Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western

By Will Wright

From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into abstract structural theory as well as economic and political history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is based is available to all of my readers, either at the local theater or, more likely, on the late, late show. I hope you will take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle of the night, tell them firmly—as I often did—that you are doing research in social science.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.
From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consc

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520340787

Will Wright

Dr. Will Wright is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Colorado State University. Before joining the faculty at CSU-P in 1986, he taught at several universities including the University of California, Northwestern University, Wesleyan University, and the University of Arizona. Dr. Wright, who was formerly the chair of the sociology department, has written four major books The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory, Sage Publications, 2001, Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment, University of Minnesota Press, 1992, The Social Logic of Health, (with new Introduction) Wesleyan University Press, 1994, (First edition: Rutgers University Press, 1982), Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, University of California Press, 1975. Dr. Wright’s Sixguns and Society is widely considered a classic in its field and despite its publication over 30 years ago remains in print and in the library of every serious student of the Western movie. His work on Westerns is widely cited internationally and his theoretical analysis of the genre is summarized in detail in a number of prominent texts on film and society. Dr. Wright’s scholarly articles on theory, popular culture, and film have appeared in a variety of academic journals including Journal of Popular Film and Television, War, Literature and the Arts, Contemporary Sociology, The Social Text, and New Society. He has also contributed a number of chapters to edited books.

Book preview

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1975, by

The Regents of the University of California

Designed by Henry Bennett

ISBN 0-520-02753-1

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-77735

Printed in the United States of America

To my mother who taught me to love music and kindness and my father who taught me to love Westerns

Contents

Contents

Preface

Introduction.: The mith and the method

The Structure of myth

The structure of the western film INTRODUCTION: THE FILMS

THE CLASSICAL PLOT

THE VENGEANCE VARIATION

THE TRANSITION THEME

THE PROFESSIONAL PLOT

Myth as a Narrative of Social Action

Individuals and Values: The Classical Plot

Individuals Against Values The Vengeance Variation

Groups and Techniques The Professional Plot

Myth and Meaning

Methodological Epilogue

Appendix

Selective Bibliography

INDEX 217

Preface

Everyone’s seen a Western. Most people like them, some do not, but no American and few in the world can escape their influence. The Marlboro Man made Marlboro the best-selling cigarettes in the world; pintos, mustangs, mavericks are popular automobiles as well as animals and images from the Western; dude ranches do a thriving business, turning up even in Germany; western clothing is fashionable; rodeos are the most popular spectator sport in America. Two men face off to determine the fastest draw in northern Thailand, and both are killed. John Wayne, once simply a symbol of masculinity, is now both the symbol of masculinity and male chauvinism. And then there is that fine commercial in which Slim Pickens, in a cowboy hat, is driving across the desert when his car gets a flat tire—so he shoots it.

There are the movies—and the TV shows—and the novels. We are all familiar with the Western, which has had many commentators. In 1950, Henry Nash Smith dismissed it in The Virgin Land:

Devoid alike of ethical and social meaning, the Western story could develop in no direction save that of a straining and exaggeration of its formulas. It abandoned all effort to be serious, and by 1889 … it had sunk to the near-juvenile level it was to occupy with virtually no change down to our present day. (Smith, p. 135)

On the other hand, many film critics and armchair analysts have hailed its wild beauty, reveled in its masculine violence, condemned its incipient fascism, discovered the American trauma in its arid deserts, and found repressed significance in the fast draw. Yet there

have been no serious, systematic studies of the Western as a cultural genre, a popular set of stories, an American myth. So I have undertaken one.

I have entered this new, untamed territory armed with a theory, a methodology, and a set of data; with these weapons, together with Truth and Justice, I intend to drive out the evil ranchers, railroad men, and professors in order to show that there is redeeming social value in this seemingly barren intellectual wasteland. The theory and methodology I will develop as I go along, borrowing tricks from the earlier trailblazers in similar lands—anthropologists, literary critics, philosophers. The data, however, belongs to all of us—the Western movies of the last four decades, the glorious and ridiculous shoot-’em-ups of our childhood and, happily, of our adulthood as well. John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart; gunfights, saloon brawls, schoolmarms, dance-hall girls, necktie parties, stampedes, wagon trains, Indian attacks, saddle tramps; mountains, deserts, forests, plains; horses, cattle, railroads; white hats and black hats—all are familiar to us. While gangster films, romantic comedies, war dramas, spy movies, and police films have come and gone, the Western has remained popular.

