Tuesday, June 19, 2007

On the lost relevance of oaters, or, False Narratives Part 1

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

What I really want to talk about is false narratives, but it’s going to take a while to get there. The quote above comes from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, which is a movie I have little expectation that you’ve seen if you’re under the age of 30. On the other hand, if you’re a film buff, you may know it. It’s a John Ford picture, from 1962. John Kennedy was President. The Beatles had yet to release a record in the US. I was in high school.

The late 60s were the last gasp for the Western, marked in films by a string of progressively weaker John Wayne vehicles and a declining number of TV series and the rather postmodern series of spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone. Westerns had been a Hollywood staple since virtually day one, but that run was ending. You could say that The Shootist in 1976 was the true swansong of the genre, and it knew that it was the swansong of the genre. John Wayne, who was dying of cancer during the film’s production, plays a gunslinger (a shootist) who is dying of cancer. There have been a few Westerns since then, but they’ve been rare birds. The genre is, for all practical purposes, dead.

The Western wasn’t merely a type of entertainment. It was a much more transcendent genre. Kids played cowboys and Indians, or Davey Crocket, or whatever, as a matter of course. Cowboy stars were kid’s idols going back to the silent movies, and to the dime novels before that, and certainly up through 50s television. The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and company were icons. The average kid knew the names of Tim McCoy’s horse and Roy Rogers horse and Gene Autry’s horse. Knowledge of who shot whom at the O.K. Corral was a given. But it wasn’t just kid stuff. Adults enjoyed westerns too. They read western novels, they went to so-called “adult” western movies, they watched Gunsmoke week after week on television for years, after having listened to it on the radio for years prior to that. And the westerns did develop an interior mythology of white hats and black hats, schoolmarms and tongue-tied cowpokes, sheriffs and marshals and and cattle drives and range wars and railroads and a whole range of Indians from the Rousseau noble savage to the base mindless killer. And all of it just went away. It died a death. It was a slow death, but a solid one. A kid born in the last twenty years might conceivably never watch a new western movie or a new western television show. Aside from statistical deviation (like the occasional Deadwood), the genre is gone. And it hasn’t been supplanted by something else. That is, another genre as meaningful has not come along to replace it. Unquestionably certain science fiction stories are nothing but westerns in fancy dress, but in no way have SF films replaced westerns in either media ubiquity or mythic significance. That mythic significance is, of course, the relationship of the West to the American narrative. Or, if you will, the myth of the West is a key factor in the American metanarrative, which is reflected in the genre. The myth of, oh, Luke Skywalker, while perhaps primal in the Joseph Campbell sense, is not particularly American. Far from it. But the narrative of the frontier is absolutely a defining characteristic of the American personality. Or at least it used to be. Maybe the frontier has been gone for so long we’ve forgotten it ever existed.

A metanarrative, of course, is the underlying story. In the case of a national, cultural metanarrative, it is the underlying story we tell ourselves about ourselves, although it does not necessarily have to be literally expressed. That is, we don’t have to sit around the campfire every night telling the tales for those tales to be a part of us. For your postmodernists, of course, we need to go beyond the metanarratives (or maybe it’s that the metanarratives break down—it’s hard to tell with these guys). But we’re not looking at this philosophically, but simply examining it on face. The belief in the West, in the frontier, is part of the American character because the West and the frontier were so much a part of the literal American story. One could suppose from the lack of Westerns in our lives anymore, we have moved past this story, or moved past the metanarrative. Perhaps. Others would say that, since there is no longer any frontier, and it’s been so long since there was one, the stories have lost their mythic relevance. Again, perhaps. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to examine this narrative, as a history lesson, and a cultural lesson, and a fairly long digression before I get to what I really wanted to talk about.

to be continued…

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"The late 60s were the last gasp for the Western, marked in films by a string of progressively weaker John Wayne vehicles and a declining number of TV series and the rather postmodern series of spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone."

The Western bubble burst in the early sixties, which really means that interest in the television Westerns that had glutted the market fell, particularly with the advent of British spies and other genres, but the last gasp you speak of never really happened. If John Wayne as the single largest icon of that genre took the Western with him when he died, it might be difficult to convince Eastwood fans of that, Spaghetti and post-Spaghetti, including his Best Picture Oscar winner, Unforgiven, in '92.

Really, the "few" westerns you refer to after The Shootist are myriad. Your contention only holds water if you want to hold post-seventies numbers up against pre-sixties numbers, which isn't any kind of accurate scale--especially since the B movie system that produced so many of them died at roughly the same time the TV Western fell. By that reckoning you're also obligated to factor in quality and intent, and the adult, ambitious Western stayed very much alive through the decades, and is in fact flourishing today by any reckoning. Lonesome Dove, Broken Trail, the new Comanche Moon, rehashed TV series like The Magnificent Seven and the genre bending Briscoe County Jr., the considerable number of Turner-produced television Westerns, the newly greenlighted AMC series by Walter Hill (who also made a stirring Geronimo), Michael Blake (Dances With Wolves) and Thomas Haden Church, HBO's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, the new Westerns coming in from Asia, Canada and Europe, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp (metafun vs metanarrative), Costner's dedication to the form has yielded two going on three serious pictures, there are more recent films like The Missing and Serphim Falls, and three of the finest Westerns in the genre's history, Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil, The Proposition from Australia, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, are not exceptions. And there's Deadwood, which is not an exception by any means to a moribund genre. And around the bend are The Assassination Of Jesse James, a full-bore remake of 3:10 To Yuma, and Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, directed by the Coen Brothers. Finally, it was announced a few weeks ago that a Weinstein company is involved in producing 24 new Westerns.

"The belief in the West, in the frontier, is part of the American character because the West and the frontier were so much a part of the literal American story. One could suppose from the lack of Westerns in our lives anymore, we have moved past this story, or moved past the metanarrative"

I would argue that the Western as metanarrative of some specific aspect of the American character vis a vis the frontier was trounced repeatedly as far back, at least, as the thirties. There were many elegiac Westerns besides The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Ride The High Country (not least of which The Good The Bad and The Ugly, Once Upon A Time In The West, and The Wild Bunch) and there were some real stinkers that wanted to to tie the genre to some greater historical sweep, but once Cowboys started singing, etc., the genre largely divorced itself from that greater reach and instead became a self sufficient, self-inclusive set of iconic elements that could draw upon the metanarrative in various ways, but was as often independent of it.

Even if the Western had died as you said, it would not have died of disconnection to any relevent historical context.