SLAP HAPPY LARRY

Western is a genre set primarily in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th century in the Western United States, the “Old West”. Before WW2, these stories were a celebration of American expansionism.

But since the war, almost every “Western” is actually an anti-Western. Rather than romanticising the expansion into the West, anti-Westerns focus on the harshness of the landscape, the death and the despair.

Neo Western is a subgenre of the Western that adopts the character archetypes, settings, and themes of classic Westerns, but transplants them to appeal to contemporary sensibilities.

For more than fifty years, one third of all films released in the United States were westerns. They could be made cheaply, and a certain proportion of the male population could be predictably counted on to see them.

Howard Suber (who notes the exact same thing about horror films which came later)

Why The Western Needs To Come Back: Arguments For

• From its inception, the Western has been key to the communication of America’s national ideals and the mythologizing of its past and present.
• A resurgence of the genre that does best at forcing America to reckon with itself is sorely needed.
• Focusing its attentions on what motivates rural-dwellers and keeps them up at night is what the Western was born doing, and so more films in the vein of Hell or High Water could bring us closer to understanding the parts of America we don’t hear much about outside of election season — even if we don’t like what they show us.
• The particular vulnerability of Native American communities in the face of the environmental threats posed at Standing Rock has been highlighted elsewhere, but I think it deserves cinematic attention from the Western, too.

from Film School Rejects

Brief History Of The Western

• The heyday of the Western genre was from about 1880 to 1960. The Western film goes through phases of popularity and has been particularly popular in the 1930s and the 1950s and 1960s. There has been a recent resurgence of the popularity of (neo-)Western novels with the TV series Longmire.
• The conflicts in westerns, horror, gangster, and science fiction films must end in a man-to-man, man-to-moment, or man-to-machine climax.
• The Great Train Robbery (1903)
• Edwin S. Porter‘s film starring Broncho Billy Anderson, is often cited as the first Western
• Shane is an example of a film which uses every single Western symbol without irony.

The popularity of the Western for adult readers has been mirrored by the rise then the fall of cowboy stories for children. Jerry Griswold, with fond memories of his cowboy story childhood writes, “My hope is that with pirates making a comeback, cowpokes can’t be far behind. All it really takes is a few parents ready to provide a stick horse, a cowboy hat, and stories like these.”

If cowboys (with extra girls) do come back into fashion, it will be interesting to see how authors and illustrators deal with the invasion aspect behind the glamour. Perhaps these stories are for Native American writers to write.

The 7 Plots Of Classic Westerns

Author and screenwriter Frank Gruber listed seven plots for Westerns:

1. Union Pacific story. The plot concerns construction of a railroad, a telegraph line, or some other type of modern technology or transportation. Wagon train stories fall into this category. (CLASSICAL WESTERN)
2. Ranch story. The plot concerns threats to the ranch from rustlers or large landowners attempting to force out the proper owners. (WESTERN DRAMA)
3. Empire story. The plot involves building a ranch empire or an oil empire from scratch, a classic rags-to-riches plot. (CLASSICAL WESTERN)
4. Revenge story. The plot often involves an elaborate chase and pursuit by a wronged individual, but it may also include elements of the classic mystery story. (WESTERN CAT-AND-MOUSE)
5. Cavalry and Indian story. The plot revolves around “taming” the wilderness for white settlers. (CLASSICAL WESTERN)
6. Outlaw story. The outlaw gangs dominate the action. (WESTERN CRIME)
7. Marshal story. The lawman and his challenges drive the plot. (WESTERN DETECTIVE)

https://youtu.be/8wAGqNnH9FQ

The Western Gothic

Lee Clark Mitchell suggests that ‘the Western had so little to do with an actual West that it might better bethought of as its own epitaph.’ The genre’s fascination with one limited but highly aggrandized facet of American history feels rather like it is trying to conjure a phantom, summoning an illusory frontier to life through recurrent representation. As such, Westerns, with their repetitions, their constricted representations of masculinity and their unremitting fixation with violence, provide a cultural landscape, one littered with bodies, that yields ripe territory for Gothicisation.

Helena Bacon

Example of Western Gothic: The Hawkline Monster (1974). The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western is a 1974 novel by Richard Brautigan. This work parodies Western and Gothic novels.

