Okay, I’m not giving Wild west Shows enough credit for possibly influencing BIRTH OF A NATION. On the other hand, a fascination can develop for a medium/genre simply because it’s EVERYWHERE. Hollywood created the love of the cinema western by CHEAPLY making lots of them YEAR ROUND in the new medium, which was made even more exciting with the development of improved synchronized sound and better visual effects in the late 20s. Yes, they tapped into an existing audience but they unquestionably created a new market – as it happened later in radio serials and still later, television – again, not just because they were iconic, but because they could be made CHEAP. There ARE lots of people who are fans of western movies who simply don’t read western novels, don’t go to western shows, and are fans of the stars of the cinematic genre without being particularly knowledgeable of the actual history and personalities of the Old West. How many people think gunfighters shot each other down at high noon a block away because that’s how they’ve seen it in the movies? How many kids watched westerns because it was raining outside on a Saturday and the only thing on TV was “Maverick” “Bonanza” “The Lone Ranger” or “Wild Wild West?” There comes a saturation point where audience interest in a genre/medium occurs simply because a genre/medium is ubiquitous. Look what happened with 24 news channels after CNN proved an audience could be found there.
Bringing this back to my OP – is it viable for something simliar to happen using the template of the western (a time and space based genre) but in other parts of America? I think the next best regional area is the South followed by the Mid-Atlantic east. I’m a little unsure about the time frames of each. Most Old West dramas are 19th century events – events much past the Great Train Robbery are pushing it. Most so-called “Southerns” could easily span a period that’s antebellum through the Jim Crow era. The “easterns” seem to be 19th century industrial revolution/20th century affairs, too – but perhaps not much past WWI.
ITR champion. Oh, poppycock. There’s plenty of areas in America with breathtaking vistas that equal or surpass those in the west, too-- and far, FAR more in the rest of the world. The westerns are noted for them, but if other genres focussed on cinematography the way westerns do, people’d see that, too.
The age of an uncritical historical genre ended with WWII. The genres that have emerged since are much grimmer (like the disaster movie). Our vision of the past has gotten a lot darker, and movies that try to recreate the old historical movies (the Alamo, for example) seem forced and out of place in the modern world of movies.
Askia it’s been 25 years since I took that course, but key Southern authors included William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson MCullers and Flannery O’Connor (yes, there are more, but those were the ones I studied back then.)
I only remember two titles from the course, As I Lay Dying by Faulkner and One Arm* by Williams, but I recall that the professor liked Flannery O’Connor the best.
Much of the literature I studied had the theme of a “broken person” (poor, illiterate, physically or mentally handicapped or emotionally frail) trying to recover, or at least survive. Many of these characters were in dysfunctional families, with other family members alternately helping and hurting the process.
Small towns are another staple of Southern literature. While Williams, Truman Capote and a few others set some of their stories in largers cities, most of the more memorable stories take place either in small towns or farm country.
A bit of googling turned up this article which discusses heroic figures in American popular culture, and their historical connection with the knights of old. In fact, the article could have been written in response to the OP:
I should point out that while that article I linked in that last post has an annoying political slant, it does make valid points about the historical continuity of “heroic literature.”
And Askia, have you ever read Don Quixote? Synopsis: An addled old man gets it into his head that he is a knight-errant 100 years after such creatures had ceased to exist. He goes off in search of adventure and fair damsels.
Don Quixote, though set in Spain, has very much the “feel” of a Western. (Man on horseback riding through dusty frontier towns, and finding adventures.) It drives home the connection between modern Westerns and earlier chivalric literature.
One of the big Western themes, and it was one of the reasons I think Westerns were so popular was “bringing civilization to the wilderness”. You had the frontier, which was raw and uncivilized; the place where there was no law. So, you know, outlaws rob stagecoaches, Indians attack. These are the forces of chaos trying to destroy the civilization that is being imposed on the wilderness. And then, order comes. The sheriff shoots the outlaws, the cavalry shows up and routs the Indians.
Birth of a Nation, although it doesn’t take place in the west, uses those same themes and that same plot. In the climactic scene, the army of rampaging blacks are outside the cabin where our heroes are trapped. So there, you have chaos…the rampaging blacks in the wilderness of reconstruction south. Then the Klan comes, and they’re the forces of order saving civilization. They rout the blacks and save the people in the cabin. So, even though it’s in a different setting, it follows the Western pattern. I think that’s what tomndebb is trying to say.
