TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON—SO THE PREACHER would have it—and we have now arrived at the season in which the meaning of Westerns can be made clear.
Professor Will Wright, in a book called Sixguns in Society, has done for the Western what Lord Raglan did for the Hero in the classic study by that name which he produced in 1936. Wright never mentions Lord Raglan, and he should have, since it was Lord Raglan, not Claude Lévi-Strauss or Vladimir Propp, who pioneered the kind of inquiry he is engaged in. I am convinced that The Hero makes a better parent for a structural study of the Western than either The Raw and the Cooked or Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale; what the former has going for it is a high but not overly subtle intelligence, and a methodology that is less, rather than more, complex than the organization of the subject matter itself.
In saying as much, I don’t mean to prejudice readers against Wright’s book. Sixguns in Society is an excellent book, far and away the most valuable critical effort to concern itself with Westerns. It is good enough, in fact, to be approached with faint misgivings.
Watching Wright’s fascinating, but nonetheless merciless, exposure of the structure of Westerns is not unlike having to watch an old friend go under the knife. There is no doubt that the surgery exposes what’s really there, but there is some doubt that the old friend will ever be quite as affecting again. In his conclusion, Wright waxes, if not quite messianic, at least extremely optimistic. By understanding the conceptual world of the Western, he thinks we may come to a better understanding of our own social existence, and thus improve our lives. Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
In my most recent novel a lady remarks to her daughter that understanding is overrated, mystery underrated—a view I am strongly inclined to stand behind. Wright knows what happens in Westerns, but does he know what happens to a myth, once it’s been under the knife? Does understanding it increase, or diminish, its resonance and power?
The people whose myths Lévi-Strauss analyzes will never read the analysis, but I had hardly finished the book before The Wild Bunch showed up on television, and I was forced to try and enjoy it in the light of all my new knowledge. The experience was not without its interest, but I am not sure that, as Wright would hope, it made me more rationally aware of the conditions under which I live.
What it did, however, was to suggest to me that in our time the television rerun has replaced the oral tradition, upon which, for so long, the transmission of myth depended. Instead of hearing a favored story once or twice a year at the knee of an elder, one watches it once or twice a year along with a shifting complement of commercials.
Despite three-quarters of a century of fairly intensive scholarship, it seems still impossible to say with precision either what a myth is or what it does. Sixguns in Society is as much about myth as it is about movies, and it is almost, if not quite, as technical in its analysis as is Lévi-Strauss himself.
No one, anymore, is willing to take a commonsense approach to definition for fear of being thought intellectually crude, but Wright, at least, has enough sense to resist Lévi-Strauss’s theory that the structure of myth derives its consistency from the structure of the human brain itself. If the structure of the mythic story parallels the structure of our brains, as Lévi-Strauss would have us believe, one would almost have to posit God as storyteller, a sort of divine propagandist who wants his children to have only those stories that are good for them.
Reviewing myth criticism is, frankly, a nerve-racking business, because virtually all contemporary myth criticism and myth theory is so complex as to be beyond summary. To try and describe a theory in less complex terms than the theory itself will be reductive and distorting.
I personally was happy for years with Lord Raglan’s definition of myth, which is that a myth is a story accompanying a ritual, but this definition has long since been discarded as absurdly simple.
Wright should be congratulated for reminding us that myths are embodied in stories; he suggests, sensibly, that more attention should be paid to the stories, which may in some cases be the myths. Myth, however, remains a more potent word than story, perhaps because it still suggests both the sacred and the heroic, whereas stories are often merely secular, vulgar, and low.
For Wright, myth has, above all, social importance. Westerns, or anything else embodying myth, are for him conceptual responses to the requirements of human action in a social situation. Mythic stories represent a symbolic ordering of these requirements. Societies need myths in order to function with awareness and understanding. Though I am not sure that Wright directly says so, I think he believes that societies generally manage to find the myths they need, the myths that will best reconcile them to their own experience.
This belief, I suspect, is implicit in Wright’s criterion of selection, which is box office. The sixty-odd Westerns that he chooses to analyze are the top-grossing Westerns from 1930 to 1972, films that have all earned more than $4 million in rentals in the United States and Canada. Since these films are the top grossers, it is clear, at least to Wright, that the public accepts them; in analyzing films that have had a wide acceptance, he feels that he gives his study wider validity.
At this point, I find I have problems with his approach. Because these sixty films have had wide acceptance, Wright suggests that they embody myths that are models of social action. He traces and analyzes four distinct narrative stages in the development of the Western, suggesting that changes in the structure of the Western constitute symbolic parallels to changes in American social institutions.
The fly in the ointment, as I see it, is that the sixty top-grossing Westerns of the last forty-five years are by no means the sixty top-grossing films from that stretch of our history. Wright himself points out that by far the most financially successful Western ever made, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, only ranks thirteenth on Variety’s list of all-time money-makers; the next Western to be ranked, How the West Was Won, is a measly twenty-third, and probably got that high only because of Cinerama.
If the potency and relevance of the Western myth are not sufficient to get even one film into the top ten, then how can one argue that Westerns are the myths we most want, need, and accept? If the box office is going to provide Wright with his criterion of selection and ensure his thesis a wide validity, it would seem that he ought to be analyzing the real money-makers. What significance must we then attribute to the structure of The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Jaws?
