Yes, You Should Watch a Western (Dammit) Epilogue: The Spiritual Wild West

Tom Hanks’ new Western genre flick, News of the World dropped on streaming services a few months ago. Hanks’s widowed, ex-Confederate soldier travels from town to town to read newspapers to locals. Each town exemplifies the isolation and exemption they had from the centralized U.S. On his travels he encounters a girl twice orphaned; her Dutch settler parents were killed, then raised by a Native American tribe who were slaughtered. He then begrudgingly accepts the task to take her to her surviving relatives. What follows is an episodic journey as Hanks grows more paternal to the girl as they face the wildness of the west together.

It was a solid example of the Western genre.  And its depiction of hard times, mistrust, and marginalization probably seemed timely for a 2020/2021 audience.

But it also reminded me how the genre only appears here and there. It is no longer the monolithic native myth it once was. One of my primary arguments of why the Western was important because it was our myth. Yes, the genre has been revised every decade or so, with fresh eyes and minds, but it largely remains dormant. Now, narratives are much more stratified; the cultural myths we have aren’t as standardized. But once again, we are on the cusp of change, and the Western finds ways to find relevance. And the languages created by Westerns, as well as its tropes and archetypes still permeate our current lexicons. (We continue to reach back to the cowboy myths to describe actions, build metaphor, or wax poetic).

So, if the actual classic Western is a decaying myth, spiritually it continues to live on, and its soul has found its home in many genres. I think its continuation is exciting in many ways. Both ways, involve the transformation of the genre, and to its extension outside of its normal boundaries.

I’m inclined to think the best form of a spiritual Western that we have, is the post-apocalyptic road/travel tale that has risen in interest. In these films, the western lands have become wastelands. Films like The Road, The Rover, and Children of Men.  Even the pulpy classic of Escape from New York seems transplanted from a Western script. Both the series and the film version of Snowpiercer could work as a Western (it being a classist critique on a train traveling through an unforgiving barren land. I have had great fun with a game series called Borderlands, which is an eclectic mix of cyberpunk and sci-fi space western treasure hunting adventures. Then there is the Mad Max series, the penultimate apocalyptic western. The first Mad Max even still has a civilization, one on the brink of lawlessness and order. The film conveyed Western tropes with marauding gangs (this time on bikes), remote towns and taverns, and even gun-toting farm mothers. Fury Road, the most recent entry, feels like an amalgamation of a Western and a feverish fairy tale (with evil kings and citadels, and promises of hidden paradises).  All these stories ponder if our future worlds will be partial to the same mythologies as our past ones.

The Western also escaped its native land and traveled internationally. No longer confined, the genre renewed itself in several unique iterations. Since I first delved into the world of Westerns, I have since seen Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, New Zealand, Australian, and even Dutch and Danish Westerns.  In 1954, Japanese’s filmmaker Akira Kurosawa captivated the world with Seven Samurai.  Kurosawa would produce a few more Samurai era dramas, and he would cite that American films and Westerns were his big inspirations, going as to point out filmmaker John Ford (The Searchers, Stagecoach) as an influence. Then in life’s little ironies, several filmmakers began making Western remakes and other films influenced by Kurosawa’s dramas (The Magnificent Seven being a key example). Much like the 60s British Rock scene, this migration allowed for revival of this important genre.

The Seven Samurai, 1954 and The Magnificent Seven, 1960; West influences East , East influences West.

These two examples of how the Western’s spirit has transformed, puts forth a new hypothesis: in way, we are now building a sub-genre of Legacy Westerns.  We are moving further and further from it being a genre rooted in historical locations, but we are still using the essence of the genre , much like our arts still allude to Shakespeare or biblical myths.

On my blog, I propose that we are not just consumers of story and art, we are surveyors. We begin to determine the dimension and scope of our stories, and to what degree they impact us. For Americans, it does tell us about as ourselves. On the global front, it says something about Americans too, but also it highlights the constant of the individual and their agency and freedom in chaotic lands.

Watch a Western, dammit.