Setting Of A Western

• The American Southwest — Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado — dry, flat, and dusty, though the landscape functions as backdrop rather than participant
• A specific window of time: roughly 1865–1900, the post-Civil War decades before the frontier officially closed (the US Census declared the frontier closed in 1890)
• The frontier town as a symbol of civilization under construction: a main street of clapboard buildings — saloon, sheriff’s office, general store, church, bank — surrounded by open wilderness
• The spatial logic of the town is always the same: the line between the town (order, law, the future) and the wilderness beyond it (chaos, lawlessness, the past) is sharp and meaningful Monument Valley and the desert mesa, particularly in John Ford, become so iconic that the landscape itself carries moral weight
• The railroad arrives as a symbol of progress and connection to the civilized East — its coming is presented as unambiguously good The wide open range: vast, empty, and beautiful, representing both freedom and opportunity
• Often entering on the life of a nomadic cowboy or gunfighter. Westerns often stress the harshness of the wilderness and frequently set the action in an arid, desolate landscape of deserts and mountains.
• Specific settings include ranches, small frontier towns and saloons of the Wild West. Some are set in the American colonial era.
• Characters also include Native Americans, bandits, lawmen, outlaws and soldiers.

Throughout most of human history, towns were situated next to dependable rivers. Western towns in films such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven, however, are situated in the middle of some of the driest places on earth. Perhaps that’s because deserts, in the Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic Bibles, are places of spiritual conflict.

Howard Suber

In a Classic Western You’ll Also Find

• A rational grid of clapboard buildings on the flat, dry plain of the Southwest
• A bustling community under the benevolent gaze of the marshal
• A showdown, which happens in the middle of the main street where everyone can see the hero’s bravery. The cowboy hero waits for the bad man to draw first, still beats him, and reaffirms right action and law and order for the growing community.
• The modern Western story is really a mixture of other genres with a setting in the latter half of the 19th Century in the American Old West, or a similarly desolate but modern American setting.

The Following Genres Can All Be Found Mixed With Myth:

• Crime/Detective (The Streets of Laredo)
• Love (Lonesome Dove) — also an anti-Western (dependent on audience interpretation)
• Thriller (No Country For Old Men, a neo-Western)
• Domestic Drama (The Power of the Dog)

Filming Locations Of Westerns

A spaghetti Western was filmed in Italy, where the landscape looked enough like America but was a lot cheaper to use as a location. Red Westerns (a.k.a Osterns) are filmed in Russia. More recently we have the ‘Pavlova Western’ — filmed in Australia or New Zealand e.g. Mike Wallis’ Good for Nothing or John McLean’s Slow West. While these films can still have great storylines, having grown up in New Zealand and emigrated later to Australia, the trees and landscapes look far too familiar to work for me as American stories. Australian locations are also known as Meat-Pie Westerns.

You can probably guess what Curry Westerns and Indo Westerns are.

Westerns set and filmed within America itself are even broken into subcategories. Take Florida Westerns, also known as Cracker Westerns, set in Florida during the Second Seminole War.

Characters Of Westerns

• The Hero: tall, lean, taciturn, skilled with a gun and a horse, morally uncomplicated. Often a stranger or drifter rather than a local — he comes from outside, solves the problem, and leaves or settles. His virtue is innate rather than earned
• The Villain: a cattle baron, outlaw leader, or corrupt official — scheming and powerful, but ultimately revealed as cowardly when faced directly. His evil is unambiguous
• The Marshal or Sheriff: the embodiment of legitimate law, either identical with the hero or supported by him. Competent, sober, and honest
• The Schoolmarm or Homesteader’s Wife: a woman who has brought Eastern values — education, refinement, domesticity — to the frontier. She represents what the community is becoming and is the reward for the hero who chooses to settle
• The Saloon Girl: morally ambiguous, often given a heart of gold; exists on the boundary between civilization and its discontents
• The Sidekick: loyal, often comic, rarely competent — exists to make the hero look better and provide light relief
• The Native American: almost never individualized in the pre-WW2 Western; functions as an undifferentiated threat to the wagon train or the settlement, or occasionally as a “noble” background figure. The perspective is always the settler’s
• The Outlaw: sometimes romanticized — Jesse James, Billy the Kid — as a rebel against corrupt authority, but in the classic Western this romanticization is always qualified; he must die or reform
• The Cattle Baron: a local tyrant who must be brought to heel by the hero, representing the abuse of power in the absence of law

A character in a New York novel might look at the city, the press of diverse humanity, the huge buildings, the hum of activity, and feel that his/her life is insignificant or at the very least, a exceedingly small cog in the greater machine of human endeavors.

A character in a Western novel looks out at a terrifyingly empty prairie, an expanse of jagged mountains, the infinite wash of stars in an unpolluted night sky, and feels not so much that his/her life is insignificant but that humanity as a whole has vastly overestimated its own importance to the universe.

The characters in a Western are fairly regular forced to acknowledge the real scale of the world and their place in the cosmos, and I find that refreshing.

