WEBVTT 00:00:00.090 --> 00:00:02.500 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.500 --> 00:00:04.030 Commons license. 00:00:04.030 --> 00:00:06.360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.730 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.730 --> 00:00:13.330 To make a donation or view additional materials 00:00:13.330 --> 00:00:17.217 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:17.217 --> 00:00:17.842 at ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:26.280 --> 00:00:31.990 PROFESSOR: We continue this wee, next week, 00:00:31.990 --> 00:00:35.440 with our conversation-- it's really our final conversation-- 00:00:35.440 --> 00:00:39.210 about the genre forms that are at the center of the Hollywood 00:00:39.210 --> 00:00:43.830 era with a consideration of the Western. 00:00:43.830 --> 00:00:46.690 And that perhaps we should begin by acknowledging 00:00:46.690 --> 00:00:48.620 how central the Western is as a movie 00:00:48.620 --> 00:00:52.320 form in the history of American cinema. 00:00:52.320 --> 00:00:55.750 Before the advent of television in the late '40s-- 00:00:55.750 --> 00:00:59.210 the first American television broadcast was 1946. 00:00:59.210 --> 00:01:01.110 And we can say the television is actually 00:01:01.110 --> 00:01:04.470 established is a social experience in American life 00:01:04.470 --> 00:01:09.460 certainly by the late '40s, by let's say 1949 or 1950. 00:01:09.460 --> 00:01:11.200 And it's through the '50s that television 00:01:11.200 --> 00:01:15.960 spreads through the society and begins to supplant the movies. 00:01:15.960 --> 00:01:17.500 So that before television, let's say 00:01:17.500 --> 00:01:20.750 that before 1950, nearly 30% percent 00:01:20.750 --> 00:01:22.860 of every movie made in the United States 00:01:22.860 --> 00:01:27.130 was a Western all the way through the Hollywood era. 00:01:27.130 --> 00:01:33.480 And in fact, in the silent era, as I will describe briefly 00:01:33.480 --> 00:01:37.490 again this evening when I do a kind of mini history 00:01:37.490 --> 00:01:41.610 of the Western movie, even in the silent era, 00:01:41.610 --> 00:01:42.720 it's a central form. 00:01:47.540 --> 00:01:51.210 And even after the 1950s, even after the advent of television, 00:01:51.210 --> 00:01:53.160 nearly half of all movies that we 00:01:53.160 --> 00:01:57.280 might identify as set in the past, as historical movies, 00:01:57.280 --> 00:01:59.764 were Westerns. 00:01:59.764 --> 00:02:01.180 And of course, as I suggested when 00:02:01.180 --> 00:02:03.750 I talked about the musical, the Western 00:02:03.750 --> 00:02:08.759 can be understood along with the musical as a uniquely American 00:02:08.759 --> 00:02:10.750 form, even though at a certain point 00:02:10.750 --> 00:02:14.180 in the mid and late '1960s, certain gifted Italian 00:02:14.180 --> 00:02:16.180 directors begin to take over the Western 00:02:16.180 --> 00:02:19.690 and darken it and throw a kind of European cynicism 00:02:19.690 --> 00:02:21.790 into the tradition of the Western. 00:02:21.790 --> 00:02:25.880 By that time, the Western genre evolved and transformed 00:02:25.880 --> 00:02:29.900 in ways that made this cynicism not completely unique, not 00:02:29.900 --> 00:02:34.780 totally European, because a kind of subversive perspective 00:02:34.780 --> 00:02:37.800 had begun to enter the American version of the Western as well. 00:02:37.800 --> 00:02:42.700 Nonetheless, the Western form underwent 00:02:42.700 --> 00:02:44.180 profound transformations. 00:02:44.180 --> 00:02:45.890 And it's those transformations that I 00:02:45.890 --> 00:02:50.780 want to briefly to talk about here in an introductory way. 00:02:50.780 --> 00:02:53.520 And I'll return to that sort of what 00:02:53.520 --> 00:02:55.860 we might call the trajectory or the career 00:02:55.860 --> 00:02:59.630 of the Western briefly this evening when I introduce 00:02:59.630 --> 00:03:02.290 some comments I want to make about John Ford 00:03:02.290 --> 00:03:04.750 and about his classic Western, the film we're watching 00:03:04.750 --> 00:03:06.130 tonight, "The Searchers." 00:03:06.130 --> 00:03:10.260 I want to talk a little bit more, 00:03:10.260 --> 00:03:12.860 not only about the Western, but about why the Western might 00:03:12.860 --> 00:03:16.390 be seen as being the central American form, 00:03:16.390 --> 00:03:20.910 why it is so central not only to the History of American cinema, 00:03:20.910 --> 00:03:24.630 but in a certain sense, central to the cultural history 00:03:24.630 --> 00:03:26.340 of American society. 00:03:26.340 --> 00:03:28.550 One way to see this is to reframe 00:03:28.550 --> 00:03:31.800 the idea I've been suggesting all through the term 00:03:31.800 --> 00:03:33.650 this notion that at a certain point, 00:03:33.650 --> 00:03:37.970 the movies became a form of central storytelling 00:03:37.970 --> 00:03:40.870 in the society, the form of storytelling 00:03:40.870 --> 00:03:45.300 that more Americans than any other form 00:03:45.300 --> 00:03:49.240 participated in and experienced, a form that I've 00:03:49.240 --> 00:03:51.810 come to label consensus narrative, 00:03:51.810 --> 00:03:55.860 a kind of story system that appeals across social barriers 00:03:55.860 --> 00:04:00.450 and across age that intends in some sense to express what 00:04:00.450 --> 00:04:03.190 might be called the dominant or the central values 00:04:03.190 --> 00:04:04.160 of a society. 00:04:04.160 --> 00:04:08.410 We talked about this idea-- I've talked about this idea 00:04:08.410 --> 00:04:10.020 already at some length and I don't 00:04:10.020 --> 00:04:11.690 want to spend too much time on it here. 00:04:11.690 --> 00:04:14.770 But I want to complicate those ideas one more 00:04:14.770 --> 00:04:20.240 time by reminding you that one way to think about or one way 00:04:20.240 --> 00:04:25.105 to frame this notion that the movies and the Western form 00:04:25.105 --> 00:04:30.030 in particular embody this notion of a story form that 00:04:30.030 --> 00:04:32.190 tends to reach the whole society or to speak 00:04:32.190 --> 00:04:33.950 for the whole society or to embody 00:04:33.950 --> 00:04:36.430 the central values of the whole society 00:04:36.430 --> 00:04:39.100 is one way of understanding the implications of that 00:04:39.100 --> 00:04:45.780 is to recognize, first of all, that the Hollywood system which 00:04:45.780 --> 00:04:49.460 is so committed to forms of genre representation 00:04:49.460 --> 00:04:57.200 is particularly served by the principles of repetition that 00:04:57.200 --> 00:05:01.260 are inherent in the conventions that surround the Western. 00:05:01.260 --> 00:05:03.470 Even the Western-- the content of Westerns 00:05:03.470 --> 00:05:05.510 or the attitudes within Westerns might 00:05:05.510 --> 00:05:09.420 undergo great transformations, the basic formulas 00:05:09.420 --> 00:05:11.830 remain recognizable from the earliest days. 00:05:11.830 --> 00:05:16.000 We think about the costumes, the horses, the guns, and so forth, 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:19.870 and even certain basic plots and subplots that 00:05:19.870 --> 00:05:21.700 keep returning in the Western. 00:05:21.700 --> 00:05:27.160 As with the musical, the genre is so robust 00:05:27.160 --> 00:05:29.040 that it has many sort of some sub 00:05:29.040 --> 00:05:32.030 within it so that one can talk about Westerns 00:05:32.030 --> 00:05:36.910 that involve battles between sheep herders and ranchers. 00:05:36.910 --> 00:05:39.290 Or one can talk about the Westerns 00:05:39.290 --> 00:05:41.390 that are so focused on the laying 00:05:41.390 --> 00:05:43.270 of the transcontinental railroad. 00:05:43.270 --> 00:05:46.650 Or one could focus on Westerns that focus 00:05:46.650 --> 00:05:49.290 on the conflict between white settlers and Indians. 00:05:49.290 --> 00:05:51.720 Now, many Westerns combine a number of these elements. 