Westerns and the Concept of Civic Responsibility
They remind us that in order to survive, a healthy society needs both law and order, and men of good character willing to stand up and defend it
Some of the greatest films of all time are Westerns. Many of our greatest movies stars first made a name for themselves in the Western genre. And many of our favorite modern movies like DIE HARD, JOHN WICK and 48 HOURS, are simply Westerns in disguise. As I write this, one of the most popular shows on TV is a Western called YELLOWSTONE, and is headlined by Kevin Costner, himself one of the undisputed champions of the genre. Westerns have been an integral part of Hollywood’s relentless product since the very beginning of the movie business in America.
Why do we like them so much? Why do we pay to see them over-and-over? Well, for one thing, Westerns are like pizza, even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. But I think what appeals to us most is the way Westerns strip away all the layers of insulation that separate modern humans from the harsh realities of daily life and force their characters to deal with things head on, and all alone.
Think about the lives most of us lead... has there ever been a more cushioned, protected, leisurely generation than here in the America of 2021? Got a problem? Don’t stress about it, just head on over to Google, there’s always someone you can call.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is the very thing that we've been striving for lo these 245 years... a peaceful existence in which we are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in all the ways we, as individuals, see fit. The harsh realities of life on the Western Frontier are things to be regarded from afar, like exhibits in a museum... not necessarily something to be longed for like a lost teddy bear. Life on the Western frontier was cruel, difficult, and short... and even though it was a crucial period in the building of our national character, we are well rid of most of it.
And yet… we keep watching. Why?
I think we’re searching for something. Something we can’t get from the relatively safe, cossetted lives we lead here in the early part of the Twenty-First Century.
Unlike our modern lives where lawyers, legal disclaimers and liability waivers seem to stalk our every move, out on the frontier, law was what you made of it. There was a basic moral code that everyone instinctively understood... don't kill anyone unless it's in self defense, and keep your hands to yourself.
John Wayne, who defined the genre as much as any American movie star before or since, described the Western ethos best in his final film, THE SHOOTIST, about an aging gunfighter looking to live out his last days in peace and obscurity. "I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”
Other than that, it was… well, it was the Wild West.
But just as hard-working industrious men and women were drawn to the freedom and opportunity of the West, so too the bad guys were drawn to the anarchy and violence of a lawless frontier. And as those energetic, ambitious Americans made their way west, the predators followed in the same way that lions stalk herds of antelope across the plains… or the way MSNBC stringers stalk jurors across Kenosha.
On the frontier, a Law Man might be a hundred miles away when trouble started, and so early Westerners had to learn to take care of themselves in a way that no modern American ever has to. Men like the iconic characters played by John Wayne in his best-known films may have been born of the West, but they were also made by the West.
Wayne's character in THE SHOOTIST, J.B. Books, was a professional gunfighter, and he was quite used to living that sort of life and to backing up those words with decisive action when required to do so. But not everyone in the West was capable in the same way that Books was. The West of Hollywood’s imagination was populated by other important archetypes as well.
HIGH NOON, in many ways the quintessential American Western, introduced us to the high-minded good guy character, more comfortable fighting crime with words and the law than with a gun. The kind of guy more likely to run for office than to run towards a gun fight. In HIGH NOON, Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Kane faces a different reality than the reality of J.B. Books... the reality of what happens when Books’ SHOOTIST philosophy runs smack dab into men who are more adept at killin' than you are, and who don't much care for the concept of a "fair fight."
HIGH NOON is not really about a gun fight… well, it’s not just about a gun fight. It’s also a philosophical treatise on personal and civic responsibility. Marshal Kane has used his smarts and the law to capture an Outlaw and send him up for murder. But after a Northern judge pardons him, the Outlaw comes back to town looking for revenge, and Kane finds himself on the wrong end of Frank Miller’s gun.
