From “Lonesome Dove” (1989) to “Cowboys and Aliens” (2011)
Film critics and scholars have occasionally and mistakenly predicted the decline or even death of the Western film since the days of silent cinema.1 There have indeed been brief lulls in the making of Western films, especially when contrasted with such prolific periods as the first half of World War II and the 1950s. The decade of the 1980s, in particular, was graced by a mere handful of significant Westerns: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Walter Hill's The Long Riders (both 1980), Eastwood's Pale Rider and Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado (both 1985), and Simon Wincer's impressive television miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989). Nonetheless, Eastwood's work in the genre from the 1960s through to the early 1990s helped to define a singular artistic trajectory within a genre that otherwise experienced a rather unpredictable evolution over the past several decades.
When most film scholars speak of the transition to the postclassical Western, which also includes a move to the postmodern Western, they generally refer to the turn away from the conventional narratives and visual styles that are best evidenced by movies of Hollywood's Golden Age, such as Ford's Stagecoach and Wyler's The Westerner.2 As we have seen, the classical or traditional Western film typically portrays heroic protagonists who conquer enemies, vanquish evil, and help to blaze a path through the wilderness so that a law-centered civilization can flourish. These films almost always arrive at happy endings, with little regard for the dead and defeated. They align the values and achievements of their heroes with those of the growing social order and with the dominant national ideology—usually identified with the ideal of Manifest Destiny, a conviction in the inevitable progress of democracy and capitalism. Such a story accords with the general framework of the Western mythos, one that originated with the frontier chronicles and historical novels of the nineteenth century. The cinematic presentations of these plots were usually done with a fair degree of stylistic and narrative economy, driven by the plotline and its focus on the respective heroism and villainy of its main characters.
As we have also witnessed in earlier chapters, the postclassical and revisionist Westerns have their seeds in the noir Westerns of the later 1940s (e.g., Duel in the Sun, Pursued) and the more psychological Westerns of the 1950s (e.g., The Furies, The Naked Spur, Jubal, and The Searchers). Genre-revising Westerns continued through the 1960s (e.g., The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the films by Sergio Leone) and flowered during the 1970s (e.g., Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and High Plains Drifter). However, while such an evolution may be fairly clear in hindsight, the lines of demarcation between the classical and postclassical Westerns are not always so neatly drawn, especially when comparing individual films. Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, for example, are as classical in their visual styles as they are revisionist in their character-oriented narratives, stories that involve hero critique as well as the fading away of the Old West.
The term postclassical, when applied to American cinema as a whole, typically refers to the “New Hollywood” era that is generally accepted as beginning with the release of such movies as Mike Nichols's The Graduate and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (both 1967). This transformative period in filmmakers' methods of storytelling and visual presentation echoes earlier variations on and parodies of formulaic plots and styles. The postclassical Western can indeed be understood as a loosely defined and wide-ranging part of the genre that has its roots in the turbulent but fertile soil of the post-World War II period. This category of Western has been enriched over the decades, particularly through forms of revisionism, both subtle and dramatic, ranging from Mann's “neurotic” Westerns and Boetticher's “existential” Westerns to Eastwood's Unforgiven and beyond.
The idea of the postmodern Western makes it seem at times as though the traditional parameters of the genre have been fully critiqued, rejected, and transcended. In fact, Westerns over the past three decades have been so eclectic, wavering between radical revisionism and revivalist classicism, that it is difficult to speak of an individual postmodern Western per se, since so many of the more significant instances of genre revisionism have integrated classical elements. Since the release of three significant Westerns in the early 1990s—Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990), Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), and Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992)—there have been attention-worthy returns to the basic traditions of the genre, but also radical as well as subtle departures from those traditions. The more notable examples of revivals and revisions (and fusions thereof) include George Cosmatos's Tombstone (1993), Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp (1994), Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (1995), Costner's Open Range (2003), James Mangold's remake of 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Ed Harris's Appaloosa (2008), and the Coen brothers' remake of True Grit (2010). While none of these Westerns match the cinematic heights of, say, Red River, The Searchers, and The Wild Bunch, they offer enough adventure and visual splendor to satisfy Western fans who had, by the mid-1990s, begun to hunger for further amplifications of their beloved genre.