00:05:51.720 --> 00:05:56.150 And there are other sub genres we could describe. 00:05:56.150 --> 00:06:01.530 The very fact that there are these sub genres 00:06:01.530 --> 00:06:06.290 is a measure of how robust the system became. 00:06:06.290 --> 00:06:09.440 And one way to think, therefore, about this idea that I've 00:06:09.440 --> 00:06:13.924 labeled, consensus narrative, or another way 00:06:13.924 --> 00:06:15.840 to think about what I've earlier in the course 00:06:15.840 --> 00:06:18.210 called the cultural work of the movies 00:06:18.210 --> 00:06:21.190 or the cultural, the anthropological job, 00:06:21.190 --> 00:06:24.970 that genre forms in general during the Hollywood era 00:06:24.970 --> 00:06:29.650 perform, is to recognize that we can understand 00:06:29.650 --> 00:06:31.700 the specific genre as a distilled 00:06:31.700 --> 00:06:34.360 instance of the larger process of the movies, 00:06:34.360 --> 00:06:37.660 right, as a smaller clarifying instance, 00:06:37.660 --> 00:06:40.780 we can understand in a certain sense 00:06:40.780 --> 00:06:44.870 as a forum, a space of conversation, 00:06:44.870 --> 00:06:48.270 a space of discourse in which the culture engages 00:06:48.270 --> 00:06:50.900 in a kind of ongoing conversation. 00:06:50.900 --> 00:06:52.920 You remember the terms I used earlier borrowing 00:06:52.920 --> 00:06:55.260 from the English critic Raymond Williams. 00:06:55.260 --> 00:06:59.500 I said that we can understand that these genre reforms 00:06:59.500 --> 00:07:02.790 or these consensus forms could be said to mobilize 00:07:02.790 --> 00:07:05.100 three different strains of attitude-- 00:07:05.100 --> 00:07:09.320 an emergent, a dominant, and a traditional set of voices-- 00:07:09.320 --> 00:07:11.580 and that one of the explanations for why 00:07:11.580 --> 00:07:14.120 genre texts and the Hollywood movie specifically 00:07:14.120 --> 00:07:17.530 and the Western in particular are often so conflicted 00:07:17.530 --> 00:07:20.000 or divided is precisely that they embody 00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:23.580 or incorporate some attitudes that 00:07:23.580 --> 00:07:26.100 are traditional and old fashioned, some attitudes that 00:07:26.100 --> 00:07:29.990 are emerging and challenge traditional ideas, 00:07:29.990 --> 00:07:33.250 and also what we might central or dominant values, 00:07:33.250 --> 00:07:36.010 and that not every text will balance those elements 00:07:36.010 --> 00:07:37.710 in exactly the same way. 00:07:37.710 --> 00:07:39.780 The second point about this is to recognize 00:07:39.780 --> 00:07:42.310 that one of the beauties of genre, one of the reasons 00:07:42.310 --> 00:07:45.710 they serve such a fundamental cultural or anthropological 00:07:45.710 --> 00:07:48.690 function in a society, is precisely 00:07:48.690 --> 00:07:51.490 that they go on forever, that in other words 00:07:51.490 --> 00:07:55.060 we can think of genre forms as a kind of ongoing continuing 00:07:55.060 --> 00:07:57.780 conversation centered on the same formats 00:07:57.780 --> 00:07:59.130 and the same conventions. 00:07:59.130 --> 00:08:04.830 And if the genre is stable and if the society produces 00:08:04.830 --> 00:08:08.150 these genre forms over decades, the genre 00:08:08.150 --> 00:08:14.080 form itself becomes a mirror in which we can see 00:08:14.080 --> 00:08:18.220 reflected the changing values and assumptions of the culture. 00:08:18.220 --> 00:08:23.440 Now, this might be true of any kind of a particular genre 00:08:23.440 --> 00:08:25.300 form in any medium. 00:08:25.300 --> 00:08:27.640 But the reason it has special force when 00:08:27.640 --> 00:08:30.280 we're talking about the movies in the 20th century 00:08:30.280 --> 00:08:31.870 in the United States is precisely 00:08:31.870 --> 00:08:35.280 because the form is so central to the society, 00:08:35.280 --> 00:08:37.840 because so much of the society participates in it. 00:08:37.840 --> 00:08:39.380 So the picture of the society that 00:08:39.380 --> 00:08:43.090 is the ambivalent and conflicted picture of the society that 00:08:43.090 --> 00:08:46.170 emerges from studying these genre forms 00:08:46.170 --> 00:08:48.900 is likely to be far more illuminating about the larger 00:08:48.900 --> 00:08:54.190 culture than, let's say, a study of a cultural form, let's say, 00:08:54.190 --> 00:08:55.900 like opera. 00:08:55.900 --> 00:08:58.470 Not that the opera isn't worth studying and doesn't reflect 00:08:58.470 --> 00:09:01.700 certain cultural values too, but because the opera appeals 00:09:01.700 --> 00:09:04.210 to a particular subculture, the values 00:09:04.210 --> 00:09:06.050 are going to be narrower. 00:09:06.050 --> 00:09:09.660 The kinds of assumptions the people writing opera 00:09:09.660 --> 00:09:12.260 and attending opera make about the larger culture and about 00:09:12.260 --> 00:09:14.820 aesthetic experience are profoundly 00:09:14.820 --> 00:09:18.470 different from the much more dispersed 00:09:18.470 --> 00:09:23.150 and democratic attitudes and accessible notions 00:09:23.150 --> 00:09:28.425 that animate the create of a consensus form, 00:09:28.425 --> 00:09:32.030 of a form that's trying to reach the whole of a culture. 00:09:32.030 --> 00:09:35.000 So this is a way of reminding you 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:36.910 of what we might call the sociological and 00:09:36.910 --> 00:09:40.980 anthropological importance of the study of popular forms 00:09:40.980 --> 00:09:42.620 in general and of American movies 00:09:42.620 --> 00:09:47.080 in particular, the Western genre even more especially. 00:09:47.080 --> 00:09:52.140 We can think, therefore, of the Western almost 00:09:52.140 --> 00:09:55.880 as a form of kind of national theater, a kind of repertory 00:09:55.880 --> 00:10:00.430 company in which the same relatively small number, 00:10:00.430 --> 00:10:03.530 recognizably small number, of actors and actresses, 00:10:03.530 --> 00:10:07.710 of directors and other sub specialists whose names are 00:10:07.710 --> 00:10:13.620 never remembered, collaborate to create the film. 00:10:13.620 --> 00:10:17.210 We can think of the movies as embodying, 00:10:17.210 --> 00:10:23.220 in a certain sense, what I'm calling 00:10:23.220 --> 00:10:25.080 the theater of a nation. 00:10:25.080 --> 00:10:27.030 And I put the phrase in quotation marks 00:10:27.030 --> 00:10:29.274 not because it's a fancy phrase, but because I 00:10:29.274 --> 00:10:30.690 want to call attention to the fact 00:10:30.690 --> 00:10:32.820 that I'm actually borrowing a phrase 00:10:32.820 --> 00:10:35.420 from a great literary historian who 00:10:35.420 --> 00:10:37.644 wrote a book about Shakespeare's audience 00:10:37.644 --> 00:10:40.060 and about Shakespeare's plays and about the public theater 00:10:40.060 --> 00:10:45.330 of Shakespeare's day and called that theater the theater 00:10:45.330 --> 00:10:46.620 of a nation. 00:10:46.620 --> 00:10:49.990 And in a certain sense, we could say that the Hollywood system 00:10:49.990 --> 00:10:53.000 was a similar kind of theater. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:55.350 It doesn't from this that every text created 00:10:55.350 --> 00:10:57.620 there is a noble work of art. 00:10:57.620 --> 00:10:59.670 And it's very important to recognize 00:10:59.670 --> 00:11:01.380 that the distinction I'm making between 00:11:01.380 --> 00:11:05.020 and anthropological perspective and an artistic one 00:11:05.020 --> 00:11:07.200 must hold here. 00:11:07.200 --> 00:11:09.556 And it's another reason for emphasizing this. 00:11:09.556 --> 00:11:10.930 Because the fact of the matter is 00:11:10.930 --> 00:11:12.950 it's very hard in a course like this, 00:11:12.950 --> 00:11:15.390 especially-- because some of these films are so wonderful, 00:11:15.390 --> 00:11:18.390 my own enthusiasm encourages you to like them 00:11:18.390 --> 00:11:19.580 and I want you to like them. 00:11:19.580 --> 00:11:21.454 Nonetheless, it's very important to recognize 00:11:21.454 --> 00:11:25.140 that I'm not trying to tell you a merely triumphalist story 00:11:25.140 --> 00:11:29.200 about how magnificently American movies began 00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:31.100 to sort of realize their possibilities 00:11:31.100 --> 00:11:33.310 and dramatize experience. 