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  • Introduction:Television and the Depiction of the American West
  • Michael K. Johnson, Guest Editor (bio)

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Blackfoot author James Welch watches They Died with Their Boots On (1941), a film depicting the life of George Armstrong Custer, starring Errol Flynn. In James Welch, dir. by Matteo Bellinelli, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1995.

Two strangers walk into a bar. Outside, a wooden sign hanging over the entrance sways slightly in the wind. Inside, a thin layer of dust covers the bar, the scattered tables and chairs. An upright piano is against one wall. Three men are already inside. One of them has been drinking heavily. Another has the bearing—if not the uniform—of a lawman. His gun is holstered on his hip. The strangers are also armed.

The five men share a drink. "To better days and new friends," toasts one of the strangers. As the talk continues, it becomes clear that the two strangers want something from the other men, who aren't willing to give them what they want. The conversation becomes tense. One of the strangers stands up and leaps over to the other side of the bar. The lawman's hand falls to his hip. The stranger smiles, puts his own gun on top of the bar, and reaches underneath to grab a bottle, which he opens and pours. [End Page 123]

The other stranger moves slowly over to lean against a wall—and to shift his rifle from the strap on his back to his hands. The stranger behind the bar suddenly moves for his gun, but the lawman is faster, his first shot hitting the stranger in the head, his second shot taking out his partner—before either stranger can fire a shot.

Any regular viewer of Westerns has seen this scenario—or variations thereof—played out dozens of times. What is surprising is that this scene takes place not in a Western but in AMC's contemporary zombie series The Walking Dead (2010-present), in an episode titled "Nebraska" (2.8). Perhaps even more surprisingly, given that the television Western has widely been considered a dead genre since the 1970s, The Walking Dead is filled with allusions to Westerns. In the scene described above, the barroom set would need only slight alterations to be made into a Western saloon. We also see prominently displayed on a wall a poster that reads: "Pawnee Bill Shows, WILD WEST, Touring America This Season." A drawing of a charging buffalo is in the center of the poster. What stands out about the poster is the capitalized phrase "WILD WEST," which is visible in the background of multiple camera shots during the scene. The show signals its participation in the genre of the Western through such visual signs and through other allusions to Western conventions. The Walking Dead may literally take place in Georgia, but, metaphorically, we are in the "Wild West," a state of being brought about by the collapse of civilization in the wake of a viral infection that makes the dead walk.

As Neil Campbell observes in "Post-Western Cinema," various com-mentators have been declaring the death of the film Western for going onto a century now. However, Campbell argues, "far from being dead," Westerns have survived by "traveling across generic boundaries, poaching and borrowing from many different earlier traditions, whilst contributing to the innovation of the genre" (409, 409-10). What is particularly notable about the Western genre over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century is its adaptability: its movement from one medium to another (from books to radio to film to television), its ability to be combined with other genres (science fiction, musicals, melodrama, zombie films) to create new hybrid forms, and its potential for including voices and experiences in hybrid forms that the classic Western often excludes.

The "reinvention and survivance (its 'living on' in new or altered forms)"of the Western in cinema is also taking place in the medium of television (Campbell 409). Although the golden age of the television Western has long since passed, we have seen in the twenty-first century a remarkable rebirth of the portrayal...

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