Several noteworthy contributions to the American Western over the past few decades have taken the form of television series and miniseries. Wincer's Lonesome Dove established a benchmark for any subsequent television Western. Based on an original movie script by Larry McMurtry, one that the writer later turned into an epic novel, Lonesome Dove features performances by Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow F. Call and, most especially, Robert Duvall as Gus McCrae. Call and McRae are two former Texas Rangers who undertake a sprawling cattle drive to Montana. With the type of acting, directing, screenwriting, and landscape photography that can be found in the best works of the genre, the miniseries led to a sequel, Mike Robe's Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), and Wincer's “prequel” Comanche Moon (2008).
Lonesome Dove remains the zenith of the television Western miniseries, a format ideally suited for the epic adventure-journey narrative. Earlier examples of that format include Burt Kennedy and Daniel Mann's How the West Was Won (1977), starring James Arness as frontiersman Zeb Macahan, and Robert Totten's The Sacketts (1979), based on Louis L'Amour's third novel in his series of novels about this Western family. Lonesome Dove's exceptional quality was not matched in a television Western until Walter Hill's majestic Broken Trail (2006), also starring Duvall, and the HBO production Deadwood (2004-6). The latter series was created by David Milch and stars Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, the diabolical, obscenity-spouting saloon owner and “town boss.” Along with such films as Costner's Dances with Wolves and Eastwood's Unforgiven, these television productions give clear evidence that, while the Western has charted a somewhat chaotic and sporadic course over the past quarter century, the genre is alive and well.
Lonesome Dove also initiated a cycle of performances by Robert Duvall that provide an evolving portrait of the westerner as an older, sagacious, feisty cowpoke who still can handle a gun and drive a herd with the best of them. In the post-Ford, post-Hawks, post-Wayne world, this series of performances by Duvall—along with Eastwood's Westerns and Costner's multiple forays into the genre—contributes to a discernible pattern of artist-oriented genre-exploration in an otherwise eclectic landscape of film and television Westerns. Duvall was of course no stranger to Westerns before taking on the iconic role of cattle puncher Gus McRae. For example, he performed opposite John Wayne as villain Ned Pepper in Henry Hathaway's True Grit (1969), as the legendary Jesse James in Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), and as landowner Frank Harlan (who hires Eastwood's title character) in John Sturges's Joe Kidd (1972).
But beginning with Lonesome Dove, Duvall initiated his most significant engagement in the genre by immersing himself in a fascinating character type that blends the folksy charm of the beloved sidekick played by Walter Brennan with the stoic heroism of a Cooper, Wayne, Stewart, or Fonda. Duvall provides clear echoes of Gus's worldly wise cowboy in his performance as Boss Spearman in Costner's impressive Open Range and as Prentice “Prent” Ritter in Hill's miniseries Broken Trail. He also starred as Al Sieber, the chief of scouts, in Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). Much as Boetticher's Ranown Westerns are subtle variations on a basic story and character, these performances by Duvall offer nuanced modifications of a recurring persona, not unlike Wayne's enormous contribution to the genre throughout his long career as a repeatedly strong, confident, intelligent westerner.
The achievements of artists like Eastwood, Duvall, and Costner have helped to keep the genre flourishing since the cinematic revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Their works and performances have revived traditional components of the Western—above all, naturalistic acting, eye-catching landscape photography, an attention to narrative development, and a sustained sense of action and adventure—while also pushing the Western into new terrain. And yet the patterns of genre evolution and transformation that have been noted throughout this book are not so clearly discerned when it comes to the post-1970s Western, and this fact leads us to the idea of a growing postmodern sensibility when it comes to audiences' and filmmakers' current approaches to the Western. We can trace the general moves from the silent Western to the 1930s B-Western and then to the A-Western of the late 1930s and 1940s. And we can show a progression from the post-World War II “super-Western” to the more psychological and existential Westerns of the 1950s, and then to the more revisionist Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. But the vista becomes hazier after that.