Callan Wink, Publishers Weekly

The Hero’s Code

• He waits for the other man to draw first — this is the central ritual of the classic Western. The hero cannot initiate lethal violence; he can only respond to it. This makes his violence legitimate, even righteous
• He does not shoot a man in the back
• He does not harm women or children
• He keeps his word absolutely
• He is loyal to his friends and indifferent to his enemies’ opinions of him
• He is honest — deception is the villain’s weapon, not his
• He treats his horse well; the horse is an extension of his character
• He is self-sufficient — he does not need the community’s help, though he gives his help to the community
• He is modest about his abilities despite being clearly superior to everyone around him
• He drinks, if at all, without losing control

Plot Structures

• A threat arrives or is revealed: outlaws, a corrupt official, a land grab, a marauding group
• The community is unable to defend itself — the ordinary mechanisms of law have failed or been corrupted
• The hero arrives, is revealed, or is called upon
• A series of confrontations builds toward the inevitable showdown
• The showdown resolves the conflict decisively and publicly
• The community is saved and the hero either settles — marries the schoolmarm, takes the marshal’s badge — or rides on into the sunset, his work done
• Common variants: the cattle drive, the wagon train, the bank or train robbery, the ranch under siege, the revenge plot, the outlaw who wants to go straight but cannot escape his past

The Showdown

• Takes place in daylight, in public, usually on the main street
• The community witnesses it — this is crucial; the showdown is a public performance of justice
• The villain draws first, or makes the first hostile move
• The hero is faster, or calmer, or both
• The outcome is never in real doubt — the hero’s virtue guarantees his victory
• Death in the classic Western is clean and quick — one shot, a neat fall. There is no blood, no suffering, no aftermath
• The showdown reaffirms that right action is rewarded and that violence in the service of justice is legitimate

Moral Framework

• Good and evil are clearly distinguishable and do not shade into each other
• Violence is morally acceptable — even required — when used to defend the innocent or uphold the law
• The community is worth protecting and its growth represents genuine progress
• Justice is possible and will ultimately prevail
• Individual virtue matters: a good man can change the outcome of history by his actions
• The West is presented as a place where a man can reinvent himself — but only honestly; the false reinvention belongs to the villain

Ideology

• Manifest Destiny: the land is waiting to be settled, civilized, and made productive. This ideology is so embedded in the classic Western that it rarely needs to be stated — it is simply the water the story swims in
• The frontier as America’s founding myth — the moral and psychological equivalent of the Arthurian legend, providing a usable heroic past for a young nation
• Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis (1893) — the idea that the frontier experience forged the distinctively American character: individualistic, democratic, practical, and self-reliant — underlies almost every classic Western whether consciously or not
• The white male hero as the normative American subject; his perspective is universal and unquestioned
• Women, Native Americans, Mexican characters, and Black characters are peripheral, stereotyped, or absent
• The Civil War is ever-present as backstory — many heroes are veterans, and the West is implicitly where the wounds of that conflict can be healed or set aside
• The myth of the self-made man: birth and class don’t matter; what matters is character, courage, and skill

Problems With The Western

Reading Against Genre: Contemporary Westerns and the Problem of White Manhood by Donika DeShawn Ross (2013)

Sources of the Classic Western Myth

• The dime novel of the 19th century — cheap, formulaic, enormously popular
  Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show (from 1883) — which toured America and Europe and established the visual iconography of the West: the cowboy, the Indian, the stagecoach, the cavalry, the sharpshooter
• Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) — generally considered the first serious Western novel, which established the taciturn hero, the showdown, and the schoolmarm as foundational conventions
• The paintings of Frederic Remington and the illustrations of N.C. Wyeth — which fixed the visual language of the West in the popular imagination
  Theodore Roosevelt’s public mythology of the West and the strenuous life — he presented frontier experience as morally improving and essentially American
• The early cinema: The Great Train Robbery (1903), which established the genre almost at the moment cinema itself was born
• The films of John Ford from the 1920s onward, which gave the genre its visual grammar — Monument Valley, the cavalry, the wagon train

What the Classic Western Is Doing

• It is not really a historical account of the American West — it is a moral fable set in a mythologised version of it
• It serves an ideological function: it legitimises the conquest and settlement of the West by presenting that conquest as heroic, necessary, and just
  It defines a set of American values — individualism, self-reliance, violence as legitimate last resort, the right of the community to defend itself — and presents them as natural and universal
• It provides a simple moral world at a time of rapid and disorienting social change: the classic Western was most popular precisely when America was urbanising, industrialising, and losing the frontier that Turner had said made it American
• It is, in other words, consoling — and the anti-Western is the genre that stops being consoled

Features of Anti-Westerns

Here are the patterns I can detect, organized around what anti-Westerns and neo-Westerns do with each of the classic Western’s elements:

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THE SETTING

In the classic Western, the landscape is backdrop — it frames the drama but doesn’t participate in it. The clapboard town represents the first foothold of civilization; the wilderness beyond it is waiting to be tamed.

