this is the west, son

For my tenth birthday, I got an Ottawa Rough Riders helmet, a football and a movie. The first two gifts were odd, considering how indifferent I've always been to sports, but I suppose they do conform to my equally lifelong fixation on iconography and the image. I just thought it might be cool to have a helmet for my hometown team. (Which I wore around a lot, although never in an actual game.)

The movie was Rough Night in Jericho, a western featuring George Peppard as a good guy squaring off Dean Martin as the town's tyrannical boss. (This was a rare dastardly turn for Dino, and no doubt the movie's primary box office hook. ) I don't remember much of it -- although I've intended for years to take another look -- but I do remember this much: seeing a western with my father on my birthday seemed as natural as breathing, and certainly a wagonload or two more so than than the helmet and football.

Westerns infiltrated my imagination at an early stage. Perhaps even pre-natal, if you figure in the fact that my father was sent home from the hospital -- as many men of his day were -- when my mother was admitted for the delivery of her first baby. As I was born, Dad was at home watching Richard Boone in Have Gun Will Travel.

Have Gun Will Travel was simply one of scores of TV westerns that plugged the primetime landscape in the late fifties and early sixties. Indeed, something eight of the top-ten rated series between 1958 and '60 were westerns. That's a lot of guys on horses when you think about it.

Like I would, my father had grown up with westerns, although the westerns of his generation tended to be kid stuff: cheap programmers featuring guys like Johnny Mack Brown, Ken Maynard and Harry Carey. By the time I cottoned on their rough pleasures, the western had morphed into an adult genre, a comic book genre, a toy merchandizing boon, and all those TV shows: Sugarfoot, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wanted Dead or Alive and, of course, the swaggeringly popular and enduring Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

My father would watch anything that rode into town -- or directly into the living room -- on horseback. And I was his principle sidekick in the process. Like a lot of women, my mother never really took much to stories about men, guns, horses and landscape, and it now seems more than a little significant that, after my father took her to see The Wild Bunch in 1969 -- he had no idea it was anything more than another conventional oater -- she swore off seeing any movies for years. Meanwhile, my father and I spent a lot of time side by side observing gunplay.

It now seems almost inconceivable to consider how ubiquitous cowboy culture was for kids who grew up anywhere in the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century. After all, it's a pretty restricted little genre: restricted in terms of its narrative elements, its historical and geographic setting, and and certainly in its arcane but indispensable use of highly specific rituals.

But it's also that very specificity that, for decades that it dominated popular culture, gave it such endurance and paradoxical versatility. First of all, it dealt with pretty primal dramatic material: masculinity, the establishment of society, the causes, effects and morality of violence, racism, and the very ambiguous nature of honour and heroism.

It was, in other words, simple in form but infinitely rich in expression. Although the greatest bulk of western popular culture was set during the relative blink of the two decades from the end of the Civil War to the closing of the American frontier, this historical and geographical corral in no way prevented it from speaking relevantly to any present moment that produced it. While my Dad's era of westerns provided childlike escape fantasies for Depression kids, the postwar western ideally contained all the anxiety and contradictions of a generation of men coming home and attempting to re-domesticate. By the 1960s, when the western had entered it's so-called 'revisionist' stage, it had become all about apocalypse, revolution, remorse and death.

Although it might be considered the most cinematic of movie genres -- horses and men galloping through  rugged landscape -- it also fit very neatly into the square dimensions of TV. That's because the western was every bit as intimate and psychologically dramatic as it was visually epic. This very versatility, combined with its deeply-embedded cultural codes and adaptability to the present, is why you couldn't go anywhere at the time without stepping in some fresh new horse droppings.

So why did it die? (And it is, despite periodic attempts -- like 3:10 to Yuma, the wonderful Assassination of Jesse James and The Appaloosa -- to nudge it back in the saddle.) Obviously because this versatility spent itself: the codes and rituals of the western no longer suited the exploration of issues like violence, racism and masculinity, which found other genres -- science fiction, action, horror -- to call home. And a genre's lifetime has just as much to do with its usefulness as its popularity. Indeed, it's popularity is based on its usefulness. As a coda, I'll take Unforgiven as an especially eloquent last word. Not because it's uniformly brilliant and perfect, but because it ruefully demonstrates the futility of thinking that violence will ever be put to pasture, and because it features the very last Hollywood actor to become a superstar by riding so handsomely on a horse.

So I never expect it come back, and I hope to dear god this doesn't seem like just more long-in-the-tooth boomer retro-wallowing. I just think back now how incredibly present the western was in my life, and how it provided not only entertainment, but an ideal context for father-son bonding, a framework for the later appreciation of genre, filmmakers and filming, and a huge appreciation for ambiguity. Anyone who tells you the western was about any one thing -- violence, racism, male aggression -- obviously hasn't watched very closely. The western provided a kind of folk context in which to ask all kinds of questions about those things. To justify them, rationalize them, criticize  and generally address them. While it rode tall, it was a one form-fits-all kind of movie.