Among obvious returns to more traditional, classical modes (Lonesome Dove, Open Range, Broken Trail, and Appaloosa, for example), we have seen radical departures from such modes—Jarmusch's Dead Man, primarily, following in the tradition of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Whity, two campy “cult” Westerns from the early 1970s. But there have also been creative integrations of genre elements in films that cannot strictly be categorized as Westerns: Robert Rodriguez's “mariachi” movies, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, for instance. And then there are the fusions of conventional and anticonventional genre elements that resist easy categorization as classical or postclassical: Unforgiven, Tombstone, The Quick and the Dead, and Walter Hill's Wild Bill, for example.
Perhaps the most intriguing and effective illustration of the ways that classical and revisionist aspects of the Western have been combined to create diverse cinematic forms lies in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coens have specialized in subverting and radicalizing familiar genres in their own eccentric and highly cinematic manner, while also paying tribute to traditional codes and formulas. This is evident in their creative takes on film noir (Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There), the gangster film (Miller's Crossing), the Depression-era screwball comedy (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and the British black comedy (The Ladykillers). Other films by the Coens selectively incorporate genre elements while evading categorization altogether (Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Burn after Reading, A Serious Man). In terms of their movies that play upon the Western, the Coens have delivered a crime thriller that radically integrates aspects of the genre (No Country for Old Men), as well as a revivalist work (their remake of True Grit) that downplays the brothers' bent for revisionism and parody.
True Grit exhibits throughout its narrative a dedicated reverence for the classical styling of the Western. This movie is as good as Westerns get in terms of action and adventure, and Jeff Bridges gives the role of Rooster Cogburn (played by John Wayne in the original version) his own unique mix of charm and danger. The Coens' remake is far closer to the dialogue and plotline of the Charles Portis novel than the original, and in many ways their film is more cleverly and dramatically crafted than the version by Henry Hathaway. What makes their adaptation of the story most distinct, however, is the sustained focus on the character of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), the self-reliant girl who hires Cogburn to hunt down her father's killer. Here is a young female westerner who, with her consistent inner strength and occasional outer vulnerability, recalls such characters as Lillian Gish's Letty in The Wind, Claire Trevor's Dallas in Stagecoach, Vera Miles's Hallie in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Julie Christie's Constance in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
But the Coens' No Country for Old Men provides the most effective example of a postmodern take on the genre. Primarily a crime and action thriller and a modern meditation on violence and evil, the movie echoes those Westerns that stand on the threshold between the classical and postclassical, especially in the way it focuses on the passing of the Old West and on the fading heroes who made that transition possible. The setting of No Country is the “New” West, more specifically that of West Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border circa 1980 (the movie was filmed primarily in New Mexico, with certain scenes shot in Texas). The evil that was embodied by villains in Westerns of the past reaches a new, horrifying dimension in the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, who earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his chilling performance). Chigurh is a psychotic yet methodical killer who is frequently philosophical and who espouses a (not surprisingly) bizarre worldview that zigzags between fatalism and freedom, chance and choice, causation and consequence, destiny and death.
This hit man, sent to retrieve a satchel containing two million dollars in cash from a drug deal gone wrong, obsessively pursues Vietnam War veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the man who discovered the satchel among littered corpses and near-corpses while hunting pronghorn in the desert. After deciding to keep the money and remain silent, Moss becomes the object of an intense pursuit by Chigurh, who alternates between his two weapons of choice—a slaughterhouse stun gun and a rifle with silencer—as he destroys anyone who gets in his way. Chigurh is a fascinating but also repulsive incarnation of evil situated somewhere between the primal aggression of Robert De Niro's Max Cady in Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear (1991) and the self-reflective inhumanity of Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Chigurh's malevolence reaches almost supernatural dimensions, reminding us also at times of Robert Mitchum's satanic preacher Harry Powell in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955) and Eastwood's mysterious, revenge-driven “Stranger” in High Plains Drifter (1973).