00:11:33.310 --> 00:11:35.810 Because in a certain fundamental sense, 00:11:35.810 --> 00:11:39.200 these consensus values are not necessarily noble ones. 00:11:39.200 --> 00:11:41.200 And the western is a particularly clear instance 00:11:41.200 --> 00:11:41.699 of this. 00:11:41.699 --> 00:11:43.730 And what I'm talking about in a certain sense 00:11:43.730 --> 00:11:46.260 is the extent to which these genre reforms carry 00:11:46.260 --> 00:11:51.540 the lies, the prejudices, the nasty qualities of a society 00:11:51.540 --> 00:11:54.280 as well as their ideals and values. 00:11:54.280 --> 00:11:57.330 And we can feel those elements, even though the films 00:11:57.330 --> 00:12:00.260 themselves want to tell uplifting stories, 00:12:00.260 --> 00:12:03.410 the values embedded in them may not be so attractive at all. 00:12:03.410 --> 00:12:05.640 And the Western is a particularly clear instance 00:12:05.640 --> 00:12:08.770 of this-- a reminder, again, that we don't just 00:12:08.770 --> 00:12:11.650 look at films for aesthetic satisfaction. 00:12:11.650 --> 00:12:13.460 We don't just look at films for-- we 00:12:13.460 --> 00:12:16.120 don't need to just look at films for mere enjoyment. 00:12:16.120 --> 00:12:19.860 They are anthropological artifacts 00:12:19.860 --> 00:12:25.470 of the greatest importance exactly because they existed 00:12:25.470 --> 00:12:30.296 at such a central, at such a fundamental space in the larger 00:12:30.296 --> 00:12:30.795 society. 00:12:34.030 --> 00:12:37.240 Why would the Western-- why would the Western 00:12:37.240 --> 00:12:38.650 be such a central form? 00:12:38.650 --> 00:12:41.510 Why, in some sense, could we think of the movies, 00:12:41.510 --> 00:12:44.090 with its vast, wide, giant screen, 00:12:44.090 --> 00:12:46.900 as the ultimate destiny of the Western? 00:12:46.900 --> 00:12:49.794 I think one explanation for the power of the Western film, 00:12:49.794 --> 00:12:51.210 because there were Western stories 00:12:51.210 --> 00:12:53.860 and other Western formats before the advent of film-- 00:12:53.860 --> 00:12:55.980 and I'll talk about them in a moment. 00:12:55.980 --> 00:12:59.042 Why would the film be such a decisive space for the Western? 00:12:59.042 --> 00:13:01.000 And I think if you think about it for a moment, 00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:03.530 you'll recognize instantly why that is the case. 00:13:03.530 --> 00:13:06.890 The format of the movies is particularly 00:13:06.890 --> 00:13:10.300 conducive to the sense of grandeur and largeness, 00:13:10.300 --> 00:13:13.010 spaciousness, that's characteristic of Western 00:13:13.010 --> 00:13:22.920 spaces and of the parables of heroism and social create, 00:13:22.920 --> 00:13:25.430 society creation, so the equation 00:13:25.430 --> 00:13:29.480 of a particular culture or environment in the wilderness, 00:13:29.480 --> 00:13:32.750 the establishment of civilization as a recurring 00:13:32.750 --> 00:13:33.870 theme in the western. 00:13:33.870 --> 00:13:37.830 This kind of recurring subject is 00:13:37.830 --> 00:13:42.660 at the very heart of what Westerns do and turn 00:13:42.660 --> 00:13:46.760 the movies, I think, into a particularly appropriate 00:13:46.760 --> 00:13:49.800 environment for the largeness and grandeur 00:13:49.800 --> 00:13:52.520 that Westerns represent. 00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:54.900 But that itself isn't quite enough to explain 00:13:54.900 --> 00:13:57.970 why the Westerns occupy such a central place. 00:13:57.970 --> 00:14:00.420 And of course, there are historical and cultural 00:14:00.420 --> 00:14:02.000 explanations as well. 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:03.810 The first explanation is that the movies 00:14:03.810 --> 00:14:06.660 are born at the end of a period in which we could say 00:14:06.660 --> 00:14:08.350 the real west actually existed. 00:14:08.350 --> 00:14:10.200 In other words, the movies come in just 00:14:10.200 --> 00:14:12.940 at the moment-- the movies actually are still 00:14:12.940 --> 00:14:17.130 around when the experience of what we call the West 00:14:17.130 --> 00:14:21.630 was still historically actual. 00:14:21.630 --> 00:14:23.900 It wasn't quite in the past. 00:14:23.900 --> 00:14:28.120 The Western genre is focused really 00:14:28.120 --> 00:14:32.150 on a 30 year period, that what some critics have 00:14:32.150 --> 00:14:35.790 called the real west, in the period from about 1860 00:14:35.790 --> 00:14:38.900 through 1890. 00:14:38.900 --> 00:14:42.990 And this is the period of the Civil War, of a whole variety 00:14:42.990 --> 00:14:46.810 of Indian wars, of the laying of the transcontinental railroad, 00:14:46.810 --> 00:14:51.190 of the California and Dakota gold rushes, 00:14:51.190 --> 00:14:54.490 the period of the range wars I mentioned a little while ago 00:14:54.490 --> 00:14:57.230 between settlers and great ranchers who 00:14:57.230 --> 00:14:59.920 wanted to keep spaces open for their cattle. 00:14:59.920 --> 00:15:03.000 And of course, we now realize it's the period, 00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:05.830 although the early Westerns didn't want to acknowledge this 00:15:05.830 --> 00:15:09.540 and told a kind of opposite, it's 00:15:09.540 --> 00:15:12.400 also of course the era in which we exterminate, 00:15:12.400 --> 00:15:15.640 virtually-- the era of genocide against Native Americans, 00:15:15.640 --> 00:15:19.610 the extermination of Indians and of the Buffalo that 00:15:19.610 --> 00:15:22.600 roamed the Western plains. 00:15:22.600 --> 00:15:26.570 And before this real west moment was over, 00:15:26.570 --> 00:15:32.350 even before it became history, it 00:15:32.350 --> 00:15:35.180 had begun to be mythologized. 00:15:35.180 --> 00:15:37.620 It was mythologized in the popular culture 00:15:37.620 --> 00:15:40.710 simultaneously with its actual existence. 00:15:40.710 --> 00:15:45.430 And there were a whole series of forms of publication 00:15:45.430 --> 00:15:49.090 and forms of drama that drew on the west and stories 00:15:49.090 --> 00:15:52.640 of the west and begin to establish what we might call 00:15:52.640 --> 00:15:56.490 the basic conventions of the Western mythology 00:15:56.490 --> 00:16:01.130 or the parable America likes to tell itself 00:16:01.130 --> 00:16:03.740 about the nature of the settling the West. 00:16:03.740 --> 00:16:06.920 One of these forms were the dime novels 00:16:06.920 --> 00:16:10.510 that appeared in the late 19th century 00:16:10.510 --> 00:16:15.570 and into the early 20th century, available usually in paperback 00:16:15.570 --> 00:16:17.800 at news stands. 00:16:17.800 --> 00:16:19.855 And some of them were immensely popular. 00:16:23.290 --> 00:16:26.490 Here's one title, a very famous one, 00:16:26.490 --> 00:16:28.910 the equivalent of a best seller, I guess, 00:16:28.910 --> 00:16:32.580 of the day published in 1882-- The Life, Times, 00:16:32.580 --> 00:16:36.820 and Treacherous Death of Jesse James, 1882. 00:16:36.820 --> 00:16:39.860 And of course, what these dime novels 00:16:39.860 --> 00:16:42.230 did was they took what were quasi historical events, 00:16:42.230 --> 00:16:45.780 sometimes real events, and immensely elaborated them, 00:16:45.780 --> 00:16:49.330 fictionized them into heroic fables of various kinds, 00:16:49.330 --> 00:16:52.290 often celebrating people like Jesse James who 00:16:52.290 --> 00:16:55.090 may well have been outlaws and disreputable people 00:16:55.090 --> 00:16:57.330 in actuality. 