guerilla in a civil war that never ended
Imagine, if you will, that the Western is a living thing. It was young once and it had fun [ Stagecoach ]. It didn't worry about some of its racist or sexist undertones [ The Searchers ], or how readily it reified and reinforced patriarchal and imperialist/colonialist notions about how the world worked. It sometimes sang (and I'm sorry I didn't start this month with an earlier, musical Western) and it sometimes glorfied violence. It had its adolescent period, figuring out what it was about, dealing in post-war storylines [ 3:10 to Yuma ] to deal with a (different) post-war world. When President Kennedy was killed not long after Liberty Valance was, the tone of the Western changed a bit. Like it needed to exorcise its own violent tendencies [ The Wild Bunch ]. But, it was also coming to understand more of the world outside itself. Violence was all well and good, and it did get things done [ How the West Was Won ]. But, violence was also destroying the world, had already ...