
Joey’s hero worship of Shane . . . His break from the cycle is completed
in the symbolic act of giving up the Schofield pistol, the icon . . . by
which legend would have ‘remembered’ his exploits. The stark realities
from which the myth grew affect the Kid as it does the audience into
re-examining the grounds for their fascination with screen violence and
Western mythology.115

Intertextual referencing is, of course, nothing new in the Western and nor is
a critiquing of the mythology through which it finds its terms of expression.
After all, Ford sought just such a critique through an undermining of the
genre’s semiotic codes in Fort Apache. In the end, Colonel Thursday’s reck-
less arrogance leads to the slaughter of his command at the hands of Cochise’s
Apaches. The film is itself often regarded in terms of allegory, as Ford’s version
of ‘Custer’s Last Stand’. Indeed, the images we see on-screen are replaced in
the end by the ‘official’ history of what we might call ‘Thursday’s Last Stand’.
Through the romance of a Remington-style painting, together with the col-
lusion of Captain York, Thursday’s memory – and that of the slaughtered
regiment – are preserved and immortalised through this heroic re-imagining
of the historical record. With York remarking that the painting is ‘Exact in
every detail’, the myth of heroic leadership is re-endorsed with no small trace
of irony after its exposure as fallacious. (We might remind ourselves that Fort
Apache was released years before Shane even went into pre-production and so,
too, it must be added, before Ford’s own Liberty Valance supposedly initiated
the era of the so-called revisionist Westerns.)
Ford was, in the words of Mitchell, one of ‘the most incisive analysts of
the genre’s capacity to alter history’, and in this capacity, he suggests, resides

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the belief that myths do not misrepresent, but ‘actively comprise history’.116
Liberty Valance provides another strong example of Ford’s attitude to myth
and history. It exposes the lie that the eastern ‘dude’ lawyer, Stoddard,
managed to kill the notorious outlaw, Liberty Valance, in a fair shootout, in
the process taming the town of Shinbone and ensuring both the coming of civi-
lisation and his own future career as a Washington senator. The film’s (perhaps
also the Western’s) most quoted phrase – ‘When the legend becomes fact, print
the legend’ – actually belies the fact that the film does precisely the opposite.
This is intentional on Ford’s part, of course, and it exposes the unpalatable
fact behind the official history that informed the myth of the frontier. But it
goes much further than this, with Mitchell suggesting that fact and legend are
‘mutually sustaining imperative gestures’:

The legend insidiously belies Ransom Stoddard’s self-righteous touting of

law over brute force, in an irony that draws attention to the incoherence
of the Western’s customary resolution (with masculine violence forced to
establish the terms by which violence can be declared illegitimate). Yet
Ford . . . delights in how such lies do not simply misrepresent but actively
comprise history, and refuses in Liberty Valance to allow fact instead to
stand in for the legend. The historical record, after all, embodies a legacy
of powerful lies more than of countless irrelevant truths.117

The ending of Liberty Valance is, I believe, intentionally ambiguous. The

film appears not to doubt the progressive elements of the creation of the
promised Garden out of a Desert, as Hallie (Vera Miles) makes clear to her
husband (even using the very terms laid out by Henry Nash Smith). Although
the overall tone is, perhaps, ironic, with the train’s smokestack polluting the
Garden with its smog; the train is no longer the symbol of progress but one
of Leo Marx’s ‘Machines’ in the Garden.118 Indeed, it would seem to suggest
the coming of modernity as a historical necessity, as the price paid for pro-
gress.119 However, with its monochrome photography, stage-set interiors
rather than ‘real’ Western locations, ambivalence towards modernity and, by
extension, civilisation, it is also a profoundly elegiac film. Liberty Valance
seems concerned with mourning the loss of the generically endemic concept
of wilderness itself.
Unforgiven’s own self-conscious attempts at myth deconstruction and
exploring the way history and myth inform each other are altogether more
obvious. They are most particularly evident in the character of Beauchamp.
As mentioned earlier, Beauchamp is the enthusiastic producer to the Kid’s
equally enthusiastic consumer of myths. He is initially engaged in writing the
Duke’s biography until Daggett beats Bob down both physically and, more
significantly, psychologically. He thereby deconstructs the Duke’s image as an
heroic gunfighter in the most degrading of fashions: ‘The Duck I says.’ Grist
writes in this regard:

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[Bill] corrects Beauchamp’s floridly written description of English Bob’s

killing of Corky Corcoran. Where Beauchamp’s account constructs
English Bob as a gallant defender of women and heroically quick on the
draw, Little Bill tells how a drunken English Bob had shot a powerless
Corcoran in cold blood after Corcoran had shot himself in the toe and
his pistol had exploded.120

Such vitriolic reassessment on the part of Daggett makes one wonder whether
or not his account of what ‘really happened’ to Corky Two-Gun Corcoran
(that is, that Bob shot Corcoran over a dispute regarding a woman) ‘corrects’ a
falsity by finally revealing a true account, or is merely more self-serving mythol-
ogy on his part. With his obvious delight in correcting Bob’s tall tales, before
subsequently going on to detail his own ‘heroic’ endeavours to an avid listener
in Beauchamp, it is more likely that Daggett’s stories are merely replacing one
myth with another, more self-serving but, in the final analysis, just as fantasti-
cal. As an adjunct to this, Daggett’s ‘correction’ of Bob’s exploits also builds
on the narrative’s concern with masculinity and violence by linking alcoholism
as a catalyst for aggressive action in men. It is a concern compounded when
Munny responds to the Kid’s constant nagging about what it was really like
in the ‘Old days’. ‘I don’t remember,’ replies Munny. ‘I was drunk most of the
time.’ Furthermore, such wilful collusion – the clichéd Western ‘sit-in’ between
Bill and Beauchamp, subject and scribe, teacher and student – highlights a criti-
cal component in the Western’s relation to myth and history: self-promotion
of legend.
David Hamilton Murdoch points out that the various narratives that had
developed from the myth of the heroic gunfighter were not the sole preserve
of the eastern dime novelists or of ‘yellow’ journalists like Beauchamp. Such
narratives were actually endorsed by many Westerners themselves who stood
to benefit financially from either selling their own ‘real-life’ adventures or by
writing their own ‘genuine’ accounts. In fact, ‘virtually from the very begin-
ning’, he tells us, ‘the real West took the myth and solemnly endorsed it’.121
Murdoch continues:

Journalistic excess was credited as truth, repetitions turned stories into

folktales, wish-fulfilment made legends. Not centuries after their death,
but within their lifetimes Daniel Boone was the torchbearer of civilisation
in the wilderness, Kit Carson a superhuman scout and Jesse James the
American Robin Hood.122

The critical analysis of Westerners’ self-promotion is certainly an engag-

ing aspect of Unforgiven’s narrative, but it is, as Mitchell puts it, ‘hardly
a new tack’.123 With specific reference to Liberty Valance and Unforgiven,
Mitchell insists that ‘unlike Ford . . . who exposed how fully legend and fact
create one another, Eastwood relies on a more conventional transition from

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initial debunking to mythic restoration’.124 I would similarly seek to deny

Unforgiven’s self-conscious deconstruction as evidence of an avowedly revi-
sionist stance, also with reference to Liberty Valance, specifically through the
figure of the gunfighter.
Plantinga (along with other scholars) seeks to make clear that Munny’s and
the Kid’s murder of Davey and Mike, respectively, ‘break every traditional rule
for the hero’s violence and are designed as a painful spectatorial experience’.125
If this is so, then what is one to make of Tom Doniphon – the real man who
shot Liberty Valance? Aiming at Valance unseen in the shadows of an alley-
way, he assassinates the villain and thus initiates the fraudulent legend that
grows up around Stoddard. ‘Cold-blooded murder’. muses Doniphon before-
hand, ‘but I can live with it.’ But, of course, his bitter life and lonely, margin-
alised death after Hallie leaves him for the ‘heroic’ Stoddard prove just the
opposite. This might just be because, for the honourable Doniphon, his actions
amount to what Plantinga insists on as the ‘greatest of all Western cowardices,
shooting someone in the back’.126 I could answer this in turn by recourse to the
scene from The Searchers where Ethan uses the unsuspecting Marty as bait in
order to set an ambush for Futterman (Peter Mamakos). Ethan will go on to
shoot the duplicitous Futterman and his two cohorts in the back. Of course,
my point here is not to suggest that Munny’s and the Kid’s actions were hon-
ourable; rather, I am suggesting that Unforgiven should not be considered so
formally or thematically revisionist in this particular respect. Westerns have
always been replete with heroes interested only in profit or revenge no matter
how ethically or otherwise it is obtained; men whose selfish purposes dimin-
ish any greater concern for civilisation that they might once have had. This
analysis is supported by the events of the final shootout at Greeley’s which, I
suggest, undermines any such revisionist potential that the film may have initi-
ated along the lines of a critical re-evaluation of the gunfighter’s violence and
its implications.

VIII
I shall now focus on the figure of the gunfighter in Unforgiven, specifically
Munny’s existential nature, by analysing the shootout at Greeley’s and
addressing Eastwood himself as a cultural icon and actor in the Western.
Upon hearing Little Sue’s revelation of Logan’s death, Munny lapses,
regresses into his past of ‘drink and wickedness’. The unforgiven and unfor-
giving reputation of his own legend re-emerges: ‘a known thief and murderer,
a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition’. His regression to
what he always was occurs the instant Sue repeats Logan’s dying words to
Daggett, that he was really ‘William Munny out of Missouri . . . how he killed
women and children . . . and was more cold-blooded than William Bonney, or
Clay Allison, or the James brothers’, and how he ‘shot a US marshal in ’73’.
While Munny’s association through reputation with such ‘esteemed’ company

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is being relayed by a frightened, tearful Sue, the camera holds a shot in close-up
on the Kid’s face, his gaze fixed firmly on Munny. We cut to a point-of-view
shot from the Kid’s perspective that reveals Munny gulping down whiskey,
his last pretence of puritanical abstinence now finally abandoned. Despite
having sworn to forgo violence following his slaying of Mike (‘I’m not like
you, Will’), the Kid’s gaze remains one of sublime awe as he hands over his
Schofield pistol to Munny at the latter’s request. ‘Don’t worry, Kid,’ says
Munny, noting the Kid’s apprehension. ‘I’m not gonna kill you. You’re the
only friend I got.’ While McVeigh quite fairly observes in this episode ‘the only
positive aspect in the whole cycle of violence’, I would argue that this aspect
of Munny’s legend still holds appeal for the Kid. By extension, it appeals to
us as well – Munny’s legendary status threatens, or promises, to return. As
enthusiasts of the Eastwood persona, we cannot wait to see it. Furthermore,
I suggest that the film does little to dissuade us from this fascination with
violence.
Unforgiven teases us, makes us wait in anticipation for the coming of this
moment. We might lament Munny’s personal failure, his atavistic regression,
but the narrative has really been setting up this moment from the outset. We
have followed Munny’s tortured existence, been aligned with him throughout
and, as the protagonist, we have come to care what happens to him. By riding
into Big Whiskey on a dark, rain-swept night to indulge in ‘vengeance duty’,
Munny will reward us with the realisation of our nightmare wish fulfilment.
In addition, I contend that this wish fulfilment is not a Freudian assertion of
our unconscious desires, for the deadly violence Munny unleashes at Greeley’s
receives social sanction on a fully-conscious narrative level.127 Consider Sheriff
Daggett. In order to justify Munny’s actions, the film collapses his character
from his position as complex arbiter of frontier justice into the stock-role of
villain. With the narrative having spent so long trying to build up a balanced,
somewhat sympathetic account of Daggett, any justification for his violent
outbursts is finally undermined when, having caught Logan in his attempt
to ride home, he indulges in wanton sadism. Under the thin guise of a police
interrogation, Daggett tortures Logan to death by bull-whipping him, all the
while cooing into his victim’s ear: ‘I’m gonna hurt you, not gentle like I’ve been
doing, but bad . . .’128
Of course, this type of character is dramatically attractive in its own right,
but warrants destruction at the hands of the hero. Consider, for example,
Kitses’ analysis of the villains that populate the Westerns of Anthony Mann:

The insanity we sense in [the villainous] characters . . . derive from the
rational and efficient way they break rules they are aware of and disdain.
The attractiveness of these characters is that they are so purely out of
joint . . . [N]aked power without a moral dimension, self-interest breed-
ing totalitarianism – are persuasive arguments for the existence of evil.
Faced with them, a society cannot but sanction force, killing if necessary,

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the doer freed from blame by virtue of his instrumental role as vehicle for
social justice.129

This astute piece of analysis recalls Tompkins’ explanation of how the hero’s
violence against the villain receives moral justification. As discussed in Chapter
1, Tompkins writes that at a certain point ‘retaliatory violence becomes not
simply justifiable but imperative: now, we are made to feel, not to transgress
the interdict against violence would be the transgression’.130
Daggett’s violent outbursts – always threatening to spiral out of control and
into hysteria – are seen here to have crystallised into a tyrannical but ultimately
‘rational’ use of brute force that lacks any moral or social sanction. Indeed,
they can even be said to lack a mythic sanction, as even Beauchamp squirms
and looks away from this violent spectacle. Once again, it is as if the reality of
violence cannot be recuperated into the black-and-white morality of the chiv-
alrous tales that Beauchamp actually writes. In turn, Daggett’s abuse of Logan
helps to sanction Munny’s violent act of retribution. As if further justification
were needed, Daggett has Logan’s corpse propped up in an open coffin outside
Greeley’s in a spectacle akin to the aftermath of a racist lynch mob. A placard
is shown hanging around the cadaver’s neck: ‘This is what we do to assassins
around here.’
Grist, among others, has argued that the bull-whipping of Logan is, indeed,
symptomatic of Anglo-America’s racist legacy of slavery. He writes that ‘the
representation of [Logan’s] oppression relates it to the history of American
racism . . . whipping [was] a traditional punishment for runaway slaves’.131
This may well be true, but curiously enough the film does seem at pains
to make little of the issue of Logan’s race. I argue instead that our attitude
towards his fate feeds into the main narrative concern with the figure of
the gunfighter. Ergo, his untimely and brutal death echoes that of Davey’s.
Although not entirely blameless, neither Logan nor Davey are responsible for
the acts to which they are fatally held to account. In the final instance, Logan
is certainly innocent of the murder of which he is accused and, therefore, his
fate rouses our deepest sympathies and desire for retribution. Furthermore,
our desire is for Munny to administer it despite him being, at one and the same
time, essentially responsible for Logan’s death. It is at this point, I argue, that
Unforgiven ultimately betrays its revisionist pretensions.
As we cut to the interior of Greeley’s, Daggett is in the process of organis-
ing a posse to track down Munny and the Kid. Emboldened by hard liquor,
Munny’s masculinity has now been fully restored and, as he stands at the
front door of the saloon, his shotgun symbolically erects in the foreground
of the frame. In a carefully choreographed scene, and in what seems highly
improbable considering the sad, incompetent figure Munny has presented thus
far, he proceeds to dispatch Desbois, Daggett and three of the Sheriff’s armed
deputies with a consummate ease without receiving any wounds himself. In
many ways, Unforgiven’s shootout is more fantastical, more improbable than

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is Shane’s. After all, Shane’s competence as a gunfighter is never in doubt,

and he is, at the very least, seriously injured in his fight with Wilson and the
Rykers. Admittedly, while not being the display of superhuman speed we
would expect to see from No Name or The Preacher, Munny’s actions during
the gunfight serve as an ironic vindication of Daggett’s own earlier assurances
to Beauchamp that coolness under fire beats those who panic (as Corcoran
apparently did) and draw too fast. It also undermines Munny’s own assertions
to the Kid that ‘It’s a hell of a thing to kill a man.’ For Munny, at least, it seems
all too easy. The ‘last man standing’ routine (honed to perfection throughout
Eastwood’s career) when under fire from multiple directions ensures both his
survival and cements his mythic status, his archetypal gunfighter identity.
As mentioned above, the shootout is also a personal loss for Munny, as
justice segues into retribution. He first shoots Desbois who is unarmed; a
deplorable action that prompts Daggett to call him a ‘cowardly son-of-a-
bitch’. Munny would have done the same to the Sheriff but for his shotgun
misfiring. This could be interpreted as a further instance of irony, echoing as
it does that part of Daggett’s explanation to Beauchamp that Corcoran’s Colt
similarly misfired (‘which was a failin’ common to that model!’). More inter-
estingly, it plays into the post-structuralist notion of a fault-line, or slippage,
whereby the attempt by Munny to murder a defenceless Daggett (who, it must
be said, shows great courage in staring death in the face) highlights the film’s
problem with depicting the reality of violence. Much like Unforgiven’s depic-
tion of women, real violence proves to be unrepresentable. Therefore, after this
slippage, the gunfight plays out in a manner rather typical of Eastwood’s other
Westerns. That is to say, he goes and gets the ‘bad guys’ who are all armed
and in a fair fight; the weapon of choice, inevitably the six-gun (courtesy of the
Kid’s Schofield pistol).
In deferring the final showdown until the last possible moment, Unforgiven
offers the audience what they have been waiting for – spectatorial catharsis
by regeneration through violence. I have already discussed the problematical
relation that the Western has had with this trope with regard to Shane and The
Searchers, and it is worth quoting Slotkin’s summarisation of it:

The supreme value which the myth assigns to the climactic battle or
gunfight is not simply a function of the ideological rationale that frames
the fight. It derives its emotional force and irrational appeal from its role
in the narrative structure of the myth. Specific versions of the myth may
vary in their ideological rationale, hero type, and choice of happy or fatal
ending; but they do not vary in their representation of a consummatory
act of violence – whatever its motivation – as the necessary and sufficient
resolution of all the issues the tale has raised.132

Munny’s, more specifically, the cultural icon Clint Eastwood’s, return as the
instrument of retribution and his embracing of the ‘consummatory act of

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violence’ is in keeping with the Puritanical Angel of Vengeance that he embod-

ied in No Name, The Drifter and The Preacher. It is precisely this kind of
character intertextuality that causes the audience’s delight in such recognisable
Eastwood quips as, ‘Who’s the fella’ that owns this shithole?’ Such statements
provide a base-alloy of farce to gloss over the more tragic elements at work
within the narrative, working to make the final shootout an appealing specta-
cle, justifiable and, moreover, ‘fun’.

IX
Overall, I have suggested that Unforgiven is a far cry from a film that forces
the ‘audience into re-examining the grounds for their fascination with screen
violence and Western mythology’, as McVeigh has it. Shorn of the (conscious)
historical dimension of either Shane or The Searchers, it lacks even a counter-
narrative of nation. I also conclude that it stands opposed to O’Brien’s asser-
tion that, despite the finale’s ‘collapse’, the film’s ‘meditation on violence
. . . is provocative and largely successful’.133 In a similar vein to Greenberg’s
sentiments with which I opened this chapter (though divorced somewhat from
his concerns with the wider scope of frontier history), Grist concludes his
summary of the film thus:

Even if perpetrated in revenge for Ned’s suffering, the carnage is such

as to overwhelm any moral validation and constitutes perhaps the film’s
most significant revision of Western violence, which is thus reduced
completely to a matter of power and circumstance rather than justice or
right.134

It is difficult to see how Grist can interpret Unforgiven’s finale in this manner.
Despite the film’s overwhelming pretensions towards a revisionist stance, it
does little to critique or problematise either the so-called classical Western or
the mythic theme of regeneration through violence. The episode at Greeley’s is
less bloody than the stacks of corpses in earlier Eastwood films. Additionally, it
increases Shane’s death-tally by just two. So, far from forcing a ‘re-examining’
of our ‘fascination with screen violence’ in the manner of the Kid’s renuncia-
tion of it, and far from giving lie to the myth of the gunfighter through the
figure of Beauchamp, Unforgiven would seem to exist as a celebration of these
very things – a celebration of the gunfighter identity.
It is clear also that the myth of the West will continue to flourish in the tall
tales that Beauchamp will continue to write. Indeed, the shootout at Greeley’s
proves to be irresistible to the dime novelist, and he at once goes about
turning it into the stuff of legend. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting
Beauchamp attempts to apply mythic structure to the terrifying chaos of the
violence. As he panders around Munny like an excited dog (much akin to the
way he pandered around Daggett previously, and English Bob previous to that)

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he asks, ‘Who did you shoot first?’ He immediately answers his own question,
self-assuredly declaring that, ‘when confronted by superior numbers, the expe-
rienced gunfighter will fire on the best shots first’. ‘Is that so?’ replies Munny,
before stating that he was simply ‘lucky in the order’, philosophically musing
that he has ‘always been lucky when it comes to killin’ folks’. Quickly irritated
by the dime novelist’s incessancy, Munny turns the rifle on Beauchamp. ‘All I
know is whose gonna be last,’ he threatens. Beauchamp dutifully scurries off.
A distinct lack of braggadocio is what really distinguishes Munny from the
other would-be heroes of the film. Bob and Daggett talk a good fight, if little
else. Munny, in true Western tradition, acts. As he leaves, Munny takes a last
look at Logan’s corpse – still on display outside Greeley’s – and declares to all
the townsfolk cowering along the sidewalks, ‘You better bury Ned right . . .
and you better not carve up nor otherwise harm no whores . . . or I will come
back an’ kill every last one of you sons of bitchs!’
Tall in the saddle of his pale horse amid a dramatic thunderstorm, a low-
angle shot holds Munny with a US flag in plain view behind him, his grizzled
face catching the rain. Jim Kitses states that ‘Unforgiven insists on the con-
struction of its drunken killer as cowboy, Western hero, America.’135 Taking
the associations of Munny as America, he is precisely possessed of (or maybe
by) what D. H. Lawrence once claimed as the ‘essential American soul’, which
is ‘hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer’.136 As an instrument of death, we may also
recall Megan Wheeler’s (Sydney Penny) prayer in Pale Rider, the voicing of
which brings forth the mysterious Preacher into the Carbon Canyon: ‘And
behold a pale horse, and the name that said on him was Death, and Hell fol-
lowed with him.’
It seems clear to me that Eastwood has not revised or abandoned this char-
acter. As he rides off, Beauchamp gazes after Munny with an expression of
awe, similar to that which earlier adorned the Kid. He furiously scribbles down
notes in between quick glances at Munny’s receding figure, notes that will
no doubt continue the legend of William Munny. One of Murdoch’s boast-
ful Westerners he may not be, but the spectral figure Munny resembles here
ends up supporting rather than undermining the florid prose of writers like
Beauchamp.
During such moments in Unforgiven – the writing of history as myth – one
is encouraged to recall Linda Hutcheon’s assertion that our access to history
‘is entirely conditioned by textuality’.137 However, the post-modern implica-
tions of this claim are undermined when one considers that Unforgiven, as a
whole, exists as a wilful instance of celebratory mythography. Or, and if I may
use such redundant terms, its self-reflexivity is put to work in the service of a
more classical agenda than a revisionist one. To put it another way, at the epic
moment, Munny fulfils rather than undermines his own legend. Here, legend
is not revised as fact only to be cynically covered up as is the case in Liberty
Valance, where such cynicism purposefully undermines the cover-up that the
chronicler of official history seeks to enact. In Unforgiven, legend is merely

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revised as more legend, and written as such. Whatever fiction Beauchamp may
write about that fatal night at Greeley’s, there will be little to distinguish it
from the truth as it is presented to us.
Moreover, Grist’s argument that Unforgiven’s reduction of Western violence
to ‘power and circumstance’ over ‘justice’ constitutes a ‘significant revision of
Western violence’ is to misinterpret the figure of the gunfighter within the
history of the genre as a whole. Slotkin has said that gunfighters often operate
‘in a “terminal” environment’, and that, as a concept, the gunfighter describes
a certain ‘world-view . . . rather than a specific social role in a particular his-
torical frame’.138 He continues his description thus:

The outward form of the gunfighter style emphasises artistic

­professionalism in the use of weapons, but what justifies and directs
that professionalism is a particular state of mind, a ‘gunfighter’ under-
standing of ‘how the world works.’ That understanding is essentially
­‘hard-boiled’: the world is a hostile place, human motives are rarely
good, and outcomes depend not on right but on the proper deployment of
might.139

Slotkin’s comments refer, not as one might think to the so-called revisionist
efforts of the 1960s or 1970s, but directly to his analysis of the ‘gunfighter’
Westerns of the early 1950s; films working within the broader popular–­
cultural world of ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction and film noir. Shane, High-
Noon and The Gunfighter are, for him, chief among such Westerns. To this list
I would also add The Searchers, Winchester ’73 and Pursued for their focus on
individual ‘psychology’ and narrative concern over the ‘revenger’ plot.
Such sentiments are also easily applied to Unforgiven. As Munny suc-
cinctly puts it to a mortally wounded Daggett, ‘“Deserves” got nothin’ to do
with it.’ Daggett’s last words are a clichéd spit of defiance moments before
Munny wastes him with Logan’s reclaimed Spencer rifle: ‘I’ll see you in Hell,
William Munny.’ Munny nods knowingly, ‘Yeah.’ Clearly, Munny proves
to be extremely ‘capable’ in this regard and, in so being, can be related to
the concept of the transcendent hero whose roots can be traced back at least
as far Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. Douglas Pye writes that such a figure
is ‘invulnerable, endowed with almost superhuman skill, unencumbered by
most human limitations – a fantastic impossible figure’.140 The expression of
Munny’s transcendent power fulfils audience desires as well as providing a jus-
tification for a final mythologised, fantastical ‘consummatory act of violence’.
Furthermore, McGee notes that Munny’s journey from reformed killer and
back again fulfils the trajectory of a Calvinist morality tale. He expands upon
Slotkin’s ‘terminal environment’:

Though no one is forgiven, sooner or later retribution will come in this

Calvinist world; and its instruments are not those who are good or who

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myth of the western

have been victimised or who have shown wisdom but are those capable
of the violence retribution requires.141

According to this logic, the film thus ‘justifies violence . . . through an appeal
to transcendence’.142 The Calvinist vision of Unforgiven offered by McGee
would, through its particular concept of predestination, play into the idea that
the film’s characters appear to be ‘stuck’, as it were, in ‘roles’ already prepared
for them in advance; roles endemic to frontier mythology and the figurative
language of the Western genre (I will continue exploring this notion of ‘roles’
in Chapter 5). Munny’s transformation from broken-down pig farmer into
fantastical gunfighter would make little logical sense otherwise. And yet, far
from scrutinising such roles, Unforgiven appears to exploit them.
To my mind, the film shows little awareness of its inability to revise these
aspects of itself, which is surprising considering Eastwood’s own protracted
legacy within the genre. Alexandra Keller suggests that Eastwood may even
have been held hostage by his own star persona. She suggests that, his ‘status
as icon of the individual’s right to take matters into his own hands when the
institutions whose job that is fail him had by 1992 ossified into something
practically nonnegotiable to the public’.143 She argues that this is one reason
why ‘Unforgiven is in many ways a far less successful revisionist western than
the older Outlaw Josey Whales.’144 Given Eastwood’s own conservative poli-
tics, however, I would be inclined to think that perhaps it would be more accu-
rate to suggest that this inability is more an instance of unwillingness (Josey
Whales excepting). In any case, Unforgiven is clearly less patently revisionist
than his Italian Westerns with Leone, his own Josey Whales or Ford’s Liberty
Valance before it. (It is also less post-modernist than his 1960s collaborations
with Leone.)
A major point with which to take issue with regard to McVeigh’s assumed
post-modern status for the film would be the idea of narrative closure. In
general, post-modernists tend to be wary of the whole notion of closure,
identified as it is with forms of dogmatism and exclusivity. There is a certain
irony, therefore, in McVeigh suggesting that, ‘[u]ltimately, Unforgiven is a
closed narrative . . . The audience knows where [Munny] came from, and now
knows where he goes to.’145 This last is in reference to the final crawl, which
McVeigh uses to justify narrative closure and ‘Unforgiven’s deconstruction of
Shane’.146 The crawl suggests that Munny had ‘long since disappeared with the
children . . . some said to San Francisco where it was rumoured he prospered
in dry goods’. I find in this little proof of ‘knowing’ anything beyond hearsay
and rumour at least. The fact is that we cannot say with any degree of certainty
what fate befell Munny; that we ‘know’ nothing would surely be a more post-
modern aspect to impress.
Overall, as a frontier legend, Munny, like Shane and Ethan before him, is
an enigmatic and, ultimately, contradictory figure. The ending of Unforgiven
is ambiguous in many ways, providing little in the way of ‘a closed narrative’.

