Is the Western nearly extinct?

Cafe Society
1

Westerns were once a staple of American popular culture.

Originating in dime novels of the late 19th century which romanticized and glamorized the cowboys and pioneers and made life in the American west seem adventurous and exotic, the western was already a staple of popular entertainment by the time movies, radio and pulp magazines rolled around. In the '20’s, '30’s, and '40’s there were western feature films and serials, western radio dramas ( *Gunsmoke * is my favorite ) and western fiction magazines. Pulp magazines died out and to be replaced by paperbacks, comic books and television, and the western was generously represented in all three media. In the '50’s and '60’s there were dozens of western television shows, hundreds of films, and thousands of paperback and hardcover novels.

The '50’s and '60’s seem to have been the heyday of the western.

Some time around the '70’s, the western seems to have gone into a steep decline. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but by the mid '70’s (and perhaps earlier) westerns had disappeared entirely from television, and the number of western films being produced dropped precipitously. By the '80’s the idea of a western TV series would have been unthinkable. Some Western films were still being produced at times, and there was still a healthy market for novels. But by the end of the '90’s, the number of western films had diminished to a trickle, barely one or two a year and even less today. Western fiction seems to be almost entirely absent from the bookstore shelves except for series books that seemed to be thinly disguised pornography.

Today, the western seems on the verge of extinction.

What the **** happened??!?

Tell me if I’m wrong. I don’t keep up with popular culture all that much, so it may be that the western genre is in better shape than I thought.

If I’m not wrong, tell me what happened to the western. Why did it dry up and blow away? This was once a tremendously popular genre of popular fiction, and it seems strange that it would have disappeared so completely. I’ve never been a big western fan, but this seems awfully strange to me.

2

I blame sitcoms, which took over as westerns died out. Sitcoms are the anti-Christ of television.

More seriously, I think it’s just a matter of what viewers want to see. The standard western just isn’t edgy enough by today’s standards. However, HBO should start reairing Deadwood in a few months. Deadwood is a new and outstanding western series that definitely has a hard edge.

3

My guess is that it got oversaturated. People just got tired of them.

I would guess that after a while, they may come back.

For instance, there used to be quite a few pirate movies about and they pretty much died out when BAM Pirates of the Carribean come out of nowhere to be a smash hit.

4

IMHO westerns died a long time ago. All you get now are dramas set in a western time.

Dramas that could have been set in any time.

5

A lot of classic Westerns were like that, too. The Magnificant Seven, for instance. Or A Fistful of Dollars. I can easily imagine them both being set in, say, mediaval Japan.

6

Heh. :slight_smile:

7

Alessan, I don’t know about A Fistful of Dollars, but The Magnificent Seven was based on Seven Samurai, which was set in medieval Japan. Hence Tremorviolet’s heh. :slight_smile:

I still watch and read westerns whenever I hear about a good one. HBO’s Deadwood, Larry McMurtry’s books, the occasional movie (Pale Rider, Open Range, The Jack Bull). They’re not as evident in popular culture as they were in the 50’s and 60’s, but they’re not as formulaic either. But they’re still around, maybe even better.

8

Well, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man came out in 1995, and it ranks among the top ten American westerns of all time. I think the a great deal of it has to do, at least in terms of film westerns, with the fact that the western was used as a mirror of societal and cultural mores of the era it was made in, and as a convenient social commentary vehicle. The modern era presents a difficult set of values and appurtenances to deal with. It would be difficult to have a convincing western where John Wayne rode in to kill the the crooked cell-phone merchants, or the local Republican. Or prosecute local teens for underage sex.

9

I love westerns. (I just finished reading one, as it happens, though it was kind of crappy.) Last year USA Network had Peacemakers, which a lot of us really enjoyed. So of course they had to immediately cancel it.

Everyone once in a while there’s a TV movie or series or something. But it’s slim pickings these days.

10

Not only that, but 7S was based on the concept of Westerns in general, one of Kurosawa’s favorite genres…

Re: fall of Westerns: remember that in the '70s we also got more Action films (Dirty Harry, Deathwish, exploitation, kung fu, etc.) that would have siphoned off part of the audience. Especially as spaghetti Westerns were so far removed from your standard Western generic conventions.

Hm, was that last sentence redundant or what?

11

A Fistful of Dollars was based on Yojimbo. I believe that Alessan, knowing this, was going for a dry wit sort of thing and **Tremorviolet’**s “heh” was a recognition of this fact.

It is, however, Friday night and I have rendered myself…unreliable.
So YMMV. :slight_smile:

12

Better unreliable than whooshed. Now I have to do my hair again. :slight_smile:

13

Oh. Now I get it. Friday night. Unreliable. Double whoosh. :smack:

14

Once the Western had been perfected (see “Pale Rider” and “The Wild Bunch”) what was the point?

15

Convincing or not, I’d cheer loudly to see the Duke gun down them mangy telemarketers.

16

The Western is just played out. You can still make a good one by bringing new ideas or cultural trends to it. Frex, a pretty good recent Western was Cheyenne which was a Gorean bondage romance (maledom/femsub with light bondage and strong romantic/sexual elements) in the Western format. Worked very nicely.

