Friday

As Alex astutely pointed out yesterday, the Western is capable of telling almost every story. Of course, this is true of most genres - that's what's appealing about them - but I do think the development of the Western has seen it express more from its, seemingly narrow, conventions than other types of cinema. When trying to think of ideas for a Western a few weeks ago, I couldn't pin down where to start. The problem is that the genre has evolved over time. At first it was good guys against bad guys. In the article from The Sunday Times, one critic said the Western was thus nostalgic for a time when things were simple. But then the genre evolved. The Indians were no longer always bad, and sometimes the good guys turned out to be greedy, or bloodthirsty, or immoral. James Stewart, famous for always playing wholesome family heroes, even played an ambiguous bounty-hunter in The Naked Spur. Then there's love stories, and civil war stories, stories about the beginning of the West and the end of the West, films that seem like MTV videos (Young Guns), and films that transport the Western into other times and places (Star Wars). For me, the Western expresses the tension of a place that never really existed - a moment of expansion, and freedom, that soon dwindled into lawlessness and violence, until the pacification of technology (the railway and the telegraph) spread over it. I'm not sure what our connection to that might be, but it still seems strong.