In the anti-Western, the landscape is antagonist. It overwhelms, defeats, and survives human ambition. Blood Meridian’s desert is prehistoric and indifferent. Robinson’s Northwest is cold and encroaching. Proulx’s Wyoming resists every attempt to make it hospitable. McMurtry’s frontier is not waiting to be civilized — it is already dying, or already dead, before the story begins. The ghost town appears repeatedly: in Angels: Hard as They Come, The Day of the Wolves, The Proposition. It is what the classic Western’s bustling community becomes.

The anti-Western often begins where the classic Western ends — after the frontier has closed, after the cattle drives are over, after the railroad has arrived and changed everything. The characters are always already too late.

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THE COMMUNITY

The classic Western’s community is nascent but hopeful — a settlement that will become a town, a town that will become a city. The marshal holds it together while it grows. The coming of law is the coming of civilization.

In the anti-Western, the community is corrupt, dwindling, or complicit. In Hell or High Water, the town is being foreclosed on. In Winter in the Blood, the reservation is what the community looks like after the myth of civilizing progress has done its work. In Lonesome Dove, the town that Call and McCrae establish at such cost is shown in later novels to have produced nothing worth the price.

The anti-Western is also interested in the communities the classic Western ignored entirely: the Cheyenne in Little Big Man, the Assiniboine in The Englishman’s Boy, the Comanche in The Son and in McMurtry’s prequels. The land belonged to someone before it was a frontier, and those people are what the bustling community of the classic Western was built on top of.

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THE LAWMAN AND THE MARSHAL

The classic Western marshal is competent, sober, and morally unambiguous. His authority is legitimate because he is better than the men he polices.

The anti-Western marshal is almost always compromised. Rooster Cogburn is a drunken, one-eyed perjurer. Walt Longmire is in psychic collapse. Raylan Givens is a man who provokes gunfights and calls them justified. Pat Garrett has sold out to the establishment he used to oppose. The lawmen of No Country for Old Men cannot even comprehend the violence they are supposed to contain, let alone stop it.

In many anti-Westerns, the distinction between lawman and criminal has dissolved entirely. In Hell or High Water, the banks are robbing the community; the robbers are paying off the bank. In The Proposition, the colonial lawman and the outlaw are engaged in the same project of violence and are equally unable to stop it.

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THE SHOWDOWN

The classic Western showdown is theatre. It happens in public, in daylight, on main street, where the whole community can witness the hero’s moral courage. He waits for the bad man to draw first. Right action is performed and seen to be performed. Law and order are reaffirmed.

The anti-Western dismantles this almost as a reflex. Peckinpah’s violence — in The Wild Bunch, in Pat Garrett — is filmed in slow motion not to glamorize it but to make the viewer sit in it, to refuse the clean cut that the classic Western uses to make death palatable. In Unforgiven, the climactic confrontation is a massacre in a saloon, not a duel in daylight, and Eastwood’s character is drunk and terrified. In No Country for Old Men, the violence is mostly offscreen and entirely random: Chigurh cannot be faced down because he does not operate by the rules that make a showdown possible.

In many anti-Westerns, the showdown is replaced by an ambush, an accident, or an attrition. Butch and Sundance are surrounded and shot to pieces by an army. The Wild Bunch walk into a trap they know is a trap. Lonely Are the Brave is killed by a truck. The unheroic death — by technology, by numbers, by modernity — is the anti-Western’s answer to the showdown.

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THE HERO

The classic Western hero is solitary, self-sufficient, and morally clean. He can ride, shoot, and make the right decision. He is usually passing through — not a settler but a cleanser, removing the threat so that the community can grow.

The anti-Western hero is old, failing, alcoholic, disabled, or simply wrong. He is not passing through — he is stuck, unable to leave a world that has already left him. Call in the later McMurtry novels is literally dismembered. Rooster Cogburn is a fraud. The Kid in Blood Meridian is passive and ultimately pointless. Many anti-Western protagonists are not heroes at all in any meaningful sense — they are survivors at best.

The anti-Western also disrupts who the hero can be. Mattie Ross in True Grit. Mary Bee Cuddy in The Homesman. The unnamed tracker E. Johnson in Cherry 2000. Meek’s Cutoff reorganizes the entire Western landscape around the women who are usually its background. The genre’s insistence on the male hero is itself part of what the anti-Western is arguing against.

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TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY

In the classic Western, the arrival of technology — the railroad, the telegraph, the lawman with his badge — represents progress. The West is being connected to civilization.

