The Cowboys are coming back with a bang. Films and TV series revisit the rich mythology of the Western and dynamize its codes to better question the era.
A cowboy and a sheriff experience a passion as hot as it is forbidden on an isolated ranch. Rich Americans killed for their oil, victims of white greed. Back strange lifestyle by Pedro Almodovar (in theaters August 16), tagged queer western and Flower Moon Assassinsdenouncing the dispossession of the Osage Indians, signing Martin Scorsese meeting the Pope and announcing a new film about Jesus (released October 18), the 2023 Cannes Film Festival was a grand display of the Western’s return to grace.
Meanwhile, in the land of John Wayne, just when we thought the genre was as buried as the last Indian battle axes, Taylor Sheridan, creator, writer and director of the series. Yellowstone (Paramount+) has lassoed an audience that is now addicted to this neoDallas in the air of succession. Starting from 2018 Yellowstone called “the most famous American soap opera”. It broke all cable audience records during the pandemic. His hero. John Dutton (Kevin Costner), owner of a ranch in Montana. An awkward patriarch, this rancher struggles to maintain and expand his property, the largest in the country, in the face of the ambitions of developers, native Indians, and politicians. the star of Dances with Wolves embodies the cowboy values in which “middle America,” rural, it red states conservatives who are nostalgic for their pioneer roots want to identify themselves: family, honor, honesty, loyalty… but also an easy factor when it comes to protecting their territory.
American history
Therefore, Hollywood is putting this subgenre of the historical film back on the saddle to clean it up even more. “The history of the Western has been intertwined with the history of the film industry since its theatrical release. high speed flight by Edwin Stanton Porter (1903), the first western, recalls John D. Connor is Associate Professor of Film at USC University in Los Angeles (1). It is inherently a male, white and conservative genre. Participating in the mythology of the United States, these films also gave birth to the image of the cowboy; “He is the first American hero”, as American history lecturer Marian Kuck-Vergne (2) notes. Because the noble vigilante of the conquest of the West, who rescues the widow and the orphan before riding, alone, into the sunset, is pure construction, the historian insists.
“Actually, cowboys were not given a social rating. They were often Civil War veterans who had lost everything or freed slaves. Landless men, considered barefoot, who worked for others,” he recalls. The power of Hollywood images. Forging and exaggerating this iconic silhouette, recognizable at first glance: bowed legs, studded cowboy boots, jeans, duster coat, wide-brimmed hat twisted on head and trigger finger. An archetype personified by John Wayne for over forty years: strong, laconic, brave, independent. The man is vigorous, supremely exciting, driven by a sense of sacrifice and a follower of the law of the strongest. “However, this image of idealized, nostalgic masculinity is unrealistic,” cautions Marianne Kack-Vergne. The character represents archaic values and conventions that no longer apply today; A cowboy doesn’t represent the future.”
The Western has had to evolve to survive. “The golden age of the studios, from the 1920s to the 1950s, was already covered in ‘miscellaneous’ work,” recalls John D. Conor. Like a feminist Johnny’s guitarBy Nicholas Ray, in which two strong female characters clashed in a merciless duel, or Satan’s door, by Anthony Mann, in which an Indian veteran who has been promoted to second-class citizen leads a violent campaign to reclaim his land. Also disruptive Only the unruly David Miller’s cult film, released in 1962, features a gasping cowboy who foreshadows the Twilight character that Clint Eastwood invoked in the 1990s.
Women, new heroines
Today, the west is reinventing itself with one ambition: to restore humanity to minorities, to affirm the differences of origin, sex, and gender among the populations of the Far West, and to restore the outrages of the past. And women are actively participating in this change behind and in front of the camera. In this postMeToo movement, the cowboy, who carries “a certain image of individuality,” was the first to be thrown off the rails. Back The power of the dogDirector Jane Campion (who won an Oscar for this film in 2022) has engaged in a disturbing reinterpretation of masculinity in the West; a psychological conflict between a progressive young woman and a brutal, “old-fashioned” rancher. repressed homoerotic sensitivity. “For a long time in Westerns, women occupied secondary positions: the object of desire, the wife or daughter to be protected, mixed or mixed-race, impure, whom we don’t understand,” observes Marianne Kach-Vergne. The character of Calamity Jane, a heroine of the plains with proven deeds of bravery, was only the exception that proved the rule.
“But the pioneers were not these passive figures whose purity must be preserved, but real partners, resilient and resourceful,” notes John D. Conor. They shine as such on the screen today. Dirty and machiavellian as hell, Jennifer Jason Leigh was “the one” eight scoundrels by Quentin Tarantino. Showing Godless (Netflix), produced by Steven Soderbergh, widows run a lonely pioneer town and magnificent English: (myCANAL), English lady Emily Blunt, searching for her son’s killer, turns into a skilled warrior with deadly arrows and shots that hit the mark. Meanwhile, diversity is finally coming into focus.
Ecological “walk”
Django Unchainedby Quentin Tarantino and How hard do they fall? (Netflix), James Samuel’s biography of Nat Love (a freed slave and legendary figure of the West), also reminded us of the essential role African Americans played in the creation of the American nation. “We are in an era of gender specialization,” analyzes John D. Conor. The new neo-Western design is defined by a rebalancing of perspectives. the history of forgotten minorities, including Native Americans, as told by them. Like the exciting and funny series Reservation dogs (Disney+), created by Seminole Indian Sterlin Harjo, depicts the plight of Native youth on a present-day Oklahoma reservation. Finally, John D. For Connor, as confirmed Yellowstone, the renewal of the genre is also related to environmental protection. “During the climate crisis, the West symbolizes our planet as this place of resources that we cannot plunder or extract endlessly and with absolute impunity. We’re going to need more and more figures like John Dutton (Kevin Costner) to move forward.” After the widow and the orphan, will the new cowboy save the world?
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(1) Author: Hollywood Math and Consequence, Ed. Bloomsbury, untranslated. (2) at Jules-Verne University of Picard; author of Masculinity in modern science fiction cinema. Cyborgs, Soldiers and Other Humans of the Future, Ed. Bloomsbury, untranslated.
Source: Le Figaro
