American idols

Davy Crockett and Wild Bill Hickok spurred generations of boyhood fantasies. The dark side of these cowboy heroes depicted in "Deadwood" and "The Alamo" are just what America needs to see today.

By Allen Barra

Apr 10, 2004 | [Spoiler alert: Plot twists in HBO's "Deadwood" are described throughout this essay.]

Two great American icons cash in their chips this week.

This weekend, Billy Bob Thornton goes down swinging -- or at least hollering -- in the controversial and much anticipated "The Alamo." Sunday night Keith Carradine, holding those fabled aces and eights at the poker table, is assassinated by that dirty little coward "Jack McCall" in the most talked about new cable series of the year, HBO's "Deadwood." It looks like a bad week for American idols.

Actually, the two greatest legends of the American frontier have never had it so good. Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, and Wild Bill Hickok, Prince of Pistoleers, have, between them, been portrayed more than 100 times on stage, screen and television, but they had to wait until the western was supposedly dead to get their best representation.

Of course, as the current incarnations of Crockett and Hickok illustrate, the western is very much alive. Though in recent years Sunday arts-section stories on "What Happened to Westerns?" have outnumbered the westerns, the truth is that the frontier West is as much a part of our national consciousness as ever. The great historical theorist of the American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, knew this when, at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, he introduced his landmark thesis on what came to be called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Historians have argued over Turner's main points ever since, but his contention that the frontier is the defining element in the American character seems as solid today as it was when Turner first proposed it. And the primary medium for popularizing Turner's concept was one he couldn't possibly have envisioned in 1893: the western movie.

The western as a genre is no worse off than the other traditional staples of the Hollywood film industry -- the horror story, detective story and sci-fi flick -- which is to say they've all been turned into action movies. (Occasionally two genres bump, as in "The Mummy," where cowboys show up out of nowhere for a shootout with Arab bandits, or "Wild Wild West," where giant robots walk the prairie.)

Westerns go through cycles to match our moods. In the '50s and '60s they were seen as stand-ins for everything from McCarthyism ("High Noon") to America's Cold War resolve ("Rio Bravo," "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," et al); in the late '60s and '70s westerns were analogies for our involvement in Vietnam ("Little Big Man"). Early into this century the western has gone east: to Arabia in "Hidalgo," to Japan in "The Last Samurai," and to North Africa in "Secondhand Lions." In a couple of cases the East came west, as in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson movies "Shanghai Noon" and "Shanghai Knights." (We'll probably be seeing essays any day now on how these films parallel our "cowboying" of the East.) Whatever we use them for, and however we reinterpret our frontier legends, westerns keep coming back. As a nation, we've become like the detective in "Memento": our memories stop at a certain point in the past and we seem incapable of creating new ones.

Next Page: Davy Crockett conquers Hollywood, hits No. 1 on the charts, stumps for Nixon

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