Or put it another way: what accounts for the growth of the Old West as a viable time-and-place based genre in literature, movies and television and not any other American region or period in American history? Why isn’t there whole genres devoted to eccentric midwesterners of Noweigan and German Catholic stock like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon Days or rugged individualists in the far western frontiers of Alaska ala Tom Boydett’s radio show The End of the Road?
I’m deliberately hoping for a more vigorous debate of opinions and whatever social and historical forces helped shape the western genre her in the GD forum as opposed to Cafe Society. I love that forum but this thread would invariably degenerate into a heated discussion on why "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. " was better than “Bonanza.” Mods, PLEASE don’t move it! At least not at first.
OK. Post a coherent philosophical question to enlarge upon your OP and we’ll give it a try. (I suspect that it’s moving to Cafe Society pretty soon, anyway, but we’ll let it sit for a while.)
(I’d blame Horace Greeley for popularizing John B. L. Soule’s sentiments.)
IMO people tend to fixate on the idea of the rugged individualist making his own way despite what nature and society throw at him. The cultural customs and frontier nature of the Old West provided a setting in which the character of the RI could be developed and acted out at length. Such a scenario would be much more difficult to do in many other cultural settings. (Note that there is a small subgenre of Alaskan-frontier stories over 100 years old, though with nothing like the popularity of the Western.)
Easy: the west was seen as lawless. In a lot of ways, especially early on, it was. It shouldn’t be hard to understand why this has fascinated people for so long.
Tomndebb: The hope is that the thread might stave off the TV show comparisons for a few more posts and talk about the economics and cultural forces that elevate a “western” over, say, a “southern.” Neither BIRTH OF A NATION nor GONE WITH THE WIND created a sustainable southern gothic genre of sweeping Civil War epics.
Dunno about “philosophical”, but here’s a thought: if Hollywood hadn’t immediately fixated on westerns when the early movie studios went west (consider all that free lighting and authentic locales), would there even be a romanticized cowboy allure today? Nobody today reads the original Old West dime novels that anteceded the movies.
“East” is what many people were familiar with. If I want escapist entertainment do I want to see a movie about the trials and tribulations of urban dwellers and suburbanites. I live that, I don’t need more of it unless it involves lots of 'splosions.
There is an even smaller subgenre of “Cracker Westerns” set in 18th- or early-19th-Century Florida. Florida was the Old West before the Old West was the Old West – we had wild Indians, cattle ranchers, gunfighters, gamblers and riverboats. All that, plus rattlesnakes and alligators! See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1561640700/102-6461420-5420925.
Actually, there are plenty of “Eastern” novels – novels set on the Eastern Seaboard from D.C. up to Boston, in a highly civilized environment. It’s a well-established genre. In the 19th Century there was Alcott’s Little Women, Habberton’s Helen’s Babies, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Henry James’ Washington Square. In the 20th Century – Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and countless other prep-school stories; Segal’s Love Story; Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities; McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City; and too many others to list.
Not to mention plenty of Midwestern novels (and movies and TV shows) ranging from Lauar Ingalls Wilder to Sinclair Lewis to the above-mentioned Garrison Keilor. And Southern literature is a lot more than antebellum bodice rippers – one of my college English courses focused entirely on Southern fiction.
In fact, one of the biggest trends in literature and entertainment in the last 30 years has been the “death” of the Western and the transferrence of the “man alone against impossible odds” theme into other genres (e.g., Star Wars.)
Cisco. They read the original circa 1880s dime novels and not stuff by later writers like L’Amour, Grey and McMurtry? Okay. That’s still just your six against my six-and a half billion who don’t. Also – I get the appeal of lawlessness but even in Westerns there’s an appeal toward civilized behavior and frontier justice. It’s not always like “Deadwood.”
tomndebb. They may have been fixed in New York. I wrote “fixated” which implies a bit of obsessive behavior with regard to producing the genre. The western really took off once Hollywood studios started filming on location. IIRC, almost every studio took advantage – especially after the death of Rudolph Valentino. Had Valentino lived, I suspect there would have been a huge public appetite for “sheik” and “count” movies that might have single-handedly stalled the western film. This last is speculation on my part-- Valentino’s appeal might not have handled the transition to talkies-- but not entirely unfounded.
astro. A quick look at most movie entertainment would reveal that the famliar and realistic wins in box office clout, critical acclaim and Oscar laurels most consistently than simply escapist fare. On the small screen, fantasy doesn’t fare well at all – but people’ve made decade-long top twenty hits out of urban comedies like Cheers or dramas like the half dozen permutations of Law And Order. I’m not shortchanging the lure of the western frontier as an exotic locale but I refute your claim that things must be exotic to be successfully escapist.
