Freedom and Order in the Western
Anyone dealing with the subject of freedom in American popular culture has to come to terms with the Western. No genre is more closely associated with the celebration of freedom, and yet no genre does more to portray it as problematic. In the American imagination, the Western frontier has always been the place to which people go to achieve freedom and escape the shackles of society. Accordingly, the Western as a genre has traditionally been associated with the American spirit of rugged individualism. The Western hero is typically a loner, standing apart from the crowd, sometimes because of something shady in his past, sometimes because of his peculiar sense of mission, sometimes just because of his heroic virtue itself. The hero is frequently paired with a mirror image in the form of a villain, who equally stands alone, sometimes for unnervingly similar reasons. The fact that the line between the hero and the villain is sometimes difficult to draw in Westerns, at least in the more sophisticated ones, is a good indication that the genre does not simply celebrate freedom and individualism, but presents both concepts as deeply problematic.
The hero’s status as a lone wolf often brings him into conflict with the very society he claims to represent or defend. The taming of the frontier is one of the central themes of the American Western, and the wolf is not a tame animal. A common Western plot involves the domestication of the hero, to make him fit into a community of less violent—and less heroic—people. Westerns frequently turn on the tension between freedom and order, between the individual and the community. The history of the Western is testimony to the fact that freedom has always been viewed as a challenge in America, something that cannot be achieved without great effort and great costs.
Critics often look down on the Western, regarding it as the prime example of pop culture at its worst, a form of crude and mindless entertainment. The movie and television industries have turned out thousands of Westerns over the years, and have necessarily relied on plot formulas and clichés in order to do so. Faced with the results, a critic can easily fall into the trap of saying that all Westerns look alike; that they endlessly recycle the same old material; and consequently that they have no aesthetic or intellectual value. This may well be true of the majority of Westerns, but, according to Aristotle’s principle that the nature of a thing is the perfection of the thing, we should never judge a genre by its average specimens alone, but ultimately by its best. The Western has certainly had a checkered history, and its low points undoubtedly outnumber its high points—by a considerable margin. And yet no one can deny that the Western has had its high points, and, after a century of effort, the genre can boast of a significant number of masterpieces in its ranks, or at least genuine works of art.
Much can be learned from an extensive overview of the Western as a pop culture form; it is, for example, fascinating to trace the complex ways in which Westerns over the years have mirrored larger developments in American society. But much can be learned from an intensive approach to a genre as well; it allows for the kind of close reading and detailed interpretation that genuine works of art deserve. In this section, I concentrate on three well-known examples of the Western, which I believe epitomize its potential and the issues with which it characteristically deals.
My first choice hardly needs justification. John Ford is without question the greatest maker of Westerns and The Searchers is arguably the greatest of all his Westerns (and, I would add, one of the greatest movies in any genre). By comparing The Searchers to Greek drama (the Oresteia), as well as Greek epic (the Iliad and the Odyssey), I subject it to the most stringent aesthetic test possible, and I hope that I have succeeded in showing that the film is worthy of being discussed in this august company. The Searchers shows why it is inadvisable to draw a sharp line between high culture and pop culture, and especially why one should not do so according to medium (drama versus film). We can learn a great deal by studying The Searchers and the Oresteia together. Ford’s film helps to translate the issues Aeschylus explores into terms more familiar to us and thereby it makes his drama come alive for us and seem less remote from modern experience. By the same token, Aeschylus’ drama—and the Greek heroic tradition it represents—help to lift The Searchers out of a specifically American historical context, and thus to highlight the universality of the problems it confronts. Above all, turning to figures such as Agamemnon, Orestes, Achilles, and Odysseus as models of heroism gives us a fresh perspective on Ford’s Ethan Edwards, freeing us from the overly narrow viewpoint of middle-class morality and allowing us to understand this complex and disturbing figure in the larger context of the epic and tragic traditions to which he properly belongs. In both Ford and Aeschylus the dramatic conflict centers on a frontier—the archetypal frontier between civilization and barbarism. And although they both fall back on certain stereotypes of the barbarian (oddly similar, despite the huge differences between their two cultures), Ford and Aeschylus ultimately subvert these stereotypes in the course of exploring the tragic foundations of civilization. In The Searchers, the freedom of the frontier hero is ultimately at odds with the civil order he helps to establish and protect.
What The Searchers is to the movie Western, David Milch’s Deadwood is to the television Western—the greatest example of the genre. At a time when the Western was thought to be dead and buried on television, Milch did not simply revive the genre; he carried it to a level of complexity and profundity no one thought possible. While drawing upon familiar Western characters and motifs—who is more stereotypical than Wild Bill Hickok or Calamity Jane?—he virtually re-invented the genre, with some of the most original writing in the history of television. Even on the level of language itself, he forged a new idiom for Deadwood, a unique form of dialogue that moves seamlessly between poetry and profanity. My test for Deadwood is to discuss the show in terms of some of the most profound philosophical issues, specifically the state of nature thinking of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. And Deadwood passes this test of intellectual seriousness. Milch himself has said that he conceived of the show as exploring the perennial political issue of “order without law.” I argue that the central concepts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau help clarify Milch’s take on the American West, while Deadwood provides concrete dramatic illustrations of the specific issues the European philosophers debated. As I sometimes do in this book, I try to bring out the libertarian threads in Milch’s thinking, or at least an anti-government strain that pervades Deadwood. His search for a principle of order without law becomes an examination of the possibility of human beings living together in freedom, independent of the nation-state, developing means to harmonize their interests without the intervention of government.
As for my central subject in this part of the book, Have Gun-Will Travel, I would not claim that it deserves to be ranked with The Searchers or Deadwood in the history of the Western, either in terms of artistic quality or cultural significance. Nevertheless, many regard it as the most literate and intellectually sophisticated of the classic TV Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s. It was my own favorite among Westerns at the time, indeed one of my favorite of all television shows when I was growing up. As a precocious—and, to be honest, pretentious—intellectual in my adolescence, I loved the fact that the show’s hero quoted Shakespeare and consorted with the likes of Oscar Wilde. But despite the veneer of high culture that originally attracted me to the show, now that I am older and somewhat wiser, I do not believe that Have Gun can hold up to the kinds of comparison to which I subject The Searchers and Deadwood. Accordingly, my test for Have Gun is to compare it to something more on the ordinary pop culture level and yet with at least a modicum of intellectual cachet, namely Star Trek.
When I began re-watching Have Gun on DVD, I became aware of an aspect of the series that could not have interested me when it originally aired. The supplementary material on the DVDs highlights the fact that a significant number of the episodes were written by Gene Roddenberry, who went on to become the legendary creator of Star Trek. I thought at the time: “This would make an interesting subject for a pop culture essay,” but at first did nothing about it. A few years later and much to my amazement, I received an invitation from Hillsdale College to participate in March 2009 in a symposium on the TV Western, and I was asked to speak specifically on Roddenberry’s work on Have Gun and its relation to Star Trek. To this day, I do not know how anybody at Hillsdale could have known that I was interested in this peculiar subject, but in any event I jumped at the opportunity to work up the material.
Allowing the comparison of Have Gun and Star Trek to lead me wherever it would, I found myself pursuing a number of intriguing lines of investigation in the history of pop culture. The fact that Roddenberry’s work on Have Gun turned out to have significantly influenced his conception of Star Trek became an object lesson in the collaborative nature of creativity in television. Moreover, moving between what are normally thought of as two very distinct genres—the Western and science fiction—led me to question whether our generic divisions of pop culture really are as hard and fast as we sometimes think. The Western is generally regarded as a backward-looking genre, rooted in the past and hence conservative or even reactionary in its politics. Science fiction, by contrast, is generally regarded as a forward-looking genre, oriented toward the future and hence progressive or even radical in it politics. Roddenberry’s vision of a technologically advanced, peaceful, and culturally tolerant future in Star Trek is a perfect example of the liberal utopianism that often characterizes science fiction. After all, the genre was popularized by a socialist—H. G. Wells. And yet my studies suggested that the science fiction world of Star Trek actually grew out of Roddenberry’s work on the Western Have Gun-Will Travel.
My study of Have Gun, as well as my participation in the Hillsdale symposium, led me to reconsider my conventional assumption that the Western is conservative by nature. Upon reflection, I believe that our understanding of the politics of the Western has been unduly influenced and distorted by the fact that the two most famous stars of the genre—John Wayne and Clint Eastwood—have been associated in the public’s mind with conservative causes. In actuality, the Western over the years has been open to all sorts of political viewpoints, many of them progressive and even leftwing. Although John Ford became increasingly conservative on foreign policy issues in his later years, for much of his career, he can best be described as a New Deal Democrat, as epitomized by his film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or, for that matter, Stagecoach, with its nasty portrait of a criminal banker.
Viewing a wide variety of TV Westerns from the 1950s at the Hillsdale symposium, we were surprised by how seldom they fit the stereotype we had of the shoot ‘em up horse opera. In The Rifleman, for example, the single father raising his son on the violent frontier was, in fact, constantly teaching the boy lessons in toleration and forbearance. In one episode, the Rifleman hires a crippled man on his ranch when his son shows signs of repugnance at his grotesque appearance—to condition the boy to accept strangers who look different. We were shocked to behold the degree of political correctness already at work in what we unthinkingly looked back upon as the Dark Ages of the TV Western. I found this impression strongly re-enforced the more I studied Have Gun. The series fully anticipates the kind of Kennedy liberalism that Roddenberry went on to embody in Star Trek. Have Gun already suggests that a progressive elite is necessary to counter the baleful effects of prejudice, bigotry, and other dark forces that dominate an unenlightened American heartland.
In each of the chapters in this part of the book, I pair a Western with something that is not a Western. My aim is to take the Western out of the trash culture ghetto to which it is too often consigned. We sometimes become so obsessed with the Western as a genre that we see only its generic aspects, and lose sight of subtle distinctions in the field and its connections to broader cultural contexts. We need to be reminded that at their best, Westerns tell basic human stories and explore fundamental human problems. And, although I discuss only three examples of the Western, I offer them as evidence of the wide range of political possibilities in the genre. The Searchers offers an unforgettable image of the rugged individualism of the lone hero, and yet ultimately calls it into question, showing its tragic incompatibility with the progressive civilization he seeks to defend. Have Gun-Will Travel also presents a rugged individual as its hero, but insists even more on his role as a defender of the weak, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. It suggests that a strong man is necessary to bring order to society, which in the absence of central control will degenerate into various forms of conflict and exploitation. By contrast, Deadwood is profoundly suspicious of elites who try to impose order on society from the top down. As an alternative, it explores the spontaneous impulses to order that emerge in ordinary human interaction, especially those involving commercial activity. The three Westerns I discuss are very different, and yet they are united in portraying the problematic nature of freedom on the American frontier.
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