00:16:57.330 --> 00:17:02.000 Another title-- The Illustrated Lives and Adventures 00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:06.240 of Frank and Jesse James and the Younger Brothers. 00:17:06.240 --> 00:17:11.849 And you can imagine what that kind of thing would have done. 00:17:11.849 --> 00:17:14.020 In addition to these dime novels, 00:17:14.020 --> 00:17:17.410 there will also stage performances, plays. 00:17:17.410 --> 00:17:21.859 They were often some form of melodrama set in the Old West 00:17:21.859 --> 00:17:27.730 and involving the basic costumes and accoutrements of a Western, 00:17:27.730 --> 00:17:28.250 right? 00:17:28.250 --> 00:17:31.810 Pistols and cowboy hats and school marms from the east 00:17:31.810 --> 00:17:32.900 and so forth. 00:17:32.900 --> 00:17:35.630 But perhaps even more important than these two sources, 00:17:35.630 --> 00:17:37.820 and they were very powerful and important forms 00:17:37.820 --> 00:17:40.910 of popular culture before films to help establish what we might 00:17:40.910 --> 00:17:44.430 call the mythology of the west, were the Buffalo Bill shows, 00:17:44.430 --> 00:17:46.450 the wild west shows. 00:17:46.450 --> 00:17:49.640 These were unbelievably popular and successful. 00:17:49.640 --> 00:17:54.770 Here is a picture of a kind of flyer 00:17:54.770 --> 00:17:57.300 that would be distributed in small towns 00:17:57.300 --> 00:17:59.970 or sometimes in larger towns as the Wild West show 00:17:59.970 --> 00:18:03.690 and-- the Wild West show came to town. 00:18:03.690 --> 00:18:08.480 The star of the Wild West show was William Cody, Buffalo Bill. 00:18:08.480 --> 00:18:12.440 He had a very modest actual career in the west. 00:18:12.440 --> 00:18:15.550 But it was immensely elaborated by him and his publicist 00:18:15.550 --> 00:18:18.720 into something much grander and more remarkable. 00:18:18.720 --> 00:18:22.660 Buffalo Bill made his first age appearance in 1872 00:18:22.660 --> 00:18:26.640 in a stage melodrama called "Scout of the Planes," 00:18:26.640 --> 00:18:28.710 which went on a two year four, right? 00:18:28.710 --> 00:18:31.220 And then in 1882, 10 years later, 00:18:31.220 --> 00:18:33.610 he formed his own wild west show, which 00:18:33.610 --> 00:18:36.221 became immensely popular, traveled all over the country, 00:18:36.221 --> 00:18:37.470 and then made trips to Europe. 00:18:37.470 --> 00:18:43.290 He even did one Wild West show before the Queen of England. 00:18:43.290 --> 00:18:48.820 And it was an immensely successful public enactment. 00:18:48.820 --> 00:18:51.820 The basic elements of the wild west show 00:18:51.820 --> 00:18:54.250 contained the essential mythology that 00:18:54.250 --> 00:18:56.690 then moved into the movies. 00:18:56.690 --> 00:19:00.170 They often dramatized-- in the wild west show, 00:19:00.170 --> 00:19:02.605 they often dramatize a battle between white men 00:19:02.605 --> 00:19:05.250 and Indians in which the Indians were very treacherous 00:19:05.250 --> 00:19:07.110 and were finally defeated. 00:19:07.110 --> 00:19:10.840 They sometimes, in fact, in some of the forms of the wild west 00:19:10.840 --> 00:19:13.401 show, they reenacted the Battle of Little Bighorn 00:19:13.401 --> 00:19:15.400 in which at the last minute, there was a rescue. 00:19:15.400 --> 00:19:18.200 They reversed history in it sometimes 00:19:18.200 --> 00:19:22.830 in order to dramatize an outcome that 00:19:22.830 --> 00:19:24.885 was more appealing to the white audiences. 00:19:27.730 --> 00:19:29.640 The wild west show staged battles 00:19:29.640 --> 00:19:31.040 between cowboys and Indians. 00:19:31.040 --> 00:19:34.230 And in fact, one of the great historical ironies, 00:19:34.230 --> 00:19:36.780 the historical irony that the director we're 00:19:36.780 --> 00:19:38.290 looking at next week, Robert Altman, 00:19:38.290 --> 00:19:40.440 actually picks up on in one of his films called 00:19:40.440 --> 00:19:44.070 "Buffalo Bill and the Indians," a film he made in the 1970s-- 00:19:44.070 --> 00:19:46.320 1975, I think. 00:19:46.320 --> 00:19:49.320 One of the shocking things is that at a certain point, 00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:51.240 at least for two years, I think, one 00:19:51.240 --> 00:19:56.040 of the participants in the Wild West shows 00:19:56.040 --> 00:19:58.920 was Sitting Bull himself, the defeated Indian, 00:19:58.920 --> 00:20:04.950 the defeated Native American leader who was now domesticated 00:20:04.950 --> 00:20:07.080 and actually became part of the show. 00:20:07.080 --> 00:20:10.840 And in Altman's fictionalized version of this episode, 00:20:10.840 --> 00:20:13.700 a drunken Paul Newman plays Buffalo Bill. 00:20:13.700 --> 00:20:16.660 And he's mocked and made fun of in some sense 00:20:16.660 --> 00:20:21.770 by a character who represents Chief Sitting Bull, who 00:20:21.770 --> 00:20:24.580 has all the dignity-- he's almost the only character 00:20:24.580 --> 00:20:26.700 in the film with real dignity. 00:20:26.700 --> 00:20:32.860 It's a subversive post Hollywood era Western, 00:20:32.860 --> 00:20:33.960 as you might guess. 00:20:33.960 --> 00:20:37.470 So the Wild West shows, the Buffalo Bill wild west shows, 00:20:37.470 --> 00:20:39.260 were essentially an early rehearsal 00:20:39.260 --> 00:20:40.672 for what the movies became. 00:20:40.672 --> 00:20:42.380 And many of the elements of the wild west 00:20:42.380 --> 00:20:45.470 show-- fancy roping, fancy shooting, 00:20:45.470 --> 00:20:51.600 conflicts between cowboys and Indians, the performance 00:20:51.600 --> 00:20:55.710 of various horse riding tricks, herding of cattle 00:20:55.710 --> 00:20:58.660 and so forth-- all sort of contained the elements that 00:20:58.660 --> 00:21:00.910 then moved into the movies in an even more 00:21:00.910 --> 00:21:03.440 systematic and powerful way. 00:21:03.440 --> 00:21:05.610 And then I might mention one final source-- 00:21:05.610 --> 00:21:07.380 the novel itself. 00:21:07.380 --> 00:21:10.210 At the beginning of the 20th century, 00:21:10.210 --> 00:21:13.452 in 1902, one of the best selling novels of all time in English 00:21:13.452 --> 00:21:14.035 was published. 00:21:14.035 --> 00:21:16.510 It was a book called The Virginian 00:21:16.510 --> 00:21:18.310 by a writer named Owen Worcester. 00:21:18.310 --> 00:21:20.020 And it remains one of the bestselling 00:21:20.020 --> 00:21:21.910 books in the history of the United States. 00:21:21.910 --> 00:21:24.970 It still sells thousands of books every year. 00:21:24.970 --> 00:21:27.210 I once found, in a used bookstore, 00:21:27.210 --> 00:21:30.150 an addition of The Virginian that 00:21:30.150 --> 00:21:32.250 had been published I think 15 years 00:21:32.250 --> 00:21:34.050 after its original publication. 00:21:34.050 --> 00:21:39.210 And that addition was, I think, the 50th addition of the book. 00:21:39.210 --> 00:21:41.590 It went through an incredible number of-- and in fact, 00:21:41.590 --> 00:21:45.350 the addition I had also included beautiful illustrations that 00:21:45.350 --> 00:21:48.760 obviously were added to later additions 00:21:48.760 --> 00:21:51.520 once the popularity of the book became known. 00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:54.320 So what we find is that the popular culture 00:21:54.320 --> 00:21:57.660 before the advent of movies had already, in some sense, 00:21:57.660 --> 00:22:00.130 created a full fledged mythology of the Western, 00:22:00.130 --> 00:22:04.690 had familiarized the society with the basic attitudes, 00:22:04.690 --> 00:22:09.230 assumptions, costumes, and fundamental archetypal 00:22:09.230 --> 00:22:12.930 characters who organize the Western. 00:22:12.930 --> 00:22:14.811 And there's one further thing to emphasize. 00:22:14.811 --> 00:22:16.310 This may be the most important thing 00:22:16.310 --> 00:22:19.030 of all, what we might call the intellectual culture. 00:22:19.030 --> 00:22:22.740 It was-- not only was there a real historical background 00:22:22.740 --> 00:22:24.790 to the Western and not only was there 00:22:24.790 --> 00:22:29.140 a profound form of popular culture in theater, 00:22:29.140 --> 00:22:32.390 in public performances, like these wild west shows, 00:22:32.390 --> 00:22:35.910 and in dime novels as well as in literary novels-- 00:22:35.910 --> 00:22:39.290 a tremendous compost of discourse 00:22:39.290 --> 00:22:41.680 that already sort of establishes the genre even 00:22:41.680 --> 00:22:43.350 before the movies arrive. 00:22:43.350 --> 00:22:44.890 There was also a final touch. 00:22:44.890 --> 00:22:48.550 And this is the thing that helps to explain, I think, 00:22:48.550 --> 00:22:51.060 maybe more powerfully than the other examples I've given you 00:22:51.060 --> 00:22:54.850 why the Western had such a hold and continues in some ways 00:22:54.850 --> 00:22:58.840 to have such a vestigial hold on the American imagination 00:22:58.840 --> 00:23:01.740 and on America's sense of itself. 00:23:01.740 --> 00:23:04.410 And that is what happens in what I call here 00:23:04.410 --> 00:23:06.320 the intellectual culture. 00:23:06.320 --> 00:23:10.550 In 1893, one of the most famous historians, Frederick Jackson 00:23:10.550 --> 00:23:17.960 Turner, published an essay in the American Historical Soci-- 00:23:17.960 --> 00:23:20.700 or delivered a lecture and then it was later 00:23:20.700 --> 00:23:22.360 published as an essay-- delivered 00:23:22.360 --> 00:23:25.400 a lecture to the American Historical Society. 00:23:25.400 --> 00:23:27.760 And the title of the essay was "The Significance 00:23:27.760 --> 00:23:29.850 of the Frontier in American History." 00:23:29.850 --> 00:23:33.380 it's probably the single most influential historical essay 00:23:33.380 --> 00:23:36.040 about the American past. 00:23:36.040 --> 00:23:39.500 It's been attacked and undermined and qualified 00:23:39.500 --> 00:23:43.020 and its limitations have been widely discussed 00:23:43.020 --> 00:23:45.010 over the last 25 years. 00:23:45.010 --> 00:23:48.820 But it still remains, in some respects, a seminal essay, 00:23:48.820 --> 00:23:51.640 even when historians are reacting against it-- one 00:23:51.640 --> 00:23:55.660 of the most important central essays about the nature 00:23:55.660 --> 00:23:57.440 of American culture. 00:23:57.440 --> 00:24:00.940 And this article-- in this article, Frederick Jackson 00:24:00.940 --> 00:24:04.490 Turner argued essentially that-- he 00:24:04.490 --> 00:24:06.140 was trying to make a case for what 00:24:06.140 --> 00:24:07.770 makes the United States unique. 00:24:07.770 --> 00:24:09.450 He was making a case for what we now 00:24:09.450 --> 00:24:13.030 call American exceptionalism, a dubious proposition. 00:24:13.030 --> 00:24:15.250 But let's listen to his argument, 00:24:15.250 --> 00:24:17.980 which has a good deal of power and interest. 00:24:17.980 --> 00:24:19.880 He said essentially that the existence 00:24:19.880 --> 00:24:25.170 of free land, of a continuously receding settlement, 00:24:25.170 --> 00:24:29.970 of a continuously receding frontier, the advance 00:24:29.970 --> 00:24:33.060 of settlement westward with European settlers 00:24:33.060 --> 00:24:35.150 always pressing against that frontier, 00:24:35.150 --> 00:24:38.870 that the existence of such a reality in American life 00:24:38.870 --> 00:24:42.870 had altered inherited notions of social class and aristocratic 00:24:42.870 --> 00:24:47.880 government and had created a tendency toward what Turner 00:24:47.880 --> 00:24:50.740 implied were or said were the American ideals 00:24:50.740 --> 00:24:53.800 of individualism and classlessness, 00:24:53.800 --> 00:24:54.980 of democracy itself. 00:24:54.980 --> 00:24:56.420 In other words, the United States, 00:24:56.420 --> 00:25:00.010 according to Turner's argument, had 00:25:00.010 --> 00:25:02.520 a particularly open and democratic feel 00:25:02.520 --> 00:25:06.120 because the existence of this frontier allowed people 00:25:06.120 --> 00:25:11.570 to escape into a new life, to find possibilities, 00:25:11.570 --> 00:25:14.280 to escape the confinements of social class, 00:25:14.280 --> 00:25:16.850 even perhaps in some small degree of gender, 00:25:16.850 --> 00:25:19.370 although feminist historians have certainly 00:25:19.370 --> 00:25:24.010 shown how confining the life of women in the west actually was. 00:25:24.010 --> 00:25:27.670 Nonetheless, a sense that the existence of the frontier 00:25:27.670 --> 00:25:31.820 made the United States a uniquely individualistic 00:25:31.820 --> 00:25:33.800 and a uniquely free society. 00:25:33.800 --> 00:25:35.590 What Turner had done, of course, was 00:25:35.590 --> 00:25:39.070 define a central historical myth for European Americans, 00:25:39.070 --> 00:25:41.880 for the white society in the United States. 00:25:41.880 --> 00:25:46.220 And we've come to recognize that limitations of the argument. 00:25:46.220 --> 00:25:48.290 What's the most profound, obvious limitation 00:25:48.290 --> 00:25:50.840 that occurs to you instantly? 00:25:50.840 --> 00:25:53.316 How about the people who already here, right? 00:25:53.316 --> 00:25:54.690 In other words, one of the things 00:25:54.690 --> 00:25:57.320 that's wrong with the Turner thesis 00:25:57.320 --> 00:25:59.160 is that it's oblivious to the existence 00:25:59.160 --> 00:26:02.230 of the Native Americans who were pushed aside 00:26:02.230 --> 00:26:03.480 by the white settlers. 00:26:03.480 --> 00:26:06.240 It's a very complex story and I don't want to oversimplify it. 00:26:06.240 --> 00:26:09.480 I don't mean that the heroic white people who 00:26:09.480 --> 00:26:11.430 got in the Conestoga wagons and who 00:26:11.430 --> 00:26:13.090 settled the west, about whom there 00:26:13.090 --> 00:26:17.580 are dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of-- certainly 00:26:17.580 --> 00:26:20.970 thousands if we count stories in all formats-- of movies 00:26:20.970 --> 00:26:24.054 and books and short stories and plays and so forth. 00:26:24.054 --> 00:26:25.470 I don't want to suggest that there 00:26:25.470 --> 00:26:29.511 was nothing heroic or remarkable about that behavior. 00:26:29.511 --> 00:26:30.010 There was. 00:26:30.010 --> 00:26:32.820 The United States is not wrong-- American culture is not 00:26:32.820 --> 00:26:36.340 wrong in some sense to celebrate the heroism of those people. 00:26:36.340 --> 00:26:38.540 But of course, as we've come to realize, 00:26:38.540 --> 00:26:43.130 and as many of our most recent Westerns openly acknowledge, 00:26:43.130 --> 00:26:46.840 this original mythology which sort of celebrated 00:26:46.840 --> 00:26:50.450 unambiguously the white settlement of the West 00:26:50.450 --> 00:26:53.210 was actually also in some sense an invasion 00:26:53.210 --> 00:26:54.890 and even a genocide. 00:26:54.890 --> 00:26:58.030 And the Turner thesis doesn't even imagine that. 00:26:58.030 --> 00:27:00.440 It sees it as a triumphal reality. 00:27:00.440 --> 00:27:02.860 So there were limits, terrible limits, to the argument. 00:27:02.860 --> 00:27:05.270 But there's also something profoundly helpful 00:27:05.270 --> 00:27:06.360 about the argument. 00:27:06.360 --> 00:27:08.330 There is a sense of spaciousness, 00:27:08.330 --> 00:27:11.940 a sense of new possibilities, a greater hostility 00:27:11.940 --> 00:27:15.319 to social class and inherited wealth in the United States 00:27:15.319 --> 00:27:16.610 than there are in other places. 00:27:16.610 --> 00:27:19.490 And for both good and ill, the United States 00:27:19.490 --> 00:27:21.840 celebrates forms of individualism 00:27:21.840 --> 00:27:25.950 as against communal behavior with a kind of intensity 00:27:25.950 --> 00:27:29.750 and compelling power that many, many, not just Europeans, 00:27:29.750 --> 00:27:33.280 that many, many non Americans think is excessive and think 00:27:33.280 --> 00:27:36.960 has been reflected in some sense in various forms 00:27:36.960 --> 00:27:41.810 of national behavior which we needn't discuss in detail now. 00:27:41.810 --> 00:27:46.100 But you could all imagine your own examples. 