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rethinking revisionism

Still, far from ‘the’ post-modern status awarded the film by McVeigh, I contend
that Munny’s final resurrection through a regression into his past, through the
isolation of ‘the private dimension’ which, as Slotkin has suggested, often
‘determines the whole significance of the [gunfighter] story’, fulfils, if anything,
more of a modernist sensibility. It, therefore, provides a modernist perspec-
tive on history.147 This must be distinguished from the inference that the film
is also beholden to a modernist aesthetic; Unforgiven, like the bulk of com-
mercial cinema, remains ensconced in an essentially realist narrative structure
(although we should always bear in mind that the film does show a tendency
towards reflexivity concerning its own nature, status and role as a Western).
Pericles Lewis suggests that the defining trope of artistic modernism is the
‘continual striving for a bright future . . . forever undercut by the force or tra-
dition of history . . . which continually turns our forward-looking present into
an unalterable past’.148 As a literary example of this, Lewis turns to F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby (1925):

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we
will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning
– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the
past.149

Fitzgerald’s metaphorical ‘boats’ labour wilfully (but futilely) ‘against the

current’ in search of an ‘orgastic future . . . borne ceaselessly into the past’.
How fitting this is when applied to Unforgiven, with Munny’s future ‘borne
back’ into his own ‘unalterable past’. The individual, hopelessly committed
to the tropes of a mythic ‘tradition’, stuck in a ‘role’, suffers an ironic rever-
sal in the tides of history. ‘When we reach toward the future’, argues Lewis,
‘we find ourselves already living in the past.’150 And it is this that ensures, at
one and the same time, William Munny’s mortal damnation and his mythical
transcendence.

Notes
  1. Harvey R. Greenberg, ‘Unforgiven’, Film Quarterly, 46(3) (1993): 52–6. In
support of Greenberg, see also the essay by Leighton Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, in Ian
Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western (New York:
Continuum, 1996), pp. 294–301.
  2. Daniel O’Brien, Clint Eastwood: Film-Maker (London: Batsford, 1996), p. 178.
  3. Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the
Hollywood Western (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), p. 188.
  4. Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), pp. 133–40.
   5. It is worth mentioning that David Webb Peoples’ script for Unforgiven was origi-
nally written in 1976 and many have therefore established the film’s connection
to a decade dominated politically and culturally by the fall-out from Vietnam.

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myth of the western

   6. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West (London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 19.
   7. Alan Lovell, ‘The Western’ (1967), reprinted in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and
Methods, vol. 1: An Anthology (London: University of California Press, 1976),
pp. 164–75, quote on p. 175.
   8. Ibid., p. 175.
   9. James K. Folsom, ‘Westerns as Social and Political Alternatives’ (1967), reprinted
in Jack Nachbar (ed.), Focus on the Western (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1974), pp. 81–4, quote on p. 82
  10. Ibid., p. 82.
 11. Ibid.
  12. Ibid., p. 83.
 13. Will Wright, Six-Guns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975), p. 23.
 14. Janey Place, ‘Structured Cowboys’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary
Media, 18 (1978): 26–8.
  15. Ibid., p. 26.
  16. Ibid., p. 26.
 17. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. xiv
  18. Ibid., p. xvi.
 19. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio
System (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 50–1.
 20. Stephen McVeigh, The American Western (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2007), p. 203 (emphasis in original).
  21. Tag Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the “Evolution” of
the Western’ (1986), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 262–76.
  22. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(London: Methuen, 1981).
  23. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1989); Steve Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’ (1995), reprinted in Grant (ed.),
Film Genre Reader III, pp. 160–84.
  24. Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’, p. 179.
 25. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 17.
  26. Ibid., pp. 76–7 (emphasis in original).
  27. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
  28. Ibid., p. 99.
 29. Robert Warshow, ‘Movie Chronicle: The Westerner’ (1954), reprinted in Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory
Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 654–68, quote on
p. 654.
 30. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, [1992] 1998),
p. 379.
  31. Ibid., p. 380.
 32. Ibid.
  33. Ibid., p. 379.
  34. Ibid., p. 380 (emphasis in original).
 35. Ibid.
  36. Ibid. See also, p. 728 fn. 5.
  37. Ibid., pp. 303–4.
 38. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 50.
  39. Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral’, p. 272 (emphasis added).
 40. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 50.

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rethinking revisionism

  41. John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, [1980] 1985), p. 23.
 42. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 203.
  43. Ibid., pp. 118–25; on Shane as archetypal Western, see pp. 161–8; on Unforgiven
specifically, see pp. 202–13.
  44. Ibid., p. 155.
 45. Ibid.
  46. Ibid., p. 122.
  47. Ibid., p. 155.
  48. Ibid., pp. 155–6.
  49. Ibid., p. 155.
 50. Ibid.
  51. Ibid., p. 156.
 52. Ibid.
  53. Ibid., p. 159.
 54. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 381–2.
 55. Ibid.
 56. John Tuska, The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western
(London: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 7–8.
 57. Richard White, Review (untitled), Journal of American History, 80(3) (1993):
1039–41, quote on p. 1040.
 58. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 206.
 59. Will Penny, directed by Tom Gries, featuring Charlton Heston, Donald Pleasance,
Joan Hackett, Lee Majors (Paramount Pictures, 1968).
 60. McGee, The American Western, p. 195.
  61. Carl Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven’,
Cinema Journal, 37(2) (1998): 65–83, at p. 68.
 62. The Biblical connotations of the name Delilah, the Philistine emasculator of
Sampson, should not be overlooked.
  63. Similar and related violent episodes are repeated twice more during the course of
the narrative, with Bill beating a feverish Munny half to death, before going one
step further with his fatal and sadistic bull-whipping of Ned Logan.
  64. Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, p. 296.
  65. Ibid., p. 297.
  66. The saloon’s name is undoubtedly a reference to Horace Greeley, the nineteenth-
century editor of the New York Tribune who supported liberal policies towards
settlers, famously stating: ‘Go West, young man. Go West and grow up with the
country.’ Prior to Unforgiven, Greeley’s words were restated most famously and
directly in a cinematic Western by the eastern ‘dude’ lawyer Ranse Stoddard in
Liberty Valance.
  67. Greenberg, ‘Unforgiven’, p. 52.
  68. Ibid., p. 52.
 69. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint
Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, [2004] 2007), p. 308.
  70. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 68.
 71. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 80.
  72. Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral’, pp. 272–3.
  73. Ibid., p. 271.
 74. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 67.
  75. Ibid., pp. 50–1.
 76. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 70. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the
Western, p. 311.
 77. Tuska, The American West in Film, p. 235.
 78. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 177.

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myth of the western

 79. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western, p. 308.

  80. Ibid., p. 308.
  81. Ibid., pp. 308–9.
 82. Ibid., p. 308. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 76. See also McVeigh, The
American Western, p. 205, for a similar misreading.
 83. Andrechuck, The Golden Corral, p. 163.
  84. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 68.
  85. Ibid., p. 69.
  86. Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, p. 301.
  87. Ibid., p. 301. Parallels with Sally’s ‘look’ noted.
 88. McGee, The American Western, pp. 196–7.
 89. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 85.
  90. Ibid., p. 86.
  91. Ibid., p. 85.
  92. Ibid., pp. 85–6.
  93. Ibid., p. 86.
  94. Ibid., pp. 86–7.
 95. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 211.
 96. The William Munny Killings, an original screenplay by David Webb Peoples,
1976, available at: http://www.screenwrite.in/Screenplays/Unforgiven.pdf, pp.
17–18.
 97. Tompkins, West of Everything, p. 35.
  98. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 75.
  99. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 2nd edn (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, [1971] 1984), p. 16.
100. Scott Emmert, Loaded Fictions: Social Critique in the Twentieth Century Western
(Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1996), p. 38.
101. Ibid., p. 3.
102. In mentioning ‘that kid’, Delilah is undoubtedly referring to the Schofield Kid,
however, one could also link it to Davey, for he is ‘just . . . a boy’ too.
103. Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, p. 297.
104. Ibid., p. 297.
105. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 72.
106. Ibid., p. 72.
107. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 203.
108. Ibid.
109. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 381–2.
110. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western, p. 307.
111. Ibid., p. 308.
112. Ibid., p. 142.
113. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 155.
114. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western, pp. 142–8.
115. McVeigh, The American Western, pp. 206–7.
116. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 21–3.
117. Ibid., p. 24.
118. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
119. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: Faber, 2003), pp. 623–34.
120. Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, p. 297.
121. David Hamilton Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth
(Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2001), p. 83.
122. Ibid., p. 19.
123. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 261.

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rethinking revisionism

124. Ibid., p. 261.

125. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 76. Andrechuck relays that the ‘killing of
the cowboys by Munny and the Kid is a deplorable act of double-murder’.
Andrechuck, The Golden Corral, p. 163. See also McVeigh, The American
Western, pp. 205–7.
126. Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death’, p. 77.
127. Significantly, and in terms of anti-revisionist thinking, this gunfight, the ‘money
shot’ (Munny shot?) of Unforgiven is precisely what so-called classical Westerns
such as Red River withhold.
128. Such sadism is reminiscent of the murderous Frank (Henry Fonda) in Leone’s
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Frank is a murderous brute – an arche-
typal villain – who goes beyond what is necessary in the act of killing; a textbook
sadist who relishes in physical and psychological torture.
129. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western, p. 149.
130. Tompkins, West of Everything, p. 228.
131. Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, p. 297.
132. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 612 (emphasis in original).
133. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 179.
134. Grist, ‘Unforgiven’, pp. 297, 300.
135. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western, p. 310.
136. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature (London: Penguin
Classics, [1923] 1990). Lawrence, discussed in Slotkin, Regenration through
Violence, p. 2.
137. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989),
p. 16.
138. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 401.
139. Ibid., pp. 401–2 (emphasis added).
140. Douglas Pye, ‘Genre and History: Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance’, in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the
Western, (New York: Continuum), p. 121.
141. McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, p. 199.
142. Ibid., pp. 198–200. See also Mitchell, Westerns, p. 261.
143. Alexandra Keller, ‘Generic Subversion as Counter-history: Mario Van Peebles’s
Posse’, in Janet Walker (ed.), Westerns: Films through History (London:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 27–47, quote on p. 45 fn. 22.
144. Ibid., p. 45.
145. McVeigh, The American Western, pp. 211–12.
146. Ibid., p. 204.
147. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 382.
148. Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 32–3.
149. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, [1925] 1994), p. 123.
Fitzgerald, discussed in Lewis, pp. 32–3.
150. Lewis, Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, p. 33.

159
PART TWO
4. WHAT COUNTS AS HISTORY AND
WHOSE HISTORY IS IT?

‘I’m awful sorry about Mel. He was a good Mexican.’

I
Patricia Nelson Limerick has argued that, for much of the twentieth century,
Anglo-America has been ‘fixed on the definition of the frontier drawn from the
imaginative reconstruction of the story of the United States and its westward
expansion’.1 A prominent scholar of the New Western History, Limerick has
sought to deconstruct the ‘interpretive straightjacket’ of Turner’s Frontier
Thesis and redefine the concept of the frontier.2 Interestingly, she points out
that, despite the ‘spectre’ of the Frontier Thesis, ‘North America has, in fact,
had two strong traditions in the use of the term’.3 On the one hand, is the ‘idea
of the frontier’ that, as an ‘extremely well established . . . cultural common
property’, pertains to a Turnerian ideal, a space ‘where white settlers entered
a zone of “free” land and opportunity’.4 On the other hand, is a less familiar,
though ‘more realistic usage of la frontera’, which describes the cultural com-
plexities and individual experiences along ‘the borderlands between Mexico
and the United States’.5
As a concept la frontera stands opposed to the frontier’s ‘imaginative
reconstruction’ by giving lie to its grand narrative of optimism and simplistic
binarism, of its tale of righteous pioneers carving a civilisation out of the wil-
derness. Instead, it exposes a darker, more complex ‘legacy of conquest’ (using
Limerick’s own terminology), which includes ethnic cleansing, expropriation of
land and resources, and environmental despoliation. It is a story driven less by
dashing Anglo-American heroes on horseback, than it is by brutal monopolists,
exploiters and warmongers. According to Limerick, this is what constitutes the
real history of the American West. Consequently, when it comes to a historical
reassessment of the borderlands through la frontera, Limerick insists upon there
being ‘no illusion of vacancy, of triumphal conclusions, or of simplicity’.6

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myth of the western

Limerick has continually declared erroneous the argument that the his-
torical issues concerning the American West are a thing of the past. She draws
her inspiration from Earl Pomeroy’s 1955 essay ‘Toward a Reorientation of
Western History’. This essay is commonly regarded as a blueprint for many
of the concerns that were to be taken up by the New Western History in the
decades that followed. Perhaps of most influence is Pomeroy’s refutation of a
temporal border separating ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Wests, urging his contemporaries
to ‘disregard arbitrary borders in time and space’.7 Unlike Pomeroy, however,
who largely neglects mention of Spanish and Mexican cultures,8 Limerick
presses the importance of the history of the Hispanic borderlands as part of
the cultural geography of the United States. For her, ‘the [Anglo] American
conquest of the borderlands [is] an essential element in the story of expansion,
to be compared and contrasted with the conquest of Indians’.9 She further
suggests that, for much of the twentieth century, ‘Hispanic history remained
on the edges of Western American history’.10 Her approach is one that seeks
to highlight the cultural–ideological machinations that lay behind this elision
from the official discourse, and which seeks to re-engage the reader with an
Hispanic culture now in its ‘proper place at the centre of Western American
history’.11
Regarding la frontera, it is her belief that ‘the conquered and controlled
borderland continued to exist only in the imagination . . . the Mexican border
was a social fiction that neither nature nor people in search of opportunity
observed’.12 She draws our attention to the contemporary borderlands as
a troubled region with ongoing ‘conflicts over the restriction of immigra-
tion, with disputes over water flow and environmental pollution’, ultimately
describing ‘a zone where an industrialised nation shares a long land border
with a nation much-burdened by poverty’.13
By insisting upon the significance of economic, environmental and racial
issues in the history of the frontier, New Western historians sought a less cul-
turally anaemic and more socially relevant set of discourses on the American
West than those allegedly offered by Turner and his sympathisers.14 They
contend that, despite their obvious significance, the cultural complexities of
the borderlands are rarely accounted for in the official histories that chroni-
cle US westward expansion. As far as Limerick is concerned, such discourses
remain predominantly ethnocentric in character and are written by and for
Anglo-Americans. ‘If the idea of la frontera had anywhere near the standing of
the idea of the frontier’, she argues, ‘we would be well launched toward self-
understanding, directed toward a realistic view of this nation’s position in the
hemisphere and in the world.’15
As I have previously suggested, when it comes to popular culture’s role in
facilitating this ‘realistic view’, Limerick’s attitude is far from optimistic (an
attitude shared by many of her peers). Briefly reiterated, it was her contention
that the Western genre has done little to critique frontier mythology; on the
contrary, the genre actively and straightforwardly endorsed and engendered a

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

triumphalist Anglo-American perspective. Its imagined re-creation of the fron-

tier is one that consistently fails to deal with what she calls ‘the risks inherent
in the word, [which reduce the] multisided convergence of various peoples into
a model of the two sides of a frontier line’.16 Where she places Hollywood’s
West as something firmly enthralled to the ‘fantasy’ of the mythic frontier, the
complex ‘reality’ of la frontera typically remains, for her, outside of the genre’s
dominant ideological purview.17
As I have thus far demonstrated, however, the Western should not be
considered either historically vacant or ideologically monolithic. This under-
estimates the enormous depth of complexity with which the genre deals with
the myth of the West, and disregards the ideological contradictions inherent
in even the most ostensibly triumphalist of film texts. I have already offered
my opinions on the shortcomings of Limerick’s arguments; suffice it to say
that the film with which I am mainly concerned with here, The Three Burials
of Melquiades Estrada, responds to Limerick in ways that problematises her
attitude towards popular treatments of the frontier. I seek no corrective to her
historical challenge to Turnerian paradigms; indeed, for the most part I agree
with them. What I do object to – what I have been objecting to throughout – is
the tendency, as I see it, of a great many film scholars and cultural historians to
offer generalised simplistic (mis)readings of certain films, force whole periods
of genre production to fit into arbitrarily defined categories, or elide discussion
of certain other films altogether in order to support specious historiographic
and cultural–ideological trajectories within popular cultural production as a
whole.
Of course, Limerick is not oblivious to the complex movements within some
spheres of popular culture, and I in no way wish to accuse her of a ‘blink-
ered’ perspective. In fact, the conclusion to chapter 2 in Something in the Soil
makes both an appeal to, and a prediction of, historical transfers into North
America’s collective conscience:

If the velocity of the movement of ideas from frontier historians to

popular culture remains constant, somewhere in the next century, we
might expect the popular usage of the word [frontier] to begin to reckon
with the complexity of the westward movement and its consequences.
Somewhere in the mid-2000s, the term might undergo a crucial shift,
toward the reality of la frontera and away from the fantasy of the fron-
tier. That shift in meaning will be the measure of great change in this
nation’s understanding of its own origins.18

In light of films like Three Burials, such a ‘crucial shift’ might occur sooner
than Limerick thinks. However, it must be pointed out that this correlation
between history and popular culture exists equally as a happy coincidence of a
long-standing desire (in some quarters of cultural production at least) to depict
a more rounded perspective on the American frontier.

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myth of the western

I shall take just one example of this desire here. In one of the most engaging
essays that I have yet read on the silent era Western, Jennifer E. Smyth alerts us
to the fact that early treatments of the frontier in Hollywood were less ignorant
of the racial and imperialistic aspects of nineteenth-century expansion than is
often assumed. Her analysis of Wesley Ruggles’ Cimarron (1931), an Academy
Award winning silent epic whose narrative concerns the experiences of a pio-
neering family, the Cravats, and encompasses the cross-over of two centuries
(the late nineteenth and early twentieth) of westward expansion, teaches us
that (at least some of the time) popular culture industries at least as far back as
the early sound period ‘began to fathom the mythic undercurrents propelling
the rhetoric of western history’.19 The film begins with the ambitious lawyer
and newspaper editor, Yancy Cravat (Richard Dix), moving his wife, Sabra
(Irene Dunne), and family from Kansas and into the newly opened up territo-
ries in Oklahoma. Despite becoming a leading citizen in the new township of
Osage, Yancy abandons his family in search of yet ‘greater’ glories in the newly
emerging settlements of the Cherokee Strip. In short, Smyth argues that Yancy
is overcome by greed, and even a touch of megalomania, and Cimarron there-
fore reveals how the desire to advance Anglo-American civilisation quickly
segues into the hubris of greed and warmongering. In the process, it implies
that, as an approach to the history of the West, the New Western History is
not so new after all.
My reading of Three Burials follows in a similar vein. I should point out
that it is not my intention to offer a critique of the New Western historical
approach in general, or of Limerick’s in particular. On the contrary, it is my
express belief that Three Burials exists as a film that offers an imaginative and
a highly critical reassessment of the myth as ‘the story of the United States’ by
intentionally foregrounding the formal and thematic limitations of its terms.
Smyth’s insights into the formal and thematic resonances of Cimarron suggest
that, while this is not necessarily a new thing in and of itself, however, it
remains a sober observation that serious considerations of the effects of the
myth of the West on Mexican America are lamentably scarce in either socio-
political discourse or America’s popular culture industries. I suggest that Three
Burials seeks to address this cultural silence and, in so doing, it indicates the
capability of the Western in this regard. By applying the concept of la fron-
tera we can interpret the film’s ideological agenda as one that explores the
traumatic ‘legacy of conquest’ (using Limerick’s terminology again) by which
the United States–Mexico border has been historically and geopolitically con-
structed asymmetrically along cultural and racial lines. In my opinion, the film
offers an extremely engaging vision of the region’s cultural geography that
resonates with the concerns of the New Western History. Analysis along these
lines allows me to explore how this border has been ideologically reified as a
binary divide through frontier mythology and used as a prism for historical
(mis)understanding.
In what follows I offer a close textual analysis of Three Burials, exploring

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

some of the different narrative strategies employed by the film’s director and
star, Tommy Lee Jones, and of its writer, Guillermo Arriaga. I consider the
film’s formal characteristics and its thematic content, suggesting that both nar-
rative aspects utilise the plot motifs and iconography of the Western in order to
self-consciously address the relationship held by the myth to the borderlands.
I argue that these two interrelated (though hardly indistinguishable) aspects
of Three Burials constitute a deliberate deconstruction of this mythology; spe-
cifically, those aspects concerning the figure of the Anglo-American hero, the
culturally constructed ‘border’ separating civilisation from wilderness (with
Anglos on the former side and with Mexicans on the latter), and the idea of
Mexico itself in the North American ‘imaginary’.20 The film’s own ironic sense
of history is similarly revealed through both its content and its form. Overall,
such an approach not only allows me to explore Three Burials’ take on the
relationship between myth and history, and therefore extend the arguments of
the previous chapter, it also illuminates the film’s transnational revisioning of
the region’s cultural geography in terms that suit the outlook of historians like
Limerick.

II
Perhaps the most immediately apparent of Three Burials’ narrative strategies
is the peculiar temporal and spatial disjuncture apparent in the first part of the
film. This section of the story is pieced together by interspersing contemporary
action with sequences from the past, so that we learn only gradually what
happened to the eponymous Melquiades ‘Mel’ Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo),
follow ranch foreman Pete Perkins’ (Tommy Lee Jones) reactions of grief and
anger over his friend’s untimely death, and build up a picture of their initial
meeting and developing friendship.
Disjointed plots, typically narrated through multiple perspectives, which
challenge the conventions of so-called ‘mainstream’ filmmaking have become
something of an authorial trademark for Arriaga. His other notable credits
as screenwriter include a trilogy of collaborations with the Mexican director
Alejandro González Iñárritu: the critically acclaimed Amores Perros (2000),
21 Grams (2003) and, most recently, Babel (2006). Arriaga’s particular style
translates into the semiotic code of the films produced from his scripts, actively
confusing their visual grammar and forcing audiences to reassess their concep-
tualisations of time and space. In the case of Three Burials it is not unusual for
up to three different temporal and spatial frames to be simultaneously inter-
mingled through multiple characters’ perspectives.
It is well known how sound, continuity editing, causally coherent narrative
and closure have all developed to become the established conventions of cine-
matic realism, the so-called classical narrative cinema. This style of filmmaking
has come to dominate film production in Hollywood, and sought to feature ‘a
fictional world governed by spatial and temporal verisimilitude’, aligning the

167
myth of the western

audience with the ‘centrality of the narrative agency of psychologically-rounded

characters’.21 Obviously, such narratives threaten (whether consciously or not)
to undermine their own sense of ‘wholeness’, but if Barthes was correct in
claiming that, in effect, ideology works as a contemporary mythology, then
the overall ideological aim of a realist aesthetic is to efface its own constructed
nature as language and to pass itself off as somehow ‘natural’.
The narrative strategies apparent in the first half of Three Burials actively
seek to undermine such pretensions and, initially, draw us away from the story
towards the way the story is being told, towards its arbitrariness as a textual
construct. This is undeniably a post-modern trait; however, the filmmakers’
style here is not to be regarded as a mere pastiche of self-conscious irony. On
the contrary, and as I go on to argue below, its portrayal of the myth of the
West as a romantic delusion possessing destructive power for contemporary
Americans is rendered in terms that are too intensely serious to be regarded as
pastiche. Therefore, the question impressed upon us in the early stages of the
narrative is not so much what is happening (or, rather, what has happened),
but why is it being relayed to us in the fashion that it is?
Taking Barthes’ now commonly held position that realism does not reflect
but rather constructs reality, we might say that counter-narrative, or alterna-
tive cinematic styles, react against the conventions of realism, typically serving
to make us more aware of these conventions and to question their ideological
assumptions.22 We should, of course, also consider the ideological implica-
tions of the counter-narrative itself. To this end, Three Burials displays a
highly self-reflexive attitude towards the so-called classical Western’s alleged
collusion between cinematic realism and the myth of the West. As I have previ-
ously argued, such an attitude is not new of course, and is actually a systemic
aspect of the genre. Consequently, there is a strong intertextual relay appar-
ent in Three Burial’s confrontation with, and contestation of, these various
modes of ideological expression. The film’s aesthetic is, as a result, essentially
anti-mythic. However, as I have already discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to
Unforgiven, such a position is no guarantor of extrication from the discourses
of myth or mythmaking; nor, indeed, is it an exemption from the assertion
of an ideological position. Such assertion is, of course, usually denied by the
producer of artistic realism as surely as it is denied by the historiographer;
however, it seems axiomatic to me that the revelation of an ideological posi-
tion is one that is actively sought by the producer of alternative cinemas, as
something wilfully exposed through counter-narrative techniques rather than
disavowed through ‘causally coherent’ narrative realism.
There is a frenetic pace engendered by Three Burials’ formal structure which
makes it difficult to establish a coherent sense of either time or space. When
related to its thematic and ideological content, these formal aspects of the film
represent (in ways that are peculiar to the cinema) time and space in terms that
encompass not only the geographical, but the political, the cultural and the his-
torical as well. Three Burials being set in both southwest Texas and northern

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

Mexico, and including a cast of characters from both these regions, actively
confuses the concept of a homogeneous American national identity. It does
this by highlighting the arbitrary nature of such identities inasmuch as they are
defined historically by culture and race, and geopolitically through borders. It
addresses these thematic concerns in terms of the myth through its recourse to
certain tropes, formulas and stereotypes of the Western: the hero’s code, the
revenge motif, the shootout, the cowboy, horses, guns; physical location, the
southwest desert, the Rio Grande and the journey into a Mexico of the North
American Imaginary. Ultimately, the film depicts communities inhabiting a
cultural and geographical space that is not officially recognised by US politi-
cal institutions or typically explored through the discourses that narrate its
history. As a consequence, it is difficult to think of the borderlands with much
sobriety, and because of this I further suggest that Three Burials exemplifies
the approach adopted by David Harvey towards a philosophy of cinema.
‘Of all the art forms’, writes Harvey, ‘[cinema] has perhaps the most robust
capacity to handle intertwining themes of space and time in instructive ways.’23
He elaborates by suggesting that ‘the serial use of images, and the ability to cut
back and forth across space and time, frees it from many of the normal [artis-
tic] constraints’.24 In support of his assertions, Harvey draws directly from the
work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, particularly his concept of
‘poetic space’ in relation to the narrative construction of individual identity.
He quotes Bachelard to the effect that ‘We think we know ourselves in time,
when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stabil-
ity.’25 Bachelard states very clearly that even if we want to ‘detach from our
own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encum-
bered it, we realise that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its
imagery’.26 Harvey extends these ideas to encompass the cinema by suggesting
that time is represented ‘as memories of experienced places and spaces’ and,
furthermore, that ‘history must indeed give way to poetry, time to space, as the
fundamental material of social expression. The spatial image (particularly the
evidence of the photograph) then asserts an important power over history.’27
Harvey’s approach enables him to highlight important insights with regard
to the specific potential of cinema to signify history in terms of emotion and
memory through its unique recourse to visual imagery and the editing process.
If we apply this sentiment to Three Burials, one can discern the appearance of
a modernist (or, more properly, post-modernist) collage of fractured memo-
ries that can be understood as attempts at capturing a ‘sequence of fixations
in the spaces of the being’s stability’. These images are juxtaposed to shape a
narrative complexity that weaves together a number of seemingly disparate
temporal events by focusing on a single, violent act: the death of Melquiades
at the hands of a border patrolman called Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). This
fatal incident serves as a plot device, providing the necessary impetus behind
the film’s narrative trajectory, and of the various character motivations and
actions contained within it.

