Comprehension

DECLINE OF THE WESTERN?

For years the cowboys and Indians, the gunfighters and farmers, were the staples of the screen. For most of its history Hollywood has been if not dependent on, at least indebted to, the western for its continued popularity and success. Until recently it was a truism at the studios that the solution to the financial woes caused by too many flops was to make a western. No film of John Wayne's ever lost money, and most westerns without the Duke were also quite profitable. Similarly, the fortunes of television have, until lately, rested significantly upon the attraction of the west as a source of entertainment. Not only did the networks create their own westerns in series after successful series, they also bought up thousands of the longer Hollywood versions and showed them endlessly, in the mornings, in the afternoons, in prime time, and on the late show.

Most of these films and series repeated well-known stories with familiar characters, or character-types, but the American public responded to this familiarity not with contempt, but with the affection given an old, well-worn house slipper — based on the clear expectation of a satisfying and comfortable fit which supports and soothes without chafing. And the overseas audience, with a similar if not greater capacity for repetition, has in the last four decades adopted the western for entertainment and escape purposes with an intensity which has yet to be adequately explained.
Yet in the 1990s the western has suffered a serious decline. Few are made, and those few are not very good nor particularly successful. Clint Eastwood seems to have traded in his six-gun for a magnum, and John Wayne has been quoted as wishing he had done so with more success. The westerns which have appeared recently have seemed confused and directionless, without the assurance and moral conviction of their predecessors. Most of these films have tried to debunk the mythical assumptions of earlier westerns, just as films like "High Noon" or "The Wild Bunch" used the western form to question itself. But unlike these earlier efforts, the films of the seventies lack a clear vision of an alternative version of the west, one which is more 'realistic' than the mythical one. As a result, the western is no longer familiar and soothing; the old slipper seems to have burst at the seams, destroying its form-fitting comfort and making adjustment difficult, if not impossible. Thus the loyal audience becomes less loyal and the film-makers understandably lose much of their interest in the genre. For the last two decades, westerns have virtually disappeared from prime-time television, to be replaced by police and detective series.
What has caused the decline of the western? Many explanations are given: it could be argued, for example, that there is a natural cycle of popularity and surfeit, that this is the nadir of the cycle, and that the western will return as usual. This assumes a natural process that works independently of the other aspects of society. Or you could argue that the laws against mistreatment of horses have made the costs of producing westerns in America prohibitive. This assumes that the crucial factors are those of technique, rather than the interests of producers or audience. Another possibility is that the investors and/or the producers of films have decided for reasons of their own that westerns are no longer viable commercially, and so will not produce them. This implies a conspiracy theory - that we as the audience are subject to the whims of a few powerful men in the industry, and can see only what they permit us to see.
Each of these explanations is probably valid to some degree. But personally I prefer one which assumes that films are ideological productions — so that the popularity of a genre mainly depends on how well the ideology of the film fits the social experiences of its audience. In other words, the crucial variable would be the relation between the symbolic structure of the story and the basic social consciousness required by the institutional demands of daily life. This kind of explanation is more satisfying, I believe, because it does not assume that the audience is simply a passive receptacle of what is put in front of it. Instead, the audience is seen as an active participant in choosing, with regard to its own needs, which types of stories it will watch and enjoy. This approach has the merit of making the explanation take into account the social context of the films; to recognise that to account for the significance of a myth or a genre, the nature of the society and the expectations of its members must be incorporated into the explanation.