"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.

Damn near every time a new, good looking western comes out someone writes a piece about whether the western is making a comeback.  It's not the old days of tons of movie westerns and won't ever be again (do we really want it to be?). A list of the top ten westerns from the last decade is easy to compile because there were only 10 westerns made, you just have to decide how to order them (sarcasm). Jokey bullshitting aside this Christmas looks to be a one good for western fans with two high profile western films coming out. Take a look at the trailers and let me know what you think.

If Laird Barron wrote a western

"Have you ever thought about writing a Western novel, with no horror or science fiction elements? I’ve considered writing in many genres. My grandfather was a failed novelist. Westerns were his favorite. If I do it, and I just might, it would be a sprawling epic in the spirit of Leone and Peckinpah, full of bloody revenge, heaving bosoms, and men who love gold and horses and guns and come to bad ends. And there’d be something fucking weird going on in the periphery. Sorry."

"When I run up against that 'How can you, a mere woman, write Westerns?' attitude, I mention that in my youth I owned a number of horses, did some trail riding in Colorado and Wyoming, and once worked as a shill to a horse trader in Kansas. I don't go into details about the trail riding being connected with a stay at a dude ranch, or the job with the horse trader only lasting a couple of weeks (he got arrested)." -- Lee Hoffman

"Long before Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, or Zane Grey thought about swinging up into a saddle, women were blazing a trail for the Western story. Even prior to 1902 with Owen Wister’s The Virginian which is widely respected as the novel that put the genre on the map, female authors were far ahead on the drive."