The purpose of this book is to explain its popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn’t quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into abstract structural theory as well as economic and political history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is based is available to all of my readers, either at the local theater or, more likely, on the late, late show. I hope you will take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle of the night, tell them firmly—as I often did—that you are doing research in social science.

Much of this work falls into the category of a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Unlike John Wayne, though, I had help

when the going got tough. At Berkeley, Leo Lowenthal, Neil Smelser, Reinhard Bendix, and Alan Dundes supplied me with the weapons, ammunition, and strategy for a successful campaign. David Frisby led the cavalry charge to the rescue at the last moment. Hugh Mehan and Benetta Jules-Rossette backed me up for the final shoot-out. Trudy O’Brien, Jan Wilber, Beverly Strong, Susan Miller, and Corinne Cacas—schoolmarms and dance-hall girls all—proved to be the fastest typists and collators in the West. Finally, there is the man from Montana, Brian O’Brien, who did nothing at all except remain a good friend and a fellow connoisseur of fine cowboy movies.

Introduction.:

The mith and the method

A lone rider, sitting easily in the saddle of his dusty horse, travels across the plains toward a small, new town with muddy streets and lively saloons. He wears a tattered, wide-brimmed hat, a loose-hanging vest, a bandanna around his neck, and one gun rests naturally at his side in a smooth, well-worn holster. Behind him, the empty plains roll gently until they end abruptly in the rocks and forests that punctuate the sudden rise of towering mountain peaks.

For most Americans, and for a large percentage of the world’s population, this scene is familiar, though few people have ever actually experienced it. It does not simply present a familiar setting, it envelops the setting in social and moral meanings which are immediately understood. The scene literally tells a story, for it recreates the settling of the American West, a time and a history which, as someone said, if it did not really happen, it should have. Certainly the West was wild, but even at its wildest, the actual events could not possibly have included the many stories of glory and suffering, heroism and savagery, love and sacrifice, that the Western myth has produced. Yet somehow, the historical reality of the West provided fertile soil for the growth and development of myth. The result has been one of the richest narrative traditions of modern times.

Western novels have been popular in America since the middle of the nineteenth century, and similar tales of the West—often written by men who never even visited America—have stirred the European imagination for generations. According to a recent commentator, novels of the West constituted 10.64 percent of all works

of fictions published in America in 1958, and 7.08 percent in 1967, (Cawelti, pp. 2-3). In 1903, Edwin Porter made The Great Train Robbery, which was not only the first Western film but the first film to use cross-cutting (cutting between simultaneous events in different locations) to tell a story. Since that time, the Western has become a favorite of moviegoers and has greatly expanded the popularity and significance of the Western myth.

American Westerns have become popular throughout Europe and in Africa, Asia, and South America; in recent years, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Japan have begun to make their own Western movies. Of course, since the early fifties, television has become a major source of Western adventure. Cawelti reports that, during on average television week in Chicago in 1967, eighteen hours of Westerns were shown on the four major channels between the hours of six and ten in the evening—16 percent of the total viewing time.

The enormous popularity of the wild West could perhaps be attributed to cultural interest in a unique and colorful era of our history, but this explanation becomes unconvincing when the actual history is examined. The crucial period of settlement in which most Westerns take place lasted only about thirty years, from 1860 to 1890. In 1861 the Indian wars began as the Cheyenne found the Colorado gold miners invading their lands, and in 1862 the Homestead Act was passed. By 1890 all the American Indians had been either exterminated or placed on reservations; in 1889 the last unoccupied region in the West, the Oklahoma territory, was opened to homesteaders with a massive land rush. Between these events, the major Indian wars were fought, and cattle empires blossomed and withered. The great Texas cattle drives to the Kansas cow towns, the inspiration for much of the Western myth, lasted only from 1866 to 1885. Even if we include the period of the California gold rush and the first wagon trains to Oregon, the entire period of western settlement lasted less than fifty years. In contrast, the settling of the eastern frontier—from the Atlantic to the Great Plains—required at least 130 years; yet apart from Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Natty Bumpo, and Paul Bunyan, this era is not rich in mythical figures and events, and even these stalwart heroes have a minor status in the modern imagination compared with the cowboys, gunfighters, and gamblers of the golden West.

A more likely explanation for the West’s appeal as a setting for romance is the fact that there, for a brief time, many ways of life were available, each of which contained its own element of adventure. There were farmers, cowboys, cavalrymen, miners, Indian fighters, gamblers, gunfighters, and railroad builders, all contem-

porary with one another. Though these different types may have had little contact with each other, as a source of narrative inspiration the variety of livelihoods allows for clear-cut conflicts of interest and values.

The fictional interaction of different kinds of men often makes details of motivation unnecessary and intensifies the force of their situational antagonisms. Set in a historical context where these differences are believable, stories that utilize this potential can readily portray fundamental conflicts by relying on the established meanings of the various types.

There have been other frontiers, but probably none as rich in different and conflicting activities within a remarkably compressed period. Life on the eastern frontier of America was probably just as exciting—or dull—as in the West, but the East never offered at one time such a wide variety of occupations. In the early days, you were a trapper or a guide or an Indian fighter, and later you were a farmer or a merchant, but there was not much interaction or many alternatives. Hence, in spite of its actual and more prolonged adventure, the East could never match the social turmoil of the West as a context for fiction, and more precisely, as a ground for myth. The real but limited use of violence to settle differences in the West is simply the final rationale for the transformation of a historical period into a mythical realm in which significant social conflicts and abrupt, clear resolutions can be made both believable and meaningful in a readily understandable way.

If this explains the choice of this historical setting, how can we understand the meaning of the myth itself? What is the appeal of stories about a way of life absolutely different from that of their modern audiences? There have been remarkably few serious efforts to analyze and interpret the Western myth. It is as though its mass appeal has made it unworthy of dignified scholarly research. From time to time essays have appeared that offer capsule explanations, which generally fall into two categories: the Western, as satisfaction of social needs or the Western as satisfaction of psychological needs.

Preeminent in the first category is André Bazin, the French critic, who argues that these Western myths … may be reduced to an essential principle: … the relation between law and morality (Bazin, p. 145). Others include David Brian Davis, who believes that the Western represents the conflict of the ethic of work with the ethic of leisure, and Peter Homans, who sees in the Western a legitimation of violence in a context of Puritan control over feelings. Similarly, Robert Warshow finds the significance of the Western to lie in the fact that it offers a serious orientation to the problem of violence (Warshow, p. 103). In a recent study, John Cawelti argues

that the Western affirms the necessity of society by presenting and resolving the conflict between key American values like progress and success and the lost virtues of individual honor, heroism, and natural freedom (Cawelti, p. 80). Finally, Jim Kitses vividly contends that the Western opposes Wilderness to Civilization: What we are dealing with here, of course, is no less than a national world-view: … the isolation of a vast unexplored continent, the slow growth of social forms, the impact of an unremitting New England Puritanism obsessed with the cosmic struggle of good and evil. … We can speak of the genre’s celebration of America, of the contrasting images of Garden and Desert, as national myth (Kitses, pp. 12, 14).

These explanations, which are interesting and suggestive, share a common, implicit theoretical orientation. All assume that an emotionally felt cultural conflict is expressed and thereby displaced or resolved in individuals. The suggested conflicts are many— progress versus freedom, law versus morality, violence versus Puritan control—but, though these explanations contain valid insights into American culture, they cannot account for the popularity of the Western myth. It is doubtful that many of us who enjoy Westerns worry very much about progress versus freedom or Garden versus Desert, and the only source of evidence for the existence of these conflicts is the myth itself. An argument that attempts to explain a myth through a conflict that can only be found in the myth itself is necessarily suspect. The real difficulty with this kind of explanation, however, is that it attempts to interpret a rich and varied mythical form in terms of one specific social or cultural dynamic. The myth is thereby separated from the everyday concerns and actions of most people in the society, who cannot constantly be plagued by that particular psychological strain. Yet it is precisely these everyday concerns and actions that the myth is designed to make more bearable, through the reinforcing power of what we call entertainment.

Other commentators on the Western have stressed its relation to psychological need. F. E. Emery claims that the myth is popular because audiences experience some sense of ‘fit’ or harmony between it and certain of their own unconscious inner needs and tensions (Emery, p. 11). Cawelti argues that the Western reflects an archetypal pattern such as the adolescent’s desire to be an adult and his fear and hesitation about adulthood (Cawelti, p. 82). Kenneth Munden believes the myth symbolizes the central conflicts of the Oedipus Complex, conflicts which are not cultural but are rather based on "the decisive, universal, emotional relationships that exist between every child and its parents, no matter what variable

environmental factors be introduced" (Munden, p. 144).

