Western (genre)


The Western is a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890. The genre is commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada.
The frontier is depicted in Western fiction as a sparsely populated, hostile region patrolled by cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, and numerous other stock gunslinger characters. Western narratives often concern the gradual attempts to tame the crime-ridden American West using wider themes of justice, freedom, rugged individualism, manifest destiny, and the national history and identity of the United States. Native American populations were often portrayed as averse foes or savages.
Originating in vaquero heritage and Western fiction, the genre popularized the Western lifestyle, country-Western music, and Western wear globally. Throughout the history of the genre, it has seen popular revivals and been incorporated into various subgenres.

Characteristics

Stories and characters

The classic Western is a morality drama, presenting the conflict between wilderness and civilization. Stories commonly center on the life of a male drifter, cowboy, or gunslinger who rides a horse and is armed with a revolver or rifle. The male characters typically wear broad-brimmed and high-crowned Stetson hats, neckerchief bandannas, vests, and cowboy boots with spurs. While many wear conventional shirts and trousers, alternatives include buckskins and dusters.
Women are generally cast in secondary roles as love interests for the male lead; or in supporting roles as saloon girls, prostitutes or as the wives of pioneers and settlers. The wife character often provides a measure of comic relief. Other recurring characters include Native Americans of various tribes described as Indians or Red Indians, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, law enforcement officers, bounty hunters, outlaws, bartenders, merchants, gamblers, soldiers, and settlers.
The ambience is usually punctuated with a Western music score, including American folk music and Spanish/Mexican folk music such as country, Native American music, New Mexico music, and rancheras.

Locations

Westerns often stress the harshness of the wilderness and frequently set the action in an arid, desolate landscape of deserts and
mountains. Often, the vast landscape plays an important role, presenting a "mythic vision of the plains and deserts of the American West". Specific settings include ranches, small frontier towns, saloons, railways, wilderness, and isolated military forts of the Wild West. Many Westerns use a stock plot of depicting a crime, then showing the pursuit of the wrongdoer, ending in revenge and retribution, which is often dispensed through a shootout or quick draw duel.

Themes

The Western genre sometimes portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature in the name of civilization or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original, Native American, inhabitants of the frontier. The Western depicts a society organized around codes of honor and personal, direct or private justice—"frontier justice"—dispensed by gunfights. These honor codes are often played out through depictions of feuds or individuals seeking personal revenge or retribution against someone who has wronged them. This Western depiction of personal justice contrasts sharply with justice systems organized around rationalistic, abstract law that exist in cities, in which social order is maintained predominantly through relatively impersonal institutions such as courtrooms. The popular perception of the Western is a story that centers on the life of a seminomadic wanderer, usually a cowboy or a gunfighter. A showdown or duel at high noon featuring two or more gunfighters is a stereotypical scene in the popular conception of Westerns.
In some ways, such protagonists may be considered the literary descendants of the knights-errant, who stood at the center of earlier extensive genres such as the Arthurian romances. Like the cowboy or gunfighter of the Western, the knight-errant of the earlier European tales and poetry was wandering from place to place on his horse, fighting villains of various kinds, and bound to no fixed social structures, but only to his own innate code of honor. Like knights-errant, the heroes of Westerns frequently rescue damsels in distress. Similarly, the wandering protagonists of Westerns share many characteristics with the ronin in modern Japanese culture.
The Western typically takes these elements and uses them to tell simple morality tales, although some notable examples are more morally ambiguous. Westerns often stress the harshness and isolation of the wilderness, and frequently set the action in an arid, desolate landscape. Western films generally have specific settings, such as isolated ranches, Native American villages, or small frontier towns with a saloon. Oftentimes, these settings appear deserted and without much structure. Apart from the wilderness, the saloon usually emphasizes that this is the Wild West; it is the place to go for music, women, gambling, drinking, brawling, and shooting. In some Westerns, where civilization has arrived, the town has a church, a general store, a bank, and a school; in others, where frontier rules still hold sway, it is, as Sergio Leone said, "where life has no value".

