Why the Western Hasn't Made a Comeback
Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Image courtesy of Unidis.
For a time in the 2000s it seemed like the Western was primed for a comeback with several big budget, splashy reimaginings but after a couple false starts it sputtered and died. For some, this is doubtless a good thing as the Western helped legitimize the myth of rugged individualism and America’s westward expansion while frequently glossing over things like genocide. But, for better or worse, the Western as a genre is a quintessential part of the American cultural tradition and has been embedded in our collective consciousness for decades.
Old Hollywood loved Westerns. It’s one of the reasons Southern California became the epicenter of film production, because they could shoot on roomy back lots and on location with big open sky and chaparral filling in for the Frontier. They could be churned out at low cost and high volume, and they mythologized an essential part of America’s foundational story. The characters that populated these tales were archetypes that likewise embodied American values - the rugged outlaw, the tough but moral lawman, the enterprising saloon owner, people scratching out a living in the dirt of the Old West through sheer determination and moxy.
The stylistic innovations also helped elevate these self-made myths. John Ford and Howard Hawks are the best known directors, with John Wayne becoming the face of the genre. Ford was famous for the way he shot landscapes, and he took advantage of new technology as it developed to steep audiences in the expansive, barren beauty of an idealized vision of the Old West. Westerns were often fables or parables, containing moral lessons. High Noon starring Gary Cooper is a classic example of the genre sending a message about the importance of decent folk taking a stand against the forces of injustice. It also features magnificent cinematography that uses unusual camera angles and perspectives to convey Gary Cooper’s internal state of mind.
Westerns were massively popular in the 1940s and 50s, and like any successful genre the form itself began to metastasize and change in response to its own earlier iterations. The 1960s saw the Western adapted by foreign filmmakers, most famously in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns that made Clint Eastwood a star. Amid the social churn of the civil rights era and Vietnam war, American filmmakers also began to make Westerns that engaged critically with the genre and the foundational myths it had previously glorified.
In the hands of subversive auteurs like Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, revisionist Westerns like The Wild Bunch or Little Big Man began to question this mythology. Maybe cowboys and lawmen weren’t the archetypal heroes we once thought them to be. Maybe America’s westward expansion wasn’t a glorious fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, but imperialism by another name underwritten by blood and genocide. Paint Your Wagon, a musical Western, finally helped put the nail in the coffin of the big MGM musicals that had been so popular in the 1950s. Everywhere you look in cinema history, from Star Wars to John Woo, you will find the DNA of the humble Western.
Which is curious, because in the last several decades the genre has faded considerably from the cultural consciousness. People talk about Westerns as shorthand for a bygone era. They are outdated. They have already come full circle, being reinvented as a critique of the genre itself so where else is there to go? Well, for a while it seemed like they were going to come back clad in a shiny new big budget veneer. There was 2011’s Cowboys & Aliens, sporting a $160 million budget. There was John Carter in 2012, a $300 million dollar space Western. 2013 brought us The Lone Ranger, a $250 million Pirates of the Caribbean wannabe. These extravagantly budgeted Westerns were all enormous box office flops, and pretty terrible films to boot.
Given that the losses on those three films alone were probably equal to the GDP of a smallish country, it’s easy to see why studios gave up on bringing back the Western. And that’s a shame, because it is a genre that has found a lot of currency in our culture for a reason. I think the mistake was that the big studios tried to bring the Western back too aggressively, as a big show-stepper set piece overflowing with razzle dazzle. And that in the process they lost what made the Western such an enduring cinematic icon. Take The Lone Ranger, for instance. Johnny Depp is meant to be a supporting character, but he keeps trying to hijack the film which itself just keeps turning over into more mindless spectacle, none of which makes a lick of sense. It uses the veneer of a Western, in other words, to indulge in some of Hollywood’s most inane and worst impulses, splashing CGI on the screen like a murder scene.
But quietly and on the sly, quite a few very good moderately budgeted, tightly plotted and acted Westerns have come along in recent years that are quite good. I would say 3:10 to Yuma, released in 2007 and directed by James Mangold, got the ball rolling. It takes us back to the roots of the genre - a decent man faces off against an outlaw for the sake of his family, set against the bleak backdrop of the withered frontier. “Even bad men love their mammas” is a great line from Russell Crowe. Another little-noticed Western dropped in 2006 called Seraphim Falls which is basically a 2 hour Western-themed chase film but one which I personally really like.
More critically lauded Westerns followed from the Coen brothers’ True Grit to the fantastic indie Meek’s Cutoff to even a rare big budget revisionist Western success like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. What these films have in common is that they are well-acted, tightly plotted and they succeed because they don’t overreach. Many of them are remakes or re-imaginings of existing IP, and they are for the most part grounded in reality, in relatable stories. Even if we, here in our cushy modern existence, can’t necessarily relate to using an outhouse, we can identify with a basically decent but flawed person taking a stand against bad men, or a group of people risking (and losing) it all as they beat back the currents and struggle for a better future.
That is why the Western endures, and why these ridiculous space Westerns and Johnny Depp vanity projects missed the mark. It’s because they lost sight of why Westerns are so beloved, and they made the typical blockbuster mistake of thinking they could just fake it with CGI and big name stars and so much noise. But ultimately you can’t. Because the Western is surely about gunfights and robbers and windswept landscapes; it’s about tension and drama and people looking cool on horseback. But it also interrogates the roots of our society, it opens itself up for critical self-reflection, and it depicts people trying to find their moral center in an off-balance world. These are still the strengths of the genre and when they are done right, they can result in a damn good modern Western. And you don’t need $200 million and Johnny Depp with a stupid fucking dead bird on his head to do that.
