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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's not enough reason to write off the genre, even if you're coming at it from a anti colonialist/antiracist prism, because these films are documents ABOUT America's inability to admit one of its primal sins. The evidence of the evasion is right there, in the absence.
It'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'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' foundational myths. Myths aren't about what actually happened.
I don'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't what the storytellers intended.
To refuse to engage with the Western on grounds that it'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 '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'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'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's bragging.