BrainGlutton. You forgot The Great Gatsby and my favorite, Ragtime. See, that’s a possible workable definition of the characters and motifs of a 19th century and turn of the 20th century “Eastern novel.” I don’t think the trials of the lauded Mid-Atlantic/New England gentry are really an established genre – as evidenced by your quotes – but the motifs, conventions and themes are familiar. But there’s an undercurrent of violence and vice beneath all that genteelity that often goes unexplored: Graft at Tammany Hall, racial and immigrant ethnic tensions in the urban cities of Boston, New York, Chicago. Carrie Nation’s temperance crusade. HH Holmes. Mesmerism. Absinthe and Opium. Industrial labor practices and abuses. Fatty Arbuckle. Oscar Wilde.
Kunilou. Could you provide an brief outline describing the motifs and themes of southern literature and the books read for the course?
I think you’d have to produce a list of titles prior to 1926 to prove that point. It seems to me that the Western was already established prior to the movement of the studios to the west. Note that in the same time frame, Zane Grey and “Max Brand” (Frederick Faust) produced wildly popular novels while Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) introduced the Western novel to “respectable” literature. (Not to mention the tales, earlier by Bret Harte and later by O Henry that often featured Western themes.) Wild West shows rivalled circuses for popularity in traveling live entertainment, (and provided “crossover” entertainers such as Will Rogers an entry to other venues). Civil War stories were often “westerns” with either the Yanks or Rebs playing the part of the “hostiles” (depending on the producer and director involved). Buster Keaton’s The General, based loosely on a real event during the Civil War, was very much a “western” as was the bench mark Birth of a Nation**, for all that it was set in the South.
Movies are visual entertainment, which makes them action-oriented. Sure you can make a movie of people sitting around talking, but it almost always works better as a book. The Wild West is much more action-oriented than the Sedate East or the Suicidally Boring Midwest. That’s why when you see New York in a movie, it tends to be either a romance or a crime drama. The conflict inherent in those genres feels much more in place in an urban setting.
The romanticization of The West began before Hollywood, and before the advent of dime novels. Recall that our first great “Western” hero was Daniel Boone (back when “the West” meant Kentucky). Boone’s autobiography (ghostwritten by John Filson) inspired a Western mania which has waxed and waned but which has never entirely abated.
Daniel Boone stories are “Easterns” as defined by the OP, as are the leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper (e.g., Last of the Mohicans, set in upstate New York).
(And aren’t many of our “Westerns” just a continuation of the European traditional tales of knights errant?)
I’ve got to say I think there’s a “Southern” too. This isn’t a genre that was ever as big as the Western, but the Western hasn’t been as big as the Western for decades anyway.
For “Southerns” consider not just Gone With the Wind and various Civil War dramas and antebellum bodice-rippers, but Keaton’s Our Hospitality, the works of Tennessee Williams, and more recently movies like Steel Magnolias and Cookie’s Fortune. These could be further broken down into comedies and melodramas, or stories of the Southern upperclass and stories of small towns or country life.
I’d say that since at least the '80s there’s been a clear subgenre of Southern “chick flicks” like Steel Magnolias and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The “Southern” centered around a strong and beautiful but hot-tempered and long-suffering heroine goes back to at least Gone With the Wind. Thanks to Oprah we’ve finally got a filmed (albeit made-for-TV) version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, about a strong and beautiful but hot-tempered and long-suffering heroine who’s a black Southern woman rather than a white one.
Westerns are are interesting because they are almost ritualized. So much of “The Western” is about the setting and the whole mythos, not the individual plot of the movie.
For example, the same archetypical characters show up- often right down to their legendary names. Like Cisco brought up, the Old West provides a stage to explore what men do without laws or society- much like Mad Max style post-apocalypse movies do more recently. Humans have a deep desire to see things played out on the very edges of the world- which they envision as a lonely, violent place where men can once again be manly (and often turn in to monsters). It’s very much about how men create society when there is none and pretty much everything is out to kill them.
Westerns also provide something the fairly new nation of America desperately wants…a national pre-history. We don’t have a misty pagan past and not a lot in the way of folklore and legend. We were founded by the cool rationality of a few aristocrats. The Western provides a place for us to imagine America as founded on stuff like courage and grit, not a bunch of guys in powdered wigs that didn’t like taxes. Politically,
Westerns also question and complicate (and often justify) the thing we have the most collective guilt for- the conquest of the West and our treatment of Native Americans. This aspect of history is almost universally ignored save a paragraph in school history books about the Trail of Tears. We feel enourmous collective guilt and general unreolvedness about the whole thing, and the Western is really the only place it’s ever been brought up in pop culture.
