Westerns Are Back and They're Better than Ever
A New Old West Without the Woke
No form of American popular culture says more about how Americans think about America than “the Westerns.” One of the first and most popular shorts from Thomas Edison’s studio was a silent black-and-white film of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (1894). Some of the greatest films of the Hollywood canon are Westerns, such as the work of John Ford with movies like The Searchers (1956).
The influence of American films was global. Famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa penned his classic film The Seven Samurai (1954) on the American Western. In turn, the American movie, The Magnificent Seven (1960), turned Kurosawa’s film back into a classic American Western.
Over the decades since film was invented, as Americans changed so did their Westerns. Westerns tell us much more about how we see ourselves than how the West was.
Just a few years ago, the Old West had evolved into a leftist playground for trashing class and culture. As one reviewer wrote,
“In the modern imagination, the Western milieu is a battleground of terror and freedom. The dominant class uses it to reinforce grotesque masculinity and American exceptionalism. At the same time, downtrodden subjects draw on its old myths as inspiration to rise up against the strangulating force of globalized capital hidden within our corrupted playgrounds.”
In our post-Trump world, however, something is changing.
Today, the best of American Westerns bucks the trend of films and productions that are incessantly more woke, embracing liberal views on gender, culture, politics and values. That is not surprising. America is a fifty-fifty nation. Only half of us think men competing in women’s sports, multiple genders, and abolishing the family structure is a good idea. The contemporary American Western has become a genre for subversively mainstreaming conservative ideas. The most vital of these being the importance of self-governance and personal responsibility—that we are the authors of our fate.
Some of the most popular stuff on movie screens and streaming services, reflects a new view of the Old West we have rarely seen.
There is a new generation of Westerns, typified by the work of writer/actor/producer Taylor Sheridan in the prequel to his hit show Yellowstone (2018), titled 1883 (2022). There are other examples as well, such as the limited series The English (2022) or the film (2019) and the recurring series Deadwood (2004-2006). These works present a far less idolized vision of the West than we saw in old TV shows like Wagon Train (1957-1965) or Hollywood movies like How the West was Won (1962).
On the other hand, the Taylor Sheridan generation doesn’t repeat the moralizing of films in the 1970s and 80s that turned Westerns into contemporary social commentary with movies like Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1972) or Ulzana’s Raid (1972).
What Sheridan and others have done also looks nothing like efforts to treat the Old West as an entertaining ride at Disneyland, such as we saw in the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s or more contemporary films like Silverado (1985)[The Big Chill (1983), Young Guns (1988) The Breakfast Club (1985) (with guns) or Cowboys and Aliens( 2011) Independence Day (1996) (with cowboys and alien guns).
What the Sheridan generation has to offer is something different. They present a grittier and less sentimentalized frontier that doesn’t neglect the ugly, tragic, diseased, brutal side of the life and death in the Old West. These new works also resist turning tales of the frontier into moralizing about contemporary attitudes on race, gender, class, and politics. For sure, women play a more prominent role in their stories. But, then again there were a lot of women in the Old West and they had just as important a place in frontier life as men, so that is perfectly appropriate. Indigenous peoples are more central to story lines as well. Again, that makes sense since the Old West was just as much their story. There are also plenty of people of color-black, Asian, and every shade of European immigrant. There were straight people. There were gay people. And, that’s because, well, they were there too.
What’s different about what Sheridan and others are doing is that there are fewer caricatures. There are less “them” and “us.” There is more just “us,” humanity-fighting, scrapping, struggling to survive. There is courage and cowards. There is redemption and dissolution. There is nobility and insanity. This is decidedly a vision of how contemporary conservatives see our world.
Even into the days of Reagan, the conservative vision matched classic John Wayne Western like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). The good guys would always win because—well we were the good guys. Today, conservatives are scrappier. They don’t think the world is fair. They don’t think that just being the good guy is good enough. They must fight for their future. They might not be fighting disease, starvation, brutal weather, and bushwhackers on the open plain, but they see their struggle in school boards, the workplace, and fighting for their own families just as consequential and difficult. They are ready to sit and watch shows about a cruel and unforgivable Old West.
The Sheridan generation builds on the work of a pioneering group of artists that wrote differently about pioneer life like Cormac McCarthy, probably best known for the book and film No Country for Old Men (2007). McCarthy’s vision is most pronounced in the harrowing and brutal novel Blood Meridian (1985).
What Sheridan and others have done, however, is breakthrough the left’s hammerlock on popular culture. The left, in fact, hates how popular the new vision of the Old West is. As one writer notes,
“For all of his evident success, Sheridan and the universe he’s created occupy a peculiar place on the American cultural landscape. Despite its high ratings, and Paramount’s explicit attempts to position it as prestige television, the series doesn’t get critical love, or even much critical attention. In January, when the show received a major nomination (for best ensemble in a drama series) from the Screen Actors Guild, some thought the show’s breakthrough critical moment might finally have arrived. But when the Emmy finalists were announced, Yellowstone was shut out.”
No matter, half of America loves this stuff. For them, it’s more than entertainment, it reflects the stark and uncompromising struggles that they see in their own lives—where they rise and fall on their own merit as the fates allow. The new Old West is validation.
Meanwhile, the suits being suits, just interested in making money and burnishing their woke credentials, continue to green light new projects—thinking as long as their admirable women, minority, gay, and Indian characters they are still true to their woke ideals. Of course, they miss the whole point, they are not imposing these characters on the Old West. They were already there. Telling their story just makes the stories more authentic. As long as artists like Taylor Sheridan are telling these stories, however, they will always appeal more to Americans who are not ashamed to be Americans.