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myth of the western

It is significant to note that our access to Melquiades is largely mediated

through the subjective memories of Pete who acts as a prism through which
we interpret and attempt to decipher the unfolding events of the narrative.
Other than that, we know him only posthumously as a corpse. It is also sig-
nificant to note that these memories arise from a grief-stricken man whose
own grasp on reality progressively deteriorates following his shock at the news
of Melquiades’ death. Therefore, the act of remembering in Three Burials is
essentially unreliable and is accompanied by the process of mourning as an
attempt to recover from a personal trauma. But for Pete, it is his very memories
of Melquiades that actively constitute his trauma.
In an illuminating essay on traumatic capture in the cinematic Western,
Janet Walker relays this trope’s commonality within the genre as a whole.
Analysing such diverse films as The Searchers, Pursued, Once Upon a Time in
the West and Lone Star, she outlines in some detail the effect that the concept
of trauma has on cinematic realism in its profound potential for reinterpreting
the history of the American West through film:

A prominent subgroup of westerns [are] made up of what I’ll call ‘trau-

matic westerns,’ in which past events of a catastrophic nature are repre-
sented so as to challenge both the realist representational strategies of a
genre that so often trades on historical authenticity and the ideological
precepts of Manifest Destiny. Traumatic westerns, it might be said, are
counter-realistic and counter-historical. They are those films in which the
contradictions of American conquest – a kind of generalised trauma –
become invested in particular narrative scenarios.28

There are strong a priori grounds for suggesting that Three Burials continues
in this ‘prominent subgroup’, and I will argue below that Pete’s memories
(relayed in the form of a series of flashbacks) operate not only as another coun-
ter-narrative strategy against realism, but also (by utilising the approach taken
by Harvey) as cinematic examples of Bachelard’s concept of ‘poetic space’.
This is to say, as a ‘sequence of fixations’ through which Pete attempts to place
his friend, as it were, and construct a sense of psychological ‘stability’, an
identity for Melquiades and, ultimately, himself. It is an attempt to determine
‘spaces of the being’s stability’ that are removed from temporality, contingency
and chance; ‘fixations’ expunged from the chaotic flux of ‘real’ experience and
recast or, rather, re-remembered in mythic terms.
The film’s self-reflexivity proves to be fundamental in this respect for it
highlights the process whereby identity is constructed through the narrative.
An indicative moment includes a tender scene where Pete and Mel are herding
cattle together. Cinematographer Chris Menges’ camera encompasses the epic
landscape of the Texas southwest in slow, broad sweeps; heat-hazed long shots
‘fix’ these attractive images ‘as memories of experienced places and spaces’,
while composer Marco Beltrami’s gentle music plays over the soundtrack,

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

giving the whole scene a romanticised, timeless air. (Such scenes are visu-
ally reminiscent of some of the famous ‘cattle-driving’ Westerns of Ford and
Hawks, and the painted canvases of Remington and Charles Russell.) We then
cut to a contemporary shot of Pete sitting, brooding in his lodging, at once
indicating that this has been his subjective memory of Mel and not objective
reality. This is soon followed by another such flashback when, in an endearing
act of friendship, Mel gives Pete his best horse. To Pete’s protestations that the
gift is ‘too much . . . it’s the best horse I ever saw,’ Mel responds with, ‘Mine,
yours . . . what’s the difference? He’s got “Pete” branded on his brain!’
Recollections like this seek to provide a ‘sequence of fixations in the spaces
of the being’s stability’ and are, as indicated above, presented in mythic terms.
This is to say, shot in a traditionally realist style, they are devoid of the dis-
jointed editing of the film’s contemporary action sequences within which they
are framed and are, instead, permeated throughout with a mixture of nostal-
gia, eulogy and a ‘black-and-white’ simplistic morality. Even Pete’s engineer-
ing of a tryst for himself and Mel with two married women, the local waitress
Rachel (Melissa Leo) and Norton’s own wife Lou Ann (January Jones), when
depicted (or, more properly, remembered) in such terms, takes on an innocent
air, despite the obvious moral issue of crossing the ‘border’ of marital fidelity.
When Mel and Lou Ann are alone together in a motel room, they do not have
sexual intercourse, but merely dance; the mood of the scene is one of tender-
ness rather than carnal lust.
Such narrative simplicity is, of course, undercut by framing Pete’s flashbacks
within and (on occasion) throughout with the chronologically disjointed scenes
showing the actions and memories of other prominent characters, Norton
chief among them. Norton’s memories clearly differ from those of Pete’s in
both mood and composition. Here the mythic simplicity is replaced by a series
of complex, often repetitive flashbacks of the circumstances leading up to his
part in Mel’s death. These are relayed in disorientating fashion with staccato
bursts of varying lengths, which invade the contemporary action of the nar-
rative at seemingly random points. For instance, in one scene we see Norton
responding to the sound of rifle fire. He is aiming at something off-screen, but
there is no accompanying reverse-shot to illuminate what (if anything) is con-
tained within his point-of-view. Another such moment revealed earlier in the
narrative sees a panicked Norton burying Mel’s body in a scratch-dug hole.
(Of course, this is chronologically illogical as it is revealed before the revela-
tion of his shooting of Mel.) Another such moment is framed between shots
of Norton gazing after Lou Ann as she heads into a shopping mall, the colour
of her red miniskirt apparently enough to trigger his memory: a very brief
hand-held shot reveals Norton looking at his shaking, blood-stained hands as
he kneels over Mel’s body. A cut forward in time to a close-up shot showing
Norton’s pained expression, his eyes watering, not only frames the flashback,
it also reveals his trauma regarding the dreadful psychological consequences of
taking another man’s life.

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Walker suggests that, in ‘traumatic westerns . . . past events elude the realist
register to suggest another way of knowing, one marked by ellipsis, uncer-
tainty, and repetition’.29 Such ‘marks’ are apparent in Three Burials, relayed
through its numerous flashbacks and multi-layered diegesis. Indeed, in one
particular moment, the film itself becomes involved in the process of construct-
ing historical memory, for significantly included as a (disembodied) flashback
is the single scene shot solely from Mel’s perspective – this is the moment of
his death. As the camera pans downward to provide an overhead shot of Mel
dismounting from his horse, it is revealed that he was protecting his goats from
a prowling coyote (hence, the gunshots heard by Norton) and is himself subse-
quently gunned down by Norton’s ‘return-fire’. The tragic nature of his death
is thus enhanced with the realisation that not only did he not deserve such an
end, but that as he lay dying Melquiades never knew who or what hit him.
When taken together (and accepting that the structure of the film would
deliberately seek to deny this possibility), these sequences constitute what one
would typically refer to in generic terms as the ‘shootout’. But far from merely
repeating this convention, Three Burials denies us both the immediacy and the
catharsis of regeneration through violence; compared with Shane’s shootout
with Wilson, for instance, this epic moment is anything but. I have, through-
out, argued against the implication that regeneration through violence occurs
in all Westerns, however. Chapter 2, for instance, detailed how The Searchers,
a purportedly classical Western, points out that following this path leads not to
redemption of the spirit, but to the loss of spirit, as is Ethan’s fate.
In both real and mythic terms, therefore, not only is Mel’s death senseless,
but it becomes apparent that Norton does not really see who he is firing at
either: busy masturbating to Hustler when he is first alerted to the sound of
rifle fire, he panics and responds with shots of his own. And, if we are to believe
that he fired out of a genuine sense of self-defence, then his assigned mythical
role as villain is hereby rendered problematic. Despite his generally objection-
able personality, Norton, like everybody else in the borderlands, exists within
the chaotic, intersecting flux of emotion and action that constitutes real life in
the diegetic world of Three Burials. One can no more ‘fix’ him generically than
Pete can ‘fix’ Melquiades’ identity through subjective recollections.
The quality of memories, according to Bachelard, is that they ‘are motion-
less’, and ‘the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are’.30
It is important to point out though that none of the flashbacks in Three
Burials – Pete’s or Norton’s – serve a traditional purpose. This is to say, none
of these perspectives give us any objective clarity on events as they serve to
confuse rather than to elucidate. Norton’s recollections are rendered as trauma
through staccato editing and disorientating camera movement, while Pete’s
are, as the product of trauma, acts of attempted displacement, re-imaginations
through a romantic aesthetic that is itself profoundly undermined by the con-
fusing nature of the film’s spatial–temporal narrative patterns. The issue then
arises as to how much we really know about Melquiades. Nothing terribly

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

objective at any rate; however, such subjective spatial ‘fixations’ within the
narrative as offered through Pete’s memories work to emphasise his bond with
Mel as something almost innocent and pure, at least this is the indication – as
something removed from the complexities and frustrations of real experience
and laced with the harmonious simplicity of myth. They act as a counter-point
to the recollections of Norton, but despite their ostensible realism they remain
very much a product of the same trauma, what Walker refers to as ‘the cata-
strophic past event’.31
Bachelard’s and Harvey’s views are perhaps best illustrated in Three Burials
in what proves to be the last, most significant, of Pete’s subjective flashbacks.
In a scene established by a smooth panning shot of a flock of birds breaking
into flight across a lake at sunset, we find Pete and Mel sitting together gazing
out at the calm waters. It is here that we gain crucial knowledge of Mel’s proud
boast to Pete of a home and family back in his native Mexico, a small village
he calls Jimenez. Harvey’s idea of the significance of the ‘spatial image’, spe-
cifically the ‘evidence of the photograph’, finds a powerful consonance here as
Mel shows Pete a photograph purporting to depict himself, his wife Evelia, and
their three children. It is Mel’s assertion of both an identity and of a history for
himself through visual recourse to a family that he claims not to have seen in
over five years. Mel goes on to note with unmistakable pride that his young-
est son is ‘gonna be a damn good cowboy’, and yet this pride is tempered by
a constant fear of the possibility of death – a fear that we know to have been
already realised. As a ‘wetback’ Mel worries about being arrested or, worse
still, shot by the border patrol. And it is at this point in the narrative that he
asks Pete to promise that, should he die ‘over here’, he will return his body to
Jimenez. But, of course, this scene is, like the others, a moment selected by Pete
and re-enacted for us at a particular point in the narrative to suit a particular
purpose. And its purpose is both to explain and to justify Pete’s kidnapping
of Norton, the disinterring of Mel’s body, and his immanent embarking on a
quixotic journey across the border into Mexico. It is not, then, strictly speak-
ing, Mel’s own assertion, rather, it is Pete’s attempt to give his dead friend a
voice – ‘stability’ – to speak for him as it were.
In addition to the above, this scene provides the narrative impetus for Pete to
assume the mythic role of the hero, who will head into the wilderness in order
to deal justice to his dead friend’s killer before fulfilling his promise to return
Mel’s body to Jimenez. Before the flashback draws to a close, Mel draws Pete
a map so he can locate his claimed birth place and, as the narrative segues into
its second act – ‘The Journey/El Viaje’ – Pete will use this map and the pho-
tograph in his attempt to locate Jimenez, inform Mel’s wife of her husband’s
passing, and honour his pledge to his dead friend.

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myth of the western

III
Pete’s occupation as a ranch foreman, together with his assumption of the role
of heroic defender of his dead friend’s honour, comprises two key elements of
the Western: these are the image of the cowboy and the revenge motif. The film
trades on these elements in order to present us with its particular deconstruc-
tion of the myth of the West.
The significance of the cowboy in relation to the frontier lies at the heart of
Anglo-America’s myth of itself. As I have already detailed in previous chap-
ters, the cowboy is typically envisioned as a lone hero on horseback, one who
lives by his own code of honour: tough, courageous and quick on the draw.
He justly defends the pioneers of civilisation against the various representa-
tive forces of the wilderness. However, the hero is also a part of the world of
the villain. His past, if not exactly the same, is in many ways related to this
figurative savage. Consequently, the embryonic civilisation, whose very exist-
ence depends upon such a figure, ultimately rejects his violence once he has
vanquished the savage forces that have threatened it. The wilderness provides
the hero with the territory in which he can live out this mythic identity; its
destruction is therefore his own. The cowboy is thus a profoundly existential
figure in a profoundly existential landscape.
I have already discussed how the counter-narrative style engendered by the
peculiar editing techniques and spatial–temporal disjuncture in the first part of
Three Burials offer a brutal deconstruction of the demands cinematic realism
places on verisimilitude and its need for ‘psychologically-rounded characters’.
Therefore, it is perhaps in keeping with the film’s ironic tone that, in many
ways, its most interesting aspect (as far as the Western is concerned) comes at
the moment that this counter-narrative style is completely abandoned. At this
intermediate point, the film segues into a more traditional aesthetic style of
cinematic realism.
Having overheard a conversation between Sheriff Belmont (Dwight
Yoakam) and Border Patrol Captain Gomez (Mel Rodriguez) that implicates
Norton in the killing of Melquiades, Rachel comes to inform Pete ‘who killed
that Mexican’. Pete gazes out into the surrounding wilderness of his lonely
farmstead and the romantic backdrop – much akin to Munny’s adobe hut
in Unforgiven – subsumes Pete; almost as if it is importing the knowledge of
what he must do into his person, etching it into his very soul. The mythic West
is to provide him (or so he thinks) with the method by which Norton will be
brought to justice. This is confirmed in Pete’s mind when Belmont refuses his
angry demand that he arrest Norton. The killing of his best friend is to be
ignored by the forces of law and, with this realisation, Pete, the man who has
been brought to a standstill by his grief, is transformed into the vengeful hero.
We are now in recognisable ‘Western territory’: when the lawful representa-
tives of civilisation are unable or, in this case, unwilling to mete out justice, the
gunfighter springs into action.

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

It is, of course, the borderlands that provide the geography in which Pete can
live out his mythic role as the hero. Its constitution of deserts, mountains and
canyons likens itself to the historical epic and immediately begs comparison
with the aesthetic qualities of Westerns past, the Monument Valley terrain
of Ford or the apocalyptic deserts of Leone and Sam Peckinpah; perhaps also
with the southwestern novels of Cormac McCarthy. The film’s intertextual
relay makes clear the role that the Western narrative plays, not only in struc-
turing mythic accounts of the historical past, but also its creation of a sense
of individual identity. In this regard, Three Burials once more refers back to
the Westerns of the past: fusing existentialism with the historical epic, incor-
porating at once the thematic legacies of Bud Boetticher, Anthony Mann and
Hawks, and once again Ford.
A journey into such a territory evokes a journey back in time. Pick-up trucks
are replaced by horses and roads give way to mountains and desert tracks.
At times this effect of a temporal shift is depicted in Three Burials with no
small sense of humour. Belmont, who hates Pete primarily because both men
share a relationship with Rachel (Belmont’s resentment perhaps grows in the
knowledge of his own sexual impotency), accidentally drives his truck into a
ditch. The pursuit of Pete is to be a horseback affair. The Sheriff’s prowess as
leader of the manhunt is quickly ridiculed. When discussing plans to detain
Pete before he can make it into Mexico, Belmont enquires hopefully of Gomez,
‘What about the heat-seeking radar ya’ll got?’ With perfect comic timing,
Gomez replies, ‘It don’t work.’
Pete’s journey is accompanied by striking long-takes of mountainous terrain
which dwarf his small convoy of three horses and a pack-mule, enveloping
them all in a primordial environment. It is at this moment that Pete’s own
associations with the wilderness become visually manifested. Belmont, crouch-
ing unseen from a vantage point, trains his rifle sight on Pete. He hesitates, and
then releases his finger from the trigger before finally watching Pete disappear
behind a rock face, as if he is merging with the landscape itself. Belmont’s
failure to shoot reaffirms his impotency. More significantly, he is quick to
realise the ethical consequences should he kill Pete. He subsequently extricates
himself from the manhunt. In a more abstract sense, he extricates himself from
the myth, and his role in the narrative comes to an end.
Meanwhile, Pete’s journey becomes increasingly perverse. Melquiades’
corpse inevitably begins to rot in the desert heat, resembling less and less the
person that it once was. Pete’s vain attempts to preserve the body become
increasingly farcical: burning off ants with kerosene, pouring anti-freeze down
the cadaver’s throat, and even attempting to comb its hair with a garden fork
while drunk. Such dark humour is accompanied in equal measure by more
traditional moments of danger and fear. While trekking round a gorge, one of
Pete’s horse’s panics, slips and falls to its death in the valley below. In another,
particularly upsetting scene, an unnamed old blind man (Levon Helm), whom
Pete and Norton come across on their journey, asks Pete to shoot him because

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his son ‘has got of cancer’ and ‘won’t be comin’ back’ to look after him – a
life lived alone and in darkness is more than he can bear. Norton in turn gets
bitten by a rattlesnake and Pete has to rely on Mexican villagers to extract the
poison. The healer woman, reluctant to help a ‘gringo’ of the Border Patrol, is
swayed only by Pete’s desperate plea for a higher purpose: ‘I need him. I don’t
want him to die.’ (It is quickly revealed that this is a woman whom Norton
had, earlier on in the narrative, punched in the face as she attempted to cross
the border. She returns the ‘favour’ in kind by pouring coffee on his crotch
and then smashing the kettle across his face, breaking his nose in the bargain.)
As already mentioned, it is once Pete decides to adopt the role of the hero
and cast Norton in the role of the villain that the complex temporality that has
dominated the narrative of the film’s first part is completely abandoned. Three
Burials’ assumption of the form and iconography of the Western in its second
part seems to be undertaken with the self-conscious, deconstructive agenda.
The narrative complexity remains, but in its second part it is in the contrast
between form and meaning that the film acquires its depth and seriousness.
That is to say, the self-conscious irony of the film’s ideological agenda would
be lost if the film merely replicated the narrative and iconography of a so-called
traditional Western. Of course, as I have already outlined, and whether they
intend to or not, Westerns not only propound the myth, they question it also.
Three Burials both deconstructs the myth and shows, in an imitative form, the
fate of the man who follows it. This fate, hinted at throughout Pete’s journey,
is finally laid bare when he arrives in Coahuilla. To his dismay, none of the
locals seem to have heard of Jimenez. When Pete finally tracks down ‘Evelia’
(her name turns out to be Rosa), she claims never to have heard of Melquiades
Estrada, let alone admit to being his wife. Upon presentation of the photo-
graph, Rosa angrily demands how Pete managed to get hold of a picture of her
and her children. She does not acknowledge the figure of Mel and demands
that Pete leaves before he gets her into trouble with her husband, finally reas-
serting, ‘We don’t know any Melquiades!’ Rosa’s angry reaction suggests that
she may indeed have encountered Mel in a sexual capacity, but not that of
husband and wife.
After days of fruitless searching, Pete comes across a dilapidated old shack
in the middle of the desert and proclaims it to be Jimenez. Pete’s obsessive
delusion has, by this point, convinced him of the reality of Mel’s photograph.
Harvey writes that ‘photographs are now construed as evidence of a real
history, no matter what the truth of that history may have been. The image
is, in short, proof of the reality, and images can be constructed and manipu-
lated.’32 We now know that Pete’s only reference to the ‘real’ – the photograph
purporting to depict Mel with his wife and children – is revealed to be a lie. As
if to confound his delusions further, he produces the photograph once more
and holds it out to Norton. A reverse-shot from Norton’s perspective reveals
it to us in detail for the first time. (In the flashback, which constitutes Pete’s
memory, there is a split-second shot on the photograph as Mel hands it over.

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I would suggest that, at this point in the narrative, we have no real reason to
question its legitimacy.) Aside from the fact that Pete is holding it sideways,
disorientating our perception from the outset, upon close inspection it depicts
only Rosa and her three children – one has to look hard to see a shadowy figure
in the far background (we presume this is Mel, but it could just as easily be
anybody).
This harsh reality is as clear to Norton as it is to the audience, and we begin
to feel a tremendous sense of sympathy for Pete’s increasingly desperate situa-
tion. He is unable or, perhaps, unwilling to accept the truth of the situation as
this would involve denying the validity of the heroic role in which he has cast
himself. As Pete and Norton go about ‘recreating’ Jimenez, it is just as Harvey
relates, ‘a willingness to search for identity, home, and history’.33 Mel may not
have any of these things, but Pete is determined to create them for him. His
final act is to reconstruct in the flimsiest of forms the home that Mel claimed,
but which did not exist. It is his final attempt to create a space of ‘stability’ for
the doomed man, a final resting place for his friend.
What of the enigma of Melquiades himself? I have already discussed how
our access to him is mediated almost exclusively through the subjective memo-
ries of Pete, and it is, as a consequence of this, difficult to ascertain much of his
personal history. Nevertheless, we can hypothesise, and it does indeed become
evident that Mel created an imaginary home and family – a mythic ‘space’ for
himself – something he desired, but which never actually existed. In relation to
the North American Imaginary, Octavio Paz notes how the United States has
defined Mexico as a place onto which its own imagined fantasies of cultural
and racial otherness can be played out:

In general, Americans have not looked for Mexico in Mexico; they have
looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests – and
these are what they have found. In short, the history of our relationship
is the history of a stubborn deceit, usually involuntary though not always
so.34

If this can be said of ‘Americans’ cultural (mis)perceptions of Mexico, then

the significance of Three Burials surely lies in the way it inverts this ‘stubborn
deceit’, revealing it to work equally upon Mexico’s cultural (mis)perceptions
of the United States. If we reiterate Limerick to the effect that ‘the Mexican
border was a social fiction that neither nature nor people in search of oppor-
tunity observed’, then we could say that when Mel first arrives at Pete’s west
Texas cattle ranch, he arrives out of two interdependent social fictions: the
first of these is that which concerns the ‘conquered and controlled borderland’,
which Mel has crossed over presumably in search of work; the second consti-
tutes the mythic discourse that has influenced popular cultural perceptions of
the American West. When Mel declares – ‘I’m just a cowboy’ – he is not only
looking for employment, in mythic terms he is asserting an identity that has

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its roots firmly in the rhetoric of popular frontier mythology and its attendant
cultural, political and historical functions. In seeking economic and social
‘opportunity’, he is playing into the American Dream, itself, of course, a ‘social
fiction’ that, like the cowboy, is firmly rooted in the popular cultural mindset
of America. In existential terms, Paz also relates that, in any civilisation,
‘[t]here is no meaning, there is a search for meaning’.35 Such sentiments relate
to Three Burials’ complex use of narrative, juxtaposing the human desire for
meaning with the absence of meaning.
For his part, Norton is purged by confrontation with his own shortcomings.
His brutal and torturous journey ends with him being forced at gunpoint by
Pete to beg forgiveness for the killing of Melquiades. Indeed, his heartfelt and
pained outpourings of grief and regret leave us with little doubt that, despite
Lou Ann’s declaration, he is not ‘beyond redemption’. Instead of meeting his
end at Pete’s hands Norton is let go. Pete cannot bring himself to kill Norton
probably because this would mean a violation of the code by which Pete has
constructed his heroic persona. By the same token, Norton is the enemy whose
existence has defined Pete and given meaning to his mythic quest. He is also, in
the final instance, the closest thing to family that Pete has. (In this, his relation-
ship with Norton bears a thematic resemblance to the conflicting emotions felt
by Ethan Edwards towards Marty Pawley in The Searchers.)
In a final touching scene moments before he leaves, Pete says to Norton,
‘You can keep the horse . . . son.’ As if to confirm his redemption, Norton calls
after Pete, asking if he is ‘gonna be alright?’ A close-up of Norton’s battered
face showing genuine compassion for his erstwhile captor is thus the last image
we see. (We are also left to ponder how he will make his way back across the
border to his empty home – parted from Lou Ann, the wife who has left him to
go back to the city life she had abandoned in Cincinnati.)
So Pete rides off, betrayed by a mythic identity that did not exist as surely
as Mel’s professed identity did not exist either. He wanders into a borderland
that is neither myth nor reality, nor even a conflicted mixture of the two, lying
in between; a nowhere man, a fugitive cut-off from both the United States and
Mexico. He has also lost his relationship with Rachel, who refuses to leave
her husband Bob (Richard Jones) for either Belmont or Pete. Actually, Rachel
comes across as the most philosophical of the characters in the film. Unlike
Pete, she accepts the complex and contradictory identities that reflect the com-
plexities of the borderlands; to her they seem complimentary rather than con-
tradictory, a state of mind that completely eludes Pete (and most of the other
characters for that matter); as she says to Pete, ‘You just don’t understand.’
Such an attitude enables her to accept Belmont’s impotence and Bob’s mixture
of jealousy and complacency, all the while assuring Pete that ‘You’re the one
for me. The only one I love!’ She will not exchange this tangible reality, nor
buy into Pete’s fantasy of marriage, an offer he makes from across the border
when drunk. Thus, Rachel shatters Pete’s last-ditch effort to realise a mythic
identity, it completes his personal failure. He has become a lost soul, like

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Ethan at the conclusion of The Searchers, unmoored in a figurative borderland,

unable to adapt to civilisation and, ultimately, lost in the wilderness.