Along the lines of the knights, in my literature classes Westerns were often classified as “romances,” like the Arthurian legends.
I think “the west” began to be shorthand for movie makers. They didn’t have to work to establish a setting if previous movies had already established it. Which meant that those to come could either build off the previous works, or contradict them in effective ways. It’s always easier to use a setting that people think they know.
As for why westerns became popular in the first place, I think the terrain made any amount of individuality believable and acceptable. “That doesn’t happen here, but it could happen there.”
Breathtakingness is relative, but I see a lot more people traveling from Ohio to see the landscapes of Montana than the other way around. The East does have some nice landscapes, but gazing at a 500-foot-tall rolling hill in Kentucky doesn’t get you thinking about the possibilities of running away to a brand new life of adventure and isolation in the same way that seeing the Grand Tetons does.
And yes, the Himalayas are spectacular, but American audiences would not have related to movies or books set over there.
There are quite a few Indian movies that follow Western conventions- noteably Sholay, one of the most famous ones. Most of these, as far as I can tell, take place in the plains of central India which often looks uncannily like the America West.
There, I think, is a good encapsulation of the difference between the “Western” and the “Eastern” in American literature (at least, in a 19th-Century setting).
I think you and George Orwell have hit on something there, BrainGlutton. Particularly this:
So The West is a place of idealized perfect freedom.
Similarly, I think you could say that many of the “Southerns” (and paticularly comedies set in the South) are based on an idealized small-town “simple life.” Examples: Fried Green Tomatoes, My Dog Skip, Doc Hollywood, Big Fish, parts of Forrest Gump, the Andy Griffith Show.
Both genres provide escape fantasies for desk-bound city dwellers.
“Easterns” are on television, folks. In as great a profusion as Westerns were in the 1950s. Unlike the movies, where big city plots tend to be either romances or crime dramas, on the toob the noncrime entrants are usually comedies – whether romantic (Sex & The City, Will & Grace), domestic (Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens), or “about nothing” (Seinfeld - which was at heart about New York and New Yorkers).
“Easterns” do not need to take place in the East. Frasier, despite its Seattle setting, was an Eastern. High tech, timber, shipping and grunge rock weren’t exactly the dominant themes.
I think every single cop show/movie could qualify as an “Eastern.” Ditto the gangster and mafia genres. Westerns have rolling mountains, Easterns have soaring skylines.
Westerns were popular worldwide; everyone seemed to love them. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured Europe quite successfully I believe. Western novels were quite popular and were often written by people who had never been to America, much less the American West.
The whole concept of the West as this great wild place where people were free to be themselves (and to be brave or depraved), was most definitely cultivated by people trying to lure Easterners west and by people back east trying to sell dime novels and newspapers back east. This was all going on at the time when the Wild West was supposed to be the Wild West. A whole lot of promotin’ was going on from the very beginning. In fact, if you go back to the original settling of the colonies you see a similar thing happening where the virtues of the untamed wilderness are touted to get people to sail west to the New World. Later the same sort of thing happened when people moved west towards the Mississippi. It was still happening when people went beyond the Mississippi and began to enter what we now consider the West.
The “wild” west, though not completely tame, was not nearly as wild as it was made out to be, even at the time. Or perhaps it would be better to say that alongside the wildness was a fair amount of civilization and that the wildness was often of a different type than what is and was usually depicted.
Well as to why they are popular, it was the percieved adventure of the genre. It wasn’t just called the west, but rather the “wild west”. It was about people seeking out hope and glory, people fighting against odds. The other angle is the untamed nature of the towns, where laws were less common and things weren’t always quite as civilized. All this certainly creates the opportunity for stories. The west was popular story material even in its own day back east, due to this perceived adventuresome nature.
I would have to suppose it has to do with the romantic idea of this vast endless country full of Indians, cowboys, outlaws, gunfighters, horses and whatnot.
I would say that “Southerns” about roughly the same time period (basically the 1800s) would basically be Civil War films like Cold Mountain, Gone With The Wind, Glory and so on. While Westerns are basically about the adventure and hardships of settling the West, “Southerns” would be about the hardships of war and societal changes.
The only “Eastern” movies I can think of would be Gangs of New York and the part of Far and Away where they were holed up in an Irish slum. You don’t really find too many stories about the East in the 1800s since it was pretty industrialized by then. Pretty much you have to go back to colonial days to find the same kind of conflict that makes for interesting stories.