What A Western Isn’t
by zunguzungu
What was it about High Noon that made directors want to refute it? Rio Bravo, for example, was an explicit response to what Howard Hawks saw as High Noon‘s lack of respect for the professionalism of the “town-taming” sheriff: it irritated him that Gary Cooper spends the whole movie begging for someone to help him fight the bad guy, so in Rio Bravo he made sure that John Wayne specifically refuse to allow anyone but real professionals help him. Hawks is all about professionalism in a general sense, of course, but there’s also something specific about the stakes in this movie: he prefers the police as professional (a la the professional military) versus the police as embodying the community and peopled by its representatives (a la the classic militia model). Hamilton over Jefferson in a cage match, perhaps?
The recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma is less ideological, perhaps, but most because it’s less coherent and more stupid; it too is in dialog with High Noon, but my guess is that the director doesn’t really understand why. I could only listen to a small bit of the director’s commentary before turning it off and listening to a public radio pledge drive instead; there just wasn’t much there, beyond a lot of platitudes about how the Western is America’s mythology. Particularly notable by its absence was a distinct lack of any address to the question of why; cowboys just equal greek gods in chaps, to hear them tell it. I was reminded of the vacuity of Alec Baldwin: “Baseball! You know Timmy, that’s America’s pastime.”
I hold out some hope that the original Delmore Daves adaptation of 3:10 to Yuma — which I haven’t yet seen — will turn out to be more thoughtful, since you can still see the outlines of that film’s response to High Noon through the hash that Mangold made of it. In addition to the titular allusion — both movies revolve around an arriving train — after all, it is significant that the rancher carries out his charge (to put the bad guy on the prison train at 3:10) not for money or for personal gain, but because his masculinity requires him to do so. His wife (a role in which Gretchen Mol is wasted) and his sons do not respect him anymore, and the only way he can reassert his patriarchy is by dying in the service of order, by putting the bad guy on the train even when the forces of order themselves have proved to be corrupt and unprincipled.
In other words, the attack on High Noon is here less a defense of professionalism than a reaction to the ways that High Noon blasts apart one of the most cherished myths of the Western “town-tamer” genre: the firm belief that the line separating the masculine law-giver and the feminized subject population is clear. By the genre’s logic, after all, Gary Cooper has been emasculated by his reliance on his wife (his inability to keep her out of it), which in turn erodes away at the foundation on which her femininity is constructed. By not staying in her separate sphere, in fact, her involvement in the manliness of violence leaves her with no characterization left: her entire character has been constructed on the basis of the thing she will not do (kill), which she then does.
None of this is really unique to High Noon, of course; pitting the romance plot against the narrative problem of profession, forcing the narrator to choose between his wife and his job, is pretty standard fare in the genre. But it seems to me that Hawks’ defense of professionalism and the Mangold/Daves defense of patriarchy can settle on a common enemy because while most Westerns start with the contradiction between romance/crime-fighter and end with an implausible borrowed-kettle style resolution, the narrative of High Noon resolves itself only by blasting apart the original terms of the dichotomy. The end of High Noon is neither comedy nor tragedy, neither funeral nor wedding, but a twisted and inverted assertion of the impossibility of either. The West, it reminds us, is bullshit.
Weirdly, that’s exactly what makes it such a good Western, the fact that it’s an anti-Western. Or, on the other hand, maybe that isn’t so weird; as Tag Gallagher once noted (in “Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the ‘Evolution’ of the Western”), the idea of High Noon as a deconstruction of the classic Western requires a very selective memory of how previous Westerns worked, since you can find most of High Noon’s subversive and political overtones, albeit in a muted form, in a film like Stagecoach, and even earlier. From the beginning, he points out, the Western has been a genre defined by its own contradictions, for the paradox that the thing we are is a definition composed out of “our” habit of turning into something else. And while High Noon might have been made at a time when it was possible to be very explicit about these contradictions, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into (because he does), we should modulate our readings of the earlier Westerns to take into account the fact that they speak the same idiom, just much more quietly, and sometimes in code. A film like Liberty Valance can be more blunt about how legends are printed because it was filmed in a blunter period, but to imagine that some of the earliest Westerns weren’t consumed by this problem as well is to misunderstand them, and to flatter our own sense of superiority over the past.
All of which makes me wonder if maybe the responses to High Noon aren’t the real turning point in the genre; after all, a reactionary attempt to reconstruct a Western that never was is something very different than the John Ford-era Western, which was specifically interested in the very impossibility of resolving the contradictions between, say, senator and rancher. John Ford might have known a great deal about how legends of the West were constructed (having almost done it himself, essentially), but his only serious attempts to deal with the West in a realist vein were the interesting failures of his final period, the “black cowboy” drama of Sergeant Rutledge or the anti-Dances with Wolves nostalgia-tragedy of Cheyenne Autumn.
I’ve gone off and turned this into a John Ford post again. But here’s the bottom line: while people have liked to talk about what a Western is, I’m starting to suspect the better question is the opposite, the question of what isn’t a Western. And maybe what most Westerns aren’t is this: the “classic” Western.
zunguzungu 
“All of which makes me wonder if maybe the responses to High Noon aren’t the real turning point in the genre; after all, a reactionary attempt to reconstruct a Western that never was is something very different than the John Ford-era Western, which was specifically interested in the very impossibility of resolving the contradictions between, say, senator and rancher.”
This struggle is as old as the Western, though, surely? In the dime novel Westerns of the mid-1870s, the outlaw hero was the norm, with nascent frontier communities the passive female in need of rescuing and the representatives of capital (in the person of exploitive stockbrokers and financiers) as the bad guys. The moral panic of 1883 (spurred in part by publishers who weren’t publishing outlaw heroes) put an end to this, and the dime novel Western returned to a more black-and-white morality.
IIRC the reaction to The Virginian (short stories, 1892-1901, as a novel 1902) was along the same lines. The Virginian is a more nuanced and thoughtful treatment of masculinity, among other things, than most of us remember, but the periodical stories which responded to the Virginian ignored its more contemplative aspects and made the Western, once again, a simplistic place.
Jess,
That seems right to me in one sense; I find a genealogy of the genre most persuasive where one traces the ways it vascillates between black-and-white morality and ambiguous critiques of that black and whitedness, especially as linked to the kind of historical moments you’re flagging.
In another sense, though — and maybe this is a slightly different argument — I wonder if there’s something different about the kind of nostalgic recreation of the West in the 1950’s (where it’s clear that the West doesn’t exist anymore) and especially now, from the kind of Western that could be made in the earlier days. Wyatt Earp was still kicking around Hollywood and self-publicizing when Ford made his middle period westerns, and while the frontier might have closed, it had done so in recent historical memory. The West was a real place that really existed.
Mangold’s movie seems to be of a different breed, imagining something more like myth than history (the Assassination of Jesse James, would be another example, though more self aware about it), but unlike the ways a Ford thought about how histories were made, Mangold seems to believe in the myth as myth, as a story whose status as fiction is not as important as its social function. So I wonder if there’s a different kind of moral panic involved in the response to the a de-mythologizing Western like High Noon; it’s not an argument over real history, but an argument about myths, less an argument over what actually was than about what should have been.
I suspect there’s also a strain of professional politics in Hawks’ bilious response to High Noon, since the film’s regard for amateurism extends to the presence of an Oscar-baiter like Zinneman at the helm, melodramatically deconstructing a genre in which seasoned hands like Hawks himself had long managed to be more austerely self-reflexive. Of course, there are many worse films that Hawks didn’t go out of his way to refute, so you’re probably right to suspect that his irritation says something about the status of the genre in addition to signaling a case directorial caprice.
As for Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma, I was less struck by its attempts at mythology than its insistent self-placement within the sub-genre of Westerns with a lot of mud, alongside economically conscious efforts such as Altman’s Macabe and Mrs. Miller or HBO’s Deadwood. The inverted High Noon moment at the end of Mangold’s film, when Crowe’s tetchily queer second-in-command converts the town into a weapon with the promise of cash, heavy-handedly reminds us that the film’s mythology is both fostered and deflated at various points by financial desperation. Christian Bale’s dramatic transition from mere lean-boned raspiness to stoical Batmanliness seems to follow the revelation that shame rather than poverty is his rooting motivation. Also, if there’s any point to the scenes that Mangold adds to the original story (perhaps not), then it’s that the backdrop of his picaresque fights and chases tends to reveal a social panorama centered on the railroad. Of course, the deromanticized squalor of it all doesn’t keep Mangold from turning his outlaw into some kind of omnipotent bird-sketching dandy whose self-regard drives the conclusion more so than any previous narrative logic. And no theory will explain away the deeply stupid addition of a gattling gun to the first action sequence, the kind of thing that reveals this remake as the stylistic equivalent of the greenhorn who talks just enough that we know he’s got about two more reels to live.
When I saw High Noon a couple of years ago, I was struck by how, visually, it presaged Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. Your post, though, suggests that it may have also set into motion the swing of a thematic pendulum that Leone pushes to its limit, too. In those films, the sheriffs and other traditional figures of Law and Order, if they appear at all, might as well not even be there–the only law is lawlessness, except in the person of Eastwood’s Man with No Name and those with whom he forms his alliances of convenience. Women are barely present, except as caricatures of damsels in various forms of distress.
But Once Upon a Time in the West–whose plot revolves not around the arrival of a train but the arrival of the railroad–may also be a rewriting of High Noon: what Won the West was not lawmen’s lead but the iron horse–technology, business, the people who inevitably followed in its wake.
Scrimshander,
There might be something that connects your point about mud to mine about myth, as I think about it. The whole idea that we’re going to “de-mythologize” the West by showing it to be muddy is probably not unrelated to the notion that it was somehow mythically clean before. But your John Ford’s never cared too much about that; it was those preposterous TV westerns where everyone was wearing sparkling designer cowboy clothes. As for the rest, as always, all I have to say in response is absolutely, tell me more.
John,
I feel that too, though for me there’s also a world of interesting difference between the magnificent “What will you do…” song played in High Noon and the crazy whistling of the Leone movies, something somewhat like the difference between a tragedy and action movie aesthetic. And while I haven’t seen Once upon a time in the West, I’d guess it’s more likely that it’s responding to the original Ford era Westerns that High Noon was responding to, the “Iron Horse” theme in movies like Iron Horse. It’s all interelated, of course, and figuring out how artists influence each other should really be charted on a venn diagram, not a family tree, but to me the key thing that connects High Noon to 3:10 is the specificity of the train arriving at a particular time, the countdown to launch narrative structure. “Iron Horse” narratives are always nostalgia pieces about the thing that is lost as the railroad arrives; in “High Noon,” on the other hand, the very narrative presumes that the railroad is already there.
Leone is an interesting comparison with High Noon, now that you mention it; the womanless landscape of the former would seem to follow naturally out of the anti-domesticity latent in the plotline of the latter, too, though only as a product of the narrative working itself out.
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