In the anti-Western, technology is the destroyer. Butch and Sundance cannot outrun the telegraph or the Pinkerton men with their modern surveillance methods. The Wild Bunch are killed by a machine gun. In Lonely Are the Brave, the helicopter finds the cowboy that the posse on horseback never could. The arrival of technology does not represent progress; it represents the end of a world, however imperfect that world was.

This extends to the neo-Western, where the corporations that displaced the railroad — the oil company, the bank, the mining conglomerate — perform the same function. In Hell or High Water, Wind River, and The Proposition alike, the resource extraction industry is the force that has already won before the story begins.

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THE MYTH ITSELF

This is perhaps the anti-Western’s most distinctive pattern: it is frequently a story about storytelling, about the myth of the West as myth. The Assassination of Jesse James is literally about how a man becomes a legend while still alive, and what that does to both the legend and the man. The Englishman’s Boy is about how Hollywood manufactures frontier mythology from massacre. Lonesome Dove inadvertently reproduced the myth it intended to dissect. The Resurrection of Broncho Billy is about a young man who has learned what the West means from old films and tries to live accordingly in Los Angeles.

The anti-Western understands that the classic Western is not a neutral entertainment — it is an argument about history and about who matters in it. To make an anti-Western is always, at some level, to make an argument about what the classic Western got wrong, and about what it costs to keep telling that story.

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NEO-WESTERN SPECIFIC PATTERNS

The neo-Western keeps the genre’s furniture but relocates it. The frontier moves to:

• Space (Star Trek, Firefly/Serenity, Moon Zero Two)
• The Australian outback (Mad Max, The Proposition, The Rover)
• Contemporary urban or suburban America (Chinatown, Fargo, No Country for Old Men)
• The US-Mexico border (Sicario, Sin Nombre)
• The rural South or Midwest (Justified, Winter’s Bone)

In each case, the same structural elements recur: a lawless territory, a lone figure operating by a personal code, an encroaching force (corporate, governmental, criminal) that threatens to extinguish what little order exists, and a landscape that is indifferent to the outcome.

The neo-Western tends to be less interested in dismantling the myth than in finding new places where the myth still applies. Where the anti-Western argues with the classic Western, the neo-Western borrows from it.

Anti-Western Films

ANTI-WESTERNS

Lonely Are the Brave (1962) — Kirk Douglas plays Jack Burns, a genuinely anachronistic cowboy who deliberately gets himself arrested in order to break a friend out of jail, then escapes and is pursued across the mountains by a sheriff, a posse, and a helicopter. The film is essentially an elegy for a type of man the modern world has no room for. He is finally killed not in a shootout but by a truck on a highway. The truck is carrying toilets. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay from Edward Abbey’s novel The Brave Cowboy.

The Rounders (1965) — Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford play two ageing cowboys who can’t quite surrender the life, spending their seasons trying to break a horse that refuses to be broken. A gentle, comic anti-Western whose targets are the romance of cowboy freedom and the myth of man mastering nature — neither of which survives contact with this particular horse.

The Reward (1965) — Max von Sydow plays a drifter who discovers a wanted fugitive and assembles a posse to collect the reward. The group is quickly corrupted by greed and turns on itself before it reaches its destination. A bleak fable about how the promise of money destroys any pretence of frontier justice.

True Grit — The 1969 Henry Hathaway film is subversive largely because it centres a 14-year-old girl, Mattie Ross, as its most competent and morally serious figure, while Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne, who won his only Oscar here) is a drunken, one-eyed, ageing fraud who barely justifies his own legend. The Coen Brothers’ 2010 remake follows Portis’s novel more closely and is darker: the film’s coda shows Mattie as a one-armed spinster, the cost of her vengeance made plain.

The Wild Bunch (1969) — Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece. A gang of ageing outlaws pull one last job in 1913, on the wrong side of a frontier that is already closed. The film’s signature slow-motion violence — bodies erupting in blood, action slowed to ballet — was revolutionary and controversial; Peckinpah’s intention was not to glamorise but to implicate the viewer in what they were watching. The West here is not ending heroically; it is being picked apart by bounty hunters and absorbed by industrial capitalism.

Moon Zero Two (1969) — A British science fiction Western, self-consciously so, set on the moon in 2021. A salvage pilot is drawn into a criminal scheme to divert a valuable asteroid. The film transplants frontier genre conventions wholesale into space: the frontier town, the claim jumper, the hired gun, the crooked businessman. More interesting as an artefact of genre thinking than as a film.

