What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination by Josh Garrett-Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination by Josh Garrett-Davis Christopher Hickman What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination. By Josh Garrett-Davis. Foreword by Patricia Nelson Limerick. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. ix + 161 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 paper. Josh Garrett-Davis’s What Is a Western? coincides with revisions and the planned reopening of the Autry Museum of the American West’s principal gallery. The book has twenty-one chapters, some of which have undergone re-tooling after appearing elsewhere. Garrett-Davis’s provocations often highlight, if not feature, artifacts and items from the Autry’s collections. From borderlands music to a variety of international invocations of the “Western” genre, the inclusivity of the book fits its ambitions. All told, Garrett-Davis, who is an associate curator at the Autry, skillfully surveys a vast canvas of ideas, sources, and cultural products. His book provides the heady cultural consumer with thoughtful judgments about the “Western” as a capacious, peculiar, mythological, and dialogical cultural form. The book’s interrogatory title matters. The musings, illustrations, and examples within the book’s binding touch upon a variety of hefty questions. What gives—or at earlier points across the twentieth century gave—the “Western” its durability? This book reckons with a core problematic. Could we put the genre to such reexamination and deconstruction that we are left with pieces, if not another composite of the genre, that then undermine what Garrett-Davis calls the “specific genius of the Western”? A long-running film series “What Is a Western?” at the Autry both inspires and coheres the text. The chapters with particular focus on a film, such as those about Oklahoma! (1955), The Frisco Kid (1979), or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), are enthusiastically arranged and argued. We might ask whether filmic culture has, in fact, had an outsized influence in giving meaning to the genre. Did the “Western” convey a comfort that made it an essential part of post–Second World War American culture and society? After all, the filmic entries of the 1950s and 1960s, many presented in Fox’s Cinemas-cope, provided a visual topography that told contemporary Americans that vastness and [End Page 366] power would go hand in hand. This tandem existed as those in the present sought out and provided explanations, if not release, from the burdens of those explanations, in filmic art. The frontier then had not closed, subtly subverting what Frederick Jackson Turner had made the fons et origio of his “frontier thesis” at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, as the inimitable William Appleman Williams told us four decades ago, Americans had become accustomed to accepting the benefits, but not to account for the costs and consequences, of what Williams phrased “empire as a way of life.” Imperialism had always been there, too, at least in some generalizable American ambition. The “Western” has been its own “way of life.” As a cultural form, it featured shifting frontiers; it conveyed contortions and contests reminding Americans, if not non-American audiences, that cinema screens had a regnant didactic purpose that paralleled the country’s intended reach and power. Yet that power had its paradoxes. Monument Valley had dialogical gusto for director John Ford. It was there for movie-goers, as part of that filmic reception. Perhaps that location would persist beyond the contemporary turmoil that audiences would have known at the time of Stagecoach (1939) or later on with the existentialism of The Searchers (1956). Be that as it may, mid-twentieth-century “Western” films also continued to echo something aside from variations on the Turnerian thesis about space, movement, and democracy. Instead, such cultural items yielded to viewers an ideational, if not moral, continuity that perpetuated the racial and ethnic nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning the West (1889). What Is a Western? will be particularly useful for educators who teach courses on film, popular culture, and the American West, however broadly or paradoxically they define it. [End Page 367] Christopher Hickman Department of History Tarleton State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln