The new true West

From Larry McMurtry and Thomas Berger to "Deadwood" and the gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain," the American West is alive and wilder than ever.

By Allen Barra

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June 12, 2006 | "There's no such thing as the West any more. It's a dead issue." -- Austin, "True West"

The West a dead issue? Perhaps to a hack screenwriter in a Sam Shepard play. What world does this guy live in? The America I live in looks to the West with its vast, and still, to the naked eye, unpolluted and unexploited spaces, a natural stage from which to present dramas that reflect our ongoing national debates on race, sex, politics and our common cultural heritage. The western is more with us than ever.

The "classic" western film, the one described by Robert Warshow in his famous essay "The Westerner," where "It is always about 1870" and in which the hero "is the last gentleman," is no longer a staple of Hollywood. But what traditional movie genre is alive and well? Surely not musicals, despite an occasional "Chicago" or "Moulin Rouge"; surely not the classic detective or horror story, which have melded and evolved into teen-slasher flicks. By those standards, the so-called classic western is doing no worse than any other genre. What has happened to the western is that it has mutated into several new species, many of them the topic of hot discussion by you and your friends even if you thought you weren't talking about westerns but something else.

"Brokeback Mountain" has been such a shock to the system that the conventions of the old western may never recover. (Good.) But it's merely one of a spate of new films that might be loosely headed up under the title of "Contemporary Art House Western," with Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," Wim Wenders' "Don't Come Knocking" and David Jacobson's "Down in the Valley" as current examples.

If there was any way of measuring such things, it would probably be shown that over the last 20 years or so westerns, in one form or another, probably comprised as big a slice of the Hollywood production pie as ever. Of course, that pie takes in everything from Kevin Costner's neoclassic "Open Range" (2003) to Antonia Bird's grisly cult favorite "Ravenous" (1999), with Guy Pearce -- the first western to feature cannibalism -- and the recently released Australian western "The Proposition."

That's just on the big screen. Whether in the form of made-for-TV movies (an amazing number of which star Sam Elliott, the Randolph Scott of the last two decades) or miniseries (such as Walter Hill's "Broken Trail," with Robert Duvall, premiering June 25-26 on AMC), westerns rule on television. And with the exception of "The Sopranos," David Milch's "Deadwood" has elicited more heated discussion than any cable series in the last two years.

Then there's the so-called classic western, the one that supposedly died around the time of the Vietnam War. It may indeed be dead, but a quick turn around your television dial will reveal precisely how much it is still with us, or perhaps you didn't know that John Wayne is still hands-down the most recognizable movie star in the world?

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