IV
As the preceding chapters have sought to make clear, the separation of history
from myth is a difficult task to undertake. In the final instance, it may even be
an impossible one. From Turner onward, the terms by which the history of the
nineteenth-century American West have been rendered share more in common
with the language of fictional narratives than most historians would care to
admit. I have indicated above that opening a discussion of Three Burials’ rela-
tion to frontier mythology necessarily opens up a discussion of its relation to
frontier history, as well as confronting us with the constructed nature of his-
torical discourse itself. It is to such a discussion that I now turn.
This chapter began by describing how the New Western historians have
charged Turner with engendering a false historical consciousness, a fanciful
theory driven by myth at the expense of historical reality. However, it is pre-
cisely the elusive nature of reality that comes under scrutiny here. In an astute
critique of the New Western History, Forrest G. Robinson points out that ‘it
is telling . . . that Limerick came to the study of history convinced that it gave
her unmediated access to real things, real events, real people, and not to their
constructions in thought and word’.36 Or, as Stephen McVeigh asks, are not
history and literature ‘both stories that emerge from certain contexts to answer
specific problems or circumstances and face the same problems of language and
meaning?’37 If this is so, then one must always consider the nature and function
of culture, language and narrative in all forms of historiography; at the same
time, one must consider the historiographic element of popular culture.
Relating Three Burials’ narrative and visual style to the question of histori-
cal reality must, therefore, take into account the indelible mark of myth on
historiography. If we recall, Henry Nash Smith once described the frontier in
terms of myth and symbol, as ‘intellectual construction[s] that fuse concept
and emotion into an image’.38 And this ‘image’ was actually of great impor-
tance in ‘exert[ing] a decided influence on practical affairs’ in the historical
West.39 Despite assuming a discernable difference between myth and reality,
in other words, how the reality of the frontier has been written into history
as myth, Smith identifies the constructed image of the West as a mediator of
historical experience. He points out the fundamental necessity of a ‘continuous
dialectic interplay between the mind and its environment’, one that privileges
‘perception’ as a barometer of the real:

History cannot happen – that is, men cannot engage in purposive group
behaviour – without images which simultaneously express collective
desires and impose coherence on the infinitely numerous and infinitely
varied data of experience. These images are never, of course, exact

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reproductions of the physical or social environment. They cannot moti-

vate and direct action unless they are drastic simplifications, yet if the
impulse toward clarity of form is not controlled by some process of veri-
fication, symbols and myths can become dangerous by inciting behaviour
grossly inappropriate to the given historical situation.40

In Three Burials ‘the impulse toward clarity of form’ is undermined through-

out the narrative and ‘verification’ is denied its protagonist. In Jones’ and
Arriaga’s tragic vision, the myth and the man whose ‘perception’ is shaped by
that myth, has become not the hero of legend, but a deluded individual ‘dan-
gerous’ in his actions. Laudable as Pete’s intentions may be, they have become
‘grossly inappropriate’ in the film’s ‘given historical situation’.
In alluding to the potential sociological dangers inherent in the terms symbol
and myth, Smith also causes us to recall Slotkin’s sentiments with which he
began Regeneration through Violence. Regarding ‘the sense of coherence
and direction in history that myths give to those who believe in them’ Slotkin
writes:

The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called

the ‘national character.’ Through myths the psychology and world view
of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such
a way and with such power that our perception of contemporary reality
and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically
affected.41

Sacvan Bercovitch further elaborates upon the cultural–ideological implica-

tions of this interrelationship between myth and history. ‘Myth may clothe
history as fiction’, he writes, ‘but it persuades in proportion to its capacity to
help men act in history. Ultimately, its effectiveness derives from its functional
relationship to facts.’42 Throughout this study we have borne witness to the
multifarious ways in which the Western has responded to the issues raised by
the frontier and of its oft-times keen awareness of its own role and culpabil-
ity in shaping historical perceptions and (mis)understandings. The Western,
undoubtedly, has its own ‘functional relationship to facts’.
One of the most convincing arguments for the intermixing of historiogra-
phy and genre theory in the study of the Western comes from Walker. She
maintains that, while it is true that Westerns frequently take dramatic license,
‘it is also true that [they] take historical license [and] the rejection of the west-
ern’s historicity on the basis of its dramatic license is specious; and falsity is
not grounds for dismissal’.43 Following a rigorous critique of genre studies,
which she describes ‘as a text-dependent form of analysis’, giving little ‘play’
to ethnic voices and histories within the ‘symbolic drama’ of a white male
‘fantasy’, Walker accuses genre criticism of evincing ‘a tendency to recapitulate
the [racial] bias it pretends only to reveal’.44 It allows, instead, for ‘historical

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

interpretation presented in narrative form to parade as mere myth’.45 Hers

is an approach that highlights the benefit of studying film texts and his-
torical accounts in ‘concert’, claiming that ‘history and myth are related and
textual’.46 Walker goes further, suggesting that ‘the western is a profoundly
historical genre [one that] repays a historical approach to its analysis’.47
That I have been dealing primarily with audio-visual representations of
the West requires me to engage with the form that the Western as an ‘his-
torical genre’ may take. Hayden White’s 1988 essay, ‘Historiography and
Historiophoty’, proves relevant in this regard. Walker makes fleeting refer-
ence to this essay in her study; however, I feel that a more in-depth analysis is
necessary.48
White sought to contextualise contemporary approaches to historiography
with a well-considered and sympathetic appeal to what was fast becoming a
new subdiscipline within the field. He defines historiophoty as ‘the representa-
tion of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’.49
According to White, historiophoty raises a troublesome challenge to histori-
cal purists, whose reservations regarded the degree to which ‘it is possible to
“translate” a given written account of history into a visual-auditory equivalent
without significant loss of content’.50 This reservation brought forth two major
charges (simultaneous yet paradoxical) against the capacity of visual narratives
to be historically valid. When it came to issues of verisimilitude, historical films
were considered to be both ‘too detailed’ and ‘not detailed enough’. Although
White does not use these specific terms (he concedes to ‘not know[ing] enough
about film theory to specify more precisely the elements, equivalent to the
lexical, grammatical, and syntactical dimensions of spoken or written lan-
guage’51) when a filmic discourse is perceived to be ‘too detailed’ (that is, ‘in
what it shows when it is forced to use actors and sets that may not resemble
perfectly the historical individuals and scenes of which it is a representation’),
we can relate this to the formal aspects of its mise-en-scène. The contrariwise
charge that historical film is often ‘not detailed enough’ (that is, ‘when it is
forced to condense a process that might have taken years to occur . . . into
a two or three-hour presentation’52) we can relate directly to the process of
editing (the spatial and temporal elisions typical of the filmmaking process
which Harvey branded ‘unique’ to the cinema). As Three Burials makes clear,
the editing process can add a level of complexity that makes redundant such
charges as the ‘poverty of the “information load”’ with regard to the shaping
and presentation of past events through visual images.53
One way of approaching the complexities of the relationship between visual
and written history is to consider White’s own answer to the above academic
charges. In Metahistory (1973), he relates the practice of historiography to the
artistic-creative processes of literary narrative forms. Like Fredric Jameson,
White’s overall opinion has always been that history is consciously emplot-
ted as a narrative. This is to say, that it is always a work of interpretive his-
toriography and, therefore, necessarily engages with, and is a product of, a

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philosophy of history. Following in the tradition of Northrop Frye, White out-

lines the process of historical emplotment by utilising the traditional literary
modes available to western discourse. Romance, tragedy, comedy and satire
are thus employed in order to reveal how historians express them using one
or more of the major linguistic tropes. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and
irony thus provide ways of explaining events as historical facts and, simultane-
ously, imbuing them with cultural meaning.54
In language that is evocative of the Barthes of Mythologies, White elucidates
the ideological machinations that lay behind historical ‘facts’:

Events happen or occur; facts are constituted by the subsumption of

events under a description, which is to say, by acts of predication . . . not
‘facts’ in general, but ‘facts’ of a specific kind (political facts, social facts,
cultural facts, psychological facts).55

‘The historian shapes his materials’, claims White, ‘in response to the impera-
tives of narrative discourse in general.’56 If this is so, then the historian also
necessarily engages with ideology in his or her act of historical emplotment,
suggesting ‘the constructivist nature of the historian’s enterprise’.57 White
further suggests that ‘[j]ust as every ideology is attended by a specific idea of
history and its processes, so too . . . is every idea of history attended by specifi-
cally determinable ideological implications’.58
For his part, White draws little distinction between literary or visual modes
of historical representation as both (invariably) constitute a form of narrative
that draws its intelligibility from the same cultural–ideological traditions. In
his own discussion of White’s approach, Kerwin Lee Klein concludes that there
can be no exact science to history. As I have indicated above, each history
depends on a speculative philosophy of history, on poetic over cognitive bases,
hence, Klein writes that ‘the best reasons for choosing one history rather than
another are moral or aesthetic rather than epistemic’.59 He puts forward the
notion of a ‘plot’ of history, which constitutes a cognitive and linguistic act,
drawing a variety of disparate items into some larger, intelligible whole. Like
Smith’s approach to image, this plot explains itself by ‘individuating an event
out of the historical flux’.60 He then turns this method to Turner’s Frontier
Thesis, posing and then answering two important questions: ‘what is the fron-
tier?’ and ‘how does the frontier explain?’ In response to the first question: the
frontier is a ‘concatenation of different places and processes, from ethnic inter-
action to migration to community building, which historians abstract from the
chaos of sense data and synthesise into an individual concept’.61 In response to
the second question: it explains by providing ‘the middle in a narrative whose
beginning point is non-democratic European society and whose endpoint is
twentieth-century American democracy’.62 This brings us once more to the
vital question of history in relation to myth. Drawing directly from the struc-
tural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, White assesses the fundamental

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

role of myth in the shaping of historical narrative and, therefore, the structur-
ing of what Klein dubbed our ‘historical imaginations’:

[History] is constituted, Lévi-Strauss thinks, by virtue of a conceptual

strategy that is mythic in nature, and which identifies the ‘historical’
with the experiences, modes of thought, and praxis peculiar to modern
Western civilisation . . . stories of the founding of cities or states . . .
whether presented under the aspect either of social science or of history,
partake of the mythical inasmuch as they ‘cosmologize’ or ‘naturalise’
what are in reality nothing but human constructions which might well be
other than what they happen to be.63

From this perspective history is unavoidably conjoined with myth. Consequently,

for White, ‘thus envisioned, to historicize any structure, to write its history, is
to mythologize it’.64 Furthermore, he insists that history ‘is never only history
of, it is always also history for’.65 That is to say, any history is always written
for the interests of a specific social group, race or class, and with a certain
perspective in mind (that is, it necessarily asserts an ideological position as an
actual fact). ‘For Lévi-Strauss’, White argues, ‘the impulse to mythologize [is]
in the very nature of language itself.’66 Taken to its logical conclusion, this
approach suggests that historical form is determined not only by any given
culture’s narrative traditions, but also by the inherent nature of language.
Such opinions regarding the nature of language do not enjoy universal agree-
ment, and it is worth noting here some disputations. For one, Slotkin suggests
that such archetypal approaches (particularly the structural anthropology of
Lévi-Strauss) tend ‘to obscure the importance of historical experience and
change in the shaping of specific myth/ideological systems and in the social life
of the communities the systems serve’.67 For Slotkin, ‘myths are formulated as
ways of explaining problems that arise in the course of historical experience’.68
Hence, he considers ‘both myth and genre as phenomena shaped by histori-
cal contingency, rather than as archetypes generated either by “the nature of
things” or “the nature of language”’.69 In Narration and Knowledge (1985),
Arthur C. Danto presses these implications further by mapping the presence
of narrative onto our own, individual lives. Again, like Jameson, Danto’s
philosophical approach suggests that ‘[n]arration exemplifies one of the basic
ways in which we represent the world . . . to so great a degree that our image
of our own lives must be deeply narrational’.70 As we have seen, however,
Three Burials uses narrative in order to evoke the underlying tension afflicting
all narratives: the human desire for meaning and the very absence of meaning.
The film’s narrative apes Smith’s notion of ‘continuous dialectic interplay
between the mind and its environment’, but there is no synthesis in evidence
for the ‘interplay’ between Pete’s ‘mind’ and the ‘environment’ in which he
operates undermines human ‘perception’. For if Pete’s viaje had succeeded and
drawn to a heroic conclusion, then the film would surely have failed to live up

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myth of the western

to the promise of its counter-narrative beginnings. But, of course, this is not the
case.
In terms of its own brand of historical representation, I suggest that Three
Burials forms part of a small (but growing) number of transnational Westerns
that are concerned with both ‘sides’ of the United States–Mexico border, and
that seek to bring forth the latent history of the borderlands; an historiophotic
example of la frontera. The borderlands – as a problematic in between space
of racial antagonisms, liminal identities and violence – prove fertile ground for
scrutinising Anglo-America’s national mythology and, therefore, its own sense
history. Of course, the notion of transnationalism is not new to the Western
genre. On a broader scale, and in response to those who see the Western
primarily as an American genre, it has, in fact, always been influenced by an
extended historical legacy of European conquest from which it has drawn and
adopted its recognisable tropes and plot motifs. Specifically, from the various
narratives related to that legacy: popular literary fictions including pulp, dime
novels, literature, poetry, song; religious sermons; political speeches; historiog-
raphies; and, of course, the cinema.
In historical and racial terms, Slotkin writes of the transnational origins
of the United States, reminding us that, from its very inception, ‘[American]
history in the West and in the East, was shaped from the beginning by the
meeting, conversation, and mutual adaptation of different cultures.’71 Susan
Kollins presses an issue already implicit in Slotkin’s own treatment of the
genre. ‘In perceiving how the Western borrows its faraway setting and redeem-
ing male hero from the plots of colonial novels’, she writes, ‘critics can no
longer argue that the genre operates as a quintessential American form but
instead must recognise that its sensibilities have been shaped by a larger history
of imperialism.’72 Furthermore, she argues that Western narratives that draw
attention to this ‘colonial unconscious’ act to restore ‘the history of empire to
the genre’.73 I suggest that a film like Three Burials forces us to consider one
of the major problems posed by numerous Westerns, whether one wishes to
demarcate them in classical or revisionist categories, and that is the enigmatic
concept of a homogeneous and stable Anglo-American national identity.
To date, the prominent and oft-cited example of transnationalism in
the cinematic Western remains John Sayles’ masterful Lone Star. This film
highlights the intersections among racial, ethnic and social groups by locat-
ing itself geographically along the Rio Grande in a fictional Texas border
town aptly named, Frontera. In a representative scene, the town’s history
teachers answer angry parents’ protestations regarding the possible import
into the school’s curriculum of Mexican and Hispanic cultures extending
beyond anything other than cookery classes. ‘We’re not changing anything,’
one replies, ‘We’re just trying to present a more complete picture.’ In the
end, this is what Lone Star tries to articulate – ‘a more complete picture’ –
a breaking down of borders, both geographical and cultural, as they have
been established by the binarism of the myth of the West. It is, therefore,

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

representative of the fact that the United States is a polyglot society as well
as being culturally diverse generally; its identity ‘shaped’ by the interaction
of different cultures.74
I contend that Three Burials can be read along similar lines. To a certain
degree, the film does depict the borderlands as an in between space, one that is
not simply defined as a line drawn between two distinct and wholly different
countries, societies and cultures. Instead, it is depicted as a space with its own
character and meaning, one that is inseparable from history and myth. And,
like Lone Star, it renders its own transnational characteristics in terms that
encompass not only the political and the geographic, but the cultural and the
ethnic as well. A number of the actors, creative contributors and technicians,
including the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, are Hispanics. Aside from such
collaboration on the film’s production there is a stylistic acknowledgement
of transnationality in the fact that the film’s dialogue is in both English and
Spanish. It must be conceded that only English subtitles are provided. The
Mexican pastel-coloured chapter headings that announce the different sections
of the film are provided in both English and Spanish. Occasionally, there is
Spanish dialogue unaccompanied by English translation.
As I have suggested above, the film can also be considered transnational in
its presentation of cultural identity for, in part, Three Burials deals with the
various ethnic groups – Hispanic, Chicano, Mestizo and Mexican – that the
official history of the borderlands so often neglects, and that (so the charge
goes) the myth and the Western genre often reduce to orientalist, unflattering
or outright insulting stereotypes: the bordello ‘senorita’ (as witnessed briefly in
The Searchers); the savage ‘bandit’ or the lazy ‘greaser’. Not only does Three
Burials explode such stereotypes, it explodes the notion of a border through
its presentation of the various characters and their relationships, all of whom
cross ‘borders’ of one kind or another: racial, marital, lawful, political, social,
economic and cultural.
Most directly, however, Three Burials’ overall theme seeks to draw the
history of the borderlands onto the contemporary moment with the extremely
controversial issue of ‘border jumping’. Mexicans desperate to escape their
poverty-stricken situation by ‘crossing-over’ into the United States in search
of economic opportunity is, of course, another repressed aspect of Anglo-
America’s triumphalist version of the history of frontier settlement. The New
Western History is surely correct in suggesting that, for the most part, so-
called official history sought to conceal the brutal acts of conquest required
in advancing US claims of national, cultural and racial hegemony throughout
the southwest. This historical elision is of fundamental importance if we are to
consider both the national and individual identities of the borderlands. One of
the most important writers in this regard is Gloria Anzaldúa.
Anzaldúa writes a poetic and highly personalised account of her upbringing
along the borderlands. In Borderlands – la Frontera: the New Mestiza (1987),
she shifts the traditional parameters of historiographic concern, displaying a

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myth of the western

sense of frustration and fear held by the local communities – the ‘little people’
– among whom she lived and grew up, and with whom she identifies her
personal history. Her reminiscences of her childhood and self-identification
with cultural otherness as a mestiza share pages with long passages of non-
translated Spanish dialogue, thus ramifying the reality of the borderlands as
linguistically polyglot, a ‘melting pot’ of myriad cultures, identities and voices;
voices that have, themselves, invariably become subsumed under the official
Anglo-American discourse. The result of her work is part poetry, part literary
criticism and part history. This in itself can be considered a part of la frontera
and in keeping with the spirit of historiophoty: a breaking down of the borders
between various modes of artistic and historical expression.75 Of course, the
fact that Anzaldúa does write in Spanish as well as English (and other indige-
nous languages such as Nahua) provides us with an analogue to Three Burials’
own dialogism. But this is not the only point of comparison.
Anzaldúa writes from the perspective of an intellectual who is at once a
woman, a Tejana and a lesbian. Therefore, for her borders are primarily
cultural; just as the border between the United States and Mexico defines in
geopolitical terms the two nations, so it symbolises the imagined borders sepa-
rating cultural identities. Her perspective is that of a member of several ethnici-
ties who have suffered from discrimination and who continue to struggle for
recognition. She also identifies herself as a Chicana – one of the ‘dispossessed’
– whose ancestors ‘lost their land and, overnight, became foreigners’ after
the ‘white imperialist takeover’, and who are now regarded as interlopers in
their own land.76 In order to consolidate their hegemony, the Anglo-American
population has either forgotten that the Chicanos once ‘owned’ the country, or
else bluntly claim that the southwest is theirs by right of conquest and is to be
protected by force from the ‘incursion’ of the Mexican ‘other’.
What she seeks to remind us is that 150 years ago the border separating
Mexico and the United States simply did not exist, and the people of the area
moved across the Rio Grande at will; in some indigenous cultures they still do.
Her account of the contemporary borderlands, however, is one of trauma for
those ‘mojados’ who, ‘without the benefit of bridges . . . float on inflatable rafts
across el rio Grande, or wade or swim across naked, clutching their clothes
over their heads’.77 For her, the United States–Mexico border,

es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and
bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of
two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture. Borders
are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us
from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge.
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional
residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of revision. The
prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here:
the squint-eyed, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal.’ Gringos in the
US Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors,
aliens – whether they posses documents or not . . . The only legitimate
inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align them-
selves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like
a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger.78

Anzaldúa’s language elicits a powerful imagery of the border as an open wound

– ‘una herida abierta’ – her emotive language exploding the repressed history
of the United States–Mexico border. This finds a consonance with Limerick’s
idea of the border as a ‘social fiction’. However, for the tens of thousands of
people – ‘los atravesados’ – who attempt to cross it illegally year-in year-out,
this fiction seems all too real:

Barefoot and uneducated, Mexicans with hands like boot soles gather at
night by the river where two worlds merge creating what Reagan calls
a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has caused a shock culture, a
border culture, a third country, a closed country.79

Anzaldúa conflates the personal with the political, victims in Reagan’s so-
called ‘frontline’, thereby casting doubt over the possibility of a stable sub-
jectivity. Identity proves as porous and uncertain as the concept of a border
that cleanly and unambiguously separates nations, the ‘Third World’ from
the ‘first’. Her conception of a ‘border culture’, borne painfully of an uneasy
synthesis between ‘two worlds merging’, is one that highlights the fallacy of
geopolitical attempts to establish a border along national or racial lines, a
binary to ‘distinguish us from them’. In la frontera, nothing could be further
from Turner’s ‘closed’ frontier.
An attempt to distinguish ‘us from them’ is personified (and undermined) in
Three Burials through the character of Norton. Norton clearly sees himself as
a defender of Anglo-American territory by resisting with violence the Mexican
‘transgressors’. For him the border must be defended with a paranoid (even
pathological) zeal. In one particularly telling scene, we find Norton involved
in a round-up of Mexicans attempting to cross the border illegally. During
the group’s detainment, Norton pursues a woman who attempts to flee; after
a lengthy chase he launches himself at her, roughly tackling her to the ground
and punching her in the face, breaking her nose. Norton’s extreme actions are
the product of fear, the fear of the racial other that lies at the heart of racism.
They are also the product of his sexual frustrations, which serve only to fuel
his aggressive behaviour, at once linking sex (or rather the lack of it) with
violence. (Norton is masturbating to Hustler moments before his call to duty,
an action which is, as mentioned above, replicated moments before his fatal
shooting of Melquiades.)
Similarly related to the effort to maintain the sanctity of the border is Captain

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myth of the western

Gomez, Norton’s commanding officer. In racial terms, Gomez problematises

the binary that the border would otherwise seek to establish, the ‘us from
them’. He is either a Mestizo or a Chicano (though this is, perhaps fittingly,
never made clear), but he is also a US citizen born and a part of the establish-
ment; one of those ‘who align themselves with whites’. He is caught between
the opposed forces of the two worlds to which he belongs and which conflict
in the ‘border culture’ in which he operates. As a servant of the white power
structure he enforces US immigration law, yet he also reprimands Norton for
‘beating up on’ the Mexicans he apprehends. (One suspects, however, that this
ostensible concern has less to do with protecting their human rights than it
does with him avoiding trouble with his own superiors.) His offhand remark
regarding the few of the group who escaped implicitly reveals the southwest’s
economic dependency on illegal labour from Mexico: ‘Well, I guess some-
body’s gotta pick strawberries.’ More significantly, Gomez also knows that
Norton killed Melquiades, but conspires with Belmont to cover it up.
Overall, the film’s depiction of the brutalisation of illegal immigrants at
the hands of the Border Patrol, combined with the establishment’s callous
attitude towards Mel’s death, comprise a shocking indictment of the United
States’ relationship with Mexico. Indeed, the official response to Mel’s death
exposes a cynical racist dictum: ‘Your life only matters if you are white.’ The
metonym is reinforced during the scene at the graveyard. When asked by the
grave digger what Mel’s surname is, Deputy Antonio (Brent Smiga) merely
shrugs his shoulders and replies, ‘Mexico?’ It is as if, as a nation, Mexico is
to be regarded as one homogeneous mass; as an individual, one Mexican is
the same as another and, perhaps, at a stretch: ‘The only good Mexican is a
dead Mexican’? This callousness is summarised neatly in a subsequent scene
that depicts Pete sitting miserably beside Mel’s grave. The smallest of markers
simply reads: ‘Melquiades, Mexico’.
Three Burials conflates the personal with the political. Mel’s ill-treatment
thus becomes a mirror for the reflection of broader social truths about relations
between the United States and Mexico. In other words, the film’s ideological
concern with the mythic themes of justice, morality, violence and redemption
become focused on the individual. Looked at in this way, Mel’s pauper’s life
and ignominious death comes to symbolise social attitudes as a whole. In his
own way, Pete tries to rectify this by inverting the terms under which oppressor
and oppressed operate. He takes Norton to Mel’s adobe hut, forces him sit in
his chair, wear his work clothes, and even makes him drink from his cup. It is
as if by forcing Norton to exist in Mel’s ‘space’, he can force him to see from
Mel’s perspective. But it is Mel’s decaying body which best exemplifies this
conflation, representing as it does the ultimate sign of putrefaction: the corpse
of an unwanted and unknown vaquero, a horrible, rotting memento mori for
Anglo-America to reflect upon.
However, we should not be too quick to reassert our own binary, depict-
ing (albeit in inverted terms) one nation simply as victims of another’s brutal

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

oppression. Such a reading would overlook the intelligent way in which Three
Burials operates as an historiophotic text. Aside from Gomez, the film exposes
Mexican complicity in the oppression of Mexicans. As Limerick rightly points
out, one should not slip into the habit of ‘taking point[s] of view for granted’
and she reminds us that ‘Hispanics – like Indians, Anglos, and every other
group – could be victims as well as victimisers, and [that] the meanings of the
past could seem, at times, to be riding a seesaw.’80 Again, it is Three Burials’
narrative concern with borders and the crossing of those borders that illus-
trates this intelligence. The film is also ironic in that it inverts a historical phe-
nomenon by having its Anglo-American protagonist attempt to enter Mexico
illegally. Pete enlists the help of a Mexican (the same man who, earlier, we
see ‘helping’ the group who are detained by the Border Patrol) who smuggles
illegal Mexican immigrants over the Rio Grande – for a fee. Upon quoting Pete
$1,000 for his assistance, Pete scoffs, ‘I don’t have a thousand dollars.’ ‘No,
not one thousand,’ replies the smuggler. ‘Three thousand: one for you, one
for the Gringo, and one for the dead guy!’ Pete eventually bargains his horse
for passage, but, in a broader sense, what this scene reveals is the extortionate
amount ‘wetbacks’ are charged by gangsters in this regard. As an organised
crime, people trafficking is a booming economy, intimately connected to cross-
border drug trafficking, and largely set up by unscrupulous Mexicans in order
to financially exploit the desperation of their fellow countrymen and women.

V
Interpreting Three Burials’ stylistic and thematic peculiarities in tandem with
the writings of Anzaldúa has the additional and more significant consequence
of forcing us to re-engage our conceptual barometer of what counts as history
or, more properly, what counts as historiography.
As outlined above, such an appeal was made by White in 1988 with the
consideration of historiophoty. However, in his much-celebrated earlier essay,
‘The Burden of History’ (1966), White responded to the reasons behind the
growing anti-historicist sentiment apparent from the early twentieth century
onwards. In many ways this essay acted as a precursor to his essay on historio-
photy.81 He argued that the reasons behind this anti-historicism lay in the fact
that historians of the period were wedded to ‘antiquated’ nineteenth-century
approaches to both science and the arts; approaches that were more in line
with the realism of William Makepeace Thackeray than they were with the
modernism of either Henrik Ibsen or James Joyce.82 ‘When [historians] say
they are artists’, he wrote, ‘they certainly don’t mean to identify themselves
with action painters, kinetic sculptors, existentialist novelists, imagist poets, or
nouvelle vague cinematographers.’83 In essence, White’s accusation was that
many ‘historians continue to treat their “facts” as though they were “given”
and refuse to recognise . . . that they are not so much “found” as “constructed”
by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before

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myth of the western

him’.84 He deemed such an approach to be inadequate to the task of repre-

senting contemporary society. As Klein succinctly puts it, ‘[i]nvented in an
earlier age, “realist history” no longer served its original purpose: it could not
adequately represent the authentic chaos of modernity’.85 Even more succinctly
than this: ‘“Historical realism” was no longer “realistic”.’86 In his appeal for
the development of a conceptual language capable of representing history for
the modern world, White lamented that, so far, ‘there have been no significant
attempts at surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist historiography in this
century (except by novelists and poets themselves) for all the vaunted “art-
istry” of the historians of modern times’.87
To White’s exceptions I would include certain contemporary film texts such
as Lone Star and Three Burials. Indeed, it seems to me that, writing more
than a generation ago, White must have had the sort of aesthetic formal quali-
ties displayed in Three Burials in mind when he concerned himself with the
concept of historiophoty. Consequently, my approach to the film has viewed
it as an historiophotic document adequate to the task of representing Klein’s
‘authentic chaos of modernity’, satisfying Anzaldúa’s demand for personal
history, and realising Limerick’s regional appeal through the concept of la
frontera in the history of the American West.

