11. The American West on Film

Book: The American West on Film: Myth and Reality

Author: Richard A. Maynard

Number of pages: 130

What I’m watching: TV: Garfield & Friends, Red Dwarf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seinfeld, Angel, Wonder Showzen, Friends, Bones Movies: Once, Philadelphia Story, Escape From L.A., Groundhog Day, Slither, Beastly, Escape From New York, Ghost, The Phantom of the Opera (Stage Recording)

What I’m playing: Ultimate Spiderman, Skyrim, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Dead Space 3, The Last of Us, Castlevania IV, Legend of Zelda, Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Red, Secret of Mana

 

            Well then, I guess it’s September already…since my last post, I’ve watched five seasons of Buffy, a season of Angel, two and a half series of Red Dwarf, played all of R-1 of Pokémon Stadium and a ridiculous number of hours in Pokémon Red, finished Dead Space 3, traveled to Canada for a week for Stratford’s Theater Festival, and more.

But what really got in the way of my blog has been my job. Lately, it’s been wearing me down. As much as I want to keep at my bookshelves, at the end of the day it’s a lot easier to plop down on the couch and turn on Netflix.

            Anyway…The American West on Film!

I love Westerns: Once Upon a Time in the West, True Grit, The Magnificent Seven, 3:10 to Yuma, The Sons of Katie Elder, the list goes on. So, of course I was excited to read a critical analysis of them (and I mean that). However, within the first few pages, I get an “Editor’s Introduction,” explaining how “our national preoccupation with the cowboy legend reflects an American tradition of militant individualism, violence, White supremacy, and an often contradictory code of right and wrong” (vii). Dammit, I hope this book doesn’t make me end up hating Westerns.

            Looking at the table of contents, I notice there are four major sections of the book, and only the last two actually discuss Western films. The first part looks at actual writings from the Old West (“The West as Fact”). The second part deals with Western novels. So turns out I’ll have to read half the book before I get to any Western films, even though the book is called The American West on Film!

            So the basic idea of the book is to separate all the untruth from Western fiction, identify all the inaccuracies and legends, and show how different reality was from the glorified depictions of cowboys in movies and books. Maynard begins by showing how boring real cowboy life was back in the 1800s and how the biggest threat was surviving the elements. He includes diary excerpts and letters from settlers. Now sure, their lives aren’t heroic or exciting like movie characters, but I won’t say I wasn’t interested by them. The lives and hardships faced by early settlers, I find, are very compelling.

Maynard includes lyrics to “The Lane County Bachelor,” a sarcastic song from 1890 about living out west. One stanza includes “And the gay little centipede, void of all fear / Crawls over my pillow and into my ear” (13). That’s fucking nasty. Centipedes are gross enough on the ground, but, man, going into my ear? Yuck!

Following that are excerpts from essays and books about the racism in Western fiction. Writers touch on the misrepresentation or lack of representation of non-Whites. In Westerns, Native Americans are portrayed as violent and unintelligent savages, often barely human. Black people are pretty non-existent. I do love Westerns, but, yeah, I recognized an inherent racism in some I’ve watched. For example, El Dorado and The Shakiest Gun in the West are two films which have negative Chinese images and stereotypes. What’s kind of neat is that since the book is meant as a classroom text, each section ends with a few discussion questions. I guess I’m a nerd for thinking that’s neat, and using the word neat.

            Part Two (“The West as Fiction”) primarily explains the beginnings of how Western life became mythified. Maynard sums it up pretty well as Part Two opens:

Three Eastern gentlemen of wealth, education, and breeding helped legitimize the cowboy’s image and make him into America’s “knight in shining armor.” Theodore Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister had many things in common. Fellow Easterners…and peers in age, wealth, and status (they were also quite close friends), the three men lived in the far West for only short periods of their early adulthood. Still, each came away fascinated with the freedom of Western life. Each interpreted this as a kind of natural alternative to the unexciting, industrialized society of the East. Members of a disillusioned upper-class establishment, they saw the great plains as a sanctuary…(29)

Roosevelt and Wister both were writers. Remington was an artist.

All three of them over-idealized their brief experiences and created a fantasy image of rugged individualism in the “Wild West.”

            I also learned about Buffalo Bill’s history. Originally William Cody, a hunter and soldier, he became a performing cowboy stuntman, using the stage name Buffalo Bill. His performance character became a literary figure. Okay, referencing this next part from my book is going to be a little messy because I am going to be quoting a book which is quoting a book which is quoting a book. I don’t even know how deep a quote-ception that is. So, Maynard the editor includes part of a book by Henry Nash Smith who quotes Buffalo Bill’s described appearance in the story Gold Plume, the Boy Bandit. Buffalo Bill wears “a red velvet jacket, white corduroy pants, stuck in handsome top boots, which were armed with heavy gold spurs, and…upon his head a gray sombrero, encircled by a gold cord and looped up on the left side with a pin representing a spur. He also wore an embroidered silk shirt, a black cravat, gauntlet gloves, and a sash of red silk, in which were stuck a pair of revolvers and a dirk-knife” (37). That over-the-top description reminds me of Marty in Back to the Future Part III, when Doc Brown dresses up Marty to send him back to 1885.

Though on some levels that movie plays upon the mythos of the Old West, it does in part acknowledge inaccuracies of the idealized West.

            I finally get to Part 3 and some movies, but I don’t know any of them. The book was published in 1974, but films mentioned are mostly from the 40s and 50s. Most of my favorite Westerns are from the 60s and 70s. I’d like to see a new edition of this book released, or a second volume, updating the contemporary perspectives of Western films. I do recognize some of the films, and there’s enough explanation for the films I don’t that it’s easy to follow. However, there was one tediously long section. It was boring, but I still cared about what I read. I learned that apparently lynching in movies became a film taboo except to show “the illegality and injustice of lynching itself” (Warshow 68). Is that still a thing?

            Maynard includes a number of interviews and movie reviews, which I thought were all cool. Also included is a promotional piece for Geronimo designed for classrooms suggesting boys build model canoe ashtrays and the girls design Indian blankets. All I will say is “Ugh…” But that is followed by a really cool comparison of a novel and a screenplay, addressing how the movie adaptation reworks layered characters into flatter, two-dimensional types.

            I didn’t like every excerpt Maynard included. Pauline Kael wrote on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, how she “dreaded an evening with James Stewart and John Wayne” (103). She referred to Western film actors as “stars who have aged in the business, who have survived and who go on dragging their world-famous, expensive carcasses through the same old motions” (103). What a dick! However, as shitty as I found Pauline Kael, almost all of the readings within the book are really cool; letters, diaries, screenplays, stage plays, novels, interviews, movie reviews, and essays all come together in one awesome read.

            At the end, Maynard compiles a nice filmography, recommending a lot of films within different sub-genres. A few of them I’ve seen, a few of them I’ve heard of, and a lot of them I’d like to find and watch. Maynard suggests simply renting a “D” grade film for a classroom setting. I’ve heard of B-movies. How low do you have to get for D-level films?

            So, I still love Westerns. Before the book, I hadn’t thought about their accuracy or distinguishing history from legend. Rather than making me hate the genre, the book gave me an added level of appreciating them.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Works Cited

Maynard, Richard A. The American West on Film: Myth and Reality. Rochelle Park,

            New Jersey: Hayden, 1974. Print.