Analyses such as these attribute the Western’s popularity to universal and unconscious needs. The setting and actions of the Western are interpreted as an elaborate cultural code that both expresses and obscures the real, biological meaning of the myth. In such a code, for example, the hero represents childhood or the hero’s gun the penis. By claiming universal, unconscious necessity for its central conflict, this approach avoids the problem of how we can enjoy Westerns without constantly worrying about the trauma. But it raises another, and greater, problem: the code that interprets the myth—hero = childhood, gun = penis—is part of the theory that explains the meaning of the myth. Thus, there is no way that the Western itself can validate the psychological theory. Until there is a clear, external translation of cultural images into biological meanings, no verifying evidence for such explanations, other than elegance of fit, can be produced.

But the central problem with the psychological approach is that it either ignores or denies the fact that the Western, like other myths, is a social phenomenon. If its meaning is universal and emotional, then the particular social structure and institutions only determine its code; they have nothing to do with its meaning. Once again, this is a claim that is made because the theory demands it, not because of any evidence in the Western itself. Indeed, all the evidence is to the contrary, particularly the fact that the plot structure of the Western has changed dramatically over the forty years considered by this study, a fact difficult to explain if the meaning of the myth is universal, biological, and therefore static.

As commonly practiced, both the social and the psychological approaches to myth share a common assumption that limits their analytic power as well as their ability to grasp the Western as an experienced whole. Both assume that a myth reflects a shared concern with a specific conflict in attitudes or desires. Further, they assume that if this conflict is not somehow displaced or resolved, an emotional tension or disturbance will result. Circumstances create a specific and widespread incompatibility of needs, and the myth is popular and successful insofar as it contributes to the satisfaction of those needs and the circumvention of the associated emotional tensions. From this perspective, the myth can only be understood in terms of one overriding emotional dynamic.

This approach to the study of myth is derived from the theories of the great anthropologists and their interpretations of tribal myths. Until recently, tribal myths were viewed as emotional, irrational ways of expressing social value and psychological conflict. Thus, for Radcliff-Brown the myths of the Andaman Islanders function

to reoncile the social order with the natural order; the myths satisfactorily fulfil their function not by any appeal to the reasoning powers of the intellect but by appealing, through the imagination, to the mind’s affective dispositions (Georges, p. 65). For Malinowski, the Trobriand myths reinforce custom and magic as distinct from actual historical reality, and thus we can define myth as a narrative of events which are to the native supernatural (Georges, p. 78). Finally, for Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho myths resolve cultural or psychological anxieties through reaction formation, introjection, and projection:

The all-pervasive configurations of word symbols (myths) and of act symbols (rituals) preserve the cohesion of the society and sustain the individual, protecting him from intolerable conflict. … Mythology is the rationalization … of the fundamental needs of the society, whether economic, biological, social, or sexual. (Georges, pp. 166-167).

This approach makes the basic psychological assumption that emotional disorder results from a conflict or confusion of social beliefs or biological needs. In one sense, this statement is unexceptionable; but it is usually interpreted to mean that emotional trauma or tension is caused by one (or perhaps more) specific complex of irreconcilable desires, and then the search is on to discover this complex and explain its manifestations. In this way a direct connection is established between unavoidable mental concerns and particular cultural expressions: the individual mind must grasp and endure certain inherent conflicts—love of mother versus fear of authority, progress versus freedom—or else emotional disturbances will occur. Cultural forms such as myths help the individual to live with these conflicts.

While this view is accurate as a description, it is mistaken as an explanation. Certainly, specific conflicts of beliefs and desires generate emotional disturbance, but the psychological connection between the disturbance and the conflicts is not as direct as this argument assumes. Freud is probably responsible for the popularity of this approach; as Philip Rieff comments, he encouraged it by making the Oedipus Complex the nucleus of all neurotic problems. After him, for example, Adler rejected the centrality of the Oedipal desires but replaced them with an equally single-minded emphasis on the inherent conflict between inferiority and power. This methodological approach to attitudes and behavior—one central conflict, many behavioral manifestations—can be used both by psychoanalysts (e.g., Munden) and by more socially oriented interpreters of the Western to explain the meaning of the myth. But the problem

is more complex than this. The trouble with this approach is that the basic conflict, whether psychological or social, is simply assumed to be the underlying motivation of the myth—or dream, or attitude—and then the myth or other manifestation is analyzed in such a way that, when the conflict is indeed found to be present, the interpretation is proven to be valid. Unfortunately, this method can be used to validate many such fundamental conflicts in the Western and in other aspects of cultural and psychic life.

