Consuming Subjects: Making Sense of Post–World War II Westerns

Abstract

IntroductionThe American Western, a popular film genre from earliest days of cinema well into 1960s, has been linked to story of America more insistently than any other genre. Set in American West, that most mythic of spaces, conventional wisdom has these films embodying the spirit, struggle and demise of new (American Film Institute) even as concepts of American spirit and of frontier are taken for granted and thus seemingly self-evident. This article is a revisitation of so-called Golden Age of Western2-roughly 1946 to 1962-a period in which moviegoing3 as well as production of Westerns peaked,4 with both dropping offf precipitously by 1960s. This Golden Age coincided with major social and cultural shifts in United States, and this project takes particular convergences of history in America in postwar period as significant influences nature and reception of Western. It integrates cultural events and phenomena of 1950s in America with an understanding of ways in which Western shaped and appealed to popular imagination in order to better understand how Westerns made sense in post-World War II period. The ubiquity of Western during this time and its normalized rendering of a very particular narrative of America that was projected onto a mythic interpellated viewers into a contemporary consumerist ideology while developing a Western version of Family Romance that was consistent with economic, social, and political goals of configuring nuclear family as bulwark against insecurities of age. The Westerns of 1950s, in their representation of American story and values provided model for how to be an American, which, in 1950s, was to be a consumer for whom market was final frontier.The West of Imagination-History and Myth in WesternThis is West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print legend.-The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, dir. 1962)The Western emerges out of nexus of signifying practices that has come to be called Myth of West. This West of imagination has, since time of Columbus, been integral to story of America, proving a natural image to reality (Barthes 142). That is, west and events and people in it have, through process of mythologization, been emptied of their specific historicity and refilled with meaning-resignified-to appear as if natural. In Western, this naturalization is overdetermined: filmed on location (even if simulated in studio), landscape registers immediately as West, and locates that meaning in nature.5 Scholars of Western are beholden to this Barthesian logic: 1950s Westerns transform history into a species of narrative which we know to be fiction, but which we nevertheless take to have some important element of truth (Cortese 124). Myths are stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage power of symbolizing that society's ideology . . . their identification with venerable tradition makes them appear to be products of 'nature' rather than history-expressions of a trans-historical consciousness (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 5-6). This dehistoricization pertains to narrative level-the mythic-in contrast to background, which has often been characterized as historically accurate. But in film, every aspect of mise-en-scene is intentional. The apparent attention to historical detail is an authenticating gesture, itself a fiction that provides ground, unquestioned routine of insistently recurring that audience apprehends to be that which anchors storyline to a historical context. Throughout, history maintains some kind of ontological reality, with events in retrievable in some unmediated form: one of things which distinguishes bourgeois myth from history is [the] silent and continuous intrusion of present into what ought to be an inviolable past (Cortese 124). …