Plots

Author and screenwriter Frank Gruber identified seven basic plots for Westerns:
  • Union Pacific story: The plot concerns construction of a railroad, a telegraph line, or some other type of modern technology on the wild frontier. Wagon-train stories fall into this category.
  • Ranch story: Ranchers protecting their family ranch from rustlers or large landowners attempting to force out the proper owners.
  • Empire story: The plot involves building a ranch empire or an oil empire from scratch, a classic rags-to-riches plot, often involving conflict over resources such as water or minerals.
  • 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.
  • Cavalry and Indian story: The plot revolves around taming the wilderness for White settlers or fighting Native Americans.
  • Outlaw story: The outlaw gangs dominate the action.
  • Marshal story: The lawman and his challenges drive the plot.
Gruber noted that good writers use dialogue and plot development to expand these basic plots into believable stories.

Media

Film

The American Film Institute defines Western films as those "set in the American West that the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier". Originally, these films were called "Wild West dramas", a reference to Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill Cody's. The term "Western", used to describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World magazine.
Most of the characteristics of Western films were part of 19th-century popular Western fiction, and were firmly in place before film became a popular art form. Western films commonly feature protagonists such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bounty hunters, who are often depicted as seminomadic wanderers who wear Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival and as a means to settle disputes using frontier justice. Protagonists ride between dusty towns and cattle ranches on their trusty steeds.
The first films that belong to the Western genre are a series of short single reel silents made in 1894 by Edison Studios at their Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. These featured veterans of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show exhibiting skills acquired by living in the Old West – they included Annie Oakley and members of the Sioux.
The earliest known Western narrative film is the British short Kidnapping by Indians, made by Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn, England, in 1899. The Great Train Robbery, Edwin S. Porter's film starring Broncho Billy Anderson, is often erroneously cited as the first Western, though George N. Fenin and William K. Everson point out that the "Edison company had played with Western material for several years prior to The Great Train Robbery". Nonetheless, they concur that Porter's film "set the pattern—of crime, pursuit, and retribution—for the Western film as a genre". The film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first Western star; he made several hundred Western film shorts. So popular was the genre that he soon faced competition from Tom Mix and William S. Hart.
Western films were enormously popular in the silent film era. With the advent of sound in 1927–1928, the major Hollywood studios rapidly abandoned Westerns, leaving the genre to smaller studios and producers. These smaller organizations churned out countless low-budget features and serials in the 1930s. An exception was The Big Trail, a 1930 American pre-Code widescreen Western film shot on location across the American West, including the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the giant redwoods, starring 23-year-old John Wayne in his first leading role and directed by Raoul Walsh. The epic film noted for its authenticity was a financial failure due in part to exhibitors' inability to switch over to widescreen during the Great Depression.
By the late 1930s, the Western film was widely regarded as a pulp genre in Hollywood, but its popularity was dramatically revived in 1939 by major studio productions such as Dodge City starring Errol Flynn, Jesse James with Tyrone Power, Union Pacific with Joel McCrea, Destry Rides Again featuring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, and especially John Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach starring John Wayne, which became one of the biggest hits of the year. Released through United Artists, Stagecoach made John Wayne a mainstream screen star in the wake of a decade of headlining B Westerns. After renewed commercial successes in the late 1930s, the popularity of Westerns continued to rise until its peak in the 1950s, when the number of Western films produced outnumbered all other genres combined.
The period from 1940 to 1960 has been called the "Golden Age of the Western". It is epitomized by the work of several prominent directors including Robert Aldrich, Budd Boetticher, Delmer Daves, John Ford, and others. Some of the popular films during this era include Apache, Broken Arrow, and My Darling Clementine.
The changing popularity of the Western genre has influenced worldwide pop culture over time. During the 1960s and 1970s, Spaghetti Westerns from Italy became popular worldwide; this was due to the success of Sergio Leone's storytelling method.
After having been previously pronounced dead, a resurgence of Westerns occurred during the 1990s with films such as Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, and Geronimo, as Westerns once again increased in popularity.