» The western as American Epic

Several years ago, I read a piece (link no longer good) by a John Marini who made the case that John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, more than any other western, was to American psyche what Homer's poems were to the Greeks'. That is, like Homer for the Greeks, it teaches the American understanding of justice and law, community, individualism, and polity.

As one who read and loved both Homer and westerns for years, I found this confirmed a vague hunch. Westerns celebrate America's virtues and, at the same time, celebrate something true for all mankind, because they do embody the principles of the Declaration, which claim to be true for all men, everywhere. They also affirm something good about human nature--that men with the power to do harm and under no compunction or law (ie in the Frontier) to do right will in fact do right and use their power to uphold principles of justice.

Now, to be sure, it is true that some westerns show that evil prevails, that human nature is depraved and life is bound to a short, nasty and brutal existence. But the key is that each western revisits the country's founding. Or, in other words, it is a re-founding (or at least an attempt) dealing with one or another flaw of the American regime (or, if you wish, flaw of human nature). Thus making the western the embodiment, in story, of the great American faith in improvement, of righting the sins of the father, of restarting with a clean slate. So, we have westerns seeking to address issues of class and property, race and gender inequality, the displacement of the Indians, the so-called "robber barons" and the expansion of captialism, or what have you. Generally speaking, there seems to be a trend in westerns that follow our faith in our exceptionalism.

For example, in the films of perhaps the best director of westerns, John Ford moves from the highpoint of the redemptive (or re-creative?) power of human nature and human society in Stagecoach (1939)--effectively transforming John Wayne from a B-grade western actor to the top--through to his greatest western and Wayne's best performance as the inhumane, even barbaric Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956). Redemption is ambiguous if it occurs at all. And, Ford's last westerns dealt explicitly with blacks (Sgt. Rutledge, 1960) and women (7 Women, 1966) in the West.

Spencer Warren and Terry Teachout both have similar appreciations and recommend some classics.

UPDATE:

In Claremont's Christmas books recommendations, Ken Masugi holds out Xenophon's Anabasis (account of how 10,000 Greek mercenaries retreated from Babylon,up the Tigris-Euphrates) as a kind of model of westerns. In our subsequent emailing, he pointed out a couple of pieces by Tom Engeman, from the Claremont Review of Books:

The In Defense of Cowboy Culture shows that cowboy is the democratic equivalent of Sir Walter Scott's Saxon knights. He believes that the frontier changes with time but there is always a democratic hero there to defend democracy: in the urban frontier of film noir, Philip Marlowe, and in the nihilistic world of apocalyptic films, Mad Max. Pretty compelling. And his Why the American 'Frontier' Will Always be Populated by Democratic Knights is the longer, more scholarly version of the first.

UPDATE 2:

Just came across this piece , "The Soviet Novel and the Western" by David A. Goldfarb (CCACC, Rutgers University, 30 November 1990). I will excerpt the first paragraph:

Many scholars have, in passing, intuitively juxtaposed the Soviet Socialist Realist novel with the formulaic American Western or popular novel.1 These genres share themes, stylistic characteristics, and parallel evolutions. Their most direct models, Maxim Gorky's Mother and Owen Wister's The Virginian were published at about the same time--1907 and 1902, respectively. The era of Socialist Realism ran from about 1929, when the term was coined, to the Thaw of 1956; Geoffrey O'Brien (1981, 137-142) places the golden age of the paperback between 1929 and 1958. The coincidence of so many features of these two "Establishment" genres, suggests that their similarity deserves more than passing reference, especially when they claim to serve such apparently ideologically divergent establishments as those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Though there are important differences between the genres, I will argue, considering the examples of Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned and Louis L'Amour's Hondo, that their commonalities are based in the socio-economic conditions which gave rise to them and in the "master narratives" which they emulate, suggesting that U.S. and Soviet state ideologies and mythologies are not at their centers2 as different as one might suspect.