17

You can probably also blame historical revisionism. (First person to call it by the idiot prejorative of political correctness gets an arrow where it really hurts.)

Westerns as a genre started with the wildest of wild west tales in the dime novel era. Many of these promoted real people as heroes, albeit performing deeds as implausible as any Jerry Bruckheimer ever purveyed; others were simple tall tales, urban legends, anti-Indian hate speech, and sheer nonsense written by easterners who never got farther west than New Jersey.

Wild West shows became extremely popular by the end of the 1800s and Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and other characters caricatured themselves, along with Indians who needed a way to make a buck by pretending to be bucks. These toured all over the country, and were seen even in New York City.

Early movies drew on the images from the dime novels and the Wild West shows more than they did anything that really happened in the west.

Westerns got better and slicker at the same time, evolving not just to John Huston movies but also to the singing cowboy genre, with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and many forgotten others cranking out hundreds of reels of totally inauthentic nonsense. Better movies weren’t all that much better in giving the audience anything that remotely resembled the real west.

By the 1950s the movie westerns were beginning to get a bit more factual, or at least a bit more cynical, but television intervened. TV was supposed to be the medium of the future, but most of the early popular programs might as well have been drawn from vaudeville. All the singing cowboys moved over, and so did the radio cowboys. Gunsmoke started on radio, after all.

Oversaturation is certainly part of the cause: there were proportionally more westerns on the networks at their peak than crime shows today. But I think the times that were already changing in Hollywood in the 50s caught up with television by the end of the 60s.

By then it wasn’t possible, post civil rights-era, to portray Indians as mindless savages whose only role was to get shot and fall off horses picturesquely. It wasn’t possible to glorify taking their lands and putting them in reservations and destroying their food sources and punishing their children for speaking their native language and reviling their religions.

And the all white western hero didn’t look so good either, especially if the black was a comic sidekick. History didn’t help much: the Indians hated the black Buffalo Soldiers as much as they did any whites.

After Vietnam it became less possible to refuse to acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated by the government, by individual soldiers and agents of the governments, and by various big money people - ranchers, miners, oilmen - whose depredations the government winked at or supported outright.

After the women’s movement, it wasn’t possible to have all the females divided into prostitutes and schoolmarms, or ignore the huge role that females played in creating a civilization in a west that was seldom as wild as the movies.

Action shows of all types require a good/bad dichotomy. Without Indians as automatic villains, who could be substituted? Mexicans? Not when they’re the fasting growing minority group. Sheep ranchers? Only if you’re a cattle baron.

The real west is a utterly fascinating place to study, and western history is in a true boom today. But it just doesn’t have any simplistic villains. And it just wasn’t as picturesque as saloons and whorehouses and singing cowboys. And it kept moving and changing year by year so much that you have to be a scholar just to understand what should be happening where at what time.

The west turned out to be subtle and complex and contain huge historic tragedies carried out by the very heroes we used to cheer about. That’s death for popular entertainment. Writers and directors don’t know how to tell it; worse, audiences don’t know how to watch it.

Maybe when we get more distance someone will figure out how to reinvent the genre. In the meantime real western history and solid western historical fiction exists. But its like jazz; few know about it, fewer care to steep themselves in it. It feels too strange for beginners.

18

Well, every year or so there’s a high budget Serious Western these days in the theaters. They’re almost all of that Kevin Costner genre, though - the last Western action/comedy I can think of off-hand is Maverick, which while solid was a few years ago and based on a TV show - hardly original. I was going to point out that a few of the best weren’t that old, but then I realized that Unforgiven came out longer ago than I thought.

I think what’s been bad for the genre is this Serious Western idea. There have been some really, really good ones, but honestly there’s only so many three hour Ethical Studies movies set in the West that the moviegoing public will take in a year.

TV has done some interesting stuff with the genre in the past few decades - Deadwood, like somebody mentioned, but The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. wasn’t so long ago and that’s a direction I wish the Western would go back into - there’s still life there, in the action adventure/comedy vein. Really, good TV might be the place to look for the rebirth of the modern Western.

Funny how the book market there has disappeared, though.

19

Well it seems to me that, probably for many of the reasons you described, the nature of the Western shifted somewhere in the late 60s - early 70s. Instead of the Roy Rogers “good guy=white hat/bad guy= black hat” dichotomy, the good guy is more often an anti hero. Usually some kind of outlaw, renegade or maverick. Usually Clint Eastwood. The bad guy is typically the cattle baron, the railroad, renegade soldiers.

Actually, for a really funny take on this change in the Western, watch Rustler’s Rhapsody staring Tom Berrenger. Tom plays this singing cowboy who travels around helping villagers. The bad guy cattle ranchers all wear black but have to team up with some Italian railroad guy who’s henchmen all wear circa Good, Bad, and Ugly trenchcoats. It’s actually pretty funny.

20

“Now draw, so I can shoot the guns out of your hands.”

There was a brief resurgence with Young Guns, but the most interesting character was the sociopathic Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez), so I daresay the traditional good guy is no more.