Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MGibster" data-source="post: 8371306" data-attributes="member: 4534">The Western is a genre and like all genres it's got its own tropes and stock characters and even in the 19th century it never really adhered to what we might call realism. Most westerns are set in areas where civilization hasn't quite taken root because it gives a writer the opportunity to use stock western characters like the gunslinger, gambler, prostitute with a heart of gold, etc., etc. to tell an interesting story.  Writers certainly recognized that there were cites that weren't lawless.   Most episodes of Have Gun-Will Travel opened with protagonist Paladin in San Francisco enjoying the trappings of civilization including fine dining, playing the stock market, and the opera but would see him travel to other locations where the meat of that episode's story would take place.  High Noon subverts this trope as Gary Cooper had cleaned up the town long before the story starts.  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, an excellent deconstruction of the Western, is all about civilization and community driving out the lawless aspects of the west.    I think it's important to note that the Western as a genre is quite ahistorical.  Even Westerns published in dime novels during the 1870s and 80s didn't hew too closely to reality.  And certainly Hollywood helped cement some of those images into our popular consciousness.  Pictured below is the most commonly worn hat in the American West in the latter half of the 19th century.  But most of us would associate that hat with a London banker before an American laborer in Cripple Creek, Colorado circa 1879.  [ATTACH=full]142061[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

Verification