How The North Was Won

Years after its proclaimed demise, the western has once again risen from the ashes. In the United States, authors Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, having reinvented the form, are showered with Pulitzers and Oscars. In Canada, Guy Vanderhaeghe is honoured by the Governor General and cbc listeners, who voted The Last Crossing the must-read novel of 2004. At the cinema, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are only the most ambitious of recent western-inspired movies. On television, both American and Canadian networks are running important western series.

In Six Guns and Society, Will Wright argues that the Hollywood western has long taken on mythic qualities, its evolution echoing America’s changing attitudes toward a capitalist society that is ever more corporate. But the topic is more basic than this, and common to all popular arts: the uneasy relationship of the individual to society in general, a theme as relevant today as it was in the earliest days of Hollywood.

Created in reaction to sentimental, moralizing bestsellers, a nostalgic Wild West quickly captured the male market, and soon millions of dime adventure novels flooded the continent. By the end of the nineteenth century, the western had become the American way of storytelling. Despite critical disdain, the flood has still not fully abated. Ronald Reagan’s favourite author, Louis L’Amour, has sold over 300 million copies of his westerns to date.

But movies were the genre’s perfect medium, and for the next half century American males spent their Saturday afternoons in theatres, lost to stories of cowboys and Indians. Later, these yarns were reinvented for television, and until the 1970s many of the highest-rated shows were western serials.

For almost a century, North Americans were marinated in westerns. None of us could escape. Nostalgic for their unapologetic celebration of a code of values and conduct whose passing we regretted, we overlooked their misogyny, violence, and racism.

A lone gunman, taking time to be silhouetted against the western sky, rides out of the hills and is reluctantly caught up in the lives of grateful homesteaders. The most famous western novel, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), starts this way, as do a thousand lesser novels and almost every silent western. The man is strong, society is weak, and in the end the hero will be provoked to destroy, in a satisfying burst of violence, those forces that seek to harm the defenceless.

But by the 1940s, society’s attitudes had changed, and the new westerns reflected this. The homestead had become a settled community, and the reticent hero had morphed into a damaged gunman seeking revenge. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953) both fit this pattern. By the time the fictional community had become as settled as Hadleyville in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), its citizens had rejected both violence and the hero’s values, often siding with the villain for the sake of momentary peace.

With the Vietnam War, this essentially American form of entertainment became a global parable, as the world grew concerned about the glorification of violence and our leaders’ ambiguous morality and obsession with their own virtues. Echoing Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) celebrated a new hero, the professional hired by a society too craven to face the evil that threatens to destroy it. The tone was now completely cynical. These experts had a monopoly not only on bravery but on manners as well. Politeness, which had always been a surer barometer of decency in a western than skill with a pistol or even the colour of one’s hat, was now firmly on the side of a band of outsiders. As the sheriff says in Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, “Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.”

It only took a small step to make the villain the charismatic protagonist, and last fall’s releases 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford have carried on this theme — much better to be a heroic criminal than a rotten cop or humourless banker. As Russell Crowe’s character in 3:10 to Yuma says, “Even bad men love their mamas.”

In No Country for Old Men, McCarthy takes this theme to its logical conclusion. Set in a modern desert of strip malls and sad motels, the novel chronicles the end of social values. With nothing but greed as a measure, only the “honour” of the killer, Anton Chigurh, has any currency. Evil is now as triumphant as once was the goodness of the heroic gunman. Gone are the idealistic boys, the rich metaphors that insisted on a lost innocence, and the poetic descriptions of landscapes and horses in McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. Instead, he now gives us a relentless and cruel causality. Nostalgia is reserved for the ineffectual and melancholy Sheriff Bell.