The struggle of Moss for his and his wife's survival against the threat of Chigurh is not precisely a battle between absolute good and absolute evil, as we might find in traditional Westerns such as High Noon and Shane, since Moss is far from being a knight in shining armor. After all, Moss chooses to keep the fortune he has found and refrains from reporting the crime scene to the police, suggesting perhaps that the remainder of the film is a series of negative consequences through which fate punishes Moss for his bad decision. The hero in the story, if one could call him that, is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), though he is hardly heroic in the traditional sense. He fails to find Chigurh and stop him from killing Moss, seems in no particular hurry at times to attempt to stop him, and laments that he is “overmatched” by the current force of evil facing him.
While Sheriff Bell is indeed the kind of strong, pragmatic, and stoic protagonist who exhibits the authority of experience, and who is initially expected to be able to conquer the villain and save the day, he winds up being more passive and jaded than we would like. Above all, the sheriff looks back to a better and more dignified version of the West, one in which lawmen did not always need to carry a gun (shades of Destry Rides Again), where men adhered to a code of honor (or at least a code of humanity, within broad limits), and where one knew what to expect from an enemy. The sheriff recognizes a change in the times and sees around him a West that has gone to the dogs, given the clear disintegration of a common ethos, ranging from a lack of courtesy to a seemingly new brand of evil. Bell declares at one point, “But I think once you quit hearing ‘sir' and ‘ma'am,' the rest is soon to foller.”
No Country's underlying nihilism and the sheriff's inability to comprehend and deal with his current situation make this a postmodern take on the Western, to be sure. It is a playful and cynical response to several of the genre's conventions. The movie is an entirely unique fusion of the Western, crime drama, and psychological thriller, reminding us of the combining of the Western and film noir in such post-World War II films as Pursued and The Furies. But the narrative of No Country, based closely on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, does emphasize the important differences between the cultures of the Old West and New West, particularly when it comes to Sheriff Bell's reflections on the importance of traditional mores and codes of honor in the face of changing times. Above all, the Coen brothers clearly evoke the spirit of Sam Peckinpah's recurring emphasis on the theme of an evolving West, and they pay implicit tribute to his ways of juxtaposing the ugliness of graphic violence with the beauties of the Western landscape.
The evil that Chigurh represents is a force of nature that, in transcending the conventional boundaries of the human condition, lifts the movie's narrative into the realm of the archetypal and the symbolic. It is not simply the evil of the greedy and self-centered gunslingers who obstructed the flourishing of communities and interrupted the progress of civilization. It is, rather, a form of evil that exists for its own sake, connected secondarily with a human mission (money retrieval) that merely provides an occasion for Chigurh's misanthropic destructiveness. As Sheriff Bell confesses at one point to his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin) while reminiscing about a more intelligible version of the West, the situation that he now faces is one that defies his very conception of human reality:
I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe—Jim Scarborough'd never carry one (that's the younger Jim). Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear one up in Camanche County. I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can't help but wonder how theyd've operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the ‘lectric chair in Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. “Be there in about fifteen minutes.” I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, “O.K., I'll be part of this world.”
The sheriff's uncle, a man who is familiar with the traditional ways of an older West, disagrees with his nephew's verdict, maintaining that this kind of evil has been around for a good long while, and that it must be confronted for what it is, not for what decent lawmen like Bell try to make of it: “Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming: it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.” But the sheriff does not seem so convinced. He believes that he has something new on his hands, a form of evil that is as chaotic as the times in which he lives. The sheriff is an old-fashioned warrior who has come to recognize the current wasteland for what it is: an amoral abyss that breeds monsters like Chigurh.
