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Introduction to Part One
- The University Press of Kentucky
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Introduction to Part One Anyone dealing with the subject of freedom in American popular culture has to come to terms with the Western. No genre is more closely associated with the celebration of freedom, and yet no genre does more to portray it as problematic. In the American imagination, the Western frontier has always been the place to which people go to achieve freedom and escape the shackles of society. Accordingly, the Western as a genre has traditionally been associated with the American spirit of rugged individualism. The Western hero is typically a loner, standing apart from the crowd, sometimes because of something shady in his past, sometimes because of his peculiar sense of mission, sometimes just because of his heroic virtue itself. The hero is frequently paired with a mirror image in the form of a villain, who equally stands alone, sometimes for unnervingly similar reasons. The fact that the line between the hero and the villain is sometimes difficult to draw in Westerns, at least in the more sophisticated ones, is a good indication that the genre does not simply celebrate freedom and individualism, but presents both concepts as deeply problematic. The hero’s status as a lone wolf often brings him into conflict with the very society he claims to represent or defend. The taming of the frontier is one of the central themes of the American Western, and the wolf is not a tameanimal.AcommonWesternplotinvolvesthedomesticationofthehero, to make him fit into a community of less violent—and less heroic—people. Westernsfrequentlyturnonthetensionbetweenfreedomandorder,between the individual and the community. The history of the Western is testimony to the fact that freedom has always been viewed as a challenge in America, something that cannot be achieved without great effort and great cost. Critics often look down on the Western, regarding it as the prime example of pop culture at its worst, a form of crude and mindless entertainment. The movie and television industries have turned out thousands of Westerns over the years, and have necessarily relied on formulas and clichés in order to do so. Faced with the results, a critic can easily fall into the trap of saying that all Westerns look alike; that they endlessly recycle the same old mate25 26 Freedom and Order in the Western rial; and consequently that they have no aesthetic or intellectual value. This may well be true of the majority of Westerns; but, according to Aristotle’s principle that the nature of a thing is the perfection of the thing, we should never judge a genre by its average specimens alone, but ultimately by its best. The Western has certainly had a checkered history, and its low points undoubtedly outnumber its high points—by a considerable margin. And yet no one can deny that the Western has had its high points, and, after a century of effort, the genre can boast of a significant number of masterpieces in its ranks, or at least genuine works of art. Much can be learned from an extensive overview of the Western as a pop culture form; it is, for example, fascinating to trace the complex ways in which Westerns over the years have mirrored larger developments in American society. But much can be learned from an intensive approach to a genre as well; it allows for the kind of close reading and detailed interpretation that genuine works of art deserve. In this part, I concentrate on three well-known examples of the Western that I believe epitomize its potential and the issues with which it characteristically deals. My first choice hardly needs justification. John Ford is without question the greatest maker of Westerns, and The Searchers is arguably the greatest of all his Westerns (and, I would add, one of the greatest movies in any genre). By comparing The Searchers to Greek drama (the Oresteia), as well as Greek epic (the Iliad and the Odyssey), I subject it to the most stringent aesthetic test possible, and I hope that I succeed in showing that the film is worthy of being discussed in this august company. The Searchers shows why it is inadvisable to draw a sharp line between elite culture and pop culture, and especially why one should not do so according to medium (theater versus film). We can learn a great deal by studying The Searchers and the Oresteia together. Ford’s film helps to translate the issues Aeschylus explores into terms more familiar to us, thereby making the Greek drama come alive...