Too Long in the Wasteland: Visions of the American West in Film, 1980-1990

Reitinger | Too Long in the Wastland: Visions of the American West in Film, 1980-1990 Douglas W. Reitinger University of Wyoming Too Long in the Wasteland: Visions of the American West in Film, 1980-1990 / few more Westerns may still straggle in, but the Western is dead." Pauline Kael in a Newsweek review, 25 February 1974. Austin: "There's no such thing as the West anymore! It's a dead issue! It's dried up, Saul, and so are you."Sam Shepard, True West(\9S\). Way out in the wilderness A cold coyote calls."Bob Dylan, "Ballad of Hollis Brown" (1963). Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis in Paris Texas. 20 I Film & History The American Frontier in Film | Special In-Depth Section By most accounts, 1969 was weird, to use die vernacular. The United States of America was in the process of ripping itself apart, from the inside out. The nation seemed to be polarized on a multitude of issues. Battles of one sort or another were pitched on problems ranging from civil rights to the Vietnam War to abortion. While die delineation within society was largely generational, racial and ideological differences also abounded. Perhaps one fitting metaphor for diis societal split was the release of two Western movies with diametrically opposed contents and imports within the same year. On one hand was True Grit (Paramount), a film starringJohn Wayne that tends to reinforce traditional values ofmorality, individuality, and justice . Standing in stark contrast to True Grit was The Wild Bunch (Warner Bros.), a film that can be interpreted as a condemnation ofthe corruptibility ofhuman nature, and that effectively questions the traditional values True Grit seems to espouse. Though the change within the genre ofWestern film can be said to be taking place gradually throughout the decade of the sixties (Lenihan 14860 ), die opposition of these two films seems to point to 1969 as being a watershed year for Westerns . It would seem that—due to historical context and social upheaval, along with its own naturally occurring generic transformation1— Western films, as well as their audience's expectations, had changed dramatically. Some film critics mark the distinction between the psychological Western and the professional Western as the most significant change occurring around this time. According to this line of thought, the 'classic Western,' made following World War II, embodied "the hero's psychological conflict and neurosis stemming from his growing incompatibility with civilization as well as the cumulative weight of society's unreasonable expectations" (Schatz 58). Examples that fall into the psychological classification of Westerns include such films as High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959). The hero in the professional Western, on the other hand, .when faced with the conflict between his own desire for autonomy and society's demand for conformity, takes financial advantage of any given situation that arises. The hero in the more contemporary professional Western is the true opportunist, using his manly skills and even lawlessness for his own benefit. Western films in this group include The Wild Bunch (1969), The Great Northñeld Minnesota Raid (1972), and TAe Missouri Breaks (1976) (Schatz 59). A different mode of criticism marks the change in die Western genre as one in which film becomes (or becomes reiterated as) a format for social or political criticism.2 With the political polarization of the 1960s and early 1970s, there also came a sense that the American frontier myth and the values it implied were hollow, crass. The films that fit into this classification of die post-Western or anti-Western include films like The Wild Bunch, The Missouri Breaks, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (197'I). These films generally do not portray one individual as protagonist, and when they occasionally do, it is rarely in a heroic light. The post-Western is concerned with either exploding die notion of manifest destiny or revealing some other basic corruption in American society. There is also the sense in these films that there are larger forces that cannot be controlled. As William C. Siska writes concerning McCabe andMrs. Miller, "After McCabe, the myths of the western look empty compared to the raw emotive power of the rugged, uncivilized environment" (Gehring...