wasted no time getting into the act. Some of the
earliest motion pictures were Westerns, including
Thomas Edison’s 46-second, one-shot vignette
Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene(1899) and Edwin S.
Porter’s groundbreaking The Great Train Robbery
(1903).
American history inspired the Western, but the
genre’s enduring popularity has more to do with
how Americans see and explain themselves than
with any actual event. Westerns are a form of mod-
ern mythology that offers narrative representations
of Americans as rugged, self-sufficient individuals
taming a savage wilderness with common sense
and direct action. The concept of the frontier as a
sort of societal blank slate is at the heart of this
mythology. The Wild West is a land of opportunity—
both a dangerous, lawless country in need of tam-
ing and an expansive territory where anyone with
the right stuff can reinvent himself and start a new
life. The mythology label does not mean that these
notions cannot be true. It simply acknowledges
that certain aspects of the history of the American
West have been amplified and modified to serve a
collective cultural need.
Earlier in the chapter, we discussed the civiliza-
tion-versus-wilderness conflict that provides the
Western’s thematic framework. The tension pro-
duced by this conflict is an essential ingredient in
virtually every Western narrative. The wilderness
can take the form of antagonistic forces in direct
conflict with the civilizing settlers, such as the
Apache Indians in John Ford’s The Searchers(1956)
and Stagecoach(1939), or the free-range cattleman
of George Stevens’s Shane(1953). Or it can manifest
itself in more metaphorical terms. The wilderness
of Ford’s 3 Godfathers(1948), for example, takes the
form of the outlaw protagonists’ self-interest,
which is put in direct opposition with the civilizing
effects of social responsibility when the bandits dis-
cover an infant orphaned in the desert.
But this sort of duality was nothing new. Many
Western characters reverse or combine the the-
matic elements of order and chaos. Lawmen in
movies like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven(1992) are
antagonists, and often even a lawman protagonist
is a former outlaw or gunfighter. Cowboys—
quintessential Western characters—also embody
the blurred borders between the Western’s the-
matic forces. Cowboys may fight the Indians, but
they are also symbols of rootless resisters of
encroaching development. Whatever his particular
stance and occupation, the Western hero is typi-
cally a man of action, not words. He is resistant—
or at least uncomfortable—with the trappings of
civilization, even in those common cases where he
serves as a civilizing agent. Shane’s gunfighter pro-
tagonist sacrifices himself to defend the home-
steader, but he rides off into oblivion, rather than
settling down and taking up a plow himself. The
actors associated with the genre reflect the quiet
power of the laconic characters they repeatedly
play. Whereas gangster icons such as James Cagney
are compact and manic, Western stars, from the
silent era’s William S. Hart through Henry Fonda12
Wilderness and civilizationAlthough many Western
narratives favor the forces of order, the outlaw is not always
the bad guy. Revisionist Westerns like George Roy Hill’s Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid(1969) mourn the inevitable
loss of freedom that accompanies the civilization of the
frontier. In that movie, and in many others that reconsidered
Western mythology, the protagonists are good-natured
outlaws [1]; the righteous avenging posse (presented as a
faceless “other” in a technique borrowed from the horror
and science-fiction genres) is the dreaded antagonist [2].SIX MAJOR AMERICAN GENRES 103