The Traveling Executioner (1970) — Stacy Keach plays Jonas Candide, an itinerant executioner who tours the American South in 1918 with his portable electric chair, charging a hundred dollars a death. When he falls in love with a condemned woman, his professional detachment collapses. A dark comedy that uses the machinery of state killing as a metaphor for the false order imposed on the frontier South.

Deadlock (1970) — Roland Klick’s West German film, largely shot in the Canary Islands. A bounty hunter and his captive become stranded together in a barren, lunar landscape with the money between them and no way for either man to survive without the other. A minimal, existential anti-Western that strips the genre down to its basic power relations and leaves them there.

The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970) — A short film (around 25 minutes) that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. A young man in contemporary Los Angeles is obsessed with old Western films and tries to live by their codes in the modern city. A direct meditation on the gap between frontier mythology and the world it has been asked to sustain.

Angels: Hard as They Come (1971) — A biker gang film produced by Roger Corman and written by Jonathan Demme, who would go on to considerably more distinguished work. A group of bikers rides into a ghost town and comes into murderous conflict with a rival gang. Explicitly transplants Western genre conventions — the outlaw, the lawless territory, the violent confrontation — onto the counterculture, treating the biker as the frontier’s latest iteration.

The Day of the Wolves (1971) — A gang of criminals systematically isolates a small desert town — cutting phone lines, blocking roads — and moves in to rob it while the sheriff is away. A procedural anti-Western interested in institutional failure: the town has no mechanisms for protecting itself once its official structures are removed.

Pocket Money (1972) — Paul Newman and Lee Marvin as two hapless cowboys hired to drive cattle from Mexico to the United States. The job goes wrong in every direction. Stuart Rosenberg’s film is a gentle, almost plotless comedy whose anti-Western argument is made by accumulation: the cowboy life is shown to be poorly paid, physically exhausting, and faintly ridiculous, sustained only by the stubborn refusal of two middle-aged men to find something else to do.

Legends of the Fall (1994) — Edward Zwick’s film of Jim Harrison’s novella, set in early twentieth-century Montana. A Colonel who has retreated from civilisation raises three sons on a remote ranch; the wild middle son, Tristan (Brad Pitt), becomes the film’s centre of gravity, unable to be contained by family, love, or society. The landscape is magnificent but the world it once sustained is already gone; the men are performing a version of frontier life that history has already foreclosed.

The Homesman (2014) — Tommy Lee Jones directed and starred. A pious, plain-speaking pioneer woman (Hilary Swank) is tasked with transporting three women who have lost their minds on the frontier back East to a Methodist home. She recruits a dissolute claim jumper (Jones) to help her. The madness of the three women is not mysterious or gothic; it is the direct result of isolation, loss, and the unacknowledged brutality of frontier life. There is no redemption waiting at the end of the journey.

The Proposition (2005) — Nick Cave wrote the script and the score; John Hillcoat directed. Guy Pearce plays Charlie Burns, an outlaw given a proposition by a British colonial lawman (Ray Winstone): find and kill his older, more violent brother or watch his younger brother hang. Set in the Australian outback in the 1880s. The landscape is merciless and beautiful; the colonial enterprise is shown as chaotic, violent, and self-defeating; the proposition itself cannot be resolved without destroying something that matters. One of the great anti-Westerns of its decade.

They Die By Dawn (2013) — A short film directed by Jeymes Samuel, set in the Old West with an all-Black cast built around real historical figures including Bass Reeves — the frontier lawman who may have been the model for the Lone Ranger — and Stagecoach Mary Fields. A genre exercise that is also an act of reclamation: the Western’s mythology has almost entirely excluded the Black Americans who were part of the frontier story, and Samuel puts them at the centre of it.

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NEO-WESTERNS

Serenity (2005) — Joss Whedon’s film continuation of his cancelled television series Firefly. Set in a colonised solar system where the frontier planets have been absorbed by an authoritarian central government called the Alliance, it follows the crew of a salvage ship sheltering a young woman who has been turned into an unwitting weapon. Whedon mapped the Western genre onto space with unusual rigour: the frontier/core planet divide, the lost-cause veterans, the outlaw crew operating in the margins. The film was made for the fans who had watched the series; it functions as an elegy for the show as much as a story in its own right.

The Rover (2014) — David Michôd’s follow-up to Animal Kingdom. Set in Australia ten years after a global economic collapse, a taciturn, hollowed-out man (Guy Pearce) pursues the gang that stole his car across a landscape from which most of the population has already fled. Robert Pattinson plays the damaged younger brother left behind by the gang. The film is quieter and more austere than the Mad Max tradition it sits beside; the Australian outback as a post-civilisational frontier where the only law left is what a man is willing to do for the one thing he still cares about.

Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004) — The second half of Tarantino’s revenge saga is the Western half. Where Volume 1 was samurai and kung fu, Volume 2 is Sergio Leone: the Mexican standoff, the desert confrontation, the buried-alive sequence drawn from spaghetti Western iconography, the showdown that turns on character rather than action. Bill himself is a dark patriarch in the Western mode — a man of total competence and total moral corruption who has made himself the law of his own private territory.

Anti-Western Television

• Star Trek (1966) — Gene Roddenberry famously pitched the concept as a Wagon Train to the stars: the frontier as space, the crew of the Enterprise as settlers pushing into unknown territory. The Western scaffolding is visible throughout.
• Justified (2010–2015) — Raylan Givens is a US Marshal reassigned to his home territory of Harlan County, Kentucky, after shooting a man in Miami in what he considers a justified killing. The series treats Appalachian Kentucky as a frontier space: outside federal law, controlled by clans and criminal enterprises, resistant to the modern world. Raylan is a classic Western lawman who knows he is one, and the series is partly about the absurdity and the genuine cost of that self-image.
• Longmire (2012–2017) — Often marketed as a neo-Western but more of an anti-Western. Walt Longmire is the dedicated and unflappable sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. Widowed only a year, he is a man in psychic repair who buries his pain behind his brave face, unassuming grin, and dry wit. An anti-hero.

Anti-Western Literature

• The Ox-Bow Incident — Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940) — One of the earliest anti-Westerns, and one of the most direct: a wrongful lynching carried out by a mob that mistakes itself for righteous frontier justice. The myth of natural law on the frontier is the target.
• Horseman, Pass By (Hud) — Larry McMurtry (1961) — McMurtry’s first novel. Often listed as a Western, or rather the first of the revisionist Westerns. The screenwriters who adapted it consider the story a domestic drama.
• Little Big Man — Thomas Berger (1964) — Jack Crabb, a 121-year-old man, claims to be the sole white survivor of Little Bighorn and narrates his life story: adopted by the Cheyenne as a boy, he moves back and forth between white and Native American worlds for decades. The novel is comic and picaresque, but the comedy is entirely in service of dismantling frontier mythology, particularly the myth of Custer. Arthur Penn adapted it as a film in 1970.
• The Power of the Dog — Thomas Savage (1967) — A brutal, repressed Montana rancher torments his brother’s new wife and her son. The cowboy as a figure of sublimated violence and self-denial; the West as a place where masculinity has curdled into cruelty. Jane Campion adapted it as a film in 2021.
• True Grit — Charles Portis (1968) — Narrated in old age by Mattie Ross, who at fourteen hired the drunken, one-eyed Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track down her father’s killer. The narrator’s voice is the novel’s great achievement: prim, precise, and wholly unimpressed by anyone’s legend, including her own. Portis refuses to romanticise the frontier; the men are vain, incompetent, or venal, and the girl is the only one with genuine grit.
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee — Dee Brown (1970) — A landmark work of popular history that told the story of the systematic destruction of Native American peoples and cultures in the American West from 1860 to 1890, from the Native American perspective. A direct attack on the mythology of Manifest Destiny and the frontier hero, and a cultural event on publication.
• Winter in the Blood — James Welch (1974) — A young Blackfeet man drifts through the Montana reservation, detached from his own life, trailing a woman who has stolen his rifle. Welch’s prose is flat and precise; the landscape is beautiful and merciless. The novel is anti-Western in the most fundamental sense: it occupies the perspective of the people the Western myth was built on top of and simply narrates what was left behind.
• Legends of the Fall — Jim Harrison (novella, 1979) — Set in early twentieth-century Montana, three brothers are shaped and ultimately destroyed by their love for the same woman, the wildness of their landscape, and the violence of WWI. The middle brother Tristan is constitutionally unable to be domesticated by civilisation, and the novella follows the cost of that refusal across decades.
• Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson (1980) — Set in the haunting rain-soaked Northwest, Robinson’s characters are dogged by loss, encroaching transience, and the siren call of the cold mountain lake that exists at the centre of the narrative.
• Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (1985) — The most unsparing anti-Western in American literature. A teenage runaway joins a scalp-hunting gang on the US-Mexico border in the 1840s. McCarthy strips the frontier of every trace of romance or redemption: violence is not an aberration of the Western experience but its essence and its purpose.
• Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry (1985) — Before its publication, McMurtry was known as a contemporary novelist who made a point of denouncing unrealistic, romantic period novels about the frontier. McMurtry thought he had written an anti-Western, one that critics and readers then perversely took to be the greatest Western ever written. “The romance of the West is so powerful,” he said, “you can’t really swim against the current.”
• Rock Springs — Richard Ford (1987) — A short story collection set in Wyoming and Montana, frequently described as hardscrabble. Ford’s characters are adrift in a West that offers no frontier promise, only bad luck and limited options.
• The Homesman — Glendon Swarthout (1988) — Such a harsh story it would be hard for audiences to mistake it for a love-letter to the Old West. Tommy Lee Jones directed a film adaptation in 2014.
• Streets of Laredo — Larry McMurtry (1993) — Written during a long illness in Tucson, this is the darkest of the Lonesome Dove sequence. Woodrow Call, who survived Lonesome Dove intact, is shot several times, finally losing his arm and leg. “He would have to live, but without himself,” McMurtry wrote.
• Dead Man’s Walk — Larry McMurtry (1995) — The earliest prequel in the Lonesome Dove sequence, following the young Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call on an ill-fated expedition to Santa Fe that ends in disaster and Comanche captivity. McMurtry is working systematically against the myth he inadvertently created: the West here is brutal, incompetent, and wasteful of human life.
• The Englishman’s Boy — Guy Vanderhaeghe (1996) — A Canadian anti-Western told in two timelines: in 1920s Hollywood, a young screenwriter investigates the true story of a brutal massacre of Assiniboine people in the Cypress Hills in 1873, while the other timeline follows the massacre itself. Vanderhaeghe is interested in how the myth of the frontier is manufactured after the fact, and what that manufacturing erases.
• Brokeback Mountain — Annie Proulx (short story, 1997; collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999) — The most famous of Proulx’s Wyoming Stories. Proulx would not call this story any kind of Western, or a romance. It is the exposure of a community with rot and hatred at its core.
• Close Range: Wyoming Stories — Annie Proulx (1999) — Proulx’s work is unambiguously anti-Western. In these stories she offers a searing critique of cowboy culture and satirises the mindset that Wild West culture is some kind of aspirational ideal.
• No Country for Old Men — Cormac McCarthy (2005) — Anton Chigurh as an unstoppable, philosophically coherent force of violence that has no equivalent in the Western tradition; Sheriff Bell as the man who can no longer understand or police the world he was born to serve. The novel ends not with resolution but with Bell’s dream of his dead father riding ahead of him into the dark.
• Cowboys and East Indians — Nina McConigley (2013) — These stories explore what exactly it means to be the wrong kind of Indian in Wyoming, subverting expectations and giving a new way to look at a place as saturated with myth as the American West. Funny, poignant, and incredibly smart.
• The Son — Philipp Meyer (2013) — A multigenerational Texas family saga spanning from the 1840s to the near-present. Eli McCullough is captured by the Comanche as a boy and raised among them; his descendants build an oil empire on the land taken from those same people. Meyer is unsparing about what the founding of Texas actually required: the systematic dispossession and slaughter of the Comanche, and then of the Mexican landowners who preceded the Anglo settlers.

