Live by the sword, die by the gun: where Westerns and samurai movies diverge
Much has been said of the similarities between Westerns and samurai movies. Akira Kurosawa’s iconic Seven Samurai being adapted by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven displays many of the genres’ commonly shared attributes: wanderers take their skills to lawless places and fight for good against evil. A few sufficiently skilled swordsmen (or gunslingers) can stop a warlord or bandit chief from oppressing peaceful villagers.
Cowboys and samurai are rugged individualists. However, the two appear in their respective nations’ culture industries amid very different social contexts. Because of this difference in context, samurai movies are more likely to be tales that warn against a reckless embrace of violence, while Westerns are inclined to be propaganda that glorifies violence serving particular ends.
Samurai films, and arguably the Japanese film industry, did not take off until the US occupation following World War II. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai remains the most influential work of the genre and was released in 1954. Likely every adult in Japan still remembered the war. In the span of years, they saw Japan go from being a colonizing power to a colonized one.
The identification of right-wing Japanese imperialism with a romanticized vision of samurai culture was clear, from the swords for officers to ritual suicide by ultra-rightists up until the 1970s. Fascist theories of racial and cultural superiority were dealt a devastating blow by the Allied victory.
The defeat of the traditionalist vision was impossible to ignore: samurai in film are often doomed to failure or a Pyrrhic victory at best. Many samurai heroes are gunned down by muskets, an acknowledgement that the old ways, romantic as they may seem, are no match for a changing world.
Samurai films are often quite clear that reliance on strength alone leads to a tragic outcome. The thousands of innocent lives destroyed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bear real-life witness to this fact. The people who made films in post-1945 Japan were shaped by these events.
Here we can already see a major difference between Japanese and American culture after 1945: The United States has never known the humbling experience of going from regional power to occupied territory.
The typical Western, generally a mythical re-telling of the foundation of the United States, reflects this difference. Westerns are inclined to say that expansionist violence is good because it worked out well for the US.
For example, Western director John Ford was beloved for the films he made that celebrate a progressive vision of America: Stagecoach is about a band of social misfits forming a new type of community on the frontier. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is explicitly about the civilizing of the continent by a nation-state where “all men are created equal.” It is made with such earnestness that Jimmy Stewart gives a civics lesson mid-movie.
But that’s never the whole story. The happy ending for Stagecoach’s “new community” was only possible after gunning down hordes of Native Americans. Ford’s service making propaganda films for the proto-CIA was not a fluke. Nor was his role as a hooded Klansman in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic The Birth of a Nation. Ford surely believed in liberal democracy, but only for the worthy whites. A “master race,” or Herrenvolk, democracy.
Is it a surprise that an excess of 100 Westerns might be churned out yearly in the 1950s, when the US was steeling itself for conflict with the Soviet global superpower?
Is it a surprise that Hollywood generated stories glorifying the lone gunslinger’s moral certitude and ability to triumph, while facing an “ideological rival” depicted as opposed to individuality?
Is it a surprise that this glut of an “all-American” genre would take occur when McCarthyism was threatening creatives who told stories too friendly to socialistic ideals?
Is it a surprise that John Wayne called himself a white supremacist?
Ford and Wayne’s 1956 collaboration with The Searchers is lauded, for good reason, as one of the greatest American films ever produced. It gestured towards an acknowledgement of the corrosive effects of racism, but as subtext to John Wayne and company killing a heartless Comanche leader and scalping his corpse.
Like the best films in these genres, the story is complex. The scars of right-wing imperialism still linger in Japan, even on the primarily symbolic level. Prominent figures such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, among other lawmakers, continue to pay tribute at the shrines of WWII-era war criminals and take efforts to acknowledge the crimes of imperialism as an almost personal affront. Samurai films may be more introspective and less intent on validating an imperialist myth than the Western, but the forces that gave rise to right-wing nationalism in Japan persist.
Likewise, revisionist Westerns can set white capitalism as the enemy, challenge patriarchy, center indigenous people and their languages, or simply memorialize the victims of oppression. Yet the most common nods to Westerns these days are to celebrate violence upholding white supremacy.
Right-wing ideology is flexible when it comes to packaging. Cowboy hats and guntō prove that it doesn’t require jackboots or swastikas. The “libertarian” notion of individualism — presented as a traditional alternative to new “collectivist” ideologies— is usually a key component of this thought.
Individualism is already part of the dominant ideology in US society, but the myth of the gunslinger civilizing the Old West may be seen as hopelessly outdated. Yet the depiction of the individual as the primary driver of history, and not competing social classes, is something the ruling class has every interest in promoting.
Going forward, one should expect the foundational myths of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism to take whatever shape is needed to remain relevant in the modern era.
Samurai, cowboy, superhero: Übermensch.