Notes
  1. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the
New West (London: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 87.
 2. I borrow the phrase ‘interpretive straightjacket’ from Richard W. Etulain.
See Richard W. Etulain (ed.), Does the Frontier Experience Make America
Exceptional? (Boston, MA: St Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 108.
 3. Limerick, Something in the Soil, p. 87.
  4. Ibid., p. 87.
  5. Ibid., pp. 87–8.
  6. Ibid., p. 88.
 7. Earl Pomeroy, ‘Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and
Environment’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41(4) (1955): 579–600, quote
on p. 599. Pomeroy’s essay is also discussed in Richard W. Etulain, Re-imagining
the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (Tucson, AZ:
University of Arizona Press, 1996), pp. 163–8.
 8. Pomeroy, ‘Toward a Reorientation of Western History’, p. 590: ‘The role of
Spanish culture in the Southwest has been exaggerated . . . Actually the native
Spanish and Mexican elements in many parts of the West – particularly California,
where they are most revered today – were small and uninfluential, often fairly
recent arrivals themselves; the typical American settler was ignorant of their lan-
guage and despised their institutions.’
 9. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West (London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 254.
10. Ibid., p. 254.
11. Ibid., p. 255.
12. Ibid., p. 251.
13. Limerick, Something in the Soil, p. 88.
14. See especially Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

American Frontier, 2nd edn (New York: Macmillan, [1949] 1960); Ray Allen
Billington, Fredrick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973); Ray Allen Billington (ed.), The Frontier Thesis:
Valid Interpretation of American History? (Malabar, FL: Krieger, [1966] 1977),
esp. the essays by Everett S. Lee, David M. Potter and Harry C. Allen.
15. Limerick, Something in the Soil, p. 88.
16. Ibid., p. 94.
17. Ibid., pp. 88–92.
18. Ibid., p. 92.
19. J. E. Smyth, ‘The New Western History in 1931: RKO and the Challenge of
Cimarron’, in Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (eds), Hollywood’s West:
The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (Lexington, KY: University
of Kentucky Press, 2005), pp. 37–65, quote on p. 52.
20. I borrow this last term from Margarita de Orellana’s ‘The Incursion of North
American Fictional Cinema 1911–1917 into the Mexican Revolution’. This excel-
lent essay analyses US cinematic efforts to cover the armed phase of the Mexican
revolution, together with its deployment of a range of racial and gendered ste-
reotypes by which Anglo-Americans could ‘read’ the Mexican ‘other’. See in
John King, Ana M. Lopez and Manuel Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds:
Cinematic Encounters in the Americas (London: British Film Institute, 1993), pp.
2–14.
21. Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book (London: British Film
Institute, [1985] 1999), p. 226.
22. See Robert Lapsley and Michel Westlake (eds), Film Theory: An Introduction
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), see especially the chapters
‘Narrative’, ‘Realism’ and ‘The Avant-Garde’.
23. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 308.
24. Ibid., p. 308.
25. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964), discussed in Harvey, The Condition
of Postmodernity, p. 217. See also Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 81–94.
26. Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 85.
27. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 218.
28. Janet Walker (ed.), ‘Captive Images in the Traumatic Western: The Searchers,
Pursued, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Lone Star’, in Westerns: Films
Through History (London: British Film Institute, 2001), pp. 220–1.
29. Walker, ‘Captive Images in the Traumatic Western’, p. 220.
30. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 217.
31. Walker, ‘Captive Images in the Traumatic Western’, p. 220.
32. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 312.
33. Ibid.
34. Octavio Paz, ‘Mexico and the United States’ The New Yorker, 17 September 1979,
in Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (London: Penguin, [1950] 1990), p. 358.
35. Ibid., p. 353.
36. Forrest G. Robinson (ed.), ‘Clio Bereft of Calliope’, in The New Western
History: The Territory Ahead (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998),
p. 68 (emphasis added). Robinson, discussed in Stephen McVeigh, The American
Western (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 147.
37. McVeigh, The American Western, p. 147.
38. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(London: Harvard University Press, [1950] 1978), p. xi
39. Ibid., p. xi
40. Ibid., pp. ix–x

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myth of the western

41. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier, 1600–1860, new edn (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
2000), p. 3.
42. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (London: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1978), p. 11.
43. Walker, Westerns: Films through History, p. 7.
44. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
45. Ibid., p. 10.
46. Ibid., pp. 10, 13.
47. Ibid., p. 10.
48. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
49. Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, American Historical Review,
93(5) (1988): 1193–9, quote on p. 1193.
50. Ibid., pp. 1193–4.
51. Ibid., p. 1196.
52. Ibid., p. 1194.
53. Ibid., p 1195. Here White references the historian Ian Jarvie. In relation to the
‘essence’ of historiography (as opposed to film’s tendency to rely on ‘narration’),
Jarvie suggests that it consists less of ‘descriptive analysis’ than of ‘debates between
historians about just what exactly did happen, why it happened, and what would
be an adequate account of its significance’. See Ian Jarvie, ‘Seeing through Movies’,
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 8 (1978): 374–97.
54. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 1–42; White,
‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, p. 1196.
55. White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, p. 1196.
56. Hayden White, ‘Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination’, History and
Theory, 14(4) (1975): 48–67, at p. 49.
57. White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, p. 1196.
58. White, Metahistory, p. 24.
59. Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European
Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (London: University of California Press,
1997), p. 53.
60. Ibid., p. 52.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. White, ‘Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination’, p. 51 (emphasis in
original). See also Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, [1962] 1966), pp. 245–69.
64. White, ‘Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination’, p. 51 (emphasis in
original).
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., p. 52.
67. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, [1992] 1998),
p. 6.
68. Ibid., p. 7.
69. Ibid., p. 8.
70. Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University
Press, [1985] 2007), p. xiii.
71. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 655.
72. Susan Kollins, ‘Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the
Contemporary Western’, Contemporary Literature, 42(3) (2001): 557–88, quote
on p. 568.

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what counts as history and whose history is it?

73. Ibid., p. 568

74. For in-depth analyses of these issues in Lone Star, see the essays by Kim Magowan,
‘“Blood Only Means What You Let It”: Incest and Miscegenation in John
Sayles’ Lone Star’, Film Quarterly, 57(1) (2003): 20–31, and Kimberley Schultz,
‘Challenging Legends, Complicating Borderlines: The Concept of “Frontera” in
John Sayles’s Lone Star’, in Rollins and O’Connor (eds), Hollywood’s West, pp.
261–81.
75. It is worth noting that Anzaldúa was initially rejected by the academic community
because she did not hold the title of PhD. Her current acceptance is the break-
ing down of another ‘border’. See Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, pp.
266–73.
76. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands – la Frontera: the New Mestiza, 2nd edn (San
Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), p. 28.
77. Ibid., p. 33 (emphasis in original).
78. Ibid., pp. 25–6 (emphasis in original).
79. Ibid., p. 33.
80. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, p. 257.
81. Hayden White, ‘The Burden of History’, History and Theory, 5(2) (1966): 111–34.
82. Ibid., pp. 126–7.
83. Ibid., p. 126.
84. Ibid., p. 127.
85. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, p. 270.
86. Ibid., p. 270.
87. White, ‘The Burden of History’, p. 127.

193
5. ACTORS TRANSCENDING
THE DARKNESS

‘Well it’s a mess ain’t it, Sheriff.’

‘If it ain’t it’ll do till the mess gets here.’

I
This chapter continues my concerns with recent cinematic treatments of
the borderlands by focusing on Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for
Old Men (2007). The film is adapted from Pulitzer Prize winning author
Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same title.1 The book engages with
McCarthy’s  long-standing metaphysical concerns, presenting a meditation
on mortality as a terrifying contest between an ageing West Texas sheriff
and an implacable killer. The Coen’s No Country successfully adapts such
concerns to the cinema and has achieved a good deal of both critical and
commercial acclaim, garnering, among numerous other prizes, four 2008
Academy Awards, including one for Best Motion Picture and another for Best
Achievement in Directing. In this regard, a Hollywood Western has not been
so successful since Unforgiven, which similarly won multiple Oscars back in
1993. Like Three Burials and Lone Star before it, No Country reminds us that
the cinema has depicted the United States–Mexico border as a real place and
a set of myths associated with that place – a mythic terrain, adjunct to the
myth of the West. The borderlands are therefore a term of both geographical
and ideological reference for many Americans, including historians, politi-
cal figures and producers of popular culture. As such, I develop the previous
chapter’s concern with the concept of national identity in specific relation to
the Western genre.
As I have already outlined, the concept of an American national identity
draws from frontier historiography, especially the ‘mystical entity’ Turner
and Roosevelt both called the ‘national character’.2 Throughout the twentieth
century the Hollywood Western has disseminated this construct to cinema

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actors transcending the darkness

audiences both in the United States and around the world. It has provided the
United States with some of its greatest cultural heroes, both real and fictitious
– and all thoroughly re-imagined through its mythology. At the same time, the
genre has also critically interrogated and deconstructed such mythic themes as
the domestication of the wilderness, the Rooseveltian and Turnerian versions
of frontier history, and such hero figures as the cowpuncher and the gunfighter
through the forms and themes available to it: open landscapes, deserts, moun-
tains, prairie; the wilderness–civilisation binary, the epic moment, redemptive
violence, the captivity narrative, and the revenge motif. The Western has long
provided the form through which these various tropes could be articulated,
and yet, more often than not, it becomes apparent that Westerns are con-
tradictory in their narrative meanings, existing as platforms for debating the
impact and scope of the myth of the West on US culture, rather than acting
as a mouthpiece which univocally celebrates a particular version of American
history – that is to say, ‘the white man’s story’.
The kind of post-structuralist analyses already discussed alert us to the
possibility that all texts (filmic or otherwise) promise latent meanings that
potentially contradict the surface messages of the narrative. However, as my
analyses have revealed, a reading ‘against the grain’ is not always necessary as
the intertextual relay and self-reflexivity apparent in many Westerns is striking,
and No Country is no exception. Through the figure of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell
(Tommy Lee Jones), No Country re-engages us with the figure of the lawman.
Aligning the audience with him through narrative screen-time, it keeps him
as a sympathetic protagonist while self-consciously seeking to undermine
his heroic trajectory. The lawman has been depicted in the Western in both
positive and negative terms (and every which way in between). From the many
incarnations of one-time sheriff, Wyatt Earp, through to the notorious, ‘Judge’
Roy Bean, the Western has taught us that heroic or corrupt arbiters of frontier
justice need not be mutually exclusive character traits. People act in history
in complex and contradictory ways, and this is often reflected in their mythic
cinematic avatars. As my discussion in Chapter 3 of Unforgiven’s Sheriff
Little Bill Daggett suggested, the good and the bad often exist simultaneously
in the same character, even if it is eventually collapsed into one or the other
for the sake of narrative closure. A certain level of ambiguity therefore seems
apparent in many Western characters, if one cares to look closely enough.
Such a reading would align itself with the New Western historians who have
forwarded ‘complexity’ as one of their key words in discussing the American
West. Limerick writes:

A major project of the New Western History [has] to be the assertion that
benefits often came packaged with injuries, good intentions could lead to
regrettable outcomes, and the negative aspects of life wove themselves
into a permanent knot with the positive aspects. The deeply frustrating
lesson of history in the American West and elsewhere is this: human

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myth of the western

beings can be a mess – contentious, conflict loving, petty, vindictive, and

cruel – and human beings can manifest grace, dignity, compassion, and
understanding in ways that leave us breathless.3

Limerick’s sentiments with regard to human complexity would be well applied

to popular culture, but it is also, perhaps, no surprise that such character com-
plexities apparent in Westerns such as The Searchers are overlooked in those
whose first and foremost concerns are with ‘real’ history. As we know, when it
comes to the popular imagination, Limerick argues that the ‘desire for a telling
of Western history in which good guys are easily distinguished from bad guys
is deep and persistent’.4 While this is undoubtedly true in many instances, the
films analysed thus far in this study have surely illustrated that the popular
imagination is itself a complex and, often, unpredictable thing. I shall discuss
these various narrative complexities as they appear in No Country throughout
the course of this chapter. This is done in conjunction with the wider scope
of frontier mythology and its import in constructing the historical memory
informing the US cultural mindset – America’s national identity.
I am acutely aware of the fact that like Three Burials, No Country is set in
a more contemporary period and, also like Three Burials, it has been regarded
by the few critics and journalists who have discussed the film as an example
of a ‘neo’, or a post-Western. I shall scrutinise this appellation and discuss No
Country’s commentary on social, cultural and historical issues that affect the
present-day United States. I conclude with another look at the New Western
credentials of No Country; specifically, Limerick’s preference to ‘place Western
American history back into history with an explicit and honest use of the word
“conquest”’, is considered by offering a brief assessment of the continued
significance of the frontier mythology that the Western genre propounds in
relation to those aspects of US political discourse which it still informs – for
good or ill. Specifically, I discuss No Country’s ideological significance in (de)
constructing the cultural rhetoric behind twenty-first-century US foreign poli-
cies, specifically those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
While certainly not comprising the whole of No Country’s significance, the
historical issue does provide me with an inroad to my primary focal point; once
again, the figure of the Western hero – for so many a portal through which the
United States entered into a fantasy about itself and its place in the world –
shall provide the lens by which I observe how No Country assesses the role of
myth in history and its sociopolitical role in the contemporary world. Moving
beyond the concerns of the previous chapter, we could argue that if Three
Burials seeks to critically assess the notion of a homogeneous ‘American self’ in
relation to the Mexican as its foreign ‘other’, then No Country utilises the same
mythological tropes and generic conventions in order to affect a critique of the
influence that the myth of the West holds over the sociopolitical trajectory of
the present-day United States in its role as the world’s figurative lawman. In
this last regard, I take as my starting point the historian Harold Rosenberg’s

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1959 essay ‘The Resurrected Romans’.5 My application of Rosenberg’s essay

to my reading of No Country is combined with a comparative analysis of
Ford’s The Searchers, which was, of course, the subject of Chapter 2. Both
Rosenberg and Ford provide me with suitably comparative texts with which to
elucidate No Country’s attitude towards the Western genre, American history
and the myth of the West. First, however, I shall outline Rosenberg’s essay and
expand the theoretical context of this chapter before working to align its focus
with No Country.

II
Rosenberg offers a detailed analysis of Karl Marx’s 1852 treatise, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.6 Central to Rosenberg’s analysis is
Marx’s peculiar concept of how history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce. Specific to my purposes is Marx’s insistence on how
the repeating history always comes back to haunt and influence the decisions
of those acting in the present. As with White and Arthur C. Danto (discussed
in Chapter 4), Rosenberg views history as deeply narrational and he identifies
two continuities in what he describes as ‘the plot of history’. The first concerns
the various ‘circumstances in which historical acts take place’, and thus ‘con-
stitute an external continuity’; the second forms an ‘inner continuity between
the men who are to act historically in the present and other actors who once
trod the stage . . . men who in a situation sufficiently resembling the present
one played their part with greatness’.7 We can say that these two continuities
set up a distinction between macro- and micro-political scenarios; between
the general flow of historical movement itself and those individual ‘actors’
who themselves move within it and draw from the past their inspiration for
acting in the present and imagining their future. And it is these individual
actors, asserts Rosenberg, who suffer from history’s ironic ‘Reversal’: as noble
intentions grind into their very opposite, the teleological flow of history con-
tinues unabated. This is especially apt for my reading of No Country, dealing
as it does with the film as an individual (micro) unit, which is defined (if not
entirely determined) within the larger (macro) movements and language of the
myth of the West and its contingent relation to social, cultural and historical
movements.
‘The question of myth in history’, claims Rosenberg ‘is the question of the
hero. And the question of the hero is the question of resurrection.’8 So it is that
this dead hero is resurrected, disinterred, as it were, from the grave, his role
assumed by the individuals acting in the present as they ‘anxiously conjure
up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle
slogans and costumes’.9 However, just as myth seeks to eradicate the histo-
ricity of things, as Barthes has suggested, so too does the historical element
become lost on the hero whose awareness is only of ‘eternal forms’. It is this
that leads Rosenberg to concur with Marx that this ‘invasion by the “dead

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myth of the western

generations” is what makes a “nightmare” out of history’.10 It would be perti-

nent at this point to reiterate (once again) a similar sentiment made by Slotkin
in the opening paragraphs of Regeneration through Violence. As I have men-
tioned, Slotkin writes that ‘the mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask
of that enigma called the “national character”’, and it is the transference of
this ‘mask’ to the modern descendants of our cultural ancestors that ensures
that ‘our perception of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the
world [is] directly, often tragically affected’.11 Slotkin provided subsequent
chroniclers of the relationship between myth and history in American studies
with a national context for exploring what Sacvan Bercovitch described as
frontier mythology’s ‘functional relationship to facts’ in its ‘capacity to make
men act in history’.12 In another thematic link to Rosenberg, it is Slotkin’s
contention that the poets of the early years of the American republic looked
backwards into antiquity, into the founding epics of ancient Greece and Rome,
in their attempt to ‘fabricate an “American epic”’ that would mark the begin-
ning of a national mythology, ‘providing a context for all works to come after’:

Their concept of myth was essentially artificial and typically American:

they believed, in effect, that a mythology could be put together on the
ground, like the governments of frontier communities or the national
Constitution, either by specialists or by the spontaneous awakening of
the popular genius. Like the Constitution, such myth-epics would reflect
the most progressive ideas of American man, emphasising the rule of
reason in nature and in human affairs, casting aside all inherited tradi-
tions, superstitions, and spurious values of the past. The freedom and
power of man were to be asserted against the ideas of necessity, of his-
torical determinism, of the inheritance of guilt and original sin.13

Slotkin highlights an inherent contradiction in the thinking behind the

American epic. The context by which the New World was to ‘be liberated
from the dead hand of the past’ and, in the process, become ‘the scene of a new
departure in human affairs’, remained intractably tied to the very influence
of this ‘dead hand’. This was so both in its adaptation of the movements of
European history and its mythological traditions, specifically its structural and
thematic reliance on the likes of Homer and Virgil.14
This can all in turn be related to Fredric Jameson’s conception of dialectical
movements in history. Jameson insists that the various modes of production
in the process of history comprise a diachronic framework that provides the
‘cultural machinery’ informing the dialectical struggle between human ‘desire’
(for a utopian future of ‘freedom’ within collective unity along Marxist lines)
and of the painful and contradictory socioeconomic effects that we experience
as a historical ‘necessity’. As with Slotkin, ‘freedom’ stands opposed to ‘neces-
sity’ as the overall dialectic of history. And, as with Rosenberg, this struggle
is bestowed upon contemporary society as a ‘product . . . of the actions of

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past human agents’.15 Central to the cultural expression of this dialectic is the
all-important concept of narrative, to which (as I have already mentioned)
Jameson ascribes the supreme potential for concrete action in history itself.
‘History’, he assures us, ‘is not a text, not a narrative (master or otherwise) but
that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form.’16 Linked
to this claim is the concept of the text coming before us as the ‘always-already-
read’.17 In other words, we do not receive texts anew, or freshly, instead we
receive them through interpretive traditions and sedimented reading habits. It
is also strongly inferred that the various narratives through which we speak
and understand our world are, themselves, comprised and cannibalised from
these same traditions and habits.
Fundamental to the survival of the utopian desire in narratological expres-
sions of history is the importance Jameson places on situating the various
cultural artefacts (as modes of its expression) ‘within the unity of a single
great collective story’. Further adding that ‘only if, in however disguised and
symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme [and are]
grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot’.18 This ‘plot’ was, of
course, history itself, and Jameson’s philosophy of history stood-off against
emergent post-modern trends of the time, typified as they were by a declaration
of a ‘crisis of narratives’. The self-proclaimed object of Jean-François Lyotard’s
study, for instance, is a definition of the post-modern condition as one that is
‘incredulous’ towards master narratives. This would obviously include (and
oppose) Jameson’s neo-Marxist philosophy of history, defined as the dialecti-
cal struggle between ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’.19
White describes the predicted cultural consequences of a failure of Jameson’s
‘single fundamental theme’:

In those works of literature in which narrativity is either refused or breaks

down, we are met with the traces of despair that is to be assigned, not to
the moral weakness or lack of knowledge of their authors, but rather to
the apperception of a shape of social life grown old. The breakdown of
narrativity in a culture, group, or social class is a symptom of its having
entered into a state of crisis. For with any weakening of narrativising
capacity, the group loses its power to locate itself in history, to come to
grips with the Necessity that its past represents for it, and to imagine a
creative, if only provisional, transcendence of its ‘fate’.20

If, as Jameson and others suggest, culture, identity and, above all, history are
determined and structured by narrative, then it is fair to say that the national
character, or identity, has been structured by the myriad narratives that fed
into and shaped frontier mythology, including, particularly, the creation of
the myth of the West towards the close of the nineteenth century. By harness-
ing the power of myth, those who consciously helped to create the myth of
the West were able to create compelling narratives that guided and energised

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myth of the western

cultural attitudes, social action and political decisions; in other words, they
affected history and those who ‘act’ in history. These narratives frequently
justified historical movements which would otherwise be morally compro-
mised. The nineteenth-century conquest of the North American interior by
the US military, pioneers and other settlers can be seen as such a movement.
As discussed previously, this settlement, justified by the myth of bringing
civilisation – the domestication of the wilderness – was, in effect, a savage
war for land, eventuating in the slaughter, expropriation and ethnic cleansing
of the Native Americans from their ancestral homelands: racially other and,
therefore, savage, atavistic; evil agonist in a mythic struggle of Good against
Evil.
The traditions and ideologies that have been central to American thinking
for hundreds of years undoubtedly found their pre-eminent voice in the twen-
tieth century through the cinema, and it is not too difficult to see why White’s
sentiments as they are outlined above can be related to the kind of Westerns
that were being produced during the late 1960s and 1970s. There has always
been a strong tendency in genre scholarship – and, in particular, scholarship
of the Western – to try to ‘read’ films for underlying meaning. It is this con-
centration on interpretation that has given rise to the critical models typically
associated with the genre: broadly speaking, the assertion that Westerns are
about the epic moment and the domestication of the wilderness. As we have
seen, theories extolling the revisionist model typically see Westerns of the
1960s and 1970s operating as a critique of the classical model of the 1940s and
1950s, as reflections of societal change and social unrest, as well as a growing
national disillusionment with the conflict in Vietnam. More specifically, they
are seen as an open attack on the triumphalist brand of frontier mythology
that fuelled that conflict’s political rhetoric and cultural symbolism. A ‘break-
down of narrativity’ through the ‘apperception of a shape of social life grown
old’ seems to have informed the thinking behind most critical responses to the
film texts of this period. For instance, the so-called ‘spaghetti’ Westerns from
directors like Leone, Sergio Corbucci, etc. are often read in terms of generic
disillusionment, as post-modern blank parodies of Western tropes. While
turn-of-the-decade films such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969),
Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, and Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue (both 1970) are
usually read as thinly veiled allegories of atrocities committed by US Marines
in Vietnam. Either that or they are read as an exposé of the US policy of foreign
interventionism as imperial conquest thinly veiled as liberation. Perhaps such
a ‘breakdown’ finds its ultimate expression in the almost schizophrenic (non)
narrative of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970).
In this profoundly ideological reading of the Western, social and cultural
factors external to the films proper predominate, acting as the critical barom-
eter. In this regard, Kitses is surely right to warn us that ‘the thrust of ideologi-
cal and psychoanalytic analyses can be to suggest a sick culture, a cinema of
symptoms, toxic elements and pathologies’, while reminding us that, far from

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actors transcending the darkness

being exclusive, ‘ideology and aesthetics are inextricably bound up’.21 Neale
is supportive of this belief, writing that ‘the ideological significance of any
text – or any genre – is always to be sought in a context-specific analysis’.22
He further suggests that, typically, the ideological approach ‘pay[s] little atten-
tion to aesthetics . . . form is always, and only, a wrapping for the cultural
or ideological content in which [advocates of such an approach] are almost
exclusively interested’.23
The belief that, by this point in history, the mythic narrative that had
informed the classical Western had ‘entered into a state of crisis’ is indeed
a powerful one, and one with which the contemporary, or so-called post-­
Western, must contend. This chapter must do likewise. Situated in this way, I
shall use Rosenberg’s approach to argue that No Country’s attitude towards
the effects of the myth upon the history of the United States is profoundly neg-
ative. However, like Three Burials, I shall also argue that, at one and the same
time, it relies upon the established traditions and conventions of the Western in
order to enact its critique. As such, it suggests once more the profundity of the
genre’s scope through its problematic relationship with the myth of the West.
The popular tropes elicited by the Western’s brand of the myth prove vital in
the film’s shaping of its own ideological position. No Country, like numer-
ous Westerns before and since, is not so much anti-Western as it is anti-myth,
and, as I have been discussing throughout, this so-called anti-myth seems to
be as much a part of the myth itself, rather than an oppositional discourse. I
also argue that No Country understands political–ideological situations and
attitudes affecting the contemporary United States in terms of a direct conse-
quence of the ‘product’ of the actions of past ‘agents’ who have drawn their
inspiration from this same mythology. And it is through a study of the film’s
narrative characteristics that we can begin to deal with the consequential
effects that such a historical necessity has on the assertion of the ‘freedom and
power of man’, together with America’s sense of history and its sense of ‘place’
on the international ‘stage’.

III
Despite being regarded by many reviewers as a fairly straightforward literary
adaptation of McCarthy’s novel, the cinematic version of No Country does
differ in its thematic emphasis in several key aspects. I argue that the reasons
for this (aside from the more commonplace transformative necessities that
typically occur in the adaptation process) are to be found in the legacy of the
cinematic Western itself.
Like the novel, the film opens with the protagonist Ed Tom Bell’s narration,
given in the form of a voice-over by Jones. It is delivered over a montage of
shots depicting the landscapes of the Texas southwest: semi-arid plains, rolling
hills, a short barb-wire fence, and a dawn-shot of a tall metal windmill revolv-
ing familiarly and somewhat forlornly. However, there is here a significant

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difference in purpose to be discerned between the novel’s initial monologue

and the film’s opening voice-over. Condensed from Bell’s first three observa-
tions in the novel, it constitutes the one and only such voice-over in the entire
film. The reasons for this are partly practical. Since the novel is approximately
50 per cent comprised of Bell’s narration, its virtual deletion in the film can be
put down to the requirements of the medium of commercial narrative cinema
(such an amount of voice-over would be considered excessive). Most interest-
ingly, as far as the Western goes, however, it is the effect of generic intertex-
tuality that the voice-over narration creates. Bell expresses the thoughts and
emotions of a man approaching retirement:

Voice-over: I was Sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old. Hard to
believe. Grandfather was a law man. Father too. Me and him was sheriffs
at the same time, him up in Plano and me out here. I think he was pretty
proud of that. I know I was.

In Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (2008), John

Cant has traced McCarthy’s struggle with the so-called fathers of the American
literary tradition: Melville, Faulkner, Eliot, to name but a few. In Cant’s
opinion, such a struggle is articulated by McCarthy in terms of eclecticism, as
an acknowledgement of the ‘ugly fact’ that books are made out of other books
(the ‘always-already-read’?).24 Similar sentiments can be related to Bell’s voice-
over in the film where the literary fathers can be exchanged for what one might
call the cinematic or, perhaps better still, the fathers of the generic tradition;
a group in which we would undoubtedly place the likes of Ford, Boetticher,
Peckinpah (again), to name but a few.
Accordingly, Bell’s recourse to times and peoples past extend beyond the
level of plot function, beyond the introspective concerns of the familial (that
is, in his touching comments regarding his dead father’s and his own sense of
pride), and delves into the legacy of an extensive generic tradition:

Voice-over: Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of
folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never carried one. That’s
the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear one. Up in Comanche
County. I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a
chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself to the old timers.
Can’t help but wonder how they woulda operated these times.

