I was reading an article by Lily Absinthe on the costuming of one of my favorite films, Tombstone (https://lilyabsinthe.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/).  In it she predictably points out where the film gets costumes right and wrong based on actual period clothing, but where she surprises me is in her observation that moviemakers ought to be given a bit of leeway in their choices, because as she concedes, “Costuming supports this story-telling process and it’s often subject to conscious design changes in order to increase the dramatic effect.”
For reasons I dare not contemplate, this article made me think of another film, The Last Stand.  This is not a western in the traditional sense, although it very much follows the rough strokes of the genre.  It’s all about a lone hero who finds himself at the focal point of a “high noon” showdown, and the film highlights muscle cars and a wide variety of small arms, with lots of fast driving and straight shooting. It’s a near-perfect guy film.
Let’s look at the film poster featuring Arnold as the small town sheriff.


Here our hero stands tall, holding a large framed revolver.  Now, this is exactly the sort of thing we associate with a western hero, but it’s also highly anachronistic because no one in professional law enforcement has carried revolvers for decades now.  Also, thinking of costuming, Arnold wears a really nice looking leather jacket throughout much of the film.  Done in nylon instead of the higher grade leather, this is the kind of jacket you might find on a DPS trooper – in bad weather.  It’s reminiscent of a flight jacket from WW2, which carries with it all manner of heroic connotations; this is the jacket of heroes since 1944. Now, no real sheriff in a border town in southern Arizona would be wearing this, except for maybe a couple of weeks during the winter.  But it fits the image, both of Arnold (who wore a leather jacket, the Schott Perfecto, famously in Terminator) and of a western lawman.
The other, perhaps more startling element in the film is the weapon of choice for one of the main bad guys, Burrell.  He carries a revolver once again (!), but this is a special one.  Take a look:

​Westerns are back, in full force this year, and critics can’t stop talking, not only about the individual films, but also about the cultural phenomenon of westerns making (yet another) comeback.  “Back from the dead,” they all cry, as though this is an astounding feat.
 
It gives me some pause, as though the western genre is some redheaded stepchild that no one thought would amount to much, and everyone is amazed when one makes a good showing of itself.  But there is a history to this narrative, and part of the answer to why everyone is so surprised lies in the very nature of the genre itself.
 
Way back in the mid 1970s, a literary critic named John Cawelti wrote The Six-gun Mystique (1975), and part of his work was to declare the western dead – he writes that once a genre has been spoofed, it can no longer be taken seriously, and it will no longer resonate with audiences as it had previously.  He wrote this shortly after the brilliant Mel Brooks had done Blazing Saddles (1974), and if one watches this film and considers the historical moment in which Cawelti made this prediction, it makes perfect sense. But … he was wrong.  So wrong.  In fact, he was proven wrong almost immediately with the release of The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976), a film that much of Hollywood thought would tank because everyone knew the western was dead, and yet it became an instant classic, and remains so today. Oh, great film. He was also wrong in a larger sense, because Mel Brooks went on to spoof the horror genre with Young Frankenstein (1974) as well as the sci-fi genre with Spaceballs (1987), which had zero affect on the success of the continuing Star Wars franchise.  So the lingering question is why do so many critics, critics who likely have not read what is now an obscure reference work, seem to fall in line with his thinking?
 
I believe the answer lies in the very nature of the western genre and its attitude toward, and treatment of death.  The western invites ruminations on death and the transience of our worldly existence, and is in fact largely self-reflective about such matters by the very nature that the mythologized “West” was contained inside a historical period of roughly one generation.  The heroes of our frontier were born on the cups of a created West, and lived to see it decline and be taken over by civilization – indeed; many of the frontier icons were active agents in the civilization of the west, which is perhaps one of the genre’s best ironies.  The world that made people like Buffalo Bill Cody, William “Bat” Masterson, and Wyatt Earp famous was already gone long before their own deaths.  Masterson died as a newspaperman in NYC, and Earp positioned himself as a Subject Matter Expert in early films, following the mythologizing example of Buffalo Bill Cody, who became a caricature of himself and turned his own biography into a commodity for Eastern consumption.  In some ways, one might argue that he sacrificed his own actual history for the creation of a mythic history of the western frontiersman.
 
 
The West was never meant to live on.  Its demise was always already deeply embedded within its own story, and this is seen even in some famous examples of the genre.  Movies like Tom Horn (1980) and Monte Walsh (1970, 2003) explicitly address the passing of the frontier and the necessity or resistance of characters to change with the times.  Sometimes the movies eulogize the passing of a way of life, like the cowboy culture in the aforementioned films, or the codes of the gunfighter in The Shootist (1976), or even an entire way of life, as in Dances With Wolves (1990).
 
So it makes some sense that the progressivism that superceded the frontier, and even appears in many of the western films that acknowledge it, would be embraced by critics. Surely, the story goes, our contemporary culture is far too sophisticated to bother with such horse operas.  And yet, as critics ranging from Slotkin to White  have demonstrated, the western is a highly variable genre that manages to both remain true to its benchmark traits while also reinventing itself for new audiences. So ride on, cowboy, ride on.
 
 

​Well, let me say that I liked this film; I thought it a proper western. I’d heard some foul reviews from friends who thought it didn’t make the cut (pardon the pun), but in the end I thought it a well-done film that satisfied all the western genre expectations and also introduced a new twist.
 
