THE WESTERN
The Western
I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns...has been saved for the world by of all places, Hollywood.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Paris Review, 1967
Key Terms
1) Genre
This is the specific group within which a film may be placed. Films which are placed within a single genre must share common subjects, themes, character types, and plots. There is room for great variety within a single genre, but they must be unified by alike attributes. Within the Western Genre there is a great deal of scope for difference of theme and subject matter. For instance there is the Musical Western, where two genres overlap, or the Civil War Western, where American history is dealt with within the framework of the West. These may be called sub-genres. There are many other types of Western, but for the genre to have any meaning there must be alike attributes.
2) Iconography
These are the signs by which a particular genre, or even a particular film may be recognised. A hat or a gun, a particular style of dress, a setting such as Monument Valley, in John Ford Western's; these are the attributes by which the genre is recognised. The study of signs and their meaning is called semiology, a word coined by the English philosopher John Locke, who said 'the most usual whereof being words, as to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as to record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of ,are articulate sounds' (Locke, Book 4, Chapter 20). Ferdinand de Saussure also conceived of a 'science that studies the life of signs within society', which he called Semiology, which included symbolic rites, military signals, polite formulae, etc, with language being the most important system.
Thematic Concerns of the Western;
1) Law, Justice, Morality
2) Settlement: the city, the town, and the homestead
3) Women in the Western
4) Indians, and other so-called racial sub-types, ie. immigrant Americans from Europe, Mexicans, Japanese and Chinese
Authorship
It is more difficult to determine authorship in a film than in a novel, for instance, because a film has many more production staff, lighting engineers, cameramen, editors, actors etc. However, it is usual to cite the director as the author, or as the French theorists of the nouvelle vague had it, the auteur. The auteur of The Searchers is John Ford, the director, but the film may also be seen as a John Wayne film. The auteur critic concentrates his or her efforts upon the corpus of films left by a single director, and common unifying themes, characters and images are sought. This overlaps somewhat with the aspirations of the genre critic, who, usually working from a sociological viewpoint, attempts to find themes and images which unite a number of films by different directors.
The Searchers
The Searchers depicts the quest of Ethan Edward's for his two neices, both abducted on a commanche 'murder raid'. The quest motif is a favourite literary mode, see, for instance. The Odyssey. The film concerns itself with the way in which American identity is constructed, the quest, in a sense, concerns Ethan's and Martin's search for their own individual identities. Ethan returns home three years after the end of the Civil War. The film indicates that the three years were spent in Mexico, as an outlaw, or as a soldier in the army of Maximillien. In the opening shot Ethan is set against the darkness of the interior of the cabin. He is thus depicted as antipathetic to the settled, established life of the homestead and of the family. The first shot unites with the last, where Ethan is unable to enter the homestead, and instead re-enters the wilderness. The juxtaposition of wilderness and garden is important to the film. The importance of race and ethnic identity is also paramount in the film. Martin Pauley is eighth commanche, and this is remarked upon by Ethan at the start of the film. Ethan's obsession over racial purity erupts into his concern that the girls will be contaminated by their commanche captors. However, when Martin takes a commanche bride there is no such concern. Obviously, Ethan sees the commanche male as ravisher, the commanche female is to be ravished. But in Ethan's obsession with racial purity there is doubt about his status. Ethan is outside the gamut of settlement and thus is strangely other, like the commanche. Both Ethan and Martin fail to belong to the family, and their quest is toward their own integration as individuals. This Martin accomplishes, but Ethan fails. At the beginning of the film Ethan is subtly implicated as his sister-in-law's would-be lover. Thus Ethan's quest may be seen as an expiation of guilt, or of his obligation to the mother of the girls. His desire to kill his neice is another example of his blood thirsty hatred of the Indian, and the desire has mysogynist overtones as well. Martin however protects Debby, though it might be said that the entire white community desires her death (Laurie's exhortation before the raid on Scar's encampment iterates this). It must be asked, what are Ford's intentions in this? Is the film racist, as some crtics maintain? Ford's comments on the film seem to refute this. Is Ethan a caricature of the white racist? And are his desires a reflection of the desires of a white audience?
