"For the most part, the best westerns are those that omit, or minimize, the origin stories. John Wayne made any number of westerns where it was understood that he was tough old cuss, tending to fat, but we rarely dwelled on how he learned to shoot or why he walked that way. Clint Eastwood made a bunch of films where he was just a scruffy guy who could outdraw anybody and walk away with a squint, and that’s all we knew. There were a couple of others like The Outlaw Josey Wales where his background was provided in record time and High Plains Drifter where it remained an ambiguous mystery, and only one, Unforgiven, where it was a large part of the point. There are any number of films where we first meet the protagonist as he’s riding across the desert, and already know that he’s a guy whose adventures we’re here to see, without learning about every single trauma that shaped him." -- Adam-Troy Castro

Why 'Ravenous' Is the Greatest Cannibal Western Ever

An interesting conversation about westerns and whether a genre can actually die.

Winnette verifies what I suspected (and said here) about Haint's Stay. Namely that its influences were film and that he didn't/doesn't read much in the genre:

"Haints Stay was more intentionally built from movies than novels or experiences, though I’m pretty sure all the movies I watched were based on books or short stories — something that is notably common in the Western. I was interested in the stage dressing of the Western. But I didn’t let myself read many Westerns, though I wanted to. If they influenced Haints Stay, it was through gauzy layers of interpretation or my own bad memory." -- Colin Winnette

Bone Tomahawk Trailer

"The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. I don’t know of a region that buys its own bullshit more so than the American West does. I went last night to a reading by a major figure in literature of the American West, who described the “settling of the American West” as starting in 1849—and I’m like, Uh, buddy when you’re doing all your walks out in nature did you ever find an arrowhead? Apparently it’s still okay for major figures to pretend that indigenous cultures didn’t exist. The way we talk about the California drought has like all the baggage of rugged individualism and Western exceptionalism all over it." -- Claire Vaye Watkins

Death of the western

Here's a death of the western theory I haven't heard before:

"The excesses and financial disaster of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate had nearly killed the Western."

Death of the western - random thoughts

The reasons why the western was popular (and is enduring) is many fold (birth of the American Myth for example) and the reasons why the genre died are many. Not the least of which is that it resisted an accurate view of the west, ignored the diversity of the west, and catered to a white, American, male audience (and was filtered through that view point). By the time the revisionist history books of the 1970's came out that showed a more accurate representation of the west and, more perhaps more importantly, the effect of those books were felt in fiction in the 1980's, it was too late for a course correction.

Also, in the 50's and 60's the ideal representative of the explorer moved away from the settler (ie: cowboys) and moved towards the astronaut. The western started to decline, science fiction started to climb. Maybe its a coincidence, maybe not.