Bone Tomahawk has been widely labeled a “horror/western,” and I understand the impulse to do so; like its brethren Ravenous and Cowboys and Aliens, it does cross genre boundaries a bit, although in the end, I think the horrific aspect of a cannibalistic tribe tucked away in the mountains stays much closer to the traditional genre boundaries than either of the earlier films do.
 
To address the complaints of some of my friends, who said there was one scene in particular that lost them; yes, I know which scene you mean, and I too found it gratuitous and, more importantly, pointless.  Once Deputy Nick is taken from his cell, viewers know exactly what will become of him, and seeing the violent end to this character on center stage does little to forward the plot or even heighten tension.  I feel it would actually have been more effective to have the tortuous action occur offscreen, allowing viewers’ imaginations to fill in the blanks. However, it is also a brief scene, and I think the rest of the film is effective enough to give it a pass.
 
Back to its assets.  One thing I think the film does really well is that by setting the antagonists as a mysterious “tribe” who are shunned and feared even by the local native tribes, the film is able to cast an “Other” as the enemy without complicating our contemporary attitudes toward westward expansion and the subjugation of native tribes.  There is a small but effective scene in which a native character (played by Longmire’s  Zahn McClarnon) advises the posse not to go, saying that his tribe avoids this canyon because they’re so dangerous.  This effectively establishes that the tribe is not Indian, and heightens their otherworldy aspect.
 
Had this film been made in the 50s or 60s, it would have been easy enough to make the bad guys “Indians” and be done with it, and no one would have questioned the choice. But westerns have evolved with our national consciousness, and we no longer uncritically accept Native Americans as the natural antagonist, even in a western.  So Bone Tomahawk is able to deftly recast the Other as an unnatural tribe of flesh eaters, maintaining the dichotomy of hero and villain without creating the cognitive dissonance of imperialism or conquest that older westerns may have to a younger generation.
 
Finally, this film (unlike the Hateful Eight), reifies an old genre staple and provides something close to a happy ending – well, happy for at least a couple of characters, anyway.  I won’t spoil it further, but the film concludes on a fairly positive note, giving viewers a satisfying resolution.  The film is gritty and even brutal, to be sure, but in the end it reifies the social construct that was disrupted by the antagonists, and finally privileges the values of heroism, loyalty, and ultimately the power of love.

This past week marked a watershed moment for civil rights, in which the Supreme Court determined that the 14th Amendment protected same-sex marriage.  This is wonderful news for all Americans, as any extension of civil rights helps to protect everyone’s civil rights.

This got me to thinking, as it often does, of westerns.  Westerns are considered by many, including myself, as something like “America’s Genre.”  The western is the quintessential American story, and it really represents to me an embodiment of all the best that our country has to offer.

But wait, many will say, isn’t the western simply a genre rife with the romanticization of White oppression and the colonization of native peoples, essentially a genre of white hegemony? Well, yes, and also no.

The Western, firstly, is many things.  As Richard Slotkin has argued in his trilogy of the genre, the western has changed and morphed to suit and reflect the times in which it was made.  The westerns of the 1950s were very clear-cut, and reflected the certainty of their age, while the westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrated a much more nuanced treatment of the western hero, and indeed offered a new protagonist, the “anti-hero,” most notably of the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood. Richard Etulain calls these “gray westerns” because the boundary between good guy and bad guy is much more difficult to ascertain.  It was in the ‘70s that we got such notables as “Little Big Man” and later, in the 80s, “Dances With Wolves.”

But back to same sex marriage and gender roles in the western.  The Western has long been a bastion of conservative values in some respects, but if we look to the literature and the history of the late 19th century, a couple of things stand out.  First and foremost, the West of real life was a good bit more diverse than the Hollywood West that emulated it.  Some figures put white cowboys in the minority, especially in the desert Southwest, where much of the cowboy terminology owes a great debt to the Spanish and Mexican vaqueros.  Secondly, the western, as a genre, is capable of housing a multiplicity of viewpoints while still remaining a clearly identifiable western (staying true to popular genre markers), and so the tales that the western tells are not only chronicles of conquest and power, but of understanding and coexistence, and sometimes even forgiveness.

Bret Harte was an early “local color” writer whose work preceded (and some may say enabled) the success of Mark Twain.  One of his notable short stories is “Tennessee’s Partner,” which is based on a real-life pair of men in California.  In the short story, Tennesee runs off with his partner’s wife, only to return without her.  In an unexpected twist, the partner forgives and accepts him back.  In real life, the same thing happened, but the two men, Chaffee and Chamberlain, continue to live together for 54 years.  While they were not exactly “out” by modern standards, the local community seems to have considered them a couple, and accepted them as such.  People who had no particular acceptance for homosexuality accepted these two men.

Which brings me to my point.  The frontier west was a vast space with relatively small population densities, and although it was rough and tumble, people also had to work together, and the openness of the frontier created social spaces for coexistence that did not exist elsewhere.  Women, for instance, had voting rights in Wyoming from 1869, and most of the states west of the Mississippi granted women the right to vote prior to the 19th Amendment in 1920.  People might not like a certain ethnicity, or gender or religion, but in the old west they couldn’t remain ensconced in insular Facebook chat rooms of like-mindedness; they had to exercise tolerance and a certain amount of acceptance, even among people with whom they disagreed.  Some western stories, like “Tennessee’s Partner,” demonstrate this point.  You can see this story, and others, in the collection below.

I do not for a moment suggest that the west of history or literature is really a misunderstood land of progressive thinkers masquerading as rough and ready gunfighters, but do think that it’s a good example of how people can live and even thrive together in spite of their differences, and how a good western can often show us how to do it.