But Marshal Kane’s life is not all that hangs in the balance in HIGH NOON. This is not just a battle over some meaningless frontier grudge. Within this battle between Will Kane and Frank Miller’s gang, along with hundreds of others just like it that occured all across the West, hung the very fate of the Western frontier itself. Would it be a land of justice and peace in the best spirit of a fledgling Democracy? Or would it descend into lawlessness and blood... on this day, one man will help answer that question one way or the other. And not the US Army, or even the President of the United States himself, can help him. Sounds like a pretty good movie pitch, right?
That's what's great about these stories... within this structure, a single man can hold the future of the country, or indeed the entire world, in his hands.
Hollywood development executives talk about these kinds of movies in terms of stakes... always asking screenwriters to raise the stakes so that the audience will care more about the story and engage more deeply with the action that will determine how those stakes shake out. Harder to imagine bigger stakes, isn't it, than the very future of the entire western half of a developing nation?
As the weight of impending doom descends upon Marshal Kane and the town, Kane's charcter's ex-girlfriend describes the stakes of the coming fight this way…
”Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all.”
She knows the message Kane's death will send back East.
Kane's friend Martin knows it too... he makes an impassioned speech to the Church congregation in which he reminds them that the big money men back East are watching Hadleyville very closely, trying to decide if they should invest money in its stores and factories. He understands all too well that stories of murder and mayhem will convince them to send their money somewhere else.
In other words, Marshal Kane has a civic responsibility that supercedes his own well-being. If Will dies, the town will die and with it, eventually, the entire Western frontier will die. Marshal Kane wasn’t just fighting for Hadleyville, he was fighting for America, because he believed in it and thought it worth fighting for.
Thirty years of relative peace and security at home since the TAXI DRIVER days of lawlessness in our big cities have lulled Americans into believing that law and order does not require constant maintenance. The Left in particular, seems to think that crime and disorder is like a rat infestation… get rid of the rats, plug the holes in the wall, and you don’t have to worry about them ever again. Americans in general, and our Government in particular, have not yet learned the lesson that if you let your house fall into disrepair and you leave old food and garbage lying all over the floor, the rats will be back.
And indeed Government failure is a consistent theme both in Westerns and in the modern action movies that borrow from them heavily.
We can see these same stakes play out in our own modern world as major retailers like Walgreens flee San Fransisco, where theft and looting have been effectively legalized by District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and retail stores are losing thousands of dollars worth of merchandise every day. America requires law and order to survive. If the State will not deliver it, then regular folks will be forced to deliver it themselves, as they did in the Old West.
To put it much more simply, San Fransisco needs more Will Kane’s and fewer Chesa Boudins, or they’re going to get a lot more Frank Millers.
Except for the occassional OPEN RANGE, a film willed into existence by Kevin Costner, a legitimate star of the genre with the box office cred to back it up, you don’t see many traditional Westerns in the theaters anymore. But the themes and structures of the great Westerns live on in modern action movies, where we can often find traditional Westerns hiding in plain sight.
Walter Hill, who directed 48 HOURS and THE WARRIORS said “every film I've done has been a Western.” And he’s right about that… THE WARRIORS has as much in common with THE WILD BUNCH as anything else. And where else would the gun fights and barroom brawls of 48 HOURS feel more at home than in a traditional Western? One of the best scenes in the movie takes place in a Country Western bar and ends with Eddie Murphy putting on a ten-gallon hat and saying “I want the rest o’ you cowboys to know somethin’… there’s a new Sheriff in town… and his name is Reggie Hammond.”
In fact, if you watch just about any modern action movie, you'll see the same Western themes hashed out over-and-over again. It appears that we are still so desperate to be tested as Americans that we continue to inhabit dark movie theatres on Friday and Saturday nights to watch made up men and women sacrifice for what's right, rather than what’s easy. John McClane, Indiana Jones, Reggie Hammond, Roger Murtaugh, Will Kane...
