For the last couple of decades, enthusiasts have lamented the demise of Westerns. The rest of the world went about their business, ignorant that anyone cared about a genre relegated to a few obscure shelves at the local bookstore. Westerns were hugely popular for over a hundred years. Not only were Westerns popular in the United States, but the whole world devoured them. The Western was a staple of fiction, Hollywood, television, and daydreams. What happened?
Overexposure, for one thing. In 1959, there were twenty-six Western series on prime
time television. On the silver screen, John Wayne banished his Winchester at countless
bad guys. Paperback Westerns could be found in abundance in any drugstore, most
of them with Louis L’Amour’s name on the cover. The big names did some
wonderful, quality stuff, but the demand was so great that a lot of trash made
it into print and celluloid.
The common
perception is that the Western genre is moribund. Yet somehow, Larry McMurtry
and Cormac McCarthy made a good living off Westerns. (Their books, however, are
seldom stacked up with the straight-to-paperback variety of Westerns.) Robert
B. Parker temporarily abandoned private eye Spencer to embrace the western
genre for a trilogy about two guns for hire. In film, Appaloosa grossed a respectable $28 million at the box office,
while 3:10 to Yuma grossed over $70
million. Productions like Godless, Yellowstone, and Old Henry
keep the genre alive. DVD sales of vintage Westerns do well, and Louie L’Amour,
Zane Grey, and even Max Brand still sell a respectable number of books.
So, the
Western isn’t dead, but it’s just as certainly not the rage, especially for the
upcoming generation. Thrillers, fantasies, sci-fi, and romance novels garner
all the shelf space. Action movies sound tracks are filled with revving motors,
not thundering hoofs. And television … well, television just broadcasts another
police drama. In fact, the Western excesses of the late fifties are being
repeated today with cop shows. Perhaps tired audiences are ready for a
resurgence of Westerns.
Perhaps. But
what type of Western? Probably a new breed. There have been three distinct
western eras. I called them: wholesome, the flawed hero, and the violent eras.
The wholesome
era lasted until the late fifties. It was epitomized by Roy Rogers, Gene Autry,
The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and a host of other cowboys sporting white
hats. Instead of killing bad guys, they shot guns out of their hands. If
someone was killed, they damn-well deserved it, and their death would be bloodless,
with a pledge-like hand to the chest to cover unsightly bullet holes. As in all
eras, there was overlap, and during the later stages of the wholesome phase,
Wayne and others made more realistic Westerns—but these, of course, were
quarantined to movie houses, and only at night.
The flawed
hero of the sixties wasn’t the antihero of today. He merely had faults; like
Josh Randall,
the bounty hunter portrayed by Steve McQueen in Wanted Dead or Alive or the gambling
Maverick brothers who proudly proclaimed themselves cowards. Richard Boone wore
black and looked mean as a gun-for-hire in Paladin.
The Magnificent Seven were reluctant,
saviors of a small Mexican village—and flawed to a man. Again, overlapping
eras. The spaghetti Westerns of the late sixties took the genre into new territory.
From the seventies
on, the antihero ruled a frontier filled with slow-motion violence. The violent
era was ushered in by Sergio Leone with his Man With No Name trilogy (1967) and
Sam Peckinpaw with The Wild Bunch (1969).
From then on, red dominated the color spectrum and the hero was only a step
removed from the bad guy. The raw realism was inappropriate for television
until cable brought Deadwood (2004)
into our living rooms.
What’s next?
Luckily, these eras overlap, so seeing the direction of the Western genre is
not guesswork. Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Robert B. Parker pointed
the way. The future of the Western genre is historically accurate storytelling.
A story can take place in the past, the present, or the future. If the story
occurs in the past, we call them historical novels—except for Westerns. They
get consigned to a niche genre that still carries the taint of pulp fiction.
But a story that takes place in the nineteenth century American frontier has as
much legitimacy to be called a historical novel as Ken Follett’s World Without End.
McMurtry,
McCarthy, and Parker have found the key. Good writing, sound plots that move
with assurance, and great characterization. They concentrated on characters
that are forced to deal with hardships and human frailty at a particular point
in history. These are the basic elements of good storytelling. A Western
historical novel can indeed be action-adventure, but it can also borrow
elements from the detective, suspense, romance, mystery, and other genres. Lonesome Dove took from all of them.
