Critical Response to Slotkin's Archetypal Western Concerns

Richard Slotkin is a historian and Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has been described as a cultural critic and has covered, in his books, traditions that shape contemporary American culture through mythology.

By romanticizing both the geography and history of the United States, the Western film had broad appeal and an attribute of being adaptive to project modern problems into its framework. The concerning aspect of all Westerns is their blurring of the division between truth and myth, while strengthening other boundaries concerning racial, social and political issues. “Through persistent association, these border signs have come to symbolize a range of fundamental ideological differences.”[1] By projecting these contemporary subjects into the genre of the Western, audiences were compelled by the notion of a single hero rationalizing violence. Despite the fact that “No one goes to the Western for a history lesson”[2] many audiences initial concepts of Westward expansion in North America are shaped by such tales. More historically correct versions that the public may later encounter must battle in their collective consciousness’ against the drama, action and simplicity that the Western had first provided.

Slotkin does not ignore the medium of television as “a medium for disseminating mass-culture mythology”[3] but concentrates mainly on the film industry in his examples because it dominated during the Cold and Korean War. Slotkin uses John Ford’s 1950 cavalry movie, ‘Rio Grande’, as an example to compare American foreign policy, (and by extension the attitudes that shaped that maintained / established that policy), with the “pseudo-historical narratives ”[4].
Strangely enough, ‘Rio Grande’ is one of the first movies where Ford raised questions about life after war, without questioning the validity of the war in the first place. In as much, this demonstrates the common attitude of all Westerns surrounding the need for ‘heroic’ violence. The preoccupation with necessary force that characterizes the Western were useful for a period of continual conflict. Always, it is implied that violence is essential and part of the process by which American society was created, the West won, and how its democratic values are defended and enforced. Meanwhile any “ideological problems of the Cold War era could be imaginatively entertained”[5] using a variety of familiar symbols.

In Philip Tetlock’s article “Pre- to Postelection Shifts in Presidential Rhetoric” he covers the inconsistencies of candidate’s oratory comparing before and after winning office. A pattern of change from simplistic views to more complicated views and policies is obvious in all examples, leading to failure to fulfill their campaign promises. In his, ‘impression management explanation’ model, Tetlock regards “politicians [as] expert symbol manipulators who are prepared to say whatever they believe [to] attract popular support for their cause. To attract this support, politicians make sweeping generalizations and claims as far too crude and simplistic to guide actual policy making.”[6]
Peter Lewisch’s takes film theory, Identification in particular, and applies it to non-market choices, such as voting. Such voting can be explained as ‘expressive voting’ and can be explained in that the individual engages in an act of identifying “the attributes with which the voter identifies” and may be broadly defined such that “the voter may (also) identify with a candidate’s moral character, good looks or ethnic origin.”[7]
Theorists have employed Lacanian psychoanalytical concepts (such as gaze and jouissance) to explain mediated entertainment with sociopolitical content. They wanted to explain how Hollywood films hid the sociopolitical context of production. A psychoanalytical approach “explains that a sense of self displaces the recognition of the social construction of identity”[8] so that it feels natural to the audience to adopt the view of the filmmaker and protagonist / hero, but only if the mediated entertainment “masks the cultural construction and framing of that view.”[9]

Thus, combining the audience “confidently expect[ing] that it will find its moral and emotional resolution in a singular act of violence”[10] with the theory of identification, we can understand the concern of Slotkin: the application of attitudes shaped by myth into the political sphere.
Slotkin deftly exemplifies this by comparing certain elements of ‘Rio Grande’ with the accompanying government during the Korean War. More importantly, the apathetic public that ‘traversed the fantasy’, applauded his decision to use force; while Ford completed ‘Rio Grande’.

The reading shows that the Frontier myth is really about external historical forces, archetypal confrontations and external politics. Invoking these types of movies leads to a legendary version of the First Amendment: the right to rewrite history in the name of free mythopoeia.
“[What] apologists really mean by a “mythic” dimension in a Western film is that part of it which they know to be a lie but which, for whatever reason, they still wish to embrace”[11].
Slotkin covers the Native American dimension in ‘Rio Grande’, and while maintaining that they are portrayed as savages with no lines, he does not entertain the idea of the Indian becoming an empty signifier of the other that “could stand for the Negro when the implications are social, or Communist when the implications are political”[12]. Slotkin does not cover exactly who the Indian portrays in ‘Rio Grande” (though he does in other examples and chapters) but perhaps this is best to demonstrate how the myth is left empty and adaptable, with no specific content of its own. This way, the sentiment covered in the film are subjective enough to mean a variety of meanings, but there remains indubitable boundaries between peoples. Often the differences between them are emphasized, often leading to unavoidable violence. Slotkin persuades the reader to comprehend how such lessons from Cold War era Westerns were useful in illustrating the very same reaction on a much larger scale.




[1] Slotkin, Richard Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America New York: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992 , p 351
[2] Brownlow, Kevin The War, the West and the Wilderness, London: Secker & Warburg, 1979, p 223
[3] Slotkin , p 348
[4] ibid, p 350
[5] ibid , p 347
[6] Tetlock, Philip E. "Pre- to Postelection Shifts"; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1981, Vol. 41, p 207
[7] Brennan, G., & Hamlin, A. Expressive Voting and Electoral Equilibrium, Public Choice, 95, (1998) p 149
[8] Saper, Craig A Nervous Theory: The Trobling Gaze of Psychoanalysis in Media Studies , diacritics, winter, 1991, p 33
[9] ibid, p 33
[10] Slotkin, p 352
[11] Tuska, Jon The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western Greenwood, Westport: Connecticut Publishing Company, 1985, p 2
[12] ed. Cameron, Ian & Pye, Douglas; The Book of Westerns, (“A Better Sense of History” by Richard Maltby), Dumfriesshire: Continuum Publishing Company, 1996, p 36