Stagecoach
Stagecoach is the epitomy of the classic Western as described by Bazin. A group of disparate people take a stagecoach journey during an Indian rising. The group has been seen as a representation of America. As Andrew Sarris says:
It would be fairly easy to work out a symbolic reading of the plot and characters of Stagecoach. The coach is America, a nation of exiles, riven with warring and contradictory factions; the Indians are the wild forces of nature; the pregnant woman is Liberty; the banker is the corrupt Republican Establishment, the spokesman for selfish individualism; the benevolent sheriff riding shotgun is Roosevelt; the Plummer Gang are the Axis powers; Buck, the driver, and his Mexican wife 'Hoolietta' are the ethnic mixtures which give the country its democratic character.
The coach is divided between social mis-fits and outcasts (Doc Boone, the Ringo Kid, Dallas), who are at the mercy of the Woman's Temperance League, or of the Law; and Establishment figures, such as the corrupt banker, the pregnant woman and Curly. There are manifest tensions between the characters, and these tend to follow the lines of Confederate/Union (Doc Boone/the gambler), law and order (Curly/the Ringo Kid), respectable womanhood/prostitute (the pregnant woman/Dallas).
The film is structured according to several narrative 'hooks', which ease the viewer into the narrative, and keep his or her attention. The viewer accordingly suspends his or her disbelief, and is prepared to accept the conventions of storytelling and of genre. In Stagecoach there are several stories which animate the characters. There is the Ringo Kid and his feud with the Plummers, the pregnant woman and her child, etc. The conventions of storytelling and of genre sometimes defy textual and historical fidelity. For instance, the chase by the Indians across the salt flats could have been terminated easily if the Indians had shot the lead horses, as they would have done in reality. But the narrative hook which ends with the rescue of the Stagecoach by the cavalry is a convention of the Western. A sophisticated director will play with the conventions and the audience's expectations. The audience accepts this, and becomes increasingly sophisticated in its turn. In a modern Western, Heaven's Gate, the cavalry arrive to defeat the settlers, in a reversal of the normal pattern. Stagecoach is a seminal text in the history of the Western because it defines narrative style and the construction of mise en scene, it defines the way in which conventions function in regard to these, and gives an overall effect of being properly and beautifully constructed. But it is important that we 'decode' these categories, so that their effects can be properly analysed. The narrative code of 'entertainment' is one that demands special attention. Why does story entertain, and what pleasures does it sustain to achieve its overall effect? If we approach the ideological contexts in which the film was made (ie the outbreak of WW2), is the effect of entertainment somehow mystifying? Or is narrative pleasure a natural effect and attribute, as appealing as rhyme in poetry, or the denoument of a novel? The system of signs by which Stagecoach is constituted is an aesthetic and extra-textual machine for producing intellectual and discursive effects upon an audience constituted by a series of agreed ideological, textual and aesthetic conventions. But the effects of a work like Stagecoach are not totally predictable in their extent and form.
Theory of the Western
The Western was not taken seriously by critics in England and America initially, for it was thought to be a superficial and naive genre, which could not compare with the European art movie. Accordingly they looked down upon it condescendingly. It was left to the French film critics and theorists of politiques des auteurs to recognise the importance of the Western. They singled out several qualities of especial importance, "its directness, its intelligence, its energy, its formal concerns."(Lovell) The Western had begun to evolve at the start of the Twentieth-century. This coincided with the end of the history of the West, the beginnings of mass culture in America, the end of the history of Indian settlement and migration. The first Western was The Great Train Robbery. Although primitive, certain traits of the Western as we know it had already begun to evolve. These motifs were developed in the silent era, until they were crystallised in the Western Stagecoach. Andre Bazin noted that:
Stagecoach (1939) is the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection. John Ford struck the ideal balance between social myth, historical reconstruction, psychological truth, and the traditional theme of the Western mise en scene....Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position. (The Evolution of the Western)
Bazin located the golden age of the Western as belonging to this era, and the epitomy of the classic Western was Stagecoach. To iterate an earlier point, the Western developed at a time when American identity was beginning to be shaped. As a nation of natives and settlers, of Indian, Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, Irish et al the notion of identity was much more difficult to gauge. Thus, film-makers and writers sought to rediscover, or mythologise the history of the West, and to thereby discover the nature of the identity of Americans. This is why the notion of identity is a central concern of the Western (see The Searchers).