As far as the traditions of the Western are concerned, the significance of this
part of the monologue is worth discussing. With the revelation that some of the
‘old time sheriffs never even wore a gun’, the narrative acts to deconstruct the
genre’s long-held ‘six-gun mystique’ (to borrow the title of Cawelti’s study),
despite ‘a lot of folks (read audience) find[ing] that hard to believe’.25 The
apparent attempt to dispel this aspect of the myth so long articulated by the

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cinematic past is married to an antonymic desire to ‘hear about the old timers’,
Bell stating that he ‘[n]ever missed a chance to do so.’
What appears to be going on here is a dialectic that, when colligated with
the simultaneous montage of Western landscapes on display, feeds off of the
Western genre. It is an acknowledgement of the need to reference the diverse
wealth of Westerns and associated filmmakers of the past. It also suggests that
any attempt to move beyond the dictates of the past cannot but acknowledge
its influence, reaffirming Jameson’s insistence that the text comes before us as
the ‘always-already-read’. It is also in this regard that one can echo, perhaps
with no small amount of dilution, the Karl Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire:
the tradition of the dead generations weighs ‘like a nightmare upon the brain
of the living’. This conceptual belief in history as an encumbering force has
been advanced by many in the field of historiography, most notably White. In
‘The Burden of History’, we may recall that White lamented the (then) growing
sentiment that the discipline of history had outlived its usefulness. He criti-
cally assessed the growing understanding of history as a ‘substantive burden
imposed upon the present by the past in the form of outmoded institutions . . .
the way of looking at the world which gives to these outmoded forms their spe-
cious authority’.26 Such an argument continued along the lines that ‘it is only
by disenthralling human intelligence from the sense of history that men will be
able to confront creatively the problems of the present’.27
The concept of history as a burden, and even the notion of a ‘sense of
history’ are, of course, issues that the contemporary Western has to confront
if it is to conceive of set of symbols beyond a tragic or farcical repetition of
the past, its chosen metaphors and tropes doing more than what Rosenberg
describes as merely ‘mimicking the engraving of a hero on one of history’s
old playbills’.28 The symbolic struggle with regard to No Country concerns
the past generations of Westerns and their mythic heroes, the allegorical ‘old
timers’, to whom Bell compares himself. I argue that such a struggle encom-
passes both the implicitly micro-political and the explicitly macro-political in
the figure of the hero as an individual and of the Western genre as a whole.
Such an interpretation provides testament to the continuing importance of the
cinematic Western as a medium whereby such complex issues, which include
concepts of nation, history, race and identity can be played out, deconstructed
and commented upon.
Of course, the overriding allegorical sensibility of this film (which draws
directly from McCarthy’s oeuvre) would appear to be the sense of the betrayal
of the myth’s promise: the domestication of the wilderness. This idea has been
ingrained in frontier mythology since the earliest Puritan colonists’ ‘errand
into the wilderness’, and was carved into the American Imaginary in the late
nineteenth century by the likes of Cody, Turner and Roosevelt in their for-
mulation of the myth of the West. This mythic promise has, of course, been
articulated, legitimated and critiqued throughout numerous Westerns over the
past century. No Country may, indeed, exist as a sombre reminder of what

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the Garden ‘made’ by such frauds as Liberty Valance’s Ranse Stoddard and
Fort Apache’s Colonel Owen Thursday has become. After all, the country as
depicted in No Country is far from ‘A fine good place to be’.
In the case of No Country, none of the Western tropes is more important
than the issue of individual identity and the mythic mode of its expression –
the archetypal hunter-hero, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin); the lawman, Sheriff
Bell; and the savage force representing the myth’s figurative wilderness, Anton
Chigurh (Javier Bardem). This sets up what Rosenberg describes as an ‘inner
continuity between the men who are to act historically in the present and other
actors who once trod the stage . . . heroes living in the memory’.29 In revisionist
terms, the undermining of the assertive status of the hunter-hero, as embodied
by the character of Moss, and the passivity and lack of agency displayed by
Bell, spring instantly to mind. Neither of them is master of their own fate nor,
significantly, can either man domesticate the wilderness, much less can they
defeat the terrifying Chigurh.
This sense of ‘inner continuity’ extends to the very geography of the bor-
derlands and is reflected in the film’s mise-en-scène. From the outset we are
provided with a poetic collage of images and desolate impressions, evocative of
the sublime landscapes and narrative themes of Ford’s Monument Valley and
the Spanish-come-southwestern deserts of Leone. If it is the mythic landscapes
of Ford that evoke this sense of ‘inner continuity’, then it is surely the agonists
in Leone’s films in particular that lend themselves to such a reading. As indi-
cated above, the typical assertions that the characters are devoid of depth and
emotion give rise to accusations that they are merely post-modern simulacra
of generic Western stereotypes. If we accept this interpretation, then characters
like Harmonica (Charles Bronson), No-Name (Clint Eastwood) and Frank
(Henry Fonda) ‘were thrown into roles prepared for them in advance’, selected
from the Western’s gallery of stock-types and regurgitated into a world of
blank-parody (a similar observation that I made in Chapter 3 in relation to
Unforgiven).30 However, as with Three Burials, I contend that the characters
of No Country cannot be so easily described in such a fashion.
It is the recapitulation of such Western themes that becomes of particular
importance when considering the cinematic adaptation of No Country as a
Western. This is especially so if we remind ourselves that Hollywood’s West is
often considered to be largely confined to the short period between 1865 and
1890, with only a handful of notable ‘deviations’ from this (totally) arbitrary
norm (see Introduction). As many of the most distinguished of the films that
constitute the artistic hub of the post-Cold War Western are set in a more
contemporary (though no less mythic) period, the erstwhile fetishisation of this
fleeting moment in US history becomes one more among many Western tropes
to be viewed through a critical lens.
Again, this posits the spirit of my argument in relation to many of the tenets
of those affiliated with the New Western History. ‘After all’, asks Limerick, ‘are
Geiger counters and airplanes less “frontier-like” than picks and shovels?’31

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(This statement is made in reference to the numerous uranium ‘rushes’ during

the 1940s and 1950s.) In a similar vein to this, and relating more specifically to
No Country, one could ask whether or not a pick-up truck is any less Western-
like in its signification than a horse? How exactly do we value such traditional
visual signifiers against more deep-rooted generic themes? After all, both truck
and horse symbolise the desire for enfettered freedom, be it on the road or on
the range. Therefore, one could argue that both truck and horse adhere in this
respect to the prevalent mythological tropes of the Western. In this regard the
purposes of applying this aspect of the New Western History to the so-called
post-Western is to erase the notion of a Rubicon to be crossed when consider-
ing popular cultural treatments of the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ West(s).
If we were to remain purist in our generic categories, then we would have
to dismiss such significant films as Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), Terence Malik’s
Badlands, James William Guercio’s Electra Glide in Blue (both 1973) and, of
course, the magnificent Lone Star. Hud is especially relevant as its narrative
concerns the legacy of the frontier in modern America; therefore, it holds a
thematic concern with the myth of the West. The film follows the character of
Hud Bannon (Paul Newman), the hedonistic son of an aging rancher, Homer
(Melvyn Douglas). Faced with financial ruin as a result of unwittingly purchas-
ing diseased cattle from Mexico, Homer is encouraged to allow oil explora-
tion on his ranch. The conversation that follows Hud’s sarcastic remark that
‘My daddy thinks oil is something you stick in your salad dressing’ is telling
with regard to the socioeconomic impact of the myth on the twentieth-century
United States:

Homer: If there’s oil down there, you can get it sucked up after I’m
under there with it. There’ll be no holes punched in this land
while I’m here. They ain’t gonna come in and grade no roads
so the wind can blow me away. What’s oil to me? What can
I do with a bunch of oil wells? I can’t ride out every day and
prowl amongst them like I can my cattle. I can’t breed them or
tend them or rope them or chase them or nothing. I can’t feel a
smidgen of pride in them cause they ain’t none of my doing.
Hud: There’s money in it.
Homer: I don’t want that kind of money. I want mine to come from
something that keeps a man doing for himself.

All the films mentioned above draw upon frontier mythology and Westerns
past for their narrative significance, and all in my opinion are to be classified
as Westerns. Equally, they all share a sociological concern for the way both
frontier mythology and the Western genre affected the cultural outlook of the
twentieth-century United States.
As already discussed, the main theoretical thrust advanced by advocates of
revisionism is to put forward Vietnam as the last phase in the development of

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the mythology of the American frontier in its relation to this cultural outlook.
It was also for many the death-knell of the Western genre itself. The political
and social fall-out from Vietnam and the failure of frontier rhetoric to ‘speak’
that conflict adequately, as it were, led to what Slotkin termed the ‘crisis of
public myth’.32 No longer, he believed, could the Western articulate meaning
in the contemporary United States:

We are in a ‘liminal’ moment of our cultural history. We are in the

process of giving up a myth/ideology that no longer helps us to see our
way through the modern world, but lack a comparably authoritative
system of beliefs to replace what we have lost.33

If we take seriously the ‘crisis of public myth’ that Slotkin outlines, then the
tripartite relationship between myth, ideology and genre that he highlights as
informing and mediating ‘historical memory’ rightly becomes our main focus
of attention.34 This is especially so as we are considering the role of the hero,
the attendant cult of heroic leadership, and their respective relations to his-
torical movements in US politics and culture. As I have already detailed, many
scholars have discerned a loss of faith in the image of the mythic hero in the
cultural mindset. Slotkin claims that this was evidenced by the declining popu-
larity of the Western during and after the Vietnam War, where the idealisation
through myth of a violent, regenerative past did not marry well to the brutal
degenerate realities of US imperialism in southeast Asia. According to Slotkin,
this sense of disillusionment was replicated in ‘the intellectual establishment’
at the time. ‘A good deal of [its] creative energy’, he writes, went ‘into criticism
and demystification of old myths. This critical mood both reflects and adds to
a public scepticism that is the product of hard experience.’35 Consequently, he
maintains that the tenuous thread that linked this long-running myth–ideology
system to history began to come apart. This, he reasoned, caused a breakdown
in the narrative of the Western genre itself. Likewise, the end logic of the revi-
sionist argument maintains that, by the 1970s, the hero’s role in mediating
historical memory had become obsolete.
Despite the popularity of such presentist attitudes in both film theory and
frontier historiography, the Western remains a genre that has resolutely refused
to die. The Western, therefore, is defying such rigorous, almost Turnerian,
assertions that it has passed away into Hollywood history. The genre has
revealed an ongoing ability to reshape its version of history and, at the same
time, reflect or critique contemporary values as well as the values of the past.
To take just one example, after watching Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination
of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), one was struck by the deft
handling whereby both Jesse’s (Brad Pitt) and Robert’s (Casey Affleck) status
as hero and coward, respectively, are undermined. The film is centred on the
figure of Jesse James, whose legend is wholly at odds with most sober accounts
of his actual life. There is thus a certain irony in a large-scale international

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production, relying for commercial success on the appeal of its star, Brad Pitt,
being devoted to a critique of the cult of celebrity. In a further irony, it is Casey
Affleck whose performance as the hero-worshiping Ford steals the film. In his
1986 study of the James phenomenon in cinema, Christopher Anderson argues
that, as a ‘cultural figure . . . James is an inevitable intertextual signifier’.36 He
bases this belief on the fact that twenty-nine films had (as of 1986) been based
on or around Jesse James. He continues that, as ‘intertextual signifier’, James
‘exists at the junction of social, institutional, and ideological contexts, appeal-
ing to a viewer with knowledge of the figure’s intertextual resonances’.37 In
providing one of the most compelling depictions of such drab historical figures
as Jesse and Bob, Dominik has ensured that the signifier, Jesse James, still has
something to say, the trope maintaining cultural currency at the end of the first
decade of the twenty-first century.
Of course, none of this has prevented numerous commentators and critics
from pronouncing that the Western has been in terminal decline since the
1960s. I argue that, far from being ‘dead’, the Western’s protean ability to
adapt and improvise is, as Slotkin himself concedes, essential to both the sur-
vival of any mythological discourse and its connection to contemporary socio-
historical trends. More importantly than this and, despite his assertions of the
severity of the ‘crisis of public myth’ that was evidenced in the Westerns of the
1960s and 1970s, he states the following:

The beliefs and practices that hold society together are the product of a
long historical interaction between ideas, experience, and remembering.
To propose significant social change without recourse to that language
renders the proposal unintelligible; to impose change as if from outside
of culture, appealing to authority to values that the culture has not gener-
ated and accepted for itself, is to assert dictatorship.38

On this understanding, any change in sociopolitical ideology must take place

from within the mythological traditions of a nation and, therefore, within
the narratives that have helped to shape that tradition. The relevant question
now becomes: how far is this achievable within the Western? As far as the
proposition of ‘significant social change’ goes, it is important to note that No
Country does more than merely deconstruct that aspect of the myth that deals
with the construction and promotion of the cult of heroic leadership. This
alone would be nothing new. Neither, it should also be noted, was all of this
mythic deconstruction peculiar to the counter-cultural efforts of the younger
generation of Hollywood directors of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, as is
usually the case in the Western if one cares to dig deep enough, Ford was there
first.
I have argued in Chapter 2 how The Searchers goes some way to deconstruct-
ing the image of the individualist hero and, by extension, the cult of heroic
leadership such a figure has historically embodied. The iconic screen persona

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of John Wayne in the role of ex-Confederate and unregenerate racist Ethan

Edwards brings forth the dark complexities latent in Shane and is mercilessly
inverted by Ford, who refused to separate the light from the dark in this, one
of his most infamous and complex characters. It is worth reminding ourselves
here of one of the film’s more memorable scenes. Shortly after the Edwards
family massacre, Ethan disinters the body of a Comanche and, in an act of base
sadism, shoots the dead man through both eyes. To the disgusted protestations
of the Revd Captain Clayton, ‘What good did that do you?!’ Ethan retorts, ‘By
what you preach, none. What that Comanch’ believes – he ain’t got no eyes;
he can’t enter the spirit world. He’s doomed to wander forever between the
winds! You get it Reverend.’ As also discussed previously in Chapter 2, in the
final instance it is young Marty and not Ethan who kills his implacable enemy,
the Comanche chief, Scar. Likewise, it is the ‘old fool’, Mose Harper who
pinpoints the Comanche encampment, thereby locating Debbie in the process.
Not only is Ethan a failure in his professed role as a searcher (read hunter), as
is evidenced in his ineffectiveness in pinning down Scar despite several years
spent hunting him, but he is also, until the penultimate moment, an active
threat to the community that he is supposed to serve. More particularly, he is
an outright threat to Debbie, with the spectator unsure of Ethan’s intentions
– whether Debbie is the captive white woman to be rescued from savages, or
a proxy-Comanche tainted by the blood of the other and, in Ethan’s eyes, a
legitimate target for extermination.
So a question now becomes, if No Country in any way answers Ford (surely
the most significant of the cinematic fathers) then how so? As far as the under-
mining of heroic leadership is concerned, something approaching an adequate
answer would be the abject failure of individual action on the part of Moss. It
is, after all, the spirit of individual action, so long cherished in American ideol-
ogy, which inspires his theft of the $2 million in cash found abandoned at the
drug deal massacre site. But this does not really satisfy as an answer and forces
an additional question of its own: why, after all, does Moss take something
that he knows full well will be ruthlessly searched for? True, he could not have
reckoned on the furious brand of pursuit employed by Chigurh, and yet the
futility of his actions, their anti-progressive nature in mythic terms, is tellingly
revealed as he remarks to his wife, Carla-Jean (Kelly Macdonald), ‘Honey, at
what point would you quit looking for your $2 million?’ If one were to follow
Moss’ illogic to the final extreme, then his act of theft could be understood as
an act of protracted suicide, as some kind of nihilistic endeavour symptomatic
of the failure of the myth’s promise of a Garden from a Desert. There does
not, after all, appear to be any place for the likes of Moss – the hunter-hero –
in the world of No Country. By the same token, the world it depicts, with its
backdrop of cross-border drug trafficking and relentless, brutalising murder is,
again, anything but ‘A fine good place to be’.
Surely, then, the most likely figure that answers Ford in this respect has
to be Bell. As a protagonist, let alone a hero or lawman, he is something of

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a curiosity. Never initiating the action or propelling the narrative forwards,

he instead pursues the ever-destructive and despairing exchanges of violence
between Moss, Chigurh and the various Mexican drug dealers searching for
the stolen money. In fact, not once does Bell give the impression that he is
in control of events, is capable of bringing Moss into protective custody or,
indeed, that he is realistically any match for Chigurh. As he says at one point
in the narrative, ‘I guess . . . I feel overmatched.’
So, how does No Country differ from The Searchers’ repudiation of Ethan’s
brand of destructive pathology? How does it initiate a narrative that advances
upon a deconstruction of traditional heroism? The simple answer to both of
these questions would be that, unlike Ethan, Bell manages to extricate himself
from a potentially similar oscillating spiral of violence and counter-violence,
revenge and counter-revenge to that in which Ethan and Scar are permanently
and, therefore, fatally entangled. Sheriff Bell manages to transcend this fate by
recognising his own limitations as a lawman, and the realisation too that he is
not a hero (at least, not a hero in the tradition of the myth). Bell can, therefore,
be understood to have had a moment of clarity impossible to a character like
Ethan. And in so doing, he goes some way towards unburdening himself of the
weight of the ‘dead generations’ by provisionally transcending the ‘nightmare’
of history.
One of the overall aims of this study has been to uphold the contention that
in the Western there has always been a fine line discernable between the hero
and the villain. This is a much finer line than is suggestive in those stock types
who wore the white hats and the black hats ‘so as you’d know who was on
which side’, as Ronald Reagan was so fond of stating.39 As we know, the hero
has to have more than a little touch of the savage about him, for he typically
uses the methods of the wilderness against itself, in turn paving the way for the
coming civilisation ‘before whose face he must disappear’. Robert C. Cumbow
remarks, ‘Show me a hero and I’ll show you a villain with good excuses.’40
This is, of course, another way of saying that the road to Hell is paved with
good intentions, and Bell, for his part, seems to recognise the fine line that he
is treading in his literal and mythic function as lawman and, by extension, his
mythological role as hero.
Bell’s recognition is combined with the apparent self-acknowledgement of
the fate that awaits him if he commits himself fully to the course of the violent
events that he trails. There are several examples of such recognition strewn,
as it were, throughout the narrative; however, one will suffice to illustrate the
point succinctly. When Bell and his deputy, Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), break
into Moss’ abandoned trailer the Sheriff spies a carton of milk that Chigurh
had been holding moments before during his own search for Moss. Bell picks
up the milk, pours himself a glass, and sits down on Moss’ cheap sofa in
exactly the same spot that Chigurh had occupied moments before. His sil-
houetted reflection stares back at him from the blank television screen, again,
exactly the same shot which held Chigurh’s opaque expression in the previous

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scene. These two separate moments thus combined have the effect of a graphic-
match, the delayed nature of which would appear not only to symbolise Bell’s
inability to initiate the narrative action, that is to say, he is always in Chigurh’s
brutal wake, but also to operate metaphorically as a visual association between
himself and Chigurh. It is almost as if Bell knows where this will lead, knows
that, in his own words, such an endeavour would force him to ‘put his soul
at hazard’. This is, of course, precisely what Ethan ends up doing through his
pathology and his obsession; failing or refusing to recognise on a personal level
his own associations with Scar. He who puts souls at hazard (‘ain’t got no eyes,
can’t enter the spirit world’) is forced to ‘wander forever between the winds’
like the soul of the dead Comanche that Ethan condemns. Putting one’s ‘soul
at hazard’ is, of course, something Bell assuredly informs us he would never
do. ‘You think this fella, Moss, has any idea of the sorts of sons-of-bitchs that
are huntin’ him, Sheriff?’ asks Wendell. ‘Well, he ought to,’ replies Bell while
gazing at his ‘mirrored’ reflection in the television screen with a forceful intent.
‘He’s seen the same things that I have, and it’s certainly made an impression
on me.’
Upon a closer inspection of the film it would appear that this recognition is
made from the very outset as we are shown Chigurh for the first time. He is
being taken into police custody by a patrol officer who he will soon strangle
to death in a vicious paroxysm of fury. (As an aside, given what we soon learn
of Chigurh’s brutal capacities, we might indeed wonder how Chigurh was ever
apprehended in the first place, unless, for some reason, he wanted to be.) Bell
puts the statement of putting one’s ‘soul at hazard’ into context as he con-
cludes his opening monologue thus:

Voice-over: The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.
It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willin’ to die
in order to even do this job. But, I don’t wanna push my chips forward,
stand up, and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man
would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say: ‘Ok. I’ll be a part
of this world.’

With the benefits of hindsight, this seems a more obvious connection to make.
Bell refuses to ‘be a part of this world’, the world that he does not ‘understand’,
the world of cross-border drug trafficking, gangsters, hit-men, brutal massa-
cres and random death forced at the toss of a coin; in other words, the world
of Chigurh. This is suggested after Moss’ death at the hands of the Mexican
drug-dealers (the spectacle of which, not incidentally, is denied us as Bell,
typically, arrives to see not the event itself but its aftermath). While in con-
versation over coffee with another County sheriff, Roscoe Giddens (Rodger
Boyce), Bell laments what he sees as a world degenerating into violence.
Giddens moans about young people with ‘green hair’ and ‘bones through their
noses’:

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Bell: Signs and wonders. But I think once you stop hearin’ sir and
ma’am the rest is soon to follow.
Giddens: It’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It is not the one thing.
Bell: Not the one thing. I used to think I could at least some way
put things right. I don’t feel that way no more . . . I don’t
know what I do feel like.
Giddens: Try ‘old’ on for size.
Bell: Yessir. It may be that. In a nutshell.

At first it would appear that Bell is out of touch, focusing on trivial matters
such as teenage rebellion and bad manners as the foretaste of apocalypse.
However, maybe it is precisely because he does, in fact, understand the nefari-
ous machinations of Chigurh’s world that he seeks to preserve his ‘soul’ in
a manner that so many heroes of Westerns past have failed to do: doomed
to wander forever between the winds like Ethan, swept away by the tides of
history like Liberty Valance’s Tom Doniphan (perhaps the most tragic of all
Ford’s heroes), or forced into exile like Shane, Harmonica and Clementine’s
Wyatt Earp.
In the final instance, Bell returns to the motel where Moss was killed. At the
moment he is about to enter a series of shot/reverse-shots indicate that Chigurh
is there, waiting for him in the shadows. We as the audience are anticipating
the long-standing Western tradition of the gunfight, though, having several
times borne witness to Chigurh’s murderous prowess, we are in this case justi-
fiably fearful for Bell’s chances. Death is about to be visited on the sheriff. But
as he enters, he is alone in the dark room. Chigurh is not there. In either spatial
or temporal terms this makes no logical sense, of course, but what is a failure
at the level of realism is a success at the level of allegory. In an allegorical
sense it works perfectly: Bell has refused the mythic route of violent resolution,
perhaps because he realises all too well that such confrontations do not resolve
anything, and that to engage in such an endeavour he would have to ‘put his
soul at hazard’ and risk becoming as Chigurh is – a killer with no apparent
soul of his own.
Arguably, and certainly ironically, it is his uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin) – one of
the so-called ‘old timers’ – who weaves the disparate strands of Bell’s recogni-
tions into a verifiable whole. Ellis, a former lawman himself, was paralysed in
a past gunfight. When questioned what he would do if the man who shot him
was ever to have been released from prison, Ellis responds by explaining to
Bell the pitfalls of vengeance, ‘I don’t know. Probably nothin’ . . . All the time
you spend tryin’ to get back what’s been took from you there’s more going out
the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.’ It is a piece of
impromptu sermonising that Ethan Edwards would have done well to listen
to. Bell looks at his uncle and Ellis recognises his look, adding knowingly,
‘Your granddad never asked me to sign on as deputy.’ Ellis does not blame the
‘old timers’ for how his life turned out, he does not live with a vengeful mind

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myth of the western

burdened by the events of the past and, by extension, he impresses the same
sentiments onto Bell.

IV
As this study has argued, for successive generations of US Americans the
myth of the West has provided a grid, or cultural matrix, whereby complex
sociopolitical historical (and even economic) events have been shaped to fit a
grand narrative that, in its most successful moments, naturalised the myth of
American exceptionalism; under the religious auspices of Manifest Destiny it
justified the conquest of the West and the destruction of the Native American,
recasting it as the domestication of the wilderness; essentially, it helped to
legitimate the idea of the United States as the ‘redeemer nation’, the original
vision of the ‘City on the Hill’ of Puritan lore. For the first European settlers,
North America was a New World, a New Eden, a pastoral realm for the new
all-American Adam. The power of this mythology has hardly diminished in the
twenty-first century. As Cant suggests:

Any thoughts that postmodernism’s assertion of the end of the ‘grand

narratives’ of western culture might have undermined the power of
America’s identifying myth will have been dispelled by reactions to the
attack on the significantly named World Trade Centre [sic]. The incom-
prehension that greeted this grievous event was clearly informed by the
view that America is still the ‘City on the Hill’ standing as an example
that can redeem the world.41

Stephen McVeigh relates such sentiments to the cinematic Western. Declaring

that ‘a new century, launched by a shocking event, has brought the Western
back into focus in a way that it had not been since the Cold War’.42 It is worth
elaborating on these comments and bringing them up to date with a more con-
temporary political period defined by the terminology or war.
With the Bush administration’s announcement of the so-called ‘War on
Terror’ immediately following the events of 11 September 2001 – most vividly
demonstrated by the notoriously controversial 2003 invasion of Iraq – the con-
servative traditions of extreme masculinity and heroic individualism that have
informed much of the Rooseveltian brand of the myth have increasingly gained
sociopolitical currency. With George W. Bush’s comments regarding Osama
Bin Laden as ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ – the common ‘old poster out West, as I
recall . . . remembering when I was a kid . . .’ – the 43rd President of the United
States of America was invoking a well-known and clichéd visual signifier of
the Western film. As McVeigh argues, ‘Bush’s response to the events of 11
September and America’s reaction to his leadership, demonstrate the ongoing
and central importance of Western mythology in America.’43 This mythologi-
cal charge went even further in an address to the Joint Session of Congress. A

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mere nine days later, on 20 September, Bush famously stated: ‘You are either
with us or you are with the terrorists. This is civilisation’s fight.’ By reducing
what must be one of the most complex political issues in modern history to
such a simplistic binary opposition, Bush (whether consciously or not) was uti-
lising one of the most archetypal foundational constructs of the myth’s grand
narrative: the agonistic struggle between the forces of civilisation and savagery.
Of course, what Bush was articulating through his own ‘remembering’ is not
lived history, but rather a personal history shaped by mythological resonances
of the frontier. One is obliged to bear in mind when regarding the concept of
history (both in relation to the frontier and, by logical extension, the purposes
of this study) a short and insightful remark by David M. Wrobel. ‘We are
dealing here with perceptions’, he writes, ‘often with myths.’44 The myth of
the West – that firmly entrenched system of beliefs otherwise masquerading as
the US myth of origins – has informed successive generations of its citizens in
their comprehension not only of their own history, but of their immediate envi-
ronment and sociopolitical culture as well. From this, it is enough to suggest
that it was a mythic, probably even cinematic ‘remembering’, rather than any
tangible historical experience that Bush was drawing upon. The very concept
of ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ itself acts to conjure in the mind an image of the
lone gunfighter – the vindicator – as representative of such a Redeemer Nation,
one that would take on the ‘evil-doers’ and ‘smoke ’em out’, leading the way
in ‘civilisation’s fight’.
Despite the persuasive power of such rhetoric, I have, of course, argued
that the Western’s best efforts have often questioned these same legitimat-
ing ideologies, the genre’s responses to the informing myth of the West never
uniform, often confused, contradictory and complex. This being said, as a
Western, No Country is not such a libratory text in or of itself. It does not deal
with issues of gender and race in such a way as to satisfy the full spectrum of
demands outlined by the New Western History. It is less progressive than both
Lone Star and Three Burials with regard to both gender and race. Women
are largely marginalised in the film, although one must acknowledge the fact
that it is a woman, the trailer park manager (Kathy Lamkin), who remains the
only person in the film who answers back to Chigurh and survives. In terms
of race, Chigurh is, in the final analysis, played by the Spanish actor, Javier
Bardem, which adds to his ‘Mexicanness’. This figure most directly associated
with the wilderness is, therefore, still racially ‘other’. (A point worth noting is
that there is no indication of Chigurh’s nationality or ethnicity in McCarthy’s
novel.) The film’s protagonists are still Anglo-American males, still touched
with a conservative ideology and a Christian ethic, if only if they lament these
as culturally absent. As Bell says to Ellis, ‘I always thought when I got older
God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame
him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.’ To such
self-depreciating sentiments Ellis replies, ‘You don’t know what he thinks.’ It
is, I believe, a rebuke to such a conservative ideology as Bell professes.

