Introduction: The Passing of the Western

 

 

WHEN I INTRODUCED THIS in Night of the Cooters, I did a long riff on how the structure of the story drove George R. R. Martin bananas when he heard me read it. I won’t tell that again.

This was written for Joe Lansdale and Pat Lobrutto’s Razored Saddles, the cowpunk anthology.

There was, as I said, something going on in all the genre fictions in the mid-1980s—mysteries, comic books, SF, Westerns—everything was reexamining itself (except Fantasy, which seemed to be chasing itself up its retrograde butthole, then and now). Part of this was, I think, burnout on the part of the third-and-fourth generation that had been raised on the stuff and was now creating it. Like they all of a suddink (as Popeye would say) stopped and said: Why are we doing it this way? To what end? And they started doing it differently.

There is no genre so standardized as the Western, written or filmed. From The Great Train Robbery on, there were “Jersey Westerns”; because of the MPPCo. moviemaking itself moved West, where the scenery and the light were free. Méliès sent his brother to set up Star Films U.S. in San Antonio: product—Westerns. There were formula plots, seven or eight of them. The standard was the Jacobean Revenger Plot on horseback, except for the sheepherder/rancher sodbuster/rancher ones. (The old joke: Dog limps into town with a gunbelt slung around his middle. Sheriff says, “Where you goin’, boy?” Dog says, “I’m lookin’ for the feller that shot my paw.”)

And once again it took a European—this time a Brit, Kim Newman, to tell us what was there all the time: that what was going on in American society was reflected in the Western’s treatment of the cattle baron. In the ’20s he was a kindly figure whose daughter the go-getter cowboy would marry; in the Depression, he was Capitalism Rampant; in the early ’40s a benevolent, patriotic FDR figure; in the late ’40s and ’50s a psychotic madman torn apart by dissension on and off the ranch. . . .

You started getting strangely written Westerns in the 1980s (after the genre died on television—quick! Name the last regularly broadcast Western before they came back?—Kung Fu!). So-called cowpunk—from cyberpunk in SF to splatterpunk in horror to cowpunk, all lit-crit phrases—was both part and cause. Among the truly swell practitioners were Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., who loved the Western and wanted to do something new with it. Kenneth Oakley’s Season of Bloody Weather opens with Doc Holliday coughing up part of a lung in a hotel washbasin. There was so much new excitement that the late Chad Oliver wrote the two books he’d been threatening to for twenty-five years, Broken Eagle and The Cannibal Owl. (In novels, Joe’s The Magic Wagon is the true exemplar.)

I don’t look like the Western kind of guy to most folks, but don’t let that fool you. Joe said he’d have an anthology soon, would I do a story, I said sure. A few months later Joe called me and said, “Where’s the story?”

I’d been thinking about Westerns, and what would have happened if things had been a little different. I’d been reading film criticism all my reading life, and there were a couple of people I wanted to, you know, pay homage to, which will be pretty easy to figure out once you start reading this.

Indeedy, things were happening in the Western in the 1980s. I was glad to be a small part of it.