The kind of misanthropy and nihilism expressed by No Country is echoed by another quasi Western that was also released in 2007, and which intriguingly integrates genre elements within the dark tale of a man's ruthless quest to become an oil baron. There Will Be Blood was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) and based loosely on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. It features an Oscar-winning performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as the relentlessly ambitious and egocentric Daniel Plainview. The movie centers on themes of empire building, religion, and violence, and it emphasizes the more sinister side of the story of the Old West's transition to a modern industrial America. The movie also won a well-deserved Academy Award for Robert Elswit's cinematography, which captures stunning images of mostly barren landscape. There Will Be Blood was shot chiefly around El Mirage Dry Lake in California's Mojave Desert and around Marfa, a desert town in West Texas that had also served as the filming location for parts of George Stevens's 1956 Giant and for selected scenes of No Country for Old Men.
Daniel Plainview is an almost demonic exaggeration of the other Western empire-builders we have seen: “Senator” Jackson McCanles in Duel in the Sun, Tom Dunson in Red River, Colonel Jim Brewton in Sea of Grass, T. C. Jeffords in The Furies, Jordan Benedict and Jett Rink in Giant, and Alec Waggoman in The Man from Laramie. As with the epic stories of Dunson and Rink, we witness the process through which Plain-view achieves his goal, and through which his character becomes increasingly hardened and hateful. Like The Furies and Giant, There Will Be Blood does not focus on traditional Western themes of survival amid the wilderness or the conquest of native peoples or a showdown between gunslinging adversaries. However, certain details in addition to its Western setting mark Anderson's movie as a Western: it deals with the expansionist spirit of a growing America, a spirit that sometimes breeds tyranny and violence, and its portrait of the mercilessly self-centered Plainview reminds us of the kind of cruel determination and even megalomania that was sometimes embodied by those who viewed an “empty” territory and its natural resources as theirs for the taking.
This oil prospector, after his empire has been built, descends eventually into isolation and madness. He finally severs a long-standing relationship with his adopted son and enacts a moment of bloodthirsty vengeance against the young preacher-charlatan who had once humiliated Plainview before his church congregation. Plainview's moral and psychological disintegration, along with his later state of self-chosen alienation within a walled fortress of solitude, recalls the similar life course of the title character in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). What makes Plainview especially despicable is that he has managed to sustain and increase his brand of aggressive ambition throughout an entire career and even lifetime. He does not undergo any significant moral transformation but, rather, expresses ever more clearly and violently the inner drive toward wealth and power that had always possessed him. One of the unique characteristics of There Will Be Blood is its deliberate pacing, a highly patient and methodical form of montage that produces a meditative rhythm by stretching out shots and scenes in a way that prioritizes reflective stasis over immediate action. This pacing and rhythm makes us increasingly realize that we have had a good long opportunity to experience and reflect upon the character of Plainview, and that he has never taken a respite, no matter how briefly, from his greed-driven pursuit.
No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood may certainly be categorized as postmodern takes on the elements of a typically tradition-bound genre. The term postmodern may be loosely equated with the general idea of postclassical revisionism in describing the genre's turn away from the Hollywood Golden Age Western. But rather than applying that term to specific Western films, we may find it more fitting to think of “the postmodern” as a kind of self-conscious response to a wide-ranging era of Western films, a response that adheres to no fixed or definitive pattern when it comes to either the revival or the rejection of the traditional Western. The philosophical idea of postmodernism derives from a critique of Enlightenment-inspired tendencies to embrace principles of essentialism, universalism, and linear progress. And so, when applied to the Western film, this idea refers to a creative acceptance, on the part of filmmakers and viewers alike, of the old as well as the new, the traditional as well as the antitraditional. We should not attempt to locate the postmodern Western in a particular decade or neatly defined phase of Hollywood moviemaking, or to identify it as a particular form of critiquing or rejecting traditional genre formulas. It is safer to say that the postmodern era of the Western has grown naturally out of the entire development of the postclassical mode—just as the more commonly accepted models of the classical Western (especially A-production works of the late 1930s and early 1940s) grew out of earlier sound-era movies (e.g., Walsh's The Big Trail) and, of course, countless silent oaters.
