March 18, 1999

Announcements:  None.

Lecture Notes:

I.  Psychological Western:  The Searchers

• The Searchers is about a man who returns to his family after the Civil War.  He goes to save their daughter, who has been abducted by Indians.
• He can't be integrated into civilization, so in the end he leaves to rejoin the wilderness
• Violence is considered moral
• The Indians are humanized in the movie.  Usually, Indians are portrayed as violent and blood hungry.  The Indian only abducted the girl because his family was killed by whites.
• The director uses mise-en-scene in the final scene to juxtapose values of nature and civilization
• The movie was made in the 1950's which was a time period where individuals were not considered role models--a conformist community was the state of American identity

II.  From Fact to Legend:  Liberty Valance Flashback Structure

• The character of Hallie is used to show the tension between the old West and the new West
• She's torn between loving Tom and Ransom
• When she comes back for Tom's funeral, she places a cactus rose on the casket
• This is symbolic because the cactus rose as a plant is very sturdy and self-sufficient (the old West), but the actual flower bloom depends on water and irrigation (the new West)
• Tom represents nature, Ransom represents civilization
• There was no more need for western outlaws;  laws were enacted to settle disputes
• There are 4 different techniques used under the flashback structure:

• Valance represents the ways of the old West
• Stoddard represents the ways of the new West

• Eastern - reliance on formal education
• Western - differences settled violently

• In the old West, men would duke it out or have gunfights to settle their arguments
• In the new West, there was law and order to settle conflict

• The flashback scenes were meant to look artificial and cheaply produced
• This questions the mythology that was built up about the West
• We remember the West the way we want to, rather than how it actually was
• The beginning and ending scenes look natural and believable
• Ransom's memory is a product of mythology, not fact

III.  Professional Western:  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

• The professional western represents the evolution from early and psychological westerns
• The West was completely civilized, taken over by banks and real estate.  There was no individual freedom anymore.
• The community was greedy, materialistic, self-serving
• The Westerner works for a paycheck.
• This mirrors the ways of community
• Society was no longer worth defending
• The Westerner prefers the honor and company of outlaws to the company of civilized society

• 2 outlaws refused to integrate into civilized society.  They discover that they have outlived their glory days.
• The film is shot through an amber lens, which suggests a nostalgic view of the West
• Butch Cassidy is a gunfighter who refuses to cave into the demands of society.  He wants to rob a bank, but the bank has been taken over by Easterners so there is more security and he is not able to rob it.
• Butch and Sundance have to keep moving further into the West
• The values of the old West are corrupted by corporate capitalism
• The film represents the time period in which it was made - late 1960's.  Americans went into the Vietnam War ready to fight, but had to retreat in a state of shame.

IV.  Dying Western:  The Shootist

• Made in 1976 - post Vietnam War, Watergate
• This was a time where it seemed as if there were no solid values
• John Wayne plays a gunfighter dying of cancer, which he also is dying of in real life
• He goes to a western town to die in peace, but the townspeople exploit him and turn his legend into a means of making a profit
• The opening is a series of clips from John Wayne movies
• The Western built up its own cinematic frame of reference and mythology

V.  Final Frontier:  Star Wars

• Outer space replaces the Western in popular imagination
• Sci-fi picks up themes of the Western
• Star Wars is really just a Western set in outer space