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myth of the western

I suppose one ultimately agrees with Mitchell’s insistence that a text’s power
resides in its ‘margins’. In the case of No Country, this marginal figure appears
to be Ellis. In his own way, Bell’s uncle gives the lie to both aspects of the myth
that promote American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. He says to Bell
that ‘what you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country is hard on people. This
statement echoes The Searchers’ Lars Jorgenson’s insistence that ‘it was this
country’ rather than Comanches what killed his son, Brad. Ellis’ own damning
prognosis on the United States follows his retelling of how Bell’s uncle Mac
was gunned down on his porch by ‘Injuns’ in ‘nineteen zero and nine’. This
thematic link between The Searchers and No Country suggests that America’s
history of violence is something that the Western genre has always taken into
account; at its best it may even be said to hold it to account.
It also suggests this violence as an ongoing ‘nothin’ new’ that would dispel
any notion that Bell may have had that the country’s tendency towards bru-
tality is somehow getting worse (‘The crime you see now it’s hard to even
take its measure’). These are wise words indeed in light of the antithetical
neo-­conservative project that, during the Bush Administration, manipulated
and elevated the same symbols and ideological traditions of the myth of the
West into the type of decisions that propelled the United States into justifying,
despite initiating, the invasive violence in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
In The Terror Dream (2007), Susan Faludi offers a sociopolitical study of
the cultural effects of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September.
In the process she provides us with important insights into the US cultural
mindset at the time. She both reveals and comments upon a set of sociopo-
litical attitudes still shaped and defined, not only within terms of frontier
mythology, but by the Western specifically and, by inference, these attitudes
reinforce Marx’s assertion that history is an invasion by the dead generations.
‘One potential insight’, she remarks, ‘involves learning to live with insecurity,
finding accommodation with – even drawing strength from – an awareness of
vulnerability.’45 Ultimately, in the immediate aftermath of 11 September, the
‘nation refused to venture down that path. Presented with a chance to free
itself from the thrall of a dangerous myth, the country balked and summoned
John Wayne and his avenging brethren instead.’46 This marries well with
Rosenberg’s cautionary statement that ‘man has not acquired the capacity for
the historical; in crisis his response is still – the mask’.47
The issues that No Country raises would appear to relate to how the myth
affects the United States – socially, politically and historically. Such issues
comprise the very ‘content’ expressed through the various cultural ‘forms’
available. Rosenberg again: ‘In vain are the dead of every period disinterred in
nations old and new. The effect is not a heroic transcendence of “the limita-
tions of the historical content” but of mixing the “nightmare” of the past into
the “sober reality” of the present.’48 Perhaps now, however, years after the
attacks of 11 September, these attitudes are being openly questioned again
and workable political alternatives provided – the forging of a ‘mindful future’

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actors transcending the darkness

rather than ‘succumb[ing] to the hauntings of a fabricated past’.49 I have

argued that No Country is a popular cultural product of the former rather
than the latter.
Bell accepts his place by realising that, in such a place, one cannot simply
close the door on the wilderness, as is the ostensible signification of that
famous final shot of The Searchers. But as with Ford’s film, No Country
understands that this very figurative wilderness is a part of us, of our society,
of our more sinister potential. Ellis warns Bell that he ‘can’t stop what’s
coming’, but consoles him with the caveat that, at the same time, ‘it ain’t all
waiting on you’, because, tellingly, ‘that’s vanity’. Bell finally accepts his own
limitations and refuses to be defined by the cultural ‘mask’ that has shaped the
dominant attitudes of the past. Ellis can be said to reassure Bell in his concern
of feeling ‘overmatched’. The latter’s decision to retire from his job as sheriff,
and therefore give up on the symbolic roles of heroic lawman, is not compre-
hended thus as defeat. Rather, it is what Slotkin describes as incorporation
into the myth of Anglo-America’s ‘experience of defeat and disappointment,
[an] acquired sense of limitation’, which he feels essential for the very survival
of a viable and functioning mythology. This is opposed to the alternative,
which is a continuation of ‘the rigid defence of existing systems, the refusal
of change, which binds us to dead or destructive patterns of action and belief
that are out of phase with social and environmental reality’.50 This, of course,
relates directly to Jameson’s conception of history as ‘the collective struggle to
wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity’ and of the fundamental
role of narrative in this task.51 As White reiterates, this specifically distin-
guishes ‘between ideologies that conduce to the effort to liberate man from
history and those that condemn him to an “eternal return” of its “alienating
necessities”’.52
Perhaps it is too much for me to suggest that, through the figure of Bell, the
narrative of No Country achieves what Jameson describes as a ‘struggle to
wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity’. But it does suggest that
the Western hero can make a choice within what Marx describes as ‘circum-
stances directly found, given and transmitted from the past’. In accepting his
own limitations and conceding to defeat, Bell manages to escape the ‘destruc-
tive patterns of action’ that would lead him to an ‘eternal return’ of history’s
‘alienating necessities’. I would suggest that it is through recognition of his
own historical insignificance that Bell avoids being ‘crushed by the Reversal’ of
history’s ‘plot’.53 For ‘history’, Rosenberg informs us, ‘is not susceptible to the
fatalities of individual existence’, and it is through a willingness to acknowl-
edge and learn from the ‘plot’ of history that Bell saves himself through
accepting the fact that ‘it ain’t all waiting on [Him]’.54 He accepts that to feel
‘overmatched’ is not shameful, rather it is something that he needs to incorpo-
rate and come to terms with – his terms, not those of the myth that would see
him doomed. In essence, what I suggest is that Bell becomes more than a mere
‘effect’ of history; in refusing the ‘mask’ of the dead generations he manages

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myth of the western

to ‘come to grips with the necessity that [history’s] past represents . . . and to
imagine a creative, if only provisional, transcendence of [his] fate’.55
In the summary of his discussion of McCarthy’s novel No Country, Cant
discusses what he sees as Bell’s epiphany regarding ‘his acknowledgement of
his own insignificance by insisting on facing the truth of his own life, accept-
ing responsibility for that truth and resting on the life-giving support of his
wife’.56 Analogous to my own assessment of the film, he suggests that, ‘if his
inability to apprehend Chigurh is a “failure” at the level of plot, allegorically
it is a “success,” for the sheriff “chooses life” by avoiding Death personified’.57
In terms of the Western genre, it is Bell’s final monologue (the final scene in
the film), his recalling of a dream involving his own long-dead father that he
recounts to his wife, Loretta (Tess Harper), which for him encapsulates this
unburdening of history’s ‘nightmare’:

It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback
goin’ through the mountains of a night; goin’ through this pass in the
mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground. He rode past
me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin goin’ by. Just rode on past. He
had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he
rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do
and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the colour of
the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that
he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all
that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And
then I woke up.

If we relate this final moment from the film to the concerns that have struc-
tured this chapter, then we could argue that Bell has paid heed to a message
from his unconscious, relayed to him (and then to us) in the form of a lucid
dream. If his father could be said to represent the past, the ‘old timers’ to
whom Bell cannot help but ‘compare’ himself, then we see final confirmation
of the film’s narrative trajectory. Bell’s past and, by extension, America’s past
is no longer to be comprehended as a burden invading the present at inoppor-
tune moments like a nightmare. Instead, the past can now be considered (to
a certain degree) with a sense of peace, an affirmation of continuance, of life;
the metaphorical ‘fire’ that Bell’s father carries ensures that the past will be in
the future; Faludi’s ‘mindful future’, that is, with Bell ‘finding accommodation
with – even drawing strength from – an awareness of vulnerability’. Bell tran-
scends the darkness around him. He survives.

Notes
  1. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (London: Picador, 2005).
 2. Richard Slotkin, ‘Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt’s Myth of the

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actors transcending the darkness

Frontier’, American Quarterly, Special Issue: American Culture and the American
Frontier, 33(5) (1981): 608–37.
  3. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the
New West (London: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 21.
  4. Ibid., p. 21.
 5. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Resurrected Romans’ (1959), reprinted in Harold
Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (London: Paladin, 1962), pp. 140–58.
  6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: International
Publishers, [1852] 1994).
 7. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 141.
  8. Ibid., p. 141.
 9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 142.
11. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier 1600–1860, new edn (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
2000), p. 1.
12. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (London: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1978), p. 11.
13. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, pp. 3–4.
14. Ibid., p. 3.
15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 1–102. See also Hayden White, ‘Getting Out
of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative’, in The Content of the Form
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 147–8.
16. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 35.
17. Ibid., p. 9.
18. Ibid., pp. 19–20(emphasis in original).
19. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, [1979] 1984), p. xxiii
20. White, The Content of the Form, p. 149 (emphasis added).
21. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint
Eastwood (London: The British Film Institute, [2004] 2007), p. 21.
22. Steve Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’ (1995), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.),
Film Genre Reader III (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 160–84,
quote on p. 179.
23. Ibid., p. 179.
24. John Cant, Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (London:
Routledge, 2008), pp. 3–17.
25. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, [1971] 1984).
26. Hayden White, ‘The Burden of History’, History and Theory, 5(2) (1966): 111–34,
quote on p. 123 (emphasis in original).
27. Ibid., p. 123.
28. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 141.
29. Ibid., p. 141.
30. Ibid., pp. 141–2.
31. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West (London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 24.
32. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 624.
33. Ibid., p. 654.
34. Ibid., pp. 5–8, 624–63.
35. Ibid., p. 654.
36. Christopher Anderson, ‘Jesse James, the Bourgeois Bandit: The Transformation

217
myth of the western

of a Popular Hero’, Cinema Journal, 26(1) (1986): 43–64, quote on

p. 45.
37. Ibid., p. 45.
38. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 655–6.
39. See Karen R. Jones and John Wills, The American West: Competing Visions
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 100–9.
40. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 222.
41. Cant, Cormac McCarthy, pp. 252–3.
42. Stephen McVeigh, The American Western (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), p. 212.
43. Ibid., p. 215.
44. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from
the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993),
p. viii.
45. Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America (London:
Atlantic Books, 2007), p. 286.
46. Ibid., p. 286.
47. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 152.
48. Ibid., p. 158.
49. Faludi, The Terror Dream, p. 286.
50. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 655.
51. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 19–20.
52. White, The Content of the Form, p. 148.
53. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 144.
54. Ibid., p. 144.
55. White, The Content of the Form, p. 149.
56. Cant, Cormac McCarthy, p. 250.
57. Ibid., p. 250.

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CONCLUSION

I
Throughout this study I have attempted to describe through recourse to a small
but significant number of Westerns some of the contexts within which the
genre has engaged with the myth of the West. Clearly this study is not defini-
tive, but it was never intended to be. Its intention has always been to scrutinise
existing film scholarship on the Western and to highlight the complexities
of some of the genre’s most celebrated examples – even the most ostensibly
­triumphalist – and observe the complex of ways in which such films have inter-
acted with contemporary culture, politics and historical perspectives. I have
taken up the critical thread of those like Janet Walker, who have argued for a
strong historiographic element in the Western. I have also sought to assess the
interdependent relationship held between history and myth. Above all, I have
sought to repudiate the widely held belief in a pattern of consistent develop-
ment within the genre as it has been defined within terms of popular evolution
theories that tend to categorise groups of film texts rather bluntly into classical,
revisionist and post-Western phases.
Some of the ‘classical’ Westerns that I have discussed (and the many more
that I have not) often come across as more complex than most of those that
have followed, including the allegedly ‘revisionist’ exemplars, Unforgiven and
Dances with Wolves; both of which are less complex than The Searchers. This
is not to deny that there is such a thing as a revisionist Western, rather, it is to
suggest that, from the outset, the Western has been a very self-conscious, self-
reflexive and diverse genre capable of a variety of opinion. Furthermore, the
period in which a particular film was released does not necessarily determine
the nature of its relationship to the myth or, indeed, to prevailing political and
cultural ideologies. Individual film texts could be supportive, oppositional or,
more often than not, a combination of both stances. Consider (as I have done)
for example, John Ford. Anyone who has followed the line from Stagecoach
and My Darling Clementine through to The Searchers and The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance should be aware of the ambivalence, ambiguity and

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myth of the western

complexity of these films. As I have argued, a sense of narrative confusion

permeates such Westerns and the genre as a whole has never been consistent.
Recall Ford’s ‘counter-evolutionary’ depiction of Native Americans in his
Cavalry Trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande;
the complex depiction of the Comanche in The Searchers. Even within the
‘confines’ of a single filmmaker’s oeuvre, inconsistency in critical vision would
appear to prevail over all else.
Perhaps it is inevitable that the sort of approaches to the Western that I
have discussed and critiqued – those that try to discern and assert general
generic principles before attempting to ‘explain’ individual films by reference
to these principles – often result in over-simplified interpretations. Within
such broad schemas, effacement or distortion appears to be the fate of those
all too numerous films that deviate from self-serving and self-inscribed norms.
Seeking unity through a ‘grand narrative’, where the overall system of inter-
pretation is privileged over the individual films (which are essentially employed
as singular instances with which to ‘prove’ the system’s validity), cannot help
but omit the details, contradictions, ambiguities and idiosyncrasies that go
into the individual films themselves. As we have seen, Will Wright’s attempt
to apply a structural study to the Western based upon cultural–ideological
shifts and, indeed, Thomas Schatz’s attempt to discern a formal evolution
within the genre, depends upon a near total abandonment of considerations of
individual character psychology and motivation; aspects which, I have argued,
are of fundamental importance to any considerable appreciation of the films
themselves.
In spite of the ever-growing wealth of rich and insightful material on the
genre, it seems that the evolution argument together with the classical, revi-
sionist and post-Western readings will persist. For instance, Carlton Smith
(who I discussed in the Introduction) uses Shane as an example against which
to foreground the post-modern credentials of Leone’s 1960s Italian Westerns.
Smith places these films within a Cold War context and sees them as wilful
examples of post-modern blank-parody: ‘There is no meaning to the ­landscape
. . . and there is no one way to read the film[s]. There are only codes, tropes,
and images that have become detached from any stable signifier.’1 The problem
with such an analysis lies not in Smith’s assessment of the Dollars Trilogy
themselves (which I happen to agree with), but rather his use of Shane as a
classical contrast to these later, revisionist films. The legendary image of Shane
as a distillation of mythic archetypes appears so powerful in scholarship on
the Western and within popular culture that it seems to have led Smith (and
others) towards inaccurate plot description. He writes that Leone’s films ‘com-
pound the very structure of Shane. It is no longer possible, suggests Leone, for
Alan Ladd, as Shane, to ride off happily into the sunset.’2 It is difficult to see
how the conclusion of Shane could be described in such a fashion. Shane is
seriously wounded and leaves behind a domestic setting that he covets and a
woman whom he desires but can never have. He leaves trying his best to ignore

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conclusion

the pleas of a boy who idolises him. He may even be dead (or at least dying)
in the saddle – hardly riding off ‘happily into the sunset’ then! Surely Smith’s
assessment is based on a culture of genre evolution theory which cannot but
see these older Westerns through a myopic lens, one where, to reiterate Tag
Gallagher, ‘rich lodes of ambivalence are overlooked in order to bolster a spe-
cious argument that “classic” westerns are simple and naive’.3
Similarly, I have attempted to show that related political–allegorical
approaches by the likes of John G. Cawelti, John H. Lenihan, Richard Slotkin,
Michael Coyne and Stephen McVeigh, which posit Vietnam as a nexus shaping
cultural attitudes and the products of that culture, and which regarded and
repudiated an ever-declining Western idealism, also exhibit significant short-
comings. First and foremost, is the questionable assertion that the ‘destruc-
tion’ of the myth through critique of US policies in Vietnam is the same thing
as the ‘destruction’ of the genre itself. It is not. No more than the prevailing
Western theme of the ‘end of the frontier’ signals the ‘end of the Western’.
Smith adheres closely to the political–allegorical reading himself, claiming that
Leone’s films imply that the ‘very idyllic act’ of happy endings in films like
Shane were ‘complicitous in the disaster of the cold war’.4 Although Smith is
not wrong in claiming that the ‘idyllic act’ of frontier triumphalism is, politi-
cally and culturally, deeply ‘complicitous in the disaster of the cold war’, he is
wrong in his assertion that Shane embodies this mythic idyll in unproblematic
terms through a ‘happy ending’. Indeed, the homesteader’s suspicions of Shane
highlight another sort of problem. Shane may be seen as the idealised version of
the Cold War warrior by many, but the complexities and contradictions of his
own psychology can be extended in equal measure to his political–­allegorical
connotations. As Patrick McGee writes, ‘Shane may be the embodiment of the
theory of nuclear deterrence; but if he is, he also signifies US society’s fear of
its own defence and of the men who transformed themselves into the agents of
state violence.’5 This interpretation is borne out by the harsh fact that, despite
Wright’s claim to the contrary, Shane cannot stay to be a part of the commu-
nity he has helped create through his violence.
I sought to demonstrate in Chapter 2 that the formal and thematic impact
of significant Westerns does not so much come from the theme of the myth of
the West, but rather from the complexities by which the films themselves deal
with this theme and its attendant mythic discourses. In The Searchers, it is the
narrative’s focus on the captivity narrative and miscegenation, the problem-
atic nature of the hero as outrider of Manifest Destiny, and of its depiction
of the race war as a necessary phase in the domestication of the wilderness.
Furthermore, the film suggests that the values espoused by the myth could
never be anything but myths; historically devastating and destructive because
they operate in the context of a violent and death-obsessed ‘will to power’ that
provides a corrupting vehicle for their misappliance.
Following a critical account of the origins of the revisionist phase of the
genre, Chapter 3 used Clint Eastwood’s previous Westerns to argue that the

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myth of the western

causes surrounding Unforgiven’s struggle to assert its revisionism in the face

of the classical elements of its story, setting and characters can be related more
generally to the cultural prominence and power of the actor’s star persona. It
can be said to partly explain Unforgiven’s inability to offer a more complex
picture of the Western hero. It is unclear if the film is a self-consciously unsuc-
cessful attempt to escape from the conventions of the genre (and the persona
of the film’s star), whether it is just confused, or whether it is, in fact, dishon-
est. In any case, it highlights a curious dynamic when considered alongside
the dubious sort of hero played by the equally celebrated and associated
Western persona of John Wayne in the earlier, more supposedly classical, The
Searchers. In other words, through a scrutiny of the Western hero, along with
Unforgiven’s asserted ‘feminist’ perspective and its dilapidated frontier com-
munity, Chapter 3 sought to further problematise the assumed chronological
development that the genre underwent as it supposedly evolved from celebra-
tory classicism to a critical revisionist stance; and of the gunfighter himself as
he moved from celebrated hero to dangerous anachronism.

II
Part Two of this study focused on the contemporary-set ‘border’ Western and
sought to do two related things. First, it aimed to initiate critical discussion
of the so-called post-Western by offering case studies of two films that have
(so far) received little scholarly attention. Secondly, it aimed to draw thematic
links to the Western’s complex engagement with notions of race and national
identity, as well as the various iconography and tropes of the genre as a whole
that were discussed throughout Part One.
By focusing on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Chapter 4 initiated
enquiry into this topic by analysing the Western’s potential for highlighting
the violence and complexities of the borderlands. Patricia Nelson Limerick has
argued that, for much of the twentieth century, ‘Hispanic history remained on
the edges of Western American history.’6 Her account is one that highlights the
cultural–ideological machinations that lay behind this elision from the official
historical discourse, and she seeks to re-engage the reader with a Hispanic
culture now in its ‘proper place at the centre of Western American history’.7
However, if the fates of all the characters in Three Burials teach us anything,
it is that we should be wary of claiming a ‘centre’ of history, especially along
the borderlands. As Octavio Paz suggests, by the mid-twentieth century, social
alienation ‘is now a condition shared by all men’:

We Mexicans have always lived on the periphery of history. Now the

centre or nucleus of world society has disintegrated and everyone –
including the European and the North American – is a peripheral being.
We are all living on the margin because there is no longer any centre.8

­222
conclusion

The idea of a ‘disintegrated’ social centre and of the individual as a ‘periph-

eral being’, of course, relates to Gloria Anzaldúa’s la frontera. I proposed
that such identities are apparent in many of the characters that populate the
world of Three Burials – particularly illustrated in the fates of Pete Perkins and
Melquiades Estrada himself – as they play out international issues as personal
traumas while searching in vain for stable identities through the romantic
promises of the myth.
Overall, I have tried to argue that Three Burials offers us a compelling
examination of the myth of the West in both historiography–historiophoty
and popular culture – ultimately blurring the border between these modes of
discourse. To paraphrase the full title of Turner’s Frontier Thesis, we can say
that Three Burials re-engages us with the following question: how do indi-
vidual experiences relate to the broader scope of the significance of the fron-
tier in American history? John Higham insists that American historiography
must move beyond the ‘tenacity of nationalism’, and suggests that the ‘need
to rethink the vehicles of tradition and the agencies of authority in a chaotic
world is upon us’.9 How fitting this is if applied to Three Burials, where the
transnational nature of the film – both in terms of its narrative and production
– engages us with the question of what it means to be an American, ultimately
enriching our notions of such an ideological construct. Equally, it utilises the
recognisable tropes and motifs of the Western in order to suggest an inclusive
and broad telling of one of the most controversial and disputed areas of the
present-day United States.
Chapter 5’s primary focus on No Country for Old Men sought to connect
the film to some of the contemporary sociopolitical issues affecting the United
States. At its core it drew from Gallagher’s insistence that the Western genre
has always reflected or commented upon such concerns. In my reading, No
Country reflected both a sense of generic introspection though its reference
to the Westerns of the past and made broader cultural reference to the so-
called ‘War on Terror’; furthermore, it suggested that, as a political ideology,
the War on Terror is intimately related to the myth of the West. Again, this
reading is in no way definitive. That is to say, it does not suggest itself as the
constitutional theme above all others, for if Westerns (like other genres) reflect
the cultural climate within which they are produced, then it is more likely than
not that a diverse and complex set of attitudes will arise to match what is, and
always has been, a diverse and complex culture.
One could argue that No Country is in fact dominated by Chigurh and that
it demands that he is the figure who should be read. I have suggested Chigurh
as an allegory of the wilderness, although he does seem far more at home in an
urban setting and seems more like a hit-man from a crime story than a Western
outlaw. While I would not wish to argue against this, I think that Bell is a more
interesting character and the notion of the savage wilderness within, threaten-
ing to put one’s ‘soul at hazard’, struck me as the film’s most powerful aspect.
I suggested that No Country’s attitude towards the ongoing effects of the

223
myth of the western

myth upon the United States is one of profound negativity. And yet, like Three
Burials, at one and the same time, it relies upon the multitude of established
traditions and conventions of the genre in order to enact its critique. As such,
it supports the argument that has run throughout this book: the Western has
often had a problematic relationship with the myth of the West, just as often
as it lauded it, the genre displays its opposition.
To return to the introductory sentiments with which I opened this study,
films like Three Burials and No Country are a part of the current and growing
crop of Westerns being produced. We may also recall that, despite this, I
suggested that the Western is generally regarded as a somehow diminished
generic form – post-Western. Overall, I have argued against the implications
of this term. Indeed, throughout this study, I have suggested that, as a genre,
the cinematic Western metamorphoses according to the exigencies of a given
time and the visions of individual artists, but as a whole it has refused any
defined pattern of continuous development. The release of films like David
Von Ancken’s Seraphim Falls (2006), James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
and Ed Harris’ Appaloosa (2008) – which we might regard as ‘unregenerate’
Westerns – are evidence of this refusal, coming across as patently less revision-
ist than they do classical. They add a further corrective to those who consider
that the genre has long since been deconstructed and revised in gunfighter
Westerns like Unforgiven. Equally, films like Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come
Knocking and David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley (both 2005), continue the
theme of Westerns with a contemporary setting; both providing rich sources
for analysing the myth and the Western’s articulation of the concept of a
national identity in the modern era.
The genre’s output seems set to continue, occasionally taking some very
intriguing paths. Django Unchained (2012), written and directed by Quentin
Tarantino, fuses blaxploitation cinema with the generic legacy of the fictional
character, Django – a tradition first established by Sergio Corbucci in 1966
and made famous by actor Franco Nero – to tell the story of a freed slave, the
eponymous, Django (Jamie Foxx). A brutal tale of abuse and revenge, the nar-
rative revolves around the attempts of Django and his German bounty-hunter
companion, Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz in an Academy Award winning
role), to rescue his wife, Broomhilda Von Schaft (Kerry Washington), from a
notoriously brutal Mississippi slave plantation nicknamed ‘Candyland’.
Furthermore, the release of such films as the aforementioned The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and, subsequently,
the Coen brothers’ True Grit (2010) indicate that the Western is far from ‘post’
anything, and, indeed, that further scholarship on the rich diversity of the
genre (rather than a post mortem on it) should and will continue.

