?The Western: a Short History

T he western is a world of its own; a world more fully-rounded, solid and extensive, perhaps, than any other in fiction; to many more real than any but the one we actually inhabit. It is a world instantly evoked in a host of images and phrases: the good guys and the bad guys, cowboys and Indians, riding off into the sunset.

  An intimate knowledge of the ways of the Western has spread, during the century or so since it was invented, through all countries and cultures. From Timbuctoo to Tokyo, from Montevideo to Manchester, the figure of a man in a ten-gallon hat is recognizable to all. The explanation for the astonishing popularity of the Western can be contained in one word: Hollywood. Other countries have had their own myths and heroes: the samurai, King Arthur, El Cid. None of them has been realized in such detail or disseminated to so many people as the Western. Though the cinema did not invent him, the cowboy has galloped through the imagination of the world because American films and American television have, for the past seventy years, saturated the world market. This economic domination, and the huge volume of production that it sustained, have permitted the basic elements of the Western, Hollywood's most popular genre, to be elaborated in literally thousands of variations, distributed into virtually every country of the world. The resultant richness of the Western's frame of reference has allowed other forms of popular culture and commodity production to feed off it. The Western myth has overflowed its origins in visual and written narrative and fertilized popular music, fashion, children's toys, advertising, and even our everyday speech. When we say an organization has too many chiefs and not enough Indians, when a television programme makes a round-up of the news, when we have a show-down with somebody or our plans don't pan out, we draw on a shared memory sedimented by the consumption of countless Western stories. Even those who would never call themselves devotees know that the typical Westerner's diet is bacon and beans and his preferred drink coffee or whiskey. In such an elaborately coded universe any departure from the norm is likely to be significant. Wine instead of whiskey probably means we're in Mexico, or in an Italian Western. When in The Man from Laramie James Stewart is offered a cup of tea his expression speaks volumes. No other genre in the cinema delineates so precisely the details of everyday ? life. Other genres may have appropriate styles of dress: uniforms for war films, togas and helmets for epics. The Western is remarkable for the consistency and rigour with which costumes are assigned to particular roles. Contrary to caricature, the good guys have never been restricted to white hats and the bad guys to black (only those who have never seen Hopalong Cassidy can believe that). But it remains true that a character in a black frock coat, bootlace tie and embroidered waistcoat will be likely to carry a deck of cards about him. As for the cowboy himself, the basic outfit of wide-brimmed hat, jeans and boots has remained constant, despite the subtle but significant variations which modulate between the authentic historical costume and the dictates of contemporary fashion. Nor is dress any less codified for women. The respectable married woman may, it seems, wear one sort of costume and one only: a dress of some sturdy material, typically in a check pattern, buttoned up to the neck, close-fitting round the waist and with a full skirt. The more this costume is deviated from, the further from respectability does its wearer stray. Consider too the different forms of transport. Supreme is the horse. The horse confers dignity and status. To go on foot is an unthinkable humiliation. To ride a mule or donkey is either to suffer indignity or to be a Mexican (in the Western, despite recent concessions to ethnic sensitivities, much the same thing). Only women, men over a certain age or dudes ride in buggies. When the horse begins to give way to the train, the West is changing. When, as at the beginning of Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, it gives way to the car or motorbike the West is fast disappearing. A change in the means of transport, then, marks one of the limits of the genre. The Western is not merely a milieu or a way of life, but another world, or at least another country. As such it has its own language: its own vocabulary, syntax and accent. Even an English ear can distinguish the difference; not merely the scores of words, many derived from Spanish, which are specific to the Western (buckaroo, chaps, remuda, lasso), but forms of expression. When Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine is asked to dance he replies, 'I'd admire to, ma'am.' In any film other than a Western such a phrase would surely mark him as a hick. Whole sentences from the Western have become common currency: 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.' As for accent and intonation, if there is no adequate way in print to convey the peculiarities of Western speech, we all know a drawl when we hear one.