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The Western Genre: Dead or Evolved?

2/18/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
by Michael Hoffman
            Given its unique ability to cater to American sensibilities and nostalgia for the early days of the expansive, untamed American frontier, the Western could be observed as the quintessential genre of the American film industry. However, despite being one of the oldest and most enduring genres of American filmmaking, the popularity of the Western seems to have significantly diminished. Should this observation be noted as an indicator of the Western’s passing, or has the Western instead evolved into something more relatable to the modern viewer?

            Without a doubt, even throughout its prolific era, the Western remained a flexible genre, capable of providing unique societal insights that were relevant to different time periods. During the silent era, the Western grew alongside the development of Hollywood’s studio production system and sought to capture moviegoers’ imaginations. But it was with Edwin Porter’s pioneering Western, The Great Train Robbery (1903), that the genre truly established itself as a valuable cinematic movement through the film’s utilization of innovative crosscutting editing techniques and the institution of essential conventions of typical Westerns (e.g. good guys vs. bad guys, a final showdown, a natural setting, etc).

            Although the early Westerns continued to adopt a very similar style, during the 1930s, singing cowboy movies were released, which sought to highlight the musical talents of the featured actors (such as Roy Rogers), and through the 1940s and 1950s, actors like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Gary Cooper starred in movies that idealized the cowboy as a clean-cut hero (Perry). This optimistic presentation of the Western ushered in its “golden age,” and solidified the legacies of directors like John Ford and King Vidor.

            However, with films like The Searchers (Ford, 1956), the Western came to embrace the role of the anti-hero. In The Searchers, John Wayne played a racist, hate-driven loner, obsessively searching for his Comanche-kidnapped niece. Building on this darker presentation of the Western, Sergio Leone released his “spaghetti” Westerns, which brought fame to Clint Eastwood and depicted the frontier as a harsher, more violent land, void of morals and controlled by greed. With the release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1968), the Western entered its “renaissance” era, where good and evil became ambiguous states. But with the release of Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), the genre experienced what many believed to be its swan song.

            Without a doubt, the popularity of the Western as we know it has significantly diminished. In fact, some of the more recently successful Westerns are actually remakes of classics (e.g. the Coen brothers’ True Grit and James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma). Does this indicate that the Western genre is indeed dead? While it might be valid to state that the Western of the “golden age” is no more, I personally find it foolish to disregard the Western genre’s place in cinema today. With films such as No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007), which utilizes elements of the Western to tell the cat-and-mouse story of a drug deal gone wrong, or television series like Deadwood, which takes place in a South Dakota town filled with corruption and crime, I believe that the Western has proven its evolution and can still be appreciated by modern viewers, albeit through quite a different, darker approach than at the point of its origin.

Works Cited

Perry, C.J. "The Evolution of the Western Genre." Film Slate Magazine. 6 Feb. 2014. <http://www.filmslatemagazine.com/filmmaking/the-evolution-of-the-western-genre>.
1 Comment
Billy Martel
2/18/2014 07:54:56 am

Obviously the western as with any genre of film has gone through a lot of changes and evolutions over the years. But what is the evolution it's going through now? That it's dark? So people still make western genre entries now. Does that mean that the Western genre isn't dead? How do you know? I see most of the Westerns made now as criticisms of the genre. Like Unforgiven, which you claim as the death of the genre, most of these new westerns seem more concerned with tearing down the genre than evolving it. While some do so out of respect for the genre I believe that some, like the Coen brothers, do so in an attempt to repaint our understanding of that period in our history. Westerns have always glorified the life of the cowboys on the frontier but modern westerns prefer to show up how hard the lives of the people who lived out there really were. And in that effort some push the pendulum too far in the other direction creating a version of the west which resembles a sort of hell on earth. But always the modern westerns too me seem to be commenting on the genre itself even when trying to get away from itself. Scifi westerns have seen a rise in popularity over the years with shows like Firefly, and movies like Cowboys and Aliens. It seems to me as if you were both right and wrong with your supposition. I believe the western genre has evolved to the point of death. In that it has evolved to the point where it is no longer the western genre as we understand it. I believe that the only proper way to classify the westerns you mentioned and I mentioned is under the heading: Neo Western. Much like Neo Noir all of the entries are not only entries in their own genre but utilize well known tropes of previous genres to create an atmosphere. Much like Noir, the genre (or whatever else it may be) is dead, but pieces of it live on in a evolved more complex form.

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