­224
conclusion

III
Following in the tradition of the New Western History, scholars like Neil
Campbell have suggested that the West is ‘always relational, dialogic, engaged
in or capable of reinvention – and, therefore, contradictory, irreducible, and
hybrid’.10 To me this complex descriptive could well be applied to the cin-
ematic Western. For even in the most apparently ideologically uniformed of
times, the United States has hosted a vast range of opinion and visions of the
world, and this has always been reflected in Hollywood. The idea that the
Western has ever had such an ideological uniformity has never been true. It is
the failure to take this into account, the desire to produce unifying theories,
which leads so many scholars astray. While it remains necessary to analyse
a set of films that do fit a particular theoretical  framework, this remains so
only as long as this, itself, is not taken to be the whole picture. Such scholars
discount the exceptions, whereas they should include them, marked as excep-
tions, as evidence of the permanent ongoing ideological contest that exists
everywhere. Such disunity has always characterised the narratives Hollywood
has produced. For, if the Western ever was an attempt to provide a mythic set
of values and a version of history around which the United States could unite,
the creative imagination never admits of, much less allows for, such uniform-
ity and certainly the public’s desire for innovation often ironically undermines
the desired result. Indeed, as I have shown in this study, one often finds that
any given Western draws introspectively upon elements and conventions of the
genre from both past and present along with numerous other cultural themes
in a process of reinvention.
Let us consider for a moment the case of Howard Hawks’ Red River. For
some this is an exemplar of the classical Western; it was certainly one of the
most successful. Red River is set in the context of the development of the
(short-lived) cattle-ranching industry of the nineteenth century, a develop-
ment associated with the growth of the eastern cities and the railroads that
served them. Within the context of the first use by drovers of the ‘Chisholm
Trail’, the film encapsulates the role played by sheer violence in the appro-
priation of the land. In that sense we can draw thematic links with the earlier
films Cimarron, Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine, and a few years
later with Shane and The Searchers; further into the future still, we can ret-
roactively relate it to films such as Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2004). It
is clear that Hawks deliberately addresses the historical aspect of the film,
particularly in the initial sequences in which we learn that this story is from
‘Early Tales of Texas’ and Tom Dunson (John Wayne), who ‘claims’ his terri-
tory by means of his prowess with a gun. This is possible due to the fact that
its Mexican owner lives so far away that he cannot exercise effective power
over his domain. What we see is, in effect, a change of feudal overlordship
brought about by force of arms. (The film does not represent the histori-
cal details accurately, particularly with respect to dates, but the process is

225
myth of the western

essentially what occurred.) For many Red River expresses the myth of the
West in political–allegorical terms that mirror the confidence of a country
recently victorious in the Second World War. While there is no revisionist
West here, it is equally the case that there is no civilised community estab-
lished either, even in embryo. In addition to the open acknowledgement
of ‘land-grabbing’, the film also reveals Dunson, the embodiment of late-
nineteenth-century US capitalist expansion, as a fascist, ready to lynch those
who dare oppose his tyranny. It is fair to say that the ‘classical’ Red River
displays both narrative confusion and ‘revisionist’ traits in its assertion of the
myth of the West.
To return to another pair of scholars who I discussed in the Introduction,
Karen R. Jones and John Wills re-emphasised a key point regarding the double-
edged nature of the myth of the West within the popular imagination. This re-
emphasis goes hand-in-hand with what we might refer to as the double-edged
nature of contemporary accounts of the American West which, in part, use
the cinematic Western as a source of reference. With regard to the myth of the
West, Jones and Wills suggest that, at the same time that its triumphalist rheto-
ric was being expounded upon by artists, journalists, religious leaders and poli-
ticians alike, there existed significant anti-mythic discourses. Notwithstanding
‘that damned cowboy’ epithet by Roosevelt’s political enemies, Jones and
Wills highlight that ‘for critics and satirists, the cowboy moniker serviced
accusations that harked back to the myth of the lawless West’.11 Furthermore,
that none other than Mark Twain offered a cautionary voice in the face of
the overwhelming drive towards late-nineteenth-century US expansionism.
Twain ‘quipped that Roosevelt was “clearly insane . . . and insanest upon war
and its supreme glories”’.12 (Farther back yet, in 1851, Herman Melville had
completed his magnum opus, Moby Dick. Through Captain Ahab’s monoma-
niacal pursuit of the white whale, Melville can be said to have given an early
literary voice against what I described earlier as the hubristic condition of US
self-righteousness.)
It is unfortunate to note, therefore, that in having correctly highlighted
anti-mythic sentiment from the outset of the cultural and political ascendancy
of the myth of the West, Jones and Wills doubt the capacity of the cinematic
Western to the task of mythological critique. Here, for instance, is their use of
High Noon in order to illustrate the historical reality of the West:

Frontier imaginings of the dime novel and Hollywood showed the West
as a land of conflict – the sheriff with pistols cocked, facing off against his
outlaw nemesis across a dusty main street. This brand of High Noon-style
violence – heroic, redemptive and honourable – offered an unproblematic
narrative of the winning of the West: all glory and gun-play without gory
details or moral qualms. In reality, violence in the nineteenth-century
West proved to be far more inglorious, atavistic and disturbing. Ethnic,
racial and religious issues fostered hatred, social conflict, community

­226
conclusion

feuds and contests for resources; all promoted a brand of violence that
was far less endearing to celluloid.13

By way of conclusion, I would hope that throughout this study I have indicated
convincingly enough that the Western cannot simply be described as ‘heroic,
redemptive and honourable’, and that, as often as it celebrated the myth of the
West, it betrayed the more ‘inglorious, atavistic and disturbing’ elements of
American national identity and the domestication of the wilderness. I suggest
that the genre’s attitude towards the myth has, therefore, always itself been
double-edged; with myth and anti-myth often merging into the forms and
themes of the same film text to create what Mitchell described as an ‘exhilarat-
ing narrative mix’, and that I have described as a mosaic of varied narratives
that reflect not only different times, but also different attitudes existing within
any given time.

Notes
 1. Carlton Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary
Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 2000), p. 97.
  2. Ibid., p. 97.
  3. Tag Gallagher, ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the “Evolution” of
the Western’ (1986), reprinted in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 262–76, quote on p. 272.
 4. Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne, p. 98.
 5. Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), p. 19.
 6. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West (London: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 253–4.
  7. Ibid., p. 255.
  8. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (London: Penguin, [1950] 1990), p. 159.
 9. John Higham, ‘The Future of American History’, Journal of American History,
80(4) (1994): 1289–309, quote on p. 1295.
10. Neil Campbell, The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000), p. 164.
11. Karen R. Jones and John Wills, The American West: Competing Visions (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 98.
12. Bernard DeVoto (ed.), Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harpers, 1940), p. 8.
Twain and DeVoto, discussed in Jones and Wills, The American West, p. 98.
13. Jones and Wills, The American West, p. 171.

227
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Zellweger, Jeremy Irons (New Line Cinema, 2008).
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Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero (Nu Vision/
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Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The, director
Andrew Dominick, featuring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Mary-Louise Parker,
Sam Sheperd (Warner Bros, 2007).
Babel, director Alejandro González Iñárritu, featuring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett,
Mohamed Akhzam, Peter Wight (Paramount Vantage, 2006).
Black Robe, director Bruce Beresford, featuring Lothaire Bluteau, Aden
Young, Sandrine Holt, August Schellenberg (Alliance Communications Co.,
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Broken Arrow, director Delmer Daves, featuring Jimmy Stewart, Jeff Chandler,
Debra Paget, Basil Ruysdael (20th Century Fox, 1950).
Buffalo Bill and the Indians; or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, director Robert
Altman, featuring Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Joel Grey, Harvey Keitel
(Lion’s Gate Films, 1976).
Chisum, director Andrew V. McLaglen, featuring John Wayne, Forrest Tucker,
Ben Johnson, Christopher George (Warner Bros, 1970).
Cimarron, director Wesley Ruggles, featuring Richard Dix, Irene Dunne,
Estelle Taylor, Nance O’Neil (RKO, 1931).
Dances with Wolves, director Kevin Costner, featuring Kevin Costner, Rodney
A. Grant, Graham Greene, Wes Studi (Orion Picture Corp., 1990).
Devil’s Doorway, director Anthony Mann, featuring Robert Taylor, Louise
Calhern, Paula Raymond, Marshall Thompson (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor,
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Lange, Sarah Polley, Tim Roth (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).
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Brontis Jodorowsky, José Legarreta, Alfonso Arau (Producciones Panicas,
1970).
Fistful of Dollars, A, director Sergio Leone, featuring Clint Eastwood,
Marianne Koch, John Wels, Joe Edger (20th Century Fox, 1964).
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Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte, Klaus Kinski (20th Century Fox,
1965).

239
myth of the western

Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The, director Sergio Leone, featuring Clint
Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffre (20th Century Fox, 1967).
Great Train Robbery, The, director Edwin S. Porter, featuring A. C. Abadie,
Gilbert M. ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson, George Barnes, Justus D. Barnes
(Edison Manufacturing Co., 1903).
Gunfighter, The, director Henry King, featuring Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott,
Millard Mitchell, Karl Malden (20th Century Fox, 1950).
Hell Bent, director John Ford, featuring Harry Carey, Duke R. Lee, Neva
Gerber, Vester Pegg (Universal Film Manufacturer’s Co., 1918).
High Noon, director Fred Zinnemann, featuring Gary Cooper, Katy Jurado,
Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell (United Artists, 1952).
High Plains Drifter, director Clint Eastwood, featuring Clint Eastwood, Verna
Bloom, Marianna Hill, Mitch Ryan (Malpaso/Universal Pictures, 1973).
Hondo, director John Farrow, featuring John Wayne, Geraldine Page, Ward
Bond, Michael Pate (Warner Bros, 1953).
Hour of the Gun, director John Sturges, featuring James Garner, Jason
Robards, Robert Ryan, Albert Salmi (United Artists, 1967).
Last of the Mohicans, The, director Michael Mann, featuring Daniel Day-
Lewis, Wes Studi, Madeleine Stowe, Jodhi May (20th Century Fox, 1992).
Life of Buffalo Bill, The, director Paul Panzer, featuring William F. Cody,
William J. Craft, Irving Cummings, Pearl White (Pawnee Bill Film Co.,
1912).
Little Big Man, director Arthur Penn, featuring Dustin Hoffman, Chief Dan
George, Faye Dunaway, Richard Mulligan (Cinema Center Films, 1970).
Lone Star, director John Sayles, featuring Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Kris
Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey (Columbia TriStar, 1996).
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, director John Ford, featuring John
Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin (Paramount Pictures,
1962).
No Country for Old Men, director Joel Coen, featuring Tommy Lee Jones,
Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly MacDonald (Miramax-Paramount
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Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards (Paramount,
1968).
One-Eyed Jacks, director Marlon Brando, featuring Marlon Brando, Karl
Malden, Katy Jurado, Ben Johnson (Paramount Pictures, 1961).
Ox-Bow Incident, The, director William A. Wellman, featuring Henry Fonda,
Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn (20th Century Fox,
1943).
Pale Rider, director Clint Eastwood, featuring Clint Eastwood, Michael
Moriarty, Carrie Snodgrass, Sydney Penny (Warner Bros, 1985).
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Judith Anderson, Dean Jagger (Warner Bros, 1947).

­240
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Red River, director Howard Hawks, featuring John Wayne, Montgomery

Clift, Joanne Dru, Coleen Gray (United Artists, 1948).
Searchers, The, director John Ford, featuring John Wayne, Henry Brandon,
Ward Bond, Nathalie Wood (Warner Bros, 1956).
Seraphim Falls, director David Von Ancken, featuring Liam Neeson, Pierce
Brosnan, Michael Wincott, Xander Berkeley (Icon Productions, 2006).
Shane, director George Stevens, featuring Alan Ladd, Brandon De Wilde, Van
Heflin, Jean Arthur (Paramount Pictures, 1953).
Soldier Blue, director Ralph Nelson, featuring Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss,
Donald Pleasance, Jorge Rivero (AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1970).
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The, director Tommy Lee Jones,
featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, January Jones
(EuropaCorp., 2005).
Track of the Cat, director William A. Wellman, featuring Robert Mitchum,
Teresa Wright, William Hopper, Diane Lynn (Warner Bros, 1954).
True Grit, director Joel Coen, featuring Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Josh
Brolin, Matt Damon (Paramount Pictures, 2010).
Unforgiven, director Clint Eastwood, featuring Clint Eastwood, Gene
Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris (Malpaso/Warner Bros, 1992).
Virginian, The, director Victor Fleming, featuring Gary Cooper, Walter
Huston, Richard Arlen, Mary Brian (Paramount Pictures, 1929).
Wild Bunch, The, director Sam Peckinpah, featuring William Holden, Ernest
Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates (Warner Bros, 1969).
Wild and Woolly, director John Emerson, featuring Douglas Fairbanks, Eileen
Percy, Walter Bytell, Joseph Singleton (Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, 1917).
Winchester ’73, director Anthony Mann, featuring Jimmy Stewart, Shelley
Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephan McNally (Universal Pictures, 1950).
3:10 to Yuma, director James Mangold, featuring Russell Crowe, Christian
Bale, Logan Lerman, Ben Foster (LionsGate Films, 2007).
21 Grams, director Alejandro González Iñárritu, featuring Sean Penn, Naomi
Watts, Danny Huston, Benicio Del Toro (Focus Features, 2003).

241
INDEX

Adams, Herbert Baxter, 10 Broken Arrow, see Daves, Delmar

Affleck, Casey, 207 Brown, Dee, 103, 112n
Afghanistan, 21, 196, 214 Buffalo Bill and the Indians; or, Sitting
Altman, Rick, 5, 70n, 120 Bull’s History Lesson, 116
American Civil War, 11, 12, 43, 102, Buscombe, Ed, 31
128 Bush, George W., 212–13, 214
Amores Perros see Iñárritu, Alejandro
González Campbell, Neil, 225
Anderson, Christopher, 207 Cant, John, 202, 212, 216
Andrechuck, Ed, 135–6, 159n Carson, Kit, 146
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 185–7, 189, 190, 193n Cawelti, John G., 33–4, 36–7, 38, 42, 45,
Appaloosa, 224 46, 59, 79, 92, 142, 202
Arriaga, Guillermo, 167, 180, 185 Chinatown, 2
Assassination of Jesse James by the Chisum, 56
Coward Robert Ford, The see Cimarron see Ruggles, Wesley
Dominick, Andrew Cixous, Hélène, 72n
Cody, William ‘Buffalo Bill’, 7–9, 10, 12,
Babel see Iñárritu, Alejandro González 13, 14, 15, 23n, 49, 203
Bachelard, Gaston, 169, 170, 172, 173 Coen, Joel
Badlands, 205 No Country for Old Men, 20–1, 25n,
Baker, Bob, 49, 65 194, 201–12, 213–16, 223–4
Bardem, Javier, 213 True Grit, 224
Barthes, Roland, 46, 80, 107, 168, 182, Cold War, 67–8, 98, 120–3, 204, 212,
197 220–1
Bazin, André, 48, 117 Colonese, Tom Grayson, 92, 93, 94
Beltrami, Marco, 170–1 Cooper, James Fenimore, 6–7, 29, 45,
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 180, 198 50–1, 73n, 89, 153
Bierstadt, Albert, 50, 128 The Pioneers (novel), 45–6
Billington, Ray Allen, 23n Corbucci, Sergio, 200, 224
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 89 Costner, Kevin, 92–3
Birth of a Nation, The, 77 Dances with Wolves, 18, 92–5
Black Robe, 94 Open Range, 225
Boetticher, Bud, 175, 202 Countryman, Edward, and Rick
Bonney, William H. ‘Billy the Kid’, Worland, 47, 94
129 Coyne, Michael, 32–3, 37, 41, 43, 57,
Boone, Daniel, 45, 50, 67, 92n, 101, 68–9, 109n, 114–15, 126, 221
146 Cumbow, Robert C., 209
Brokeback Mountain, 2 Custer, George Armstrong, 96–8, 111n

­242
index

Dances with Wolves see Costner, Kevin My Darling Clementine, 59–60, 211
Danto, Arthur C., 183, 197 Rio Grande, 82–3, 110n
Daves, Delmar Searchers, The, 18–19, 52, 79–80, 82,
Broken Arrow, 83, 92 83–108, 109n, 110n, 111n, 118,
deconstruction see Eagleton, Terry 119, 125, 127–8, 147, 172, 178–9,
Devil’s Doorway see Mann, Anthony 208–10, 214–15, 221
Django Unchained, 224 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 82, 128,
Dominik, Andrew 139
Assassination of Jesse James by the Stagecoach, 18, 55, 77–8, 85, 121–3,
Coward Robert Ford, 206–7, 224 132–3
Don’t Come Knocking, 224 For a Few Dollars More see Leone,
Down in the Valley, 224 Sergio
Fort Apache see Ford, John
Eagleton, Terry, 52–3 Foucault, Michel, 53–4, 74n, 120, 125
Eastwood, Clint, 115, 119, 128–9, 132, French, Philip, 6
134, 139, 140–1, 143, 147, 148, Freud, Sigmund, 69, 89–90, 90, 143,
150–1, 152, 154, 221–2 148
High Plains Drifter, 115, 129, 132 Frontier Thesis see Turner, Frederick
Outlaw Josey Whales, The, 129, 140, Jackson
154 Frye, Northrop, 29, 40, 182
Pale Rider, 115, 129, 152
Unforgiven, 19–20, 114–15, 118–19, Gallagher, Tag, 4–5, 16, 48–9, 55–6, 57,
123–55, 157n, 159n, 168, 174, 194, 83, 119, 122, 132–3, 221
195, 204, 219, 222, 224 Gettysburg (battle), 37
Eckstein, Arthur M., 78, 86, 97, 99–100, Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The see
106, 111n Leone, Sergio
El Topo see Jodorowsky, Alejandro Great Gatsby, The see Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Electra Glide in Blue, 205 Great Train Robbery, The, 9
Eliot, T. S., 202 Greb, Jacqueline K., 82, 92
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29, 49 Green, Jack M., 128
Emmert, Scott D., 142 Greenberg, Harvey R., 114–15, 118,
Esselman, Kathryn, C., 55, 91 122–3, 132, 151
Griffin, Ruth, 40, 47, 64
Faludi, Susan, 214, 216 Grimsted, David, 102–6
Faulkner, William, 202 Grist, Leighton, 131, 137, 142–3, 145–6,
Fenin, George K. and William K. Everson, 149, 151, 153
9 Gunfighter, The see King, Henry
Fiedler, Leslie A., 42, 45, 51
Fistful of Dollars, A see Leone, Sergio Harvey, David, 169, 170, 173, 176–7,
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 181
Great Gatsby, The, 155 Hawks, Howard, 171, 175, 225
Fleming, Victor Red River, 115, 225–6
Virginian, The (1929 film version), 55, Hearne, Joanna, 86, 87
56 Henderson, Brian, 83–6, 90, 109n,
Folsom, James K., 117, 123 117
Ford, John, 52, 79, 82–3, 84, 90, 92, 93, Higham, John, 12, 223
96–9, 100, 101, 112n, 128, 132, High Noon see Zinnemann, Fred
171, 175, 202, 204, 207–9, 215, High Plains Drifter see Eastwood, Clint
219–20 Hine, Robert V., and John Mack
Fort Apache, 82–3, 110n, 111n, 115, Faragher, 93, 95
144, 204 Holtz, Martin, 4
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, Hud see Ritt, Martin
19, 115–16, 125–6, 132–5, 144–5, Hutcheon, Linda, 152
146–7, 152, 154, 157n, 204, 211 Hutson, Richard, 112n

243
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Iñárritu, Alejandro González Lincoln County War, 129

Amores Perros, 167 Little Big Man see Penn, Arthur
Babel, 167 Little Bighorn, (battle), 37
21 Grams, 167 Lone Star see Sayles, John
Iraq, 21, 196, 212, 214 Louisiana Purchase, 10–11
Lovell, Alan, 55, 117
James, Jesse, 100, 129, 146, 206–7 Lyotard, Jean-François, 199
Jameson, Fredric, 119–20, 121, 122, 138,
181–2, 183, 198–9, 203, 215 McBride, Joseph, and Michael
Jefferson, Thomas, 10–11, 60 Wilmington, 96, 110n
Jodorowsky, Alejandro McCarthy, Cormac, 175, 194, 201, 202,
El Topo, 200 213, 216
Johnson County War, 35, 38 McGee, Patrick, 2–3, 58, 61, 66, 68, 69,
Jones, Karen R., and John Wills, 2, 15, 88, 90, 106, 116, 118, 129–30, 137,
59, 226–7 153–4, 221
Jones, Tommy Lee, 167, 180, 201 McVeigh, Stephen, 2, 13, 15, 19–20, 119,
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, 123–7, 128, 138, 143–4, 148, 151,
20, 25n, 165–90, 194, 196, 201, 154–5, 179, 212–13
204, 213, 222–3, 224 Maltby, Richard, 80–1, 82, 86, 91, 101
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The see
Kasson, Joy S., 8, 9, 23n Ford, John
Keller, Alexandra, 154 Mann, Anthony, 143–4, 148–9
Kennedy, John F., 123, 124, 125–6, Devil’s Doorway, 83, 86, 92
143 Winchester ’73, 121–2, 153
King, Geoff, 16 Marx, Karl, 197, 198, 203, 214, 215
King, Henry Marx, Leo, 29, 145
The Gunfighter, 20, 121, 124, 140, Melville, Herman, 202, 226
153 Menges, Chris, 170
Kitses, Jim, 7, 40, 43, 132, 134, 135–6, Mitchell, Lee Clarke, 42, 50, 52, 61–3,
143–4, 148–9, 152, 200–1 64, 67–8, 137, 144–5, 146–7, 214,
Klein, Kerwin Lee, 182–3, 190 227
Kollins, Susan, 82, 184 Moby Dick, see Melville, Herman
Mulvey, Laura, 72
Last of the Mohicans, The (1992 film Murdoch, David Hamilton, 8, 146, 152
version), 94 My Darling Clementine see Ford, John
Le May, Alan, 84
Leatherstocking tales see Cooper, James Nachbar, Jack, 33, 74n
Fenimore Neale, Steve, 3, 5, 16, 31, 34, 109n, 120,
Lenihan, John H., 31, 40, 49, 51, 109n, 201
123 Nelson, Ralph, 116
Leone, Sergio, 128–9, 132, 143, 154, Soldier Blue, 116, 200
175, 200, 204, 220, 221 Nero, Franco, 224
Fistful of Dollars, A, 128 New Western History see Limerick,
For a Few Dollars More, 128 Patricia Nelson
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The, 128 Niehaus, Lennie, 128
Once Upon a Time in the West, 159n, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53
170 No Country for Old Men see Coen, Joel
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 39, 83–4, 109n,
182–3 O’Brien, Daniel, 114, 115, 151
Lewis, Pericles, 155 Once Upon a Time in the West see
Life of Buffalo Bill, The, 9 Leone, Sergio
Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 20, 116–17, One-Eyed Jacks, 117
163–7, 177, 179, 187, 189, 190, Open Range see Costner, Kevin
195–6, 204, 222 O’Sullivan, John L., 46

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index

Outlaw Josey Whales, The see Eastwood, Second World War, 48, 68, 120, 121, 226
Clint Seraphim Falls, 224
Ox-Bow Incident, The, 116, 134 Shane see Stevens, George
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon see Ford, John
Pale Rider see Eastwood, Clint Sherman, William Tecumseh, 103
Parker, Quanah, 88, 110n, 112n Slotkin, Richard, 8, 9, 10, 44–5, 49, 51,
Patterson, John, 1–2 59, 61, 63–4, 67, 78–9, 80, 89–90,
Paz, Octavio, 177–8, 222 98–9, 100, 101, 111n, 121–2, 124,
Pearl Harbor, 37 126, 132, 143, 150, 153, 155, 180,
Peckinpah, Sam, 143, 175, 200, 202 183, 184, 198, 206, 207, 215
Wild Bunch, The, 200 Smith, Carlton, 3–4, 12–13,
Penn, Arthur, 200 220–1
Little Big Man, 116, 200 Smith, Henry Nash, 12, 24n 145,
Peoples, David Webb, 114, 139, 155n 179–80, 182, 183
Pippin, Robert, B., 3, 110n Smyth, Jennifer E., 166
Pitt, Brad, 207 Soldier Blue see Nelson, Ralph
Place, Janey, 118 Stagecoach see Ford, John
Plantinga, Carl, 130, 132, 134, 135–7, Staiger, Janet, 34, 53
141, 143, 147 Star Trek, 2
Pomeroy, Earl, 164, 190n Star Wars, 2
post-modernism, 4, 20, 128, 138, 143, Stevens, George, 48, 49
152, 154–5, 168, 169, 199, 200, Shane, 17–18, 29–52, 54–69, 75n, 81,
204, 220 89–90, 95, 100, 117, 123, 124–6,
post-structuralism see Foucault, Michel 139, 143, 144, 150, 151, 154, 172,
Propp, Vladimir, 39, 83–4 220–1
psychoanalysis see Freud, Sigmund structural anthropology/structuralism see
Pursued see Walsh, Raoul Lévi-Strauss, Claude
Pye, Douglas, 30, 79, 80, 81, 82, 98, 101, Studlar, Gaylyn, 96, 104–6, 106
103, 104, 153 Szaloky, Melinda, 91

Reagan, Ronald, 187, 209 Thompson, David, 2

Red River see Hawks, Howard Thoreau, Henry David, 29
Remington, Frederic, 14, 50, 128, 144, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The
171 see Jones, Tommy Lee
Rio Grande see Ford, John Tompkins, Jane, 38, 42–3, 52, 59, 69, 80,
Ritt, Martin 139–40, 149
Hud, 21, 205 True Grit see Coen, Joel
Robinson, Forrest, G., 54, 179 Tudor, Andrew, 55, 57
Roosevelt, Theodore, 13–15, 18, 24n, 36, Turner, Frederick Jackson, 9–14, 15, 18,
41, 49, 50, 81, 102, 194–5, 212, 226 20, 24n, 29, 47, 49, 50, 60, 64, 65–6,
Rosenberg, Harold, 196–9, 201, 203, 75n, 81, 102, 132, 163–4, 165, 179,
204, 214, 215–16 182, 187, 194–5, 206, 223
Ruggles, Wesley Tuska, John, 41–2, 57, 96, 97, 98, 126,
Cimarron, 166 134
Russell, Charles, 128, 171 Twain, Mark, 226

Sayles, John Unforgiven see Eastwood, Clint

Lone Star, 21, 170, 184–5, 190, 193n,
194, 205, 213 Vietnam War, 1, 31–3, 81, 123, 143,
Schaeffer, Jack 155n, 200, 205–6, 221
Shane (novel), 29, 35, 46–7, 54 Virginian, The see Wister, Owen
Schatz, Thomas, 30, 31–3, 34, 40, 56–7,
59, 119, 122, 123, 132, 133, 220 Walker, Janet, 23n, 32, 92–3, 170, 172,
Searchers, The see Ford, John 173, 180–1, 219

245
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Walsh, Raoul Wister, Owen, 36, 43

Pursued, 143, 153, 170 Virginian, The, 36; film version see
War on Terror, 212, 223 Fleming, Victor
Warshow, Robert, 36–7, 48–9, 51, 55, Wright, Will, 38–41, 43, 44, 49, 51,
117, 120–1 55, 57, 59, 60–2, 65, 75n, 84, 91,
Wayne, John, 79, 82, 97, 101, 111n, 112n, 117–18, 120, 220–1
114, 123, 129, 207–8, 214, 222 Wrobel, David M., 11, 213
White, Hayden, 181–3, 189–90, 192n,
197, 199–200, 203, 215 Yorktown (battle), 37
White, Richard, 116, 126 Young, Victor, 67
Wild and Woolly, 57
Wild Bunch, The see Peckinpah, Sam Zinnemann, Fred
Williams, Alan, 31–2, 56 High Noon, 20, 32, 56, 117, 121, 123,
Winchester ’73 see Mann, Anthony 124, 125, 153, 226
Winthrop, John, 12 Žižek, Slavoj, 106–8

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