In the essay The Evolution of the Western the French film theorist Andre Bazin identified the 'SuperWestern', which is a baroque development from the classicism of Stagecoach. This "imported fresh elements (sociological, moral, erotic) to enrich itself." Typical examples of this are Shane and High Noon. To complement the 'SuperWestern', Bazin also evolved the concept of the sincerely made "B" Western, which he saw as taking on a "novelistic quality, best presented in the films of Anthony Mann". In the theorisation of the Western, two main critical poles identify themselves. These are the genre critic and the auteur critic. The genre critic approaches the Western from a sociological perspective, identifying trends within the Western which relate back to social and historical perspectives. However, the genre critic is rarely naive about the complex relation between the artwork and the reality it seeks to depict. Often this critic differentiates between history and mythology. He may identify certain archetypes utilised constantly in the Western. These archetypes are the fundamental symbols by which the Western may be recognised. The auteur critic relates the films of a single director to a set of unifying themes, images and symbols. Critics may examine the work of a single director, and in a given case a director may work in a single genre, or a great variety of genres (ie Howard Hawks).
Quality and Evaluation
Within literary criticism the idea of evaluation and quality is a predominant and privileged discourse. However, literary critics and sociologists have begun to look at popular and mass culture, and to discern its effects. Within film studies the question of mass culture has been more critical, since Holywood cinema, the most predominant cinematic culture, is motivated towards profit and not artistic merit. However, film critics have begun to discern that Holywood film may not be just interesting to sociologists, but may be a viable art form in itself. Thus, quality may reside within a popular discourse. Individual directors, who opposed the studio system, have always been eminent inside Holywood, and may be seen as so-called auteurs (ie Chaplin, Welles). How far can this idea of evaluation be taken? For instance, can soap operas and even advertisements be seen as meriting attention to their artistic effects, or are they outside the critical domain?
Conventions and Receptions
The importance of convention was described last week as a fundamental facet of genre. It is also responsible for the pleasures of narrative, where audience expectations are satisfied or forestalled, satisfied or denied. The other important pole of this argument is the reception of texts by an audience. Obviously audiences are constituted by a number of individuals, sharing different social and aesthetic assumptions. For a text to be meaningfully transmitted it must be received by the audience. Of course, audiences are differentiated on lines of gender, race, class, age. Thus there are different audiences, with different sets of shared assumptions.
It might be said that the Western is a masculine genre, and may be compared with the Musical, a feminine genre. This dichotomy is too simplistic to be sustained, however. The Western fetishises the figure of the male, and establishes a machismo quality, while also eulogising the pleasures of male camaraderie. A strain of homo-eroticism and male narcissism distinguishes the Western. In Stagecoach the women tend to occupy positions classically defined within the Western. The pregnant woman, the wife of a cavalry officer, is protected by the Southern gambler. Dallas, the prostitute, is driven out of the town by the Women's Temperance League. Thus women are asssociated both with that which is morally illicit, and that which is morally upright. The men are not defined in this same way, except for the corrupt banker. Women are either wives or prostitutes, there being no middle ground. This is typical of the Western, which defines women as being either moral or immoral. The other women in the film are Buck's Mexican wife, and the wife of the innkeeper, who is an apache. She is defined as 'savage' by the corrupt banker, and she ultimately owes her allegiance to Geronimo. It is interesting to note the way in which she is foregrounded by the camera, brought to the gaze of the viewer by a close up, we are left to examine her.
