Fiction Writing 3: Westerns and Metaphorical Concepts

After Reading Heather Cox Richardson This Morning

[Previously]

[This is a quick one. Please forgive any mistakes.]

This is a surprise, spur-of-the-moment post. While reading Heather Cox Richardson this morning about the firings of military officials (not for the faint of heart), I came across this:

In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.

When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.

It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.

This struck me because of what Richardson said about the number of TV Westerns in the late 50s, something I also mentioned in a couple of chapters I’d written in my never-ending novel project. Like Richardson’s paragraphs above, both chapters are about the impact of Westerns on US culture.

My novel also deals with how they impacted the family in the story. The father is based on my real-life father who loved Westerns, specifically, John Wayne Westerns. (Wayne, ha, there’s that name again!) I’ve always been struck by how baked-in this outlook was for him and the culture at large. In these two short chapters, the narrator uses a Western movie and a TV series to try and make sense of his family’s confusing dynamics.

Westerns and their metaphorical concepts are connected with the posts here about the uses and the power of metaphor to influence our thoughts and actions. The metaphorical concepts we’ve inherited from Westerns help me understand not only what went wrong in my family but also some of what is happening all around us right now.

Here are those chapters. This is not the sequence in which they appear in the manuscript. Westerns are a recurring theme that pops up now and then. Though not within the context of the story here, the chapters can stand alone, almost like movie and television reviews. All you need to know is that the narrator tells the story of his troubled older brother who met a tragic end.

Home on the Range

The year I was born, eight of the top ten television shows were Westerns. This trend continued throughout my childhood. A steady stream of cowboy movies played on TV back then, too. Our father loved Westerns, especially John Wayne Westerns. Recently, I watched one of his favorites: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

There’s Liberty, a nasty gunslinger who stands on the side of the large landowners and cattle barons. Then there’s Tom, a white hat gunslinger who, though more on the side of the people, also still clings to some of those Liberty Valance might-makes-right values. Next, we have Ransom, a young, East Coast, citified lawyer type. He wants to teach townsfolk, including Mexicans, to read. He wants to replace the existing shoot-from-the-hip and string-em-up justice system with the rule of law. Those lawbreakers like Valance who do the dirty work for the well-connected? Ransom wants to put them in jail—after a fair trial by a jury of his peers, of course. Now that takes a lot of damned gall.

In true Hollywood fashion, underdog Ransom prevails, the town gets civilized, and the children learn their readin’ and ‘rithmetic. The problem is, that Ransom ends up having to shoot Valance to accomplish this. This throws a kink into his overall message, but it’s a crowd-pleaser. Complicating the picture further is that, unbeknownst to himself and the locals, Ransom didn’t kill Valance after all. It was Tom, the gunslinger, shootin’ from the shadows. He was the one who saved Ransom’s life and did Liberty in, making it possible for Ransom to be seen as the hero. Only Tom and the movie viewers know this because Tom, ever the silent type, kept that one to himself, as all good heroes do.

Ultimately the movie seems to say that things like providing education for women and Mexicans are all well and good and that having a big ol’ fancy court system is just fine and dandy—that is until things start to get dicey. Then, it’s time to roll out the guns and bring on the whiskey!

The gender and racial messages in the film are all twisted up as well. Nellie and the other womenfolk barely existed in many of these stories. They are background, afterthoughts, domesticated like horses. Mexicans also are mostly minor characters. Sometimes the womenfolk (the white ones, of course) teach them some English. You get the feeling, though, that teaching Mexicans some English only made it easier for the cowboys to tell ‘em what to do. And unlike in most Westerns, this one has no Indians. Huh, where’d they go?

And then there’s Pompey, the Black, right-hand man who helped make Tom the self-made man that he supposedly is. Pompey seems to exist for the sole purpose of making sure Tom succeeds and doesn’t kill himself in his drunken rages, and he does so with quiet dignity and an unexplained devotion, which is a key requirement if you don’t happen to be white. In one key scene, Tom realizes that his ladyfriend Hallie, whom he plans to marry, even though there’s no indication Miss Hallie was informed of this, is in love with that low-down, out-of-towner Ransom. Upon learning this, Tom, following traditional Western protocol, proceeds to drink a lot of whiskey, bash up everything in sight, and burn down his own damned house.

What do you expect? That’s what happens when you give whiskey to the cowboys.

