From André Bazin, “The Western: Or the American Film Par Excellence”
(1953)
The western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical
with those of the cinema itself and which is as alive as ever after almost half
a century
of uninterrupted success. Even if one disputes the quality of its
inspiration and of its style since the thirties, one is amazed at the steady
commercial
success which is the measure of its health…..The
western does not age.
Its world-wide appeal is even more astonishing than its historical
survival…The western must possess some greater secret than simply the secret of
its youthfulness. It must
be a secret that somehow identifies it with the essence of cinema.
From
Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (2nd
ed.), p. 94
Loss of
knowledge [i.e., of the genre's conventions by the audience] is particularly
important in this case as Hollywood's production of Westerns declined
precipitously
after 1970, with barely a handful being made in the 1980s. Hollywood's apparent abandonment of what has
been its most common genre raised
questions
about the critical arguments that claimed that the Western was central to the
expression of an American mythology. Had
the mythology changed,
so that the
Western was no longer relevant? Or had
the mythology migrated elsewhere, to other genres, and if so
had it changed its meaning in the process?
Or had Hollywood somehow stopped articulating
American mythology? Whatever set of
circumstances brought about the change, it shows that even so
self-generating
and apparently transhistorical a genre as the Western is subject to historical
forces.
from Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 642-43 (conclusion)
The "post-Western" genre map suggests that,
while the Western may no longer provide the most important of our ideologically
symbolic languages, the
underlying mythic structures it expressed remain more or less intact. Action
in the imagined world of myth-symbolic play still takes the form of captivities
and
rescues, still invokes
the three-part opposition in which the American hero stands between the
extremes of bureaucratic order and savage license, and still requires
a racial symbolism to
express the most significant ideological differences. What has been lost is not
the underlying myth but a particular set of historical references
that tied a scenario of
heroic action to a particular version of American national history. The passing
of the Western may mark a significant revision of the surface
signs and referents of
our mythology, but it does not necessarily mark a change in the underlying
systems of ideology, which is still structured by its twin mythologies
of bonanza economics and
regeneration through savage war.