00:27:46.100 --> 00:27:48.040 But to come back to the primary point, 00:27:48.040 --> 00:27:51.290 then, one of the reasons that-- it's as if the movies were sort 00:27:51.290 --> 00:27:54.560 of waiting for the Western, as if the Western form already 00:27:54.560 --> 00:27:58.740 in some sense, in fundamental ways, fully formed 00:27:58.740 --> 00:28:03.000 comes into the movies just as the movies are born, 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:06.110 as if the format of the movies and the content of the Western 00:28:06.110 --> 00:28:08.040 were made for each other in some sense. 00:28:08.040 --> 00:28:11.050 And it becomes one of the dominant, one of the signature 00:28:11.050 --> 00:28:13.660 features of American cinema. 00:28:13.660 --> 00:28:16.510 One of the fundamental aspects of what the Western is, 00:28:16.510 --> 00:28:19.740 if we think of it as a kind of cultural mythology, 00:28:19.740 --> 00:28:22.820 is that it tells a founding story. 00:28:22.820 --> 00:28:24.990 It tells the story again and again. 00:28:24.990 --> 00:28:28.180 It repeats it every time you see a Western in some sense. 00:28:28.180 --> 00:28:30.320 Every Western is implicitly a story 00:28:30.320 --> 00:28:32.510 about the foundation of a society, 00:28:32.510 --> 00:28:36.610 about the equation of a community. 00:28:36.610 --> 00:28:38.170 It's always implicitly about it. 00:28:38.170 --> 00:28:41.650 In many Westerns, this is an explicit topic. 00:28:41.650 --> 00:28:44.980 And what we can say is that this means 00:28:44.980 --> 00:28:48.870 that the Western is the United States' form of a kind of story 00:28:48.870 --> 00:28:50.640 that every culture has, right? 00:28:50.640 --> 00:28:54.220 The ancient Greeks had a founding mythology 00:28:54.220 --> 00:28:56.750 grounded in The Iliad and The Odyssey, right? 00:28:56.750 --> 00:29:01.350 And Tudor England had a founding mythology 00:29:01.350 --> 00:29:04.560 partly promulgated by Shakespeare in the history 00:29:04.560 --> 00:29:10.690 plays that were put on in the public theater 00:29:10.690 --> 00:29:13.120 in the 16th century. 00:29:13.120 --> 00:29:15.740 And what we can say about these founding 00:29:15.740 --> 00:29:20.020 stories as they are always, in some sense, fantasies 00:29:20.020 --> 00:29:21.000 or fictions. 00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:23.870 But they articulate values and assumptions 00:29:23.870 --> 00:29:26.690 that the culture, in some sense, would 00:29:26.690 --> 00:29:28.410 like to believe about itself. 00:29:28.410 --> 00:29:32.100 And by their reiteration, by their repetition, 00:29:32.100 --> 00:29:34.030 by telling them again and again, they 00:29:34.030 --> 00:29:38.320 instantiate these values, these assumptions about the society, 00:29:38.320 --> 00:29:41.280 in the culture as a whole. 00:29:41.280 --> 00:29:43.140 Their very repetition is important. 00:29:43.140 --> 00:29:44.950 Because one of the fundamental things 00:29:44.950 --> 00:29:48.680 about a myth or a mythology, one of the most fundamental things 00:29:48.680 --> 00:29:50.570 about it, is that it's a collective-- 00:29:50.570 --> 00:29:52.940 it's a collective story. 00:29:52.940 --> 00:29:55.050 It's not made by a single person. 00:29:55.050 --> 00:29:57.310 And one way to think about all Westerns, 00:29:57.310 --> 00:29:59.650 although of course many of the best Westerns 00:29:59.650 --> 00:30:01.850 have the trace of-- more than the traces-- 00:30:01.850 --> 00:30:04.660 have the imprint of individual contributions. 00:30:04.660 --> 00:30:07.120 John Ford-- John Ford is a great director. 00:30:07.120 --> 00:30:10.470 And there are aspects of John Ford's personality 00:30:10.470 --> 00:30:11.870 in every one of his Westerns. 00:30:11.870 --> 00:30:14.920 Nonetheless, even the most profoundly Fordian Western 00:30:14.920 --> 00:30:17.400 is still a collaborative form, not only 00:30:17.400 --> 00:30:21.152 because Ford as a director-- because the movies 00:30:21.152 --> 00:30:22.860 are inherently collaborative because they 00:30:22.860 --> 00:30:24.970 have so many different people who contribute 00:30:24.970 --> 00:30:26.380 to the creation of the whole. 00:30:26.380 --> 00:30:28.160 No one, even the most powerful director, 00:30:28.160 --> 00:30:30.284 can completely control everything. 00:30:30.284 --> 00:30:32.200 The greatest directors know how to collaborate 00:30:32.200 --> 00:30:34.541 with their performance and their writers. 00:30:34.541 --> 00:30:36.290 But in any case, it's a collaborative form 00:30:36.290 --> 00:30:37.400 to begin with, right? 00:30:37.400 --> 00:30:39.470 But there's another kind of collaboration, 00:30:39.470 --> 00:30:40.320 several other kinds. 00:30:40.320 --> 00:30:41.100 What are they? 00:30:41.100 --> 00:30:44.310 One of them is that every Western is implicitly 00:30:44.310 --> 00:30:46.520 in a conversation with every previous Western. 00:30:46.520 --> 00:30:48.610 And in that since, there's no author. 00:30:48.610 --> 00:30:51.460 It's a collective-- the story of the American Western, 00:30:51.460 --> 00:30:53.230 in that sense, is a collective story. 00:30:53.230 --> 00:30:56.050 It's a creation of the culture. 00:30:56.050 --> 00:30:58.280 And in fact, every new version of the Western 00:30:58.280 --> 00:31:00.780 adds to the mythology in some sense, right? 00:31:00.780 --> 00:31:03.730 So in that sense, we can think of genre reforms 00:31:03.730 --> 00:31:05.660 generally, the Western in particular, 00:31:05.660 --> 00:31:11.667 as a particular kind of ongoing, recurring discourse. 00:31:11.667 --> 00:31:14.000 And if you come back again to the arguments I was making 00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:19.930 at the beginning of our class about the ways in which 00:31:19.930 --> 00:31:22.450 genre forms and especially the Western 00:31:22.450 --> 00:31:25.370 can be seen to sort of dramatize cultural change 00:31:25.370 --> 00:31:31.320 or the way in which a society's attitudes may alter over time 00:31:31.320 --> 00:31:34.040 exactly because so many elements of a genre 00:31:34.040 --> 00:31:37.030 are stable and recognizable, those that are different 00:31:37.030 --> 00:31:41.190 are easy to recognize, are easy to identify and speculate 00:31:41.190 --> 00:31:42.920 about. 00:31:42.920 --> 00:31:45.260 So one of the things we're recognizing here 00:31:45.260 --> 00:31:48.960 is that in a certain sense, the very fact that the mythology is 00:31:48.960 --> 00:31:51.650 open, is unfinished, reflects something that's 00:31:51.650 --> 00:31:54.115 fundamental about society too. 00:31:54.115 --> 00:31:56.240 And this is part of Raymond Williams' great insight 00:31:56.240 --> 00:31:58.040 into culture when he said-- what he 00:31:58.040 --> 00:32:01.870 said was culture is a constant mix of emergent, traditional, 00:32:01.870 --> 00:32:03.260 and dominant voices. 00:32:03.260 --> 00:32:04.770 It's never over. 00:32:04.770 --> 00:32:06.810 What culture is is a conversation. 00:32:06.810 --> 00:32:11.100 It's never any one fixed thing because culture is always 00:32:11.100 --> 00:32:11.730 in process. 00:32:11.730 --> 00:32:13.360 It's always changing. 00:32:13.360 --> 00:32:17.930 And what we can say-- the value of these genre reforms, 00:32:17.930 --> 00:32:21.640 and especially because the movies could reach so widely, 00:32:21.640 --> 00:32:25.240 even across linguistic barriers, the value of the movies 00:32:25.240 --> 00:32:29.580 or the power of the movies as a form of this kind of discourse 00:32:29.580 --> 00:32:32.280 is overwhelmingly clear exactly because we 00:32:32.280 --> 00:32:34.830 can imagine this process, this conversation, 00:32:34.830 --> 00:32:38.760 going on repeatedly over time-- the recognizable elements 00:32:38.760 --> 00:32:41.540 juxtaposed against the elements that are not recognizable, 00:32:41.540 --> 00:32:45.620 allowing for a kind of constant process of reevaluation, 00:32:45.620 --> 00:32:48.090 of rehearsal, and of rethinking, right? 