The Return of the Western?
It was mostly because of Scott's post on the current anti-Iraq war movies that I was interested in a series of articles on an upcoming round of westerns in today's New York Times magazine. I never did learn much about the new westerns, but I'd guess they are no more pro-American West than the Iraq movies are pro-war. Actually, I didn't get past this interview of a historian named Patty Limerick by the Times' Deborah Solomon.
Ms. Limerick explains the fact that Hollywood has a few westerns in production with a casual bit of bigotry:
A. Just as we had an upsurge in difficult westerns when we were struggling with Vietnam, now we’re struggling with Iraq, and so we are having the same upsurge.Q. Right. Westerns are useful in wartime because they bolster myths about American virility and strength. Do you think westerns make men feel more competent?
A. Whenever American men of power experience anxiety, they want to go see a western, and they want to see a western where the man peacocks and parades around and everyone says, “Isn’t he something?”
Sure. Dick Cheney needed to feel more secure, so he called some of his buddies in Hollywood and told them to make some westerns. Ms. Limerick is a "revisionist" historian of the West, which means that she holds all the views that are more or less required in academia. This was the factual claim, though, that brought me up short:
No one is going to make a film about the 500,000 abandoned mines in the West — and that may be too small a number — a symbol of the legacy of environmental damage.
500,000 abandoned mines? The West is a pretty big place, but 500,000 is a really big number. The total area of the United States is around 3.5 million square miles. If we assume that half of the country could plausibly be called "the West" for this purpose, that would mean, according to Ms. Limerick, that there is one abandoned mine for every 3.5 square miles of Western real estate. Think about that: on the average, every third section of farm land; every third square mile of every city and suburb; every third square mile of the untracked wilds of the Rocky Mountains and the Southwestern desert is, according to Ms. Limerick, home to an "abandoned mine." My home town in South Dakota, if it were average, would have three or four abandoned mines within its city limits. Unless every square foot of land that anyone ever struck with a pickaxe is considered an "abandoned mine," this is a ludicrous claim.
I once read an account (likely apocryphal) of a primitive tribe that had words for the numbers up to five or ten; after that, all numbers were covered by a word that meant "many." I sometimes think that many liberals are like that: numbers have no reality for them. 500,000, 50,000, 5,000--who knows? There are "many" abandoned mines.
We'll have comments on the new westerns, no doubt, in due course.