The postmodern phase of the Western revolves around a noncritical openness to this gradual postclassical evolution. With the postmodern spin on the Western, we have entered a period of creative modification of genre elements and of a playful reverence for past developments. And if “revisionism” is to be strictly defined as an intentional critical reaction to the traditional Western—as broad-ranging as the idea of the traditional Western may be—then “the postmodern” may be construed as a move beyond revisionism in a way that incorporates and plays upon the traditional and the revisionist alike. This makes the current phase of Western movie production particularly exciting in its very unpredictability—anything goes.
The Western, then, has entered a cultural landscape where the traditional and antitraditional equally constitute a wide cinematic territory, one in which audience expectations are as eclectic as the times in which we live. “Postrevisionism,” if we may call it that, is a free-spirited, playful integration of what came before, and not strictly an outright critique or rejection of it. And in this spirit of contemporary potpourri, it is perhaps fitting that the more interesting and transformative incorporation of Western elements has occurred in those genre-crossing movies that resist being classified as Westerns.
Genres are best defined in terms of family resemblances and porous boundaries, not clear lines of demarcation, and the Western is one of the more effective examples of this basic truth. Its original formulas and conventions have been challenged, parodied, and modified since the birth of the comic Western in the silent era. We can expect to see other revivals of the classical Western in the future, especially given the critical and commercial success of the recent remake of True Grit. But we can also anticipate further examples of radical genre revising. We enjoy stories that freely traverse space and time and celebrate the thrill of adventure, and it should come as no surprise that the mythos underlying these stories is perpetually open to acts of boundary crossing.
The year 2011, for example, saw the release of Gore Verbinski's animated and comic take on the genre, Rango, as well as Jon Favreau's bigbudget Cowboys and Aliens. The latter film, as its title clearly indicates, is an action-fantasy fusion of the Western and science fiction genres. Starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and set in the Arizona territory of the 1870s, the latter film revolves around a mysterious amnesiac (Craig) who wears a strange mechanical bracelet and arrives in the town of Absolution just in time to contend with the ruthless Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford), not to mention a band of hostile aliens bent on destruction and conquest. The local cowboys, of course, must ride to the rescue, even if Winchesters are not the best weapons to shoot down spaceships; courage, strength, confidence, alliance, and stoic self-reliance are required. Cowboys and Aliens shows us that, if nothing else, we have traveled a long and winding trail since the days of the Biograph oaters and the heroics of Cheyenne Harry and Blaze Tracy. On the other hand, and despite its high-tech gloss, Favreau's film loosely recalls some of the earliest silent Westerns, perhaps most especially 1903's The Great Train Robbery. That is to say, before creators of Western movies became increasingly interested in more intricate ways of developing character and narrative, their primary goal was simply to astonish audiences with pure action and visual spectacle.
The American Western has evolved in ways that are sometimes clearly delineated and sometimes not. Recent revivals of traditional narratives and conventional visual stylizations have emerged alongside revisionist alterations of genre elements, alterations that play creatively upon the codes of the past while also pointing to the future. While the Western narrative has addressed in mythical terms the story of the transition from wilderness to modern civilization, the history of the filming of this wide-ranging narrative has evolved as much as, and been as self-transformative as, its subject matter. The primitive frontier of the Old West may now even intersect with the “new frontier” of space and our contact with extraterrestrials. Nonetheless, we are continually reminded that the Western's clearest expression of journey, adventure, and expansionism has been the journey, adventure, and expansion of the genre itself.