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I don’t love Westerns in the way that I did when I was young. But I think I watch them now with a more attentive eye, and I find them even more fascinating because they are so ideologically contradictory/evasive/muddled a lot of the time. They tell the truth even when they lie.
One stumbling block I have (even when watching truly great, smart, otherwise honest western) is that I have limited ability to empathize with the "good guys" if the story is about land rights. Every single white person in a Western is the beneficiary of genocide and land theft.
But that& #39;s not enough reason to write off the genre, even if you& #39;re coming at it from a anti colonialist/antiracist prism, because these films are documents ABOUT America& #39;s inability to admit one of its primal sins. The evidence of the evasion is right there, in the absence.
It& #39;s like reading a transcript from a trial where somebody accused of a heinous crime keeps talking around it, fixating on their own best qualities so as to avoid addressing why they& #39;re sitting there next to the judge.
Put it another way: there is a reason, a very GOOD reason, why film scholars refer to the Western as a repository of the United States& #39; foundational myths. Myths aren& #39;t about what actually happened.
I don& #39;t really LOVE Westerns anymore, as fun/escapism/adventure, but I absolutely do love how interesting they are, and I love how much they continue to teach me about this country, even when the lesson isn& #39;t what the storytellers intended.
To refuse to engage with the Western on grounds that it& #39;s filled with self-serving untruths is akin to a detective refusing to read a transcript of an interview with a crime suspect who is blatantly a liar.
Westerns started to click for me in a different way when one of my film professors explained that the "Indian westerns" of the 1950s and & #39;60s were coded stories about the Civil Rights movement and then, later, Vietnam. And how that the same story when you thought about it.
Another thing I obsess over now when I watch Westerns, even older, less graphically violent ones, is how honest they are about what it means to exist in a land without much functioning government or law. Every second you could be murdered, violated, robbed, and no one would know.
Justice often only exists in Westerns for white people with a lot of money, or a lot of men with guns, or enough money to hire a lot of men with guns. The depiction of basically criminal power dynamics is often the most honest thing in any Western.
One of the many reasons I could never get into Westworld was that it generally avoided race when discussing slavery and power dynamics. It also mostly avoided asking why anybody who wasn& #39;t a white man would want to visit a park like that.
One of my uncles, who saw combat in both Vietnam and Korea, said the best films he& #39;d seen about American foreign policy were science fiction (he loved Aliens) and westerns like The Wild Bunch (which he saw as the story of a war machine obsessed with past glories).
I will always regret not having a proper, recorded conversation with my war veteran uncle, George, about movies. He was very astute. He thought Aliens was a better metaphor for what happened to the US in Vietnam than Apocalypse Now.
Anyway: Westerns. Essential viewing for lots of reasons, even if (indeed because) their politics are so self-canceling/muddled/contradictory. There is revelatory material in there if you know where to look for it. The Western is America telling on itself even when it& #39;s bragging.