The movie suggests race and gender equality are fine, up to a point, which reflects the prevailing attitude in 1962 when the film came out. The thinking was, Whoa, Nellie, son. Hold your horses, now. All in good time. No sense putting the cart before the horse.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was our father’s kind of movie. It shows that despite those pesky Ransom types and their fancy rule-of-law talk, stern Tom and his kind do the real work. This glosses over the inconvenient fact that Tom’s life wouldn’t be possible without Pompey.

And yes, when Liberty got himself gunned down, well, he got his just deserts, didn’t he? This is what must happen. According to The Code, jail is too good for a man like that.

Tom, you see, is one of the good guys, but he’s complicated because, you know, being a good guy is the toughest job of all. No one appreciates you. Poor, Tom. Still, somebody needs to fill the role. How else are you gonna keep folks in line? For the good guys like Tom, the world is just one letdown after another, so they turn to whiskey because whiskey is the only thing that’s never let them down. I can’t help wondering, if those guys are so tough, what’s with all that whiskey? Why can’t these tough cowboys take things straight?

But in Liberty, it all makes sense. Tom, the hero, may not get everything he wants, but that’s just the price you pay when it’s your job to set the world right.

In my version of the film, Ransom (rather, Tom) never would have had to shoot Liberty because Liberty would have been arrested, tried by a jury of his peers, and jailed. While serving his time, he would have learned to read and write—probably taught by one of those uppity womenfolk, or maybe even one of them there Mexicans, to rub some salt in the wound.

In Westerns, staying true to your convictions is the highest ideal. It’s more important than being right. Rarely does anyone ever change his goddamned mind. That part of The Code was being acted out all around me, not just on TV but in my home, around town, and everywhere else. Whether Washington, Dodge City, or the soon-to-be Ho Chi Minh City, it made no difference. Everywhere you looked, it was all cowboys all the time.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Legend of Lucas McCain

Though our father watched a lot of TV Westerns, I watched only one. In it, a single Dad, Lucas McCain, raised his young son with loving care. Contrary to many Westerns, in The Rifleman, a few conflicts somehow got resolved without bloodshed, and McCain taught his son that violence was the absolute last resort. Absolute last resorts came up at some point in almost every episode, however. It would be a darn shame not to put that fancy Winchester rifle to good use. Though life had dealt the Rifleman terrible blows, such as when he lost his wife to smallpox, he didn't shoot up the town or turn to the bottle for solace every time something didn't go his way. Instead, he turned his attention toward raising his son.

Our father used the mythology of the hard-working cowboy, the self-made man to make sense of his world, and it's easy to see why. Night after night, maverick wisdom was celebrated on television. We saw men taming the wilderness, breaking horses’ and children's wild spirits, protecting women from the bad guys, from wild animals, from “wild” Indians, and sometimes from their wild selves. We saw men honoring unspoken codes, meting out private justice, answering any offense with an eye for an eye, and always going it alone. Our father ate it up. Such scenes must have supplied ample evidence to bolster his worldview. No doubt such constant reinforcement, so prevalent in the culture of the time, made it difficult for him to see any other point of view.

The outcomes of his outlook were disastrous for our family. There were times, though, when our father’s sense of cowboy justice seemed more comic than tragic. On one such occasion, Snowy the harbormaster and his wife came over, along with some others, for one of my parents’ legendary cocktail parties. Since these parties got loud and sleep became impossible, I heard what went on downstairs. It sounded like a saloon, minus the player piano. On this night, Snowy got carried away and at one point used the word “fuck.” With that, things quieted down real fast.

Now, there were always Goddamns, Jesus Christs, sons of bitches, bastards, and plenty of shits to be heard around our house, but you never heard fuck from my relatives or at one of these parties. Snowy had crossed a line in the sand as far as our father was concerned. Suddenly, he dressed Snowy down, and the saloon fell silent—so silent, you might mistake it for a church. Then, our father, in the gravest tone, slurred the words, “We don't say that word in this house. That word is not allowed under my roof.” Snowy apologized immediately and blamed the whiskey. This dust-up, though tense, didn't lead to a shootout, but the saloon shut down early that night.

Adopting a stern, Western hero view of the world worked for our father in some ways, yet it cost him big time in ways he couldn't recognize. Most notably, it did not have the desired effect on my brother. When Dad-the-Sheriff spoke, the two of them became locked in an Old West duel I don't think either one of them understood or wanted. But for our father, to be less firm would have revealed weakness and vulnerability. It would have made Dean a “spoiled brat” who'd be even more stubborn and difficