Three Lessons in Storytelling from Westerns

Cowboys, Cactuses and Horses, Oh My

I don't love westerns. Why am I writing this if I don't love westerns? I'm not thinking of writing a western. I had an idea and it made me want to know more about westerns. That's what triggered a research binge.

Modern Box Office Poison

Genres change over time.

The contemporary wisdom has been that westerns are box office poison. This isn't true anymore. But it was true for a time with Jonah Hex and Cowboys & Aliens coming to mind.

Maybe many contemporary writers and directors have trouble understanding the qualities that a western needs to engage an audience. Quentin Tarantino doesn't have trouble. He's created two very successful westerns, The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained. Leonardo DiCaprio's recent film The Revenant is nominated for 12 Academy Awards. Longmire is coming back for a fifth season on Netflix.

Modern westerns are no more like classic westerns than modern comedies are like the screwball comedies of the 1920s. Modern westerns are gritty and violent with complex characters struggling to survive. Triumph isn't triumphant. They are not necessarily realistic and not very fantastic. It's the brutality of existence on the edge of society with people pushed to the limits of humanity. They evoke a feeling and an idea of what it was like to be there.

Earlier westerns were based around black and white morality. Often, literally black hats against white hats. They had exciting heroes on horseback. Not much reality and so much fantasy. In the past, westerns told a version of history from one specific perspective with the Motion Picture Production Code dictating acceptable content. It was wholesome entertainment. Not everyone's worried about wholesome nowadays.

Tropetastic

Every trope starts somewhere.

Tropes and stock characters from westerns are a part of our storytelling culture and our history. I see no point in writing about them in detail when I can just say go to tvtropes but only if you don't have any plans for the next three hours.

I'm most interested in the stories behind the cameras. The feeling and ideas associated with cowboy films. Locations like Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, the Old Tuscon Movie Studio and Iverson Movie Ranch were used so many times that they become the mental sound stage for western fantasies for some people. The image of a cowboy riding alone surrounded by endless expanses of desert with Saguaro Cactuses and tumbleweeds despite the fact that Saguaros are only found in Arizona and part of Mexico.

Truth

The legend of the west started in the wild west and it's been growing ever since.

I don't know if I believe in the existence of absolute truth but my continued existential sufferings on that subject are mostly covered in my previous post. I do believe in emotional truths. Western films were the truths of the people creating those films. I can't learn much about the wild west by watching the Lone Ranger (not that Johnny Depp catastrophe, the original) but I can learn about what the film makers thought and what the kids watching that show in their living room in the 1950s learned about the west.

William McCarty lived the reality but even then, the wild west was a bunch of facts mixed up in stories. Billy the Kid is a legend and a young man who was shot to death at the age of 21. He was a lie long before he died.

"I don’t blame you for writing of me as you have. You had to believe other stories but then I don’t know, as anyone would believe anything good of me anyway."

12/27/1880, Interview with The Las Vegas Gazette

From About Billy the Kid

Our perception of history is biased by the fact that none of us lived it and the records were written by the people with the loudest voices. The loudest voice isn't necessarily the right voice.