Just as an aside

There's a comment to my contention that the western is, to all intents and purposes, dead as a film/tv genre, claiming that I'm wrong. I thought I had hedged a little bit, allowing for statistical deviations. The commenter lists films like The Unforgiven, Dances with Wolves and others that are exactly the statistical deviations I alluded to. And most of which are rather old. These films, and Deadwood and the others mentioned, are almost inevitably described by critics as attempts to revive a dead genre, or breathe new life into it, or whatever, and they are usually noted as the exceptions they are. I could easily agree that Clint Eastwood is the last of the western folks, but his last western was 15 years ago. Costner did make Open Range in 2003, but I had to look that up; Wyatt Earp was in 94 and Dances was in 90. These people are mostly doing something else.

Even if the evidence could demonstrate that westerns are still an active genre (and the evidence I see on, say, Wikipedia lists of films, doesn't), I don't think there could be much disagreement that the genre does not play the role in the popular imagination that it once did. Saying that B movies, which was where most of the westerns were, went away misses the point that B movies as a production business were replaced by television, which originally was chock-filled with westerns (some of them, literally, old B westerns). Westerns died—and they did die—because people stopped going to them, or watching them. The genre wore out. Like any genre, there are still new examples, just as there's new films noir (in color!) and pirate films or whatever other examples you might like to consider. But there is certainly literature on the West as informing the American image (I'm not making this stuff up), and there is certainly not as much interest in the West these days as there was 50 years ago, at least if one goes by popular entertainment.

I'm trying to explain why I believe this stuff is so in the essay, which I'll continue tomorrow.