- First Western: British silent short Kidnapping by Indians (1899) by the Mitchell and Kenyon film company
- Or Maybe: American silent film The Great Train Robbery (1903) by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company
Mythology is important. It can give an individual or even a nation something to look back upon with pride or strive to live up to even if they understand it is not real. It can tell them what they should be and provide a vision to get there. Much like we as humans need a future idea to move towards, we need an idealized past to proceed from.
The United States needs the mythology provided by the American Western. All nations need a fictitious or idealized past, justified or not, upon which to base their nation’s character. There is the need for an era of great people doing great deeds and coming out successful against impossible odds. As young as the US is the point that somehow became chosen was the brief period referred to as the Wild West as given to us since the early days of the silver screen.
Though no longer so today originally the American Western gave us a collective mythology of good versus evil or of a strong people facing difficult circumstances and overcoming them and perhaps even learning something along the way. It could take a look at a present situation and set them in the past (or not too distant past) and allow us to step back and analyze them. It could discuss racism or perhaps not living a life all by yourself or even like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (and to some extent this post) address the need for a fiction to look up to and strive to be like.
Jimmy Stewart once described Westerns as “pure cinema” and at the time when he said that I would have to agree about the films he was probably thinking of. They did not talk down to us or tell us we as humans were all terrible. They did not say there was no hope or consistently say you cannot be anything better than what you are at the moment. There were clear delineations between good and evil and clearly defined right and wrong.
At its most creative and best the Western could look at race relations or even our own racism and because of the genre it used Native Americans to speak to us on a much broader subject. Or it did it in a modern way like Man in the Shadows and used that to touch on much more. Yet at the same time it told us there was hope and that we could improve even if that improvement was at the end of hardship.
Today though Revisionist Western makers have taken over. Gone are uplifting stories or stories that might ultimately make us feel better. Often the characters are replaced with severely damaged people so wrapped up in their own problems that they cannot realize that if they just took a step back their lives would be much better.
Gone are the hard and tough characters like Chris Adams or Rooster Cogburn or those that could be found in such films as Yellow Sky, Winchester ’73, or The Magnificent Seven. Gone are those who found it in themselves to rise to the situation and do what’s right or necessary. No longer do characters show up with regularity who are decent or trustworthy. There are no more heroes.
What’s wrong with mythmaking? What’s so wrong with a story with maybe a moral or that there are upstanding characters? I’m not sure. Maybe we’re stuck in an age of moral relativism. Maybe the people who write these things do so because they are flawed and unwilling to change or strive to be better and believe that no one can change and no one is capable of striving to be better. Whatever the reason it’s a loss for not only film or the genre but for the American people as well. We need to aspire. We need the mythology to be better and to improve ourselves or to inspire us to do great things or just what is right. Often we need an example to look at in order to have a direction in which to move. And that’s why we need the mythology of the American Western of old. Though they may be fictions, we need them to show the way.
….or….
Warren Watched A Movie 