Helluva Thing, Killin’ a Man: Why We Make Westerns
The Movie Genre That Will Never Die

As genres go, westerns have turned out to be kind of deathless, an all-American template of iconic images and story ideas that refuses to disappear. The prognosis for its survival was not always rosey, especially when you consider the genre’s pioneering position in the history of movies. The story’s like this: the first real narrative movie, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a western, and for the first half-century or more, westerns were thick on the ground, produced by the thousands and cramming matinee screens from coast to coast and around the globe. You could say that the western — always cheap to make and huge in the imaginations of kids everywhere — built and sustained Hollywood in its formative years, while other genres ebbed and flowed in audience’s hearts.

Then WWII happened, and after that everything slowly changed: American culture became more cynical and weary, rock ‘n roll defined a new rebellious generation of culture consumers, and TV brought the real chaos of the contemporary world into our living rooms. Once the ’60s came, the old-fashioned, somewhat naive, simplistic dynamics of the western seemed out of step. Maybe by then we’d grown too distant in time from the era of the Old West and its wild frontier-ism, and westerns just didn’t feel modern enough. Filmmakers started making what were called “anti-westerns,” revisionist takes that threw out the western’s moral codes and sense of nation-building righteousness, and instead went ultra-realist, revelling in lawless violence and envisioning the Old West as a hapless killing field.

In any case, the fallout from the ’70s until today is that the western is often said to be dead or near dying. (Only musicals have faced as extreme a dip in ubiquity and popularity — there is not one top-Hollywood-money-maker list between 1930 and 1973 that does not include or is in fact dominated by musicals, and since then occasional Disney cartoons and the Pitch Perfect franchise have mostly been the exceptions that prove the rule.) But, the reality is that westerns haven’t gone away, and won’t any time soon. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), easily one of the greatest and most sophisticated westerns ever made, won an armful of Oscars, and in just the last five years, we’ve seen major entries like The Lone Ranger (2013), The Homesman (2014), A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), The Hateful Eight (2015), Bone Tomahawk (2015), Slow West (2015), The Revenant (2015), Jane Got a Gun (2015), In a Valley of Violence (2016), The Magnificent Seven (2016), Hickok (2017), The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017), Hostiles (2017), The Sisters Brothers (2018), plus hundreds of smaller, less distributed westerns, and — just look at IMDb — many hundreds of new westerns, some big budget but most super-indie, that are planned or in pre-production as we speak.
Honestly, sometimes all you need is a few horses, some dusty bits of costuming, and piece of barren landscape.

The real question is why this genre persists, this obsession we still have with a national era that, in real life, only lasted about five decades or so, from some time before the Civil War to sometime before the turn of the century. Fifty years of actual sociocultural history, from which continues to spring well over a century’s worth of fictionalized movies, TV shows, books, and stories, proliferating as global culture like a hard-to-kill species of vine.
I think the answer is buried in the DNA of the genre itself. Genres are defined by different things: comedies are defined by their intention (to generate laughter), while the definition of a musical is any film at all with songs. Science fiction must involve that which hasn’t happened (be it the future or an alternate past), while a mystery is a mystery if it has the genre’s investigatory structure. Westerns, like war films and pirate movies, are defined by one thing: where and when the story takes place. Any story can happen in that time and place, but if you’re not west of the Mississippi sometime between 1840 and 1890, left of St. Louis and north of Hell, then it’s not a western.

It’s the meaning we’ve invested in this time and place that makes the genre live on — and by “we” I don’t just mean Americans, but the world. (Westerns have always been huge globally, and many countries have made their own; during the Cold War, Communist countries were fond of making westerns in which the Native Americans were the heroes, and the cowboys were villains.) Breaching and colonizing the frontier, against all odds and (often) hostile natives and an unforgiving landscape, and attempting to maintain a moral social code in the process, building a society from the dirt up with will and nerve alone, despite the ever-present temptation and threat of outlaw mayhem — this somewhat mythologized idea of the Old West has story built right into it. At every turn, in virtually any scenario, in any character you can imagine — settler, carpetbagger, bandit, soldier, hired gun, lawman, rancher, prostitute, widow, loner — there’s the inevitability of moral crisis, of having to be faced with decisions that pit honor, desire, necessity and death against each other.
That’s story structure, in a nutshell — a high-stakes situation that forces a character to make decisions, with the heady risk of disastrous fallout and damning compromise hanging in the balance. It’s almost impossible — almost — to make a western without intersecting with the setting’s primal set of dramatic ingredients, which almost organically manifest as three-act structure, and invoke existential moral questions. Should I kill to get what I want? How far will I have to go to protect what’s mine? Who defines what’s right or wrong, where there’s no law? Are the Pawnee my enemy, or the cattle barons taking my land? Who will stand for me, if I do not? Who am I, in this landscape of reinvention and last chances, an agent of ethical strength, or a filthy opportunist, or an outright evildoer? Is prosperity worth dying, or killing, for? Is justice?

Westerns — and you can see the genre’s bloodstream work its way through many movies outside of its borders, including No Country for Old Men (2007), Winter’s Bone (2010) and even Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) — will survive because of the narrative immediacy it delivers. As a filmmaker, you’d barely need to try to exploit it. Just put a character out in the desert, maybe on a horse and with a gun, with town he has to get to or someone chasing after him somewhere out there, and you’ve got a movie, and your own slice of a resonant American legacy.

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Smashcut students are assigned weekly feature films that illustrate and exemplify filmmaking concepts linked to that week’s lesson. This week, students are learning about “Story Structure,” “Outlines and Treatments,” and “Editing: Pacing and Feeling,” and watching True Grit and Unforgiven.
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