FURTHER READING

7 Historical Fiction Novels Set in the Pacific Northwest at Electric Lit

SPECULATIVE WESTS: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre by michael k. johnson

The Western as a genre is alive and vibrant, argues University of Maine – Farmington professor of English literature Michael K. Johnson. In Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and a Genre (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Johnson explains how authors, directors, and storytellers are pushing the classic genre into new directions by hybridizing Western tropes with science fiction, horror, and fantasy storytelling. These new speculative Westerns are revitalizing a genre, which has grown incredibly popular in recent years through television series like The Last of Us and Westworld, as well as many examples in film and literature. Speculative Westerns have also allowed space for Native and African American writers and storytellers to expand the genre into more inclusive spaces, telling stories about people often left out or stereotyped in more traditional Western stories. By including time travel, zombies, and vampires, Johnson argues that the Western has cemented itself with a new generation of Americans as one of the critical cultural narratives for understanding the United States.

interview at New Books Network

The Westerns and War Films of John Ford

While John Ford made films of more general subjects, he is best known for his movies that illustrated the American West and life during wartime. In her book, The Westerns and War Films of John Ford, Sue Matheson examines what was so special about his works, as well as how his films represented Ford’s view of America.

New Books Network

PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WEST

The history of the American West has typically been told in one of two ways: as triumph, or as tragedy. Stephen Aron, accomplished scholar of the West, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and President of the Autry Museum of the American West, argues that both of these narratives flatten out what was actually a much more complicated story. 

Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford UP, 2022), Aron zooms in on several moments of contingency in the Western past, moments when people of often radically different backgrounds came together to build community, or at least lived peacefully, despite their differences. Although these moments eventually fell apart, Aron argues that they show that the past was unwritten until it came to pass, and that our own uncertain future is the same. Peace and Friendship offers important lessons about the power of history and contingency, and underscores the unsettled nature of human events and our capacity for overcoming even our deepest differences.

New Books Network