Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment by Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann (review)

As the title of their book suggests, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann take up the tropes, narratives, and images of the cinematic Western as topics in ecocriticism. Indeed, as Gunfight at the Eco-Corral argues, the Western is the film genre that most insistently and obviously offers the environment itself as the locus of its themes: the usage, ownership, and transformation of land and water. Murray and Heumann propose “to look at the American Western in relation to what used to be called natural history,” but their best work in this book actually re-reads Westerns within the histories of both the environment and Hollywood treatments of the West (16).

The strength of the book is its wide-ranging knowledge of well-known and obscure Westerns from silent cinema to the present, covering classics such as The Searchers (1956) but also rarely discussed Gene Autry flicks and Roy Rogers movies. An excellent chapter on McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for instance, enables us to see that landmark film within multiple histories and cinematic accounts of mining. Readers will likewise profit from seeing the ways Shane (1953) is positioned within contentions about free-range versus fenced ranching and the ways Cimarron (1931) and There Will Be Blood (2007) participate in the tradition of “oil-frontier movies” and their ecopolitics. Other chapters focus on the Western genre’s treatment of water rights and of the impact of trains and telegraph systems on the environment. An intriguing chapter on American Indian Westerns offers an extended reading of Smoke Signals (1998) as a film about interactions between human communities and the landscape from a Native point of view.

Granted that ecocriticism is a didactic perspective, Gunfight at the Eco-Corral tends to divide films and critics into Good Guys and Bad Guys at the expense of more nuanced interpretations. Murray and Heumann describe the work of non-ecocritical scholars on the Western only to dismiss them; scholars with whom they agree get quoted but not discussed in any depth. That is, there’s no scholarly engagement here that would seek out connections and points of debate. Likewise, their approach to cinema is sometimes flattened into a scorecard on environmentalism. Describing the ways ranching and cowboys have been represented in Westerns, for example, they lament that “the history depicted in these films primarily responds to ideals of the Wild West rather than current research from ecologists”—a curious and somewhat naïve idea of popular cinema as the screening of correct or incorrect science (29). Most of all, because this book delivers the history of the genre in such an original and helpful way, it deserves better editing and indexing. The last chapter is riddled with grammatical errors and non sequiturs, and the indexing is spotty throughout.

Overall, though, despite its shortcomings, I hope this book’s rich readings of film history in relation to natural history provoke more scholarship along this line, including work that positions ecocriticism in conversation with Western-genre scholarship on nationalism, race, and gender.