Many social scientists, including some psychoanalysts, have recently begun to interpret cultural forms and attitudes, as well as emotional disturbances, as problems in communication rather than as the consequences of specific and assumed tensions. The central concern of social man is seen to be the establishment of meanings and the communication of these meanings. This constitutes an assumption about basic human needs—the search for meaning—that is more formal and abstract than the Freudian or simple social assumptions that we have encountered—Oedipal conflicts, progress versus freedom, and so forth. It is also empirically demonstrable in a straightforward way, which these other assumptions are not: men do establish symbolic meanings and they do communicate. If we seek to understand myths from this perspective, we must first analyze the formal, or logical, requirements of symbolic communication and then try to relate the particular contents to those requirements. This is clearly different from attempting to connect the content with a specific complex of conflicting ideas or desires. While these specific conflicts are certainly present in human life, they are now interpreted as efforts to make symbolic sense of ordinary experience rather than as inherent human or social dilemmas. For example, if we successfully interpret a myth in terms of the Oedipus Complex, we have not explained the social meanings of the myth but have simply established that, in this society, there is a confusion in the social attitudes and actions surrounding parents and children, a confusion that must be expressed in the culture. In order to know why this confusion exists and how its expression is understood, we must understand what social meanings concerning this problem are available and how they conflict with the psychological and logical necessities of meaning and coherence in human consciousness.

In other words, the theoretical relationship between specific social tensions and unconscious cultural expressions is no longer seen as direct and emotional but as indirect and cognitive. A specific, unresolved conflict in unconscious ideas or desires causes emotional disturbance or expression; but if this is accepted as an explanation of the expression, then the conflict becomes given and irreducible,

and human experience is seen as innately emotional. When, however, this causal statement is accepted as a description of the relationship between a conflict and its emotional expression, both can be interpreted as attempts to establish meaning in a psychological context bounded by cultural concepts, on the one hand, and by the formal requirements of symbolic understanding on the other.

This distinction underlies the recent stress on cognitive as opposed to affective psychology, where the concern is with how humans understand, organize, and communicate their experience rather than how they inherit, express, and resolve their emotional disorders. The perspective that I will adopt in this study is that emotional behavior can only be fully understood when cognitive behavior is understood. The study of human expression and communication requires a more formal psychological analysis than is available in psychoanalytic theory.

The concerns of a cognitive explanation begin with the analysis of the structure of language and, more generally, the structure of symbolic communication. When this formal theory has been established, it is then possible to return to a specific social context where the theory can be applied to real experiences and expressions. The emphasis on the structural requirements of human consciousness permits an analysis of human action that focuses on a complex and formal psychological mechanism of communication as well as on a socially established and responsive complex of motivating symbols.

It becomes possible to view myth as consisting of two analytically separable components: an abstract structure through which the human mind imposes a necessary order and a symbolic content through which the formal structure is applied to contingent, socially defined experience. With respect to its structure, myth is like language in that its elements are ordered according to formal rules of combination by which these elements take on meaning. The elements of myth are the images and actions of the narrative, and the structure that orders them, like the structure of language, is determined by the general properties of symbolic consciousness—that is, by the psychological resources of the mind and the laws of symbolic meaning. Thus, the structure of myth is assumed to be universal; it can be derived from an analysis of any instance of myth and the requirements of symbolic communication.

But the formal structure of a myth is embodied in a symbolic content that is socially specific. This content presents characters and events, telling a story that society’s members understand and enjoy. Both consciously and unconsciously the myth relates to the individual’s experience as a social and historical being. Like lan-

guage, myth exhibits an unconscious, formal structure through which its elements have meaning; whereas the elements of language—words—analyze human experience, the elements of myth synthesize experience. Words classify and separate, images and stories interrelate and unify. For this reason, myth—together with ritual, art, kinship, and politics—can be seen as a necessary symbolic strategy to reintegrate the experience that language makes detached and problematic. Through their stories and characters, and their unconscious, structural significance, myths organize and model experience. Familiar situations and conflicts are presented and resolved. Human experience is always social and cultural, and the models of experience offered by a myth therefore contain in their deepest meanings the classifications, interpretations, and inconsistencies that a particular society imposes on the individual’s understanding of the world. The ordering concepts by which an individual acts will be reflected in the myths of his society, and it is through the formal structure of the myths that these concepts are symbolized and understood by the people who know and enjoy the myth. Thus, the study of myth can enable us to achieve a greater understanding both of the mind’s resources for conceiving and acting in the world and of the organizing principles and conflicting assumptions with which a specific society attempts to order and cope with its experience.

I have restricted myself to the study of films because I believe it is in this medium that the Western has taken on its uniquely mythical

Reviews for Sixguns and Society

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A look at American society using the western movie as a metaphor. I found it trenchant and acute. Well worth reading.