The physical setting is also important. The harsh, vast, strange, and empty landscapes are part of the story. Widescreen was actually developed for the Western landscape- before that movies were pretty much square.
Anyway, there is a lot to say about why Westerns are so popular and important. There is a lot of reading out there on the subject, and a lot of very interesting ways to look at movies (for example, The Searchers is a bit of a requiem for the genre). To answer you question more thoroughly, there are a lot of movies with Western-style plots (especially in modern times) in other setting. First there are the Japanese movies that so many Westerns borrowed from. Then there are post-apocalyptic films, the occasional western-ganster film, and a whole slew of foreign films drawing on Western themes (including the re-importation of western themes to Japanese cinema).
tomndebb. I think we’re talking past each other a bit. I’m talking about a studio boom in sheer volume of westerns produced once they moved out west. When Nestor Studios first formed they made Mutt and Jeff comedy shorts. Once they moved to California in 1911, they began to produce one-reel westerns weekly. This was only possible because California weather permitted year-round filming and authentic naturalistic sets and landscapes were available – and shortly, other film studios followed Nestor’s lead, before their consolidation into Universal Studios.
As to your other point, Hickcock’s Wild West show was essentially a western themed circus, with all the excitement a big circus’ arrival brings with the major drawback that the whole spectacle (usually) has to travel from city to city to make any money. While it was very popular show, it was also a logistical nightmare and without many imitators. Its only real live entertainment competition, vaudeville, easily eclipsed the Wild West show in terms of available venues, variety acts, performers (many of whom moved on to radio, cinema and television) urban popularity and ubiquity. Time and (western) movies helped kill the live Wild West Show… and also eclipsed vaudeville and eventually helped supplant it entirely by the late 1930s. Westerns were a big part of cinema and early television because any old western-based minor Hollywood studio could enter the market cheap and continue to develop the genre they’d been building since the turn of the century.
P.S. The fact that it WAS set in the South makes “Birth of a Nation” not a western. If anything, later westerns borrowed cinematic themes from IT. (The KKK calvary charging to the rescue, battle scenes.)
Lamia. I agree, the closest thing we’ve got to a corollary to the western is not an “eastern” but a “southern” – indeed, a lot of so-called westerns actually borrow themes from situations with more southern sensibilities – runaway slaves, Union and Confederate army conflicts, war battles and the ravages of war, carpetbaggers and scalawags, the KKK, riverboat gambling and Southern hustlers, Creole prostitutes and “passing,” lynch mob justice, former slave and free black settlements, black cowboys, trailblazers, pioneers, scouts. Also, most any southern based movie that celebrates southern eccentrics, orators, preachers, politicians and other personalities dealing with the hypocrisy of southern race relations. Most of these aren’t recognized as a separate genre but it’s interesting to note the genre’s proto-motifs, characters and themes are there.
spoke- Errant knights are an antecedent of many westerns? Huh. I hadn’t heard that. Examples? I don’t exactly see Lancelot in Gary Cooper.
In terms of the thesis for this thread, I think you’ve got that exactly backwards. Certainly Birth of a Nation was set in the South and later movies borrowed from it. However, the cavalry/KKK charge to the rescue and extended battle scenes were already a staple of the wild west shows.
Again, movies clearly helped kill the wild west shows, but until the advent of the movies, there was a sufficient draw to the “mystique of the west” to keep several such shows in business for over 20 years.
Beyond that, the California climate was equally amenable to the Keystone cops and other shows.
While you might make a case that it was cheaper and easier to put chaps and hats on guys and have them ride around the country shooting guns than it would have been to dress them up with robes and scimitars or put them in plumed helmets to act like Romans, the fact remains that the country had already developed a long tradition of interest in (or an infatuation with) the various western genres long before the first projector was aimed at a sheet on the side of the local drug store. To assert that Hollywood created the love for the Western simply by making lots of them ignores both the long fascination with the West that preceeded movies and the fact that movie makers were more likely trying to tap into an existing audience than trying to create a new market.
The landscape of the West simply says adventure, romance, and action in a way that landscapes in other parts of the country, or even in most of the world, don’t. You have mountains so tall as to be barren and snow-capped year round, and when you reach the top of one such mountain all you can see is more mountains, with no humans or human activity visible anywhere. You have plains stretching out the horizon, perfect for riding off into the sunset. The world simply looks a lot bigger in the West than it does in the East.