00:32:48.090 --> 00:32:49.850 And we can say, in fact, that that's 00:32:49.850 --> 00:32:53.510 one of the deep functions that genre forms in general play 00:32:53.510 --> 00:32:55.680 and it's one of the central functions 00:32:55.680 --> 00:32:57.340 that the Hollywood movie plays. 00:32:57.340 --> 00:32:59.040 And I'll try to concretize this for you 00:32:59.040 --> 00:33:02.330 this evening in a kind of-- it's a kind of comic attempt, 00:33:02.330 --> 00:33:05.520 but I'm going to give you a kind of capsule history 00:33:05.520 --> 00:33:09.280 of the trajectory of the Western from its earliest days, 00:33:09.280 --> 00:33:12.830 from "The Great Train Robbery," to "Unforgiven." 00:33:12.830 --> 00:33:16.120 So the Western is a mythology. 00:33:16.120 --> 00:33:17.390 It's a mythology. 00:33:17.390 --> 00:33:19.440 The fact that mythologies themselves are open 00:33:19.440 --> 00:33:23.270 ended, are spaces in which a society defines and redefines 00:33:23.270 --> 00:33:26.680 its identity and its central values, makes the Western movie 00:33:26.680 --> 00:33:30.510 a particularly powerful and central anthropological space. 00:33:30.510 --> 00:33:33.250 It enacts, in different ways over and over again, 00:33:33.250 --> 00:33:35.660 a story about the founding of society. 00:33:35.660 --> 00:33:37.810 And at the end, it is grounded therefore 00:33:37.810 --> 00:33:42.270 also in a series of complex dichotomies 00:33:42.270 --> 00:33:45.420 that are worth making clear, even though they're 00:33:45.420 --> 00:33:47.980 very obvious when you think about what all Westerns do. 00:33:47.980 --> 00:33:48.900 But think about them. 00:33:48.900 --> 00:33:51.130 One of the dichotomies is the dichotomy 00:33:51.130 --> 00:33:52.880 between what is thought to be civilized 00:33:52.880 --> 00:33:55.750 and what is thought to be savage-- between civilization 00:33:55.750 --> 00:33:56.600 and savagery. 00:33:56.600 --> 00:33:58.930 Another is often between East and West 00:33:58.930 --> 00:34:01.860 in which the east represents civilization 00:34:01.860 --> 00:34:04.460 and the west the sa-- but there's an ambivalence. 00:34:04.460 --> 00:34:06.420 Because the east is also a place that 00:34:06.420 --> 00:34:10.429 is thought to be dessicated and lacking vitality. 00:34:10.429 --> 00:34:13.110 And the west is thought to be an authentic place that 00:34:13.110 --> 00:34:18.719 tests us in our heroic, largest possibilities, right? 00:34:18.719 --> 00:34:21.580 And another kind of dichotomy that is present 00:34:21.580 --> 00:34:24.900 in virtually all Westerns is a dichotomy between what we might 00:34:24.900 --> 00:34:27.659 call the claims of community, the claims of society 00:34:27.659 --> 00:34:30.050 on the one side, and the claims of the individual 00:34:30.050 --> 00:34:31.280 on the other side, right? 00:34:31.280 --> 00:34:33.460 This is a special problem for the Western 00:34:33.460 --> 00:34:37.090 because it celebrates American individualism so powerfully. 00:34:37.090 --> 00:34:39.120 The iconic scenes of the Western in which 00:34:39.120 --> 00:34:42.620 two men wearing guns square off against each other 00:34:42.620 --> 00:34:45.850 and the quicker one survives-- that scene of the quick draw 00:34:45.850 --> 00:34:48.620 one and of the death in the dusty street 00:34:48.620 --> 00:34:51.889 could be sent to be a kind of embodiment of these values 00:34:51.889 --> 00:34:54.710 in which you have to rely on yourself. 00:34:54.710 --> 00:34:56.030 You can't rely on someone else. 00:34:56.030 --> 00:34:57.190 You can't rely on the government. 00:34:57.190 --> 00:34:58.570 You can't rely on the Sheriff. 00:34:58.570 --> 00:35:00.010 You can't rely on the police. 00:35:00.010 --> 00:35:01.630 You can't rely on your neighbors. 00:35:01.630 --> 00:35:03.110 You have to trust yourself. 00:35:03.110 --> 00:35:04.840 And in fact, one of the ways you can 00:35:04.840 --> 00:35:07.430 see the power of these Western mythologies operating, 00:35:07.430 --> 00:35:09.450 as it seems to me in some sense, one 00:35:09.450 --> 00:35:11.540 of the great divides in the United States today 00:35:11.540 --> 00:35:13.830 over the question of guns and gun control 00:35:13.830 --> 00:35:18.110 is partly grounded in these myths of individualism 00:35:18.110 --> 00:35:20.490 that the Western mythology has been 00:35:20.490 --> 00:35:24.510 promulgating since before the advent of the movies. 00:35:24.510 --> 00:35:26.640 In other words, the attitudes-- and in fact, 00:35:26.640 --> 00:35:32.060 if you listen to even some of the most extreme forms of gun 00:35:32.060 --> 00:35:35.060 rights advocates actually talk in a language 00:35:35.060 --> 00:35:38.630 that we can recognize from Westerns, from Western movies. 00:35:38.630 --> 00:35:40.840 Not an accident that one of our recent presidents 00:35:40.840 --> 00:35:45.310 was a star in Western films and actually remembered 00:35:45.310 --> 00:35:48.960 some films he'd been in as if they'd been actual history. 00:35:48.960 --> 00:35:51.510 And I don't say that in a way to sort of disparage 00:35:51.510 --> 00:35:54.850 poor Ronald Reagan at all, but as a way of reminding us 00:35:54.850 --> 00:35:58.480 the confluence or the confusion of actual history 00:35:58.480 --> 00:36:00.600 with these mythological accounts of the west 00:36:00.600 --> 00:36:04.047 is a characteristic feature of the American imagination. 00:36:04.047 --> 00:36:05.130 How could it be otherwise? 00:36:05.130 --> 00:36:09.070 We have been so inundated in these stories about the west. 00:36:09.070 --> 00:36:11.990 So another dichotomy, then, is that between society 00:36:11.990 --> 00:36:14.080 and the individual, maybe finally we 00:36:14.080 --> 00:36:17.820 can say a dichotomy between culture and nature, right? 00:36:17.820 --> 00:36:20.240 Which is the story that's enacted again and again 00:36:20.240 --> 00:36:24.290 in the great epic stories that every culture sort of generates 00:36:24.290 --> 00:36:26.060 for itself. 00:36:26.060 --> 00:36:29.060 One of the most distinctive features of these dichotomies 00:36:29.060 --> 00:36:31.640 is the divided hero, a character you'll 00:36:31.640 --> 00:36:34.650 see embodied with great complexity in tonight's film 00:36:34.650 --> 00:36:36.880 played by John Wayne, a character who 00:36:36.880 --> 00:36:40.800 is-- the Western hero is often seen very ambivalently 00:36:40.800 --> 00:36:44.680 as both a savior and a savage, as someone who has the power 00:36:44.680 --> 00:36:51.620 and authority to bring a kind of decency and lawfulness 00:36:51.620 --> 00:36:54.890 to a community, but who is himself so touched by, 00:36:54.890 --> 00:36:57.790 so tainted by the very savagery that he tried 00:36:57.790 --> 00:37:00.570 to tame, that he's often excluded from the community 00:37:00.570 --> 00:37:02.070 once it's been created. 00:37:02.070 --> 00:37:04.560 And you'll see a wonderful instance, a complex instance 00:37:04.560 --> 00:37:07.340 of that, in tonight's film in the way the John Wayne 00:37:07.340 --> 00:37:09.330 character, at the very end of the film, 00:37:09.330 --> 00:37:12.050 is in a certain sense excluded from the community 00:37:12.050 --> 00:37:15.920 that he has helped to defend. 00:37:15.920 --> 00:37:17.630 One way to see many of these things 00:37:17.630 --> 00:37:19.660 or to clarify many of these things 00:37:19.660 --> 00:37:23.410 is to juxtapose-- or maybe as a way 00:37:23.410 --> 00:37:28.780 of crystallizing this process I'm talking about whereby 00:37:28.780 --> 00:37:34.360 a genre form can, in some sense, dramatize changing values. 00:37:34.360 --> 00:37:37.500 I want to show you one scene. 00:37:37.500 --> 00:37:39.960 Maybe I'll just end with the scene. 00:37:39.960 --> 00:37:42.080 This is a scene from "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", 00:37:42.080 --> 00:37:45.490 the film you're going to see in two weeks, a Western that 00:37:45.490 --> 00:37:48.390 comes after the breakdown of the Hollywood system, 00:37:48.390 --> 00:37:52.410 after the movies no longer have the responsibility 00:37:52.410 --> 00:37:56.160 or the obligation-- no longer saw themselves 00:37:56.160 --> 00:37:59.800 as having to speak to everyone-- a moment of great, 00:37:59.800 --> 00:38:03.220 in many ways, extraordinary artistic freedom, 00:38:03.220 --> 00:38:06.880 the period of the late '60s and through a good part 00:38:06.880 --> 00:38:08.180 of the 1970s. 00:38:08.180 --> 00:38:11.610 Many people would say it was a moment in American cinema 00:38:11.610 --> 00:38:14.240 unrivaled for its complexity and its richness. 00:38:14.240 --> 00:38:16.390 And one of the reasons it was such a rich moment 00:38:16.390 --> 00:38:18.190 was that the movies had been liberated 00:38:18.190 --> 00:38:20.969 from their responsibility to talk to the whole culture. 00:38:20.969 --> 00:38:23.010 There was an irony connected to that because they 00:38:23.010 --> 00:38:25.580 have smaller audience. 00:38:25.580 --> 00:38:28.440 But it gave them a kind of political freedom, 00:38:28.440 --> 00:38:31.160 a kind of moral freedom that they hadn't had before. 00:38:31.160 --> 00:38:33.024 And I want to show you one scene. 00:38:33.024 --> 00:38:34.690 One reason I'm choosing it is because it 00:38:34.690 --> 00:38:37.471 will resonate for you when we come to "McCabe and Mrs. 00:38:37.471 --> 00:38:37.970 Miller." 00:38:37.970 --> 00:38:39.830 But it requires that you know one thing. 00:38:39.830 --> 00:38:42.840 The scene, the iconic scene that I mentioned earlier 00:38:42.840 --> 00:38:46.470 where two heroes or one hero and a bad guy 00:38:46.470 --> 00:38:49.870 square off against each other on a dusty street to draw a gun 00:38:49.870 --> 00:38:53.830 might be said to be the most recurring or the most-- 00:38:53.830 --> 00:38:55.429 the quintessential Western scene, 00:38:55.429 --> 00:38:57.220 although there are others we might nominate 00:38:57.220 --> 00:38:58.990 as almost as important. 00:38:58.990 --> 00:39:01.460 And in order to understand the scene you're about to see, 00:39:01.460 --> 00:39:03.290 you need to recognize that what lies 00:39:03.290 --> 00:39:06.990 behind this very subversive version of the shoot out 00:39:06.990 --> 00:39:09.510 are dozens, if not hundreds, of earlier 00:39:09.510 --> 00:39:12.530 scenes in which heroic characters that we greatly 00:39:12.530 --> 00:39:16.150 admire shoot down bad guys in the street, right? 00:39:16.150 --> 00:39:18.280 Well, here's a scene from "McCabe and Mrs. 00:39:18.280 --> 00:39:19.960 Miller" of this iconic moment. 00:39:19.960 --> 00:39:21.540 Remember, "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" 00:39:21.540 --> 00:39:25.750 comes after the consensus dispensation. 00:39:25.750 --> 00:39:27.830 It's free not to be a consensus form. 00:39:27.830 --> 00:39:29.370 But one reason I want to show you 00:39:29.370 --> 00:39:31.400 this is I hope you can recognize that what 00:39:31.400 --> 00:39:34.250 gives this scene its power is not-- it's 00:39:34.250 --> 00:39:36.870 very brilliantly photographed and dramatized. 00:39:36.870 --> 00:39:40.590 But what gives it its power has very little 00:39:40.590 --> 00:39:43.220 to do with what it itself does. 00:39:43.220 --> 00:39:45.770 What grants its enormous authority 00:39:45.770 --> 00:39:49.670 are the dozens, if not hundreds, of prior scenes with which it's 00:39:49.670 --> 00:39:52.870 in conversation, against which it is contrasting itself. 00:39:52.870 --> 00:39:54.720 Because this scene of confrontation 00:39:54.720 --> 00:39:57.820 between two individuals-- who has the faster gun, 00:39:57.820 --> 00:40:01.230 right-- is, as I've suggested, the iconic moment 00:40:01.230 --> 00:40:02.450 in the Western. 00:40:02.450 --> 00:40:04.940 And it is, in the heroic Western, 00:40:04.940 --> 00:40:09.500 in the traditional Western, it's a heroic moment 00:40:09.500 --> 00:40:13.390 of individual self assertion in which good conquers evil. 00:40:13.390 --> 00:40:15.260 Watch Robert Altman's version of this. 00:40:15.260 --> 00:40:17.236 WOMAN: Careful. 00:40:17.236 --> 00:40:19.212 Come back. 00:40:19.212 --> 00:40:20.694 [VIDEO PLAYBACK] 00:40:23.164 --> 00:40:24.646 [? -There's ?] shorty! 00:40:24.646 --> 00:40:27.116 [INAUDIBLE] 00:40:27.116 --> 00:40:29.586 [DOG WHINING] 00:40:31.068 --> 00:40:33.044 [CLINKING] 00:40:38.972 --> 00:40:40.948 [GUNSHOT] 00:40:43.912 --> 00:40:45.394 -I wasn't trying to hit it. 00:40:45.394 --> 00:40:49.291 The trick is not to hit it, but to make it float. 00:40:49.291 --> 00:40:51.199 PROFESSOR: He's lying. 00:40:51.199 --> 00:40:53.107 You're supposed to realize he's lying here. 00:40:53.107 --> 00:40:55.970 He meant to hit it. 00:40:55.970 --> 00:40:58.670 Here comes the cowboy who's just [INAUDIBLE]. 00:40:58.670 --> 00:41:00.250 All the prostitutes loved you. 00:41:12.370 --> 00:41:14.850 -Hey, hold it, sonny. 00:41:14.850 --> 00:41:15.730 -What? 00:41:15.730 --> 00:41:17.480 -Hold up on your target practice a minute. 00:41:17.480 --> 00:41:21.110 I don't want to get shot. 00:41:21.110 --> 00:41:24.498 -Well, then get off the bridge, you saddle tramp. 00:41:24.498 --> 00:41:25.950 -I want to buy some socks. 00:41:25.950 --> 00:41:27.900 I got a long ride ahead of me. 00:41:27.900 --> 00:41:30.090 -What's wrong with the socks you got on? 00:41:30.090 --> 00:41:31.990 -I wore them out running around half-naked 00:41:31.990 --> 00:41:33.279 in that whorehouse over there. 00:41:33.279 --> 00:41:34.451 Actually quite a place. 00:41:34.451 --> 00:41:37.500 You been there yet? 00:41:37.500 --> 00:41:40.646 -Take off your boots and show me. 00:41:40.646 --> 00:41:42.370 -You're joshing me. 00:41:42.370 --> 00:41:44.955 -I said, take off your boots, and show me, eh, sucker? 00:41:57.320 --> 00:41:59.196 -I ain't going to do that. 00:41:59.196 --> 00:42:02.188 -What are you wearing that gun for? 00:42:02.188 --> 00:42:04.092 -[INAUDIBLE] I just wear it. 00:42:04.092 --> 00:42:05.747 Can't hit nothing with it. 00:42:05.747 --> 00:42:07.080 -Well, that don't make no sense. 00:42:07.080 --> 00:42:09.126 What kind of a gun is it? 00:42:09.126 --> 00:42:10.092 -Colt. 00:42:10.092 --> 00:42:11.541 -Them's big guns. 00:42:11.541 --> 00:42:13.960 That's what I got. 00:42:13.960 --> 00:42:15.340 Must be something wrong with it. 00:42:15.340 --> 00:42:16.060 -Naw, it's me. 00:42:16.060 --> 00:42:18.062 I just can't shoot good. 00:42:18.062 --> 00:42:19.355 -Well, let me see it. 00:42:26.780 --> 00:42:27.770 Come on. 00:42:27.770 --> 00:42:30.240 Maybe I can fix it for you. 00:42:30.240 --> 00:42:30.740 -OK. 00:43:00.847 --> 00:43:01.430 PROFESSOR: OK. 00:43:07.865 --> 00:43:09.027 [END PLAYBACK] 00:43:09.027 --> 00:43:10.860 BOY: So what the scene-- what the scene does 00:43:10.860 --> 00:43:13.580 is it turns on its head what we might say 00:43:13.580 --> 00:43:15.850 are the central values or assumptions 00:43:15.850 --> 00:43:19.040 that have lain behind such a seen 00:43:19.040 --> 00:43:21.590 in dozens, if not hundreds, of prior Westerns. 00:43:21.590 --> 00:43:24.970 And that's a distilled example of this process 00:43:24.970 --> 00:43:27.600 of a conversation that goes on-- if it goes on 00:43:27.600 --> 00:43:30.470 for a long enough time, the content of the conversation 00:43:30.470 --> 00:43:33.850 can virtually reverse itself even though the genre remains 00:43:33.850 --> 00:43:34.660 stable. 00:43:34.660 --> 00:43:36.360 And that's one of the-- we might call 00:43:36.360 --> 00:43:40.510 that the genius of genre, the genius of a genre form. 00:43:40.510 --> 00:43:42.530 It has to do with-- it's a version of what 00:43:42.530 --> 00:43:45.310 I mean when I talk about the cultural work 00:43:45.310 --> 00:43:49.450 or the anthropological function that movies have.