High Noon
High Noon is the epitomy of the 'SuperWestern' described by Andre Bazin. According to Bazin the SuperWestern imported elements, sociological, moral, erotic to enrich itself. High Noon is a political allegory transposed to the Western genre, and deals with a small Western town beset with forces which seek to destroy it. The establishment of a modicum of civilisation in the town is brought about by the arrest and sentencing of Frank Miller, a local gunslinger. But Frank Miller returns with his gang to wreak revenge on the Marshall (Gary Cooper). Social and personal problems manifest themselves as the Marshall tries to recruit special deputies to deal with the gang. The legacy of the past returns to haunt the peaceable townfolk, as one by one they abandon the Marshall. The film was made at the same time as the McCarthy trials, and the film has often been seen as referring to this. Other works of the same period (such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible) sought to discuss this theme, but, for the sake of censorship, had to transpose it to a different period of American history. Arthur Miller chose the Salem witch hunts, Fred Zinneman the Western. The film is also rather like the Ibsen play Pillars of Society, where a member of a small community finds that the valuable spring water which the town manufactures is contaminated. The community is built upon contaminated springs, which acts as a metaphor for bourgeois society.
The film is temporally exact, all the action occurs within one hour. Music is an important correlative within the film. It is both primitive and emotive, as the thud of the bass propels the film towards its climax. The lyrics are also important and help to outline and engage with the themes of the story. The fragility of Western society is fully outlined in the film, with the Marshall attempting to gather the townfolk who will not stand up and be counted. They each make plausible excuses, but in the face of mass cowardice the Marshall is forced to fight alone. This is a detailed recapitulation of the McCarthy period, when individual directors and stars were forced to name the names of known communists. Communist sympathisers were driven out of Hollywood (ie Chaplin) unable to find work in the face of a frightened community. The outlaws who return to the town may be seen as McCarthyites, or perhaps as insurgent communists, both interpretations seem permissible. The Marshall's past involvement with a Mexican woman (Mrs Ramirez) is important. Both Frank Miller and the Marshall's deputy (Lloyd Bridges) have and are also involved with her, and it is she who is driven out by the gang. The Marshall, by defeating the gang, asserts the values of authority and civilisation, against those of anarchy and barbarism. Yet the values which the Marshall stands for are rapidly becoming rigidly authoritarian, as the city fathers and the law they represent decays. The triumph of authority is moulded by the cowardice of the townsfolk, it is also the triumph of individualism over establishment.
I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns...has been saved for the world by of all places, Hollywood.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Paris Review, 1967
Key Terms
1) Genre
This is the specific group within which a film may be placed. Films which are placed within a single genre must share common subjects, themes, character types, and plots. There is room for great variety within a single genre, but they must be unified by alike attributes. Within the Western Genre there is a great deal of scope for difference of theme and subject matter. For instance there is the Musical Western, where two genres overlap, or the Civil War Western, where American history is dealt with within the framework of the West. These may be called sub-genres. There are many other types of Western, but for the genre to have any meaning there must be alike attributes.
2) Iconography
These are the signs by which a particular genre, or even a particular film may be recognised. A hat or a gun, a particular style of dress, a setting such as Monument Valley, in John Ford Western's; these are the attributes by which the genre is recognised. The study of signs and their meaning is called semiology, a word coined by the English philosopher John Locke, who said 'the most usual whereof being words, as to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as to record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of ,are articulate sounds' (Locke, Book 4, Chapter 20). Ferdinand de Saussure also conceived of a 'science that studies the life of signs within society', which he called Semiology, which included symbolic rites, military signals, polite formulae, etc, with language being the most important system.
Thematic Concerns of the Western;
1) Law, Justice, Morality
2) Settlement: the city, the town, and the homestead
3) Women in the Western
4) Indians, and other so-called racial sub-types, ie. immigrant Americans from Europe, Mexicans, Japanese and Chinese
Authorship
It is more difficult to determine authorship in a film than in a novel, for instance, because a film has many more production staff, lighting engineers, cameramen, editors, actors etc. However, it is usual to cite the director as the author, or as the French theorists of the nouvelle vague had it, the auteur. The auteur of The Searchers is John Ford, the director, but the film may also be seen as a John Wayne film. The auteur critic concentrates his or her efforts upon the corpus of films left by a single director, and common unifying themes, characters and images are sought. This overlaps somewhat with the aspirations of the genre critic, who, usually working from a sociological viewpoint, attempts to find themes and images which unite a number of films by different directors.