DIE HARD was an action movie so popular it spawned its own genre… they used to tell us, “come see this new movie, it’s DIE HARD in a boat, or on a plane, or in a hockey arena, or at the petrified forest.” But the truth is that DIE HARD, and its classic solitary lawman lead John McClane, is not as original as the Fox Marketing department would have you believe. DIE HARD too, owes its basic structure to Westerns like HIGH NOON.
One man trapped in a skyscraper (instead of a small western town) facing overwhelming numbers of gunmen, who struggles to find even a single competent individual willing to help him. John McClane even asks the Villain to call him “Roy”, after his favorite movie Cowboy Roy Rogers, and signs off his radio calls with “Yippe Ki-Yay Motherfucker!".”
And in the same way that Will Kane assumes it will be a simple thing to deputize 10 able-bodied men in a town full of them, and then spends two hours going from Justice of the Peace, to Churches, to saloons and getting turned down at every opportunity, John McLane looks for help from 911 dispatchers, cops, SWAT, and even the FBI before realizing that if the Nakatomi Terrorists are going to be stopped, he’s going to have to be the one who stops them.
Here in the real world, people like AOC and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti go on TV to tell you that the violent crime wave you’re seeing with your own eyes in our Big Blue Cities is merely a figment of your imagination. Watch any of these obvious attempts at gaslighting for even a few minutes, and you’ll get a sense of what John McClane was feeling as he sat on the top floor of the Nakatomi Tower bleeding, barefoot and alone.
Because, at the end of the day, the secondary villain of the DIE HARD franchise is Government, which fails McClane at every turn…. a theme we can see in a lot of classic Westerns, from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN to OPEN RANGE.
Remember Special Agent Johnson?… no the other one… as he flies towards Nakatomi Plaza in his helicopter gunship, he says “I figure we take out the terrorists… lose twenty, twenty-five percent of the hostages… tops!” So even if the hostages somehow manage to survive the terorrists, one in four of them are going to be shot dead by the very men charged with protecting their lives. From across the helicopter, his partner shouts “I can live with that!”
Think Will Kane could live with that? Not a chance.
And we can see what happens when Government abdicates its duty to protect and serve on the streets of real world America. The Kyle Rittenhouse saga didn’t begin when he shot Nussbaum… it really began when Government elected not to bother protecting the city of Kenosha from violent rioters and Kyle decided to take on the responsibility himself. Whether what Kyle did that day was smart is a topic for another debate, but it’s not hard to imagine him walking from police station to courthouse to police barricade asking for help and being told, much as Marshal Will Kane was, “sorry Kid, you’re on your own.”
Most good action movies (hell even some of the bad ones) follow the same pattern. Think about THE FUGITIVE, THE BOURNE TRILOGY, UNDER SIEGE, PREDATOR, DEMOLITION MAN, or IN THE LINE OF FIRE... what must you do in order to make your hero into someone the audience can relate to? First you must take away his safety net... you must strip him bare… he must be on his own.
Because that's really what we fear isn't it... being alone at the moment of truth? Hearing the sound of someone kicking your door in at 3 am and knowing that by the time the cops get there it will all be over? What would you do? Could you protect yourself? Your wife? Your kids? Fortunately most of us will never find out... but the reason why we love watching THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN turn a village of Farmers into the defenders of their own freedom to live and prosper as they see fit, is because it gives us faith and confidence in our own abilities to do those things for ourselves, even if it’s on a smaller scale with lesser stakes.
I think that’s what keeps us coming back to Westerns again-and-again… the thrill of watching courageous men and women overcome that basic human fear that when the shit hits the fan... we won’t be smart enough, or tough enough, or resourceful enough to make it on our own.
Gary Cooper and Yul Brynner and Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Steve McQueen and James Coburn and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman and William Holden give us hope that maybe, on the right day... we can be… whether our Government is there to back us up, or not.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING:
HIGH NOON
THE SHOOTIST
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
THE WILD BUNCH
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
THE PROFESSIONALS
SILVERADO
GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, FIST FULL OF DOLLARS, and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
OPEN RANGE
DANCES WITH WOLVES
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID