Westerns

The Western is an American genre in literature and film. more...

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Westerns are art works – films, literature, television and radio shows, sculpture (particularly that by Frederic Remington), and paintings – devoted to telling stories set in the 19th Century American West (and sometimes Mexico, Canada or the Australian Outback, during the same time period), with the setting occasionally portrayed in a romanticised light.

While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has decreased in prominence since the late 1970s.

Definition

Westerns, by definition, are set in the Western United States during the period from the start of the US Civil War in 1860 to the end of the so-called "Indian Wars" at Wounded Knee in 1890. But this definition is very elastic. Some westerns incorporate the Civil War, which was essentially an "eastern" conflict (i.e., east of the Mississippi river). Westerns have crossed the US borders: frequently into Mexico, sometimes into Canada and even, famously, into Bolivia. The timeframe is stretched even further. The genre includes films about the Battle of the Alamo in 1836; and the Mexican Revolution as late as 1920. There are also westerns which take place in Australia, such as Quigley Down Under and The Proposition. The Australian relationship with Aboriginals has many parallels with the U.S. treatment of Native Americans.

Common themes

The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. The Western depicts a society organized around codes of honor, rather than the law, in which persons have no social order larger than their immediate peers, family, or perhaps themselves alone.

One of the best examples, where honor supersedes everything else, including the law, work, and family with disastrous results, occurs in The Jack Bull (1999) starring John Cusack. This minor Western classic is a gritty, unromanticized study of the individual against the world, of a lone horse breeder in a region on the verge of statehood, yet where the law is in flux and for sale to the highest bidder. Only the individual's sense of morality, fairness, and compassion stand up to rampant greed, violence, power, and corruption. In the end, however, the individual drowns in the sea of civilization. In a way, this film, alongside Unforgiven, represents a bleaker yet some say more realistic cinematic shift where the hero may be the technical lawbreaker but the moral victor, and though vigilante justice may succeed, this new form of antihero will not be rewarded in the end.

Read more at Wikipedia.org