The Searchers
The Searchers depicts the quest of Ethan Edward's for his two neices, both abducted on a commanche 'murder raid'. The quest motif is a favourite literary mode, see, for instance. The Odyssey. The film concerns itself with the way in which American identity is constructed, the quest, in a sense, concerns Ethan's and Martin's search for their own individual identities. Ethan returns home three years after the end of the Civil War. The film indicates that the three years were spent in Mexico, as an outlaw, or as a soldier in the army of Maximillien. In the opening shot Ethan is set against the darkness of the interior of the cabin. He is thus depicted as antipathetic to the settled, established life of the homestead and of the family. The first shot unites with the last, where Ethan is unable to enter the homestead, and instead re-enters the wilderness. The juxtaposition of wilderness and garden is important to the film. The importance of race and ethnic identity is also paramount in the film. Martin Pauley is eighth commanche, and this is remarked upon by Ethan at the start of the film. Ethan's obsession over racial purity erupts into his concern that the girls will be contaminated by their commanche captors. However, when Martin takes a commanche bride there is no such concern. Obviously, Ethan sees the commanche male as ravisher, the commanche female is to be ravished. But in Ethan's obsession with racial purity there is doubt about his status. Ethan is outside the gamut of settlement and thus is strangely other, like the commanche. Both Ethan and Martin fail to belong to the family, and their quest is toward their own integration as individuals. This Martin accomplishes, but Ethan fails. At the beginning of the film Ethan is subtly implicated as his sister-in-law's would-be lover. Thus Ethan's quest may be seen as an expiation of guilt, or of his obligation to the mother of the girls. His desire to kill his neice is another example of his blood thirsty hatred of the Indian, and the desire has mysogynist overtones as well. Martin however protects Debby, though it might be said that the entire white community desires her death (Laurie's exhortation before the raid on Scar's encampment iterates this). It must be asked, what are Ford's intentions in this? Is the film racist, as some crtics maintain? Ford's comments on the film seem to refute this. Is Ethan a caricature of the white racist? And are his desires a reflection of the desires of a white audience?
Stagecoach
Stagecoach is the epitomy of the classic Western as described by Bazin. A group of disparate people take a stagecoach journey during an Indian rising. The group has been seen as a representation of America. As Andrew Sarris says:
It would be fairly easy to work out a symbolic reading of the plot and characters of Stagecoach. The coach is America, a nation of exiles, riven with warring and contradictory factions; the Indians are the wild forces of nature; the pregnant woman is Liberty; the banker is the corrupt Republican Establishment, the spokesman for selfish individualism; the benevolent sheriff riding shotgun is Roosevelt; the Plummer Gang are the Axis powers; Buck, the driver, and his Mexican wife 'Hoolietta' are the ethnic mixtures which give the country its democratic character.
The coach is divided between social mis-fits and outcasts (Doc Boone, the Ringo Kid, Dallas), who are at the mercy of the Woman's Temperance League, or of the Law; and Establishment figures, such as the corrupt banker, the pregnant woman and Curly. There are manifest tensions between the characters, and these tend to follow the lines of Confederate/Union (Doc Boone/the gambler), law and order (Curly/the Ringo Kid), respectable womanhood/prostitute (the pregnant woman/Dallas).
The film is structured according to several narrative 'hooks', which ease the viewer into the narrative, and keep his or her attention. The viewer accordingly suspends his or her disbelief, and is prepared to accept the conventions of storytelling and of genre. In Stagecoach there are several stories which animate the characters. There is the Ringo Kid and his feud with the Plummers, the pregnant woman and her child, etc. The conventions of storytelling and of genre sometimes defy textual and historical fidelity. For instance, the chase by the Indians across the salt flats could have been terminated easily if the Indians had shot the lead horses, as they would have done in reality. But the narrative hook which ends with the rescue of the Stagecoach by the cavalry is a convention of the Western. A sophisticated director will play with the conventions and the audience's expectations. The audience accepts this, and becomes increasingly sophisticated in its turn. In a modern Western, Heaven's Gate, the cavalry arrive to defeat the settlers, in a reversal of the normal pattern. Stagecoach is a seminal text in the history of the Western because it defines narrative style and the construction of mise en scene, it defines the way in which conventions function in regard to these, and gives an overall effect of being properly and beautifully constructed. But it is important that we 'decode' these categories, so that their effects can be properly analysed. The narrative code of 'entertainment' is one that demands special attention. Why does story entertain, and what pleasures does it sustain to achieve its overall effect? If we approach the ideological contexts in which the film was made (ie the outbreak of WW2), is the effect of entertainment somehow mystifying? Or is narrative pleasure a natural effect and attribute, as appealing as rhyme in poetry, or the denoument of a novel? The system of signs by which Stagecoach is constituted is an aesthetic and extra-textual machine for producing intellectual and discursive effects upon an audience constituted by a series of agreed ideological, textual and aesthetic conventions. But the effects of a work like Stagecoach are not totally predictable in their extent and form.