Moreover, if popularity is going to constitute significance, as it seems to in Wright’s study, then what about the TV Western, most particularly “Gunsmoke”? In the twenty years it was running, probably more people saw it than have seen all sixty of Wright’s Westerns put together; had it not been widely acceptable it certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to continue. One can detect in “Gunsmoke” the four oppositions that Wright finds to be central to the Western myth—these being inside society/outside society, good/bad, strong/weak, and wilderness/civilization—but the alienation from society that is common to almost all heroes of Western movies, of whatever narrative stage, is not observable in Marshal Dillon. Instead, he is the pivot of his community, the social man par excellence. Perhaps “Gunsmoke” represents an idiosyncratic variation, one that Wright’s system can handle; at any rate so popular an embodiment of Western themes deserves, at least, to have some account taken of it.
On the other hand, I would hate to see popularity pushed too far as a criterion of significance. In a culture as polyglot as ours, popularity is no reliable index; powerful, potent, and mythically representative films may fail through bad handling, bad timing, or any of the usual quirks of circumstance. Analysis of an unsuccessful but thematically rich film with a relatively low gross, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, might prove just as pertinent as a methodologically identical analysis of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Wright is to be commended, however, not on the impregnability of his system, but on the quality of his particular analyses. The four narrative stages that he defines are worth describing.
The first is what he calls the “classical plot.” In this plot, a hero of exceptional ability enters a social group from the outside. At first, the hero is not completely accepted by the society, but the society is being threatened by villains whose strength exceeds its own. The hero attempts to stay out of this conflict, but is finally drawn into it, and fights the villains. Eventually, the hero defeats the villains, and makes the society safe. The society then accepts the hero, who loses or gives up his special status. Movies of this type include Cimarron, Dodge City, San Antonio, Yellow Sky, Vera Cruz, Saskatchewan, Shane, and Hombre.
The second stage Wright calls the “vengeance variation.” In the classical plot, the hero enters the fight because of his strength and the society’s weakness; in the vengeance variation the hero leaves the society, for the same reasons. The classical hero approves of the values of the society; the vengeance hero abandons the society because of its values. He goes outside the society in order to wreak vengeance on the villains who have hurt it, and returns to it only when he has defeated them. Westerns in this category include Stagecoach, Red River, Winchester ’73, The Man From Laramie, The Searchers, One-Eyed Jacks, and Nevada Smith.
In the third stage, which Wright calls the “transition theme,” the classical plot has been almost reversed. The hero goes from inside the society to outside it. At this stage, the society is stronger than either the hero or the villains, but it refuses to aid the hero in his uneven fight with the villains, so that eventually he must fight against it, too. The woman he loves is unable to reconcile him to the society, and in the end joins him in his separation from it. The three successful films embodying this pattern are Broken Arrow, Johnny Guitar, and, of course, High Noon.
Finally, we come to what Wright calls the “professional plot,” easily the dominant plot of the last decade. In this plot, the heroes are professional men who undertake a job against villains who are very strong. The society is particularly ineffective. The heroes, each of whom has special skills, form a group independent of society; as a group they share affection and loyalty. The heroes defeat the villains and in doing so either stay, or die, together. Prominent examples are Rio Bravo, The Professionals, The Wild Bunch, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
These categories are orderly, well worked out, useful, and convincing, and the particular analyses which accompany them are Empsonian in their clarity and precision. Still, I am not sure that we can allow Wright’s claim to having “recreated” the Western, by making it possible for us to see Westerns in a fully conceptualized, socially meaningful way.
I think most of us will probably go on seeing Westerns in the mute, muddled way that we have always seen them. If we walk out better citizens, it will likely be because we have escaped from care into fantasy for a few hours, not because we now realize how capitalistic democracy gradually created the tensions and pressures under which most of us groan.
Nor, finally, am I persuaded that structuralist analysis is the only, or necessarily the best, conceptual vocabulary with which to handle the Western. As I suggested some time ago (“Movie Cowboys, Movies, Myths, and Cadillacs,” In a Narrow Grave, 1968), Northrop Frye’s theory of fictional modes also offers a workable vocabulary, and a method that is flexible and inclusive. Using his terms, Westerns can be seen to have worked their way down from levels of heroic romance, through high-mimetic (tragic) and low-mimetic (realistic) modes, to arrive at the ironic mode (for example, Little Big Man).
The point on Frye’s cycle next to the ironic is once again the mythic; the reappearance of the heroic outsider who comes to the aid of society (but remains outside) in A Fistful of Dollars may parallel, at a crude level, the reappearance of myth in an ironical masterpiece like Ulysses. A category like the low-mimetic is helpful in discussing Westerns like Welcome to Hard Times, in which the hero, society’s protector, far from having special abilities, is either reluctant or downright cowardly.
Still, that there may be alternatives to Wright’s method does not detract from the overall impressiveness of the book he has delivered. Two other recent books about Westerns, Jenni Calder’s There Must Be a Lone Ranger and Jon Tuska’s Filming of the West, seem, by comparison, lightweight and journalistic, despite the fact that Tuska’s is as heavy as a lead weight.
Wright has broken new ground in an area that has seen no cultivation at all—on a conceptual level—since Robert Warshow published his famous pilot essay in 1954. Warshow’s thesis, of course, was that the Western’s broad appeal resulted from the fact that it offered a “serious orientation to the problem of violence.” In the Western, the violence that the hero invariably commits remains to some extent under a moral control. Moreover, and just as importantly, when it is practiced, it is not allowed merely to happen: It is accomplished, that is to say, practiced with style.
That is, of course, a good point, but it is only one point. The fact that Warshow wrote with the authority of Commentary and the Partisan Review behind him lent it an unnatural currency (it was reprinted in Encounter, Preuves, and Der Monat, and still pops up now and then in anthologies). Warshow died shortly after having his say, and his say was evidently thought to be about enough. Virtually the first serious criticism ever written about the Western seemed destined, for a time, to be the last.
Fortunately, Wright—sitting tall in the saddle, as it were—has reminded us that in America there need be no last words.
Whether there are second acts is another question.