On Sun­day I returned to the Lau­rel­hurst The­ater for another of their revival screen­ings; this time for the 1948 west­ern Red River directed by every French critic’s favorite Hol­ly­wood auteur, Howard Hawks.  I con­fess that I have great admi­ra­tion for Hawks.  His career spanned nearly 50 years over which he directed musi­cals, war dra­mas, Noir gems, gang­ster pic­tures, screw­ball come­dies – you name it — many of which are sem­i­nal exam­ples within their gen­res. ^[1] Not merely a com­pe­tent direc­tor, Hawks was one of the great storycrafters of Hollywood’s golden age.

Across the lobby, the Coen broth­ers lat­est offer­ing, True Grit, was also play­ing.  Con­tin­u­ing my unex­pected “west­ern” inter­lude, one of the pre­views was for a new film enti­tled Cow­boys and Aliens.  Like nearly all con­tem­po­rary trail­ers, this one con­cisely revealed all the major plot points in 2 min­utes: futur­is­tic cow­boy falls to earth, local cow­boys try to run him out of town, vio­lent aliens arrive and ter­ror­ize the local towns­folk^[2], local cow­boys and space cow­boy ally to defeat invad­ing aliens and, although not explicit in the trailer, space cow­boy prob­a­bly wins local cowgirl’s heart.

Ini­tially I thought this con­flu­ence of west­erns noth­ing more than an amus­ing coin­ci­dence. How­ever, as I digested my pizza on the walk home and mulled over the screen­ing, it occurred to me that these three films pre­sented a neat (and no doubt sim­pli­fied) overview of mas­culin­ity in the West­ern over the last 60 years.   Red River was pro­duced when the “wild west” was still an image (if roman­ti­cized) within liv­ing mem­ory.  It presents its mas­cu­line heroes as extremely com­pe­tent; they are excep­tional marks­men, exhibit dili­gence and per­se­ver­ance, and behave hon­or­ably if brutally.

By the time the orig­i­nal True Grit was pro­duced in 1969 (from Charles Portis’s 1968 novel) the Hol­ly­wood west­ern was mori­bund and the def­i­n­i­tion of Amer­i­can mas­culin­ity like­wise was being ener­vated by counter cul­ture trends, by eco­nomic stag­na­tion, and by the flag­ging mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Viet­nam.  In both ver­sions of True Grit we no longer see the indomitable males of Red River.  In fact, it is the female char­ac­ter Mat­tie, who dis­plays the com­pe­tence and deter­mi­na­tion pre­vi­ously reserved for the cow­boy. ^[3]  Both Cog­burn and LaBoeuf are still accom­plished law­men (the law was still clearly the exclu­sive purview of men) but their shots don’t always hit their marks, nor do these men posses the stony con­fi­dence of their cin­e­matic fathers.

Over the next few decades the Hol­ly­wood west­ern con­tin­ued to appear occa­sion­ally, usu­ally in revi­sion­ist forms repu­di­at­ing their own cin­e­matic and his­tor­i­cal insen­si­tiv­ity; Dances with Wolves and The Unfor­given are two exam­ples.  Now it seems there is nowhere left for the cow­boy but fan­tasy. So acute are our anx­i­eties over the iconic mas­cu­line gun slinger that we have extracted him from any his­toric­ity or nar­ra­tive real­ism.  He is sim­ply now another trope to be mashed up in the genre grinder that is mod­ern Hol­ly­wood.  In Cow­boys and Aliens he appears to be reduced to a chaps wear­ing ver­sion of a Star­ship Trooper, exter­mi­nat­ing “bugs”.^[4]Gone is the moral cer­tainty of the old west­ern.  For­saken is the ambi­gu­ity of the late era west­erns.  Now we have the infant’s ver­sion of the cow­boy play­ing shoot ‘em up, the aliens func­tion­ing as proxy for the “red­skin” sav­ages of a pre­vi­ous era. ^[5]

Of course none of these incar­na­tions of the cow­boy is “true” but I do find it inter­est­ing that we’ve come to a point where we’ve infan­tilized our image of west­ern mas­culin­ity.  As with so many aspects of our cul­ture we seem to be retreat­ing into the illu­sory com­fort and secu­rity of childhood.

Can we escape our own escapist trap?

1. ^[1] Scar­face, Bring­ing up Baby, His Girl Fri­day (per­haps the fastest of the fast talk­ing depres­sion era pic­tures), Ball of Fire, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, The Thing, Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blonds, etc. ↩
2. ^[2] a curi­ous repack­ag­ing of the colo­nial cap­tiv­ity nar­ra­tives and post 9/11 fears as explored by Susan Faludi in her provoca­tive book, The Ter­ror Dream – 2007 Met­ro­pol­i­tan Books ↩
3. ^[3] Mattie’s appear­ance coin­cides with emer­gence of the fem­i­nist move­ment in Amer­ica and I sug­gest was the cin­e­matic har­bin­ger of Thelma and Louise who appeared two decades later. ↩
4. ^[4] Star­ship Troop­ers — the extremely vio­lent 1997 film in which the car­nage is pre­sumed palat­able because humanity’s adver­saries are enor­mous insects: lower life forms implic­itly devoid of moral­ity and unwor­thy of mercy.  Such is the “enemy” always char­ac­ter­ized in pro­pa­ganda. ↩
5. ^[5] Expect next sum­mer to see Cow­boys, Aliens and Pirates of the Caribbean 5 released. ↩