Theory of the Western
The Western was not taken seriously by critics in England and America initially, for it was thought to be a superficial and naive genre, which could not compare with the European art movie. Accordingly they looked down upon it condescendingly. It was left to the French film critics and theorists of politiques des auteurs to recognise the importance of the Western. They singled out several qualities of especial importance, "its directness, its intelligence, its energy, its formal concerns."(Lovell) The Western had begun to evolve at the start of the Twentieth-century. This coincided with the end of the history of the West, the beginnings of mass culture in America, the end of the history of Indian settlement and migration. The first Western was The Great Train Robbery. Although primitive, certain traits of the Western as we know it had already begun to evolve. These motifs were developed in the silent era, until they were crystallised in the Western Stagecoach. Andre Bazin noted that:
Stagecoach (1939) is the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection. John Ford struck the ideal balance between social myth, historical reconstruction, psychological truth, and the traditional theme of the Western mise en scene....Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position. (The Evolution of the Western)
Bazin located the golden age of the Western as belonging to this era, and the epitomy of the classic Western was Stagecoach. To iterate an earlier point, the Western developed at a time when American identity was beginning to be shaped. As a nation of natives and settlers, of Indian, Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, Irish et al the notion of identity was much more difficult to gauge. Thus, film-makers and writers sought to rediscover, or mythologise the history of the West, and to thereby discover the nature of the identity of Americans. This is why the notion of identity is a central concern of the Western (see The Searchers).
In the essay The Evolution of the Western the French film theorist Andre Bazin identified the 'SuperWestern', which is a baroque development from the classicism of Stagecoach. This "imported fresh elements (sociological, moral, erotic) to enrich itself." Typical examples of this are Shane and High Noon. To complement the 'SuperWestern', Bazin also evolved the concept of the sincerely made "B" Western, which he saw as taking on a "novelistic quality, best presented in the films of Anthony Mann". In the theorisation of the Western, two main critical poles identify themselves. These are the genre critic and the auteur critic. The genre critic approaches the Western from a sociological perspective, identifying trends within the Western which relate back to social and historical perspectives. However, the genre critic is rarely naive about the complex relation between the artwork and the reality it seeks to depict. Often this critic differentiates between history and mythology. He may identify certain archetypes utilised constantly in the Western. These archetypes are the fundamental symbols by which the Western may be recognised. The auteur critic relates the films of a single director to a set of unifying themes, images and symbols. Critics may examine the work of a single director, and in a given case a director may work in a single genre, or a great variety of genres (ie Howard Hawks).
Quality and Evaluation
Within literary criticism the idea of evaluation and quality is a predominant and privileged discourse. However, literary critics and sociologists have begun to look at popular and mass culture, and to discern its effects. Within film studies the question of mass culture has been more critical, since Holywood cinema, the most predominant cinematic culture, is motivated towards profit and not artistic merit. However, film critics have begun to discern that Holywood film may not be just interesting to sociologists, but may be a viable art form in itself. Thus, quality may reside within a popular discourse. Individual directors, who opposed the studio system, have always been eminent inside Holywood, and may be seen as so-called auteurs (ie Chaplin, Welles). How far can this idea of evaluation be taken? For instance, can soap operas and even advertisements be seen as meriting attention to their artistic effects, or are they outside the critical domain?
Conventions and Receptions
The importance of convention was described last week as a fundamental facet of genre. It is also responsible for the pleasures of narrative, where audience expectations are satisfied or forestalled, satisfied or denied. The other important pole of this argument is the reception of texts by an audience. Obviously audiences are constituted by a number of individuals, sharing different social and aesthetic assumptions. For a text to be meaningfully transmitted it must be received by the audience. Of course, audiences are differentiated on lines of gender, race, class, age. Thus there are different audiences, with different sets of shared assumptions.
It might be said that the Western is a masculine genre, and may be compared with the Musical, a feminine genre. This dichotomy is too simplistic to be sustained, however. The Western fetishises the figure of the male, and establishes a machismo quality, while also eulogising the pleasures of male camaraderie. A strain of homo-eroticism and male narcissism distinguishes the Western. In Stagecoach the women tend to occupy positions classically defined within the Western. The pregnant woman, the wife of a cavalry officer, is protected by the Southern gambler. Dallas, the prostitute, is driven out of the town by the Women's Temperance League. Thus women are asssociated both with that which is morally illicit, and that which is morally upright. The men are not defined in this same way, except for the corrupt banker. Women are either wives or prostitutes, there being no middle ground. This is typical of the Western, which defines women as being either moral or immoral. The other women in the film are Buck's Mexican wife, and the wife of the innkeeper, who is an apache. She is defined as 'savage' by the corrupt banker, and she ultimately owes her allegiance to Geronimo. It is interesting to note the way in which she is foregrounded by the camera, brought to the gaze of the viewer by a close up, we are left to examine her.
High Noon
High Noon is the epitomy of the 'SuperWestern' described by Andre Bazin. According to Bazin the SuperWestern imported elements, sociological, moral, erotic to enrich itself. High Noon is a political allegory transposed to the Western genre, and deals with a small Western town beset with forces which seek to destroy it. The establishment of a modicum of civilisation in the town is brought about by the arrest and sentencing of Frank Miller, a local gunslinger. But Frank Miller returns with his gang to wreak revenge on the Marshall (Gary Cooper). Social and personal problems manifest themselves as the Marshall tries to recruit special deputies to deal with the gang. The legacy of the past returns to haunt the peaceable townfolk, as one by one they abandon the Marshall. The film was made at the same time as the McCarthy trials, and the film has often been seen as referring to this. Other works of the same period (such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible) sought to discuss this theme, but, for the sake of censorship, had to transpose it to a different period of American history. Arthur Miller chose the Salem witch hunts, Fred Zinneman the Western. The film is also rather like the Ibsen play Pillars of Society, where a member of a small community finds that the valuable spring water which the town manufactures is contaminated. The community is built upon contaminated springs, which acts as a metaphor for bourgeois society.
The film is temporally exact, all the action occurs within one hour. Music is an important correlative within the film. It is both primitive and emotive, as the thud of the bass propels the film towards its climax. The lyrics are also important and help to outline and engage with the themes of the story. The fragility of Western society is fully outlined in the film, with the Marshall attempting to gather the townfolk who will not stand up and be counted. They each make plausible excuses, but in the face of mass cowardice the Marshall is forced to fight alone. This is a detailed recapitulation of the McCarthy period, when individual directors and stars were forced to name the names of known communists. Communist sympathisers were driven out of Hollywood (ie Chaplin) unable to find work in the face of a frightened community. The outlaws who return to the town may be seen as McCarthyites, or perhaps as insurgent communists, both interpretations seem permissible. The Marshall's past involvement with a Mexican woman (Mrs Ramirez) is important. Both Frank Miller and the Marshall's deputy (Lloyd Bridges) have and are also involved with her, and it is she who is driven out by the gang. The Marshall, by defeating the gang, asserts the values of authority and civilisation, against those of anarchy and barbarism. Yet the values which the Marshall stands for are rapidly becoming rigidly authoritarian, as the city fathers and the law they represent decays. The triumph of authority is moulded by the cowardice of the townsfolk, it is also the triumph of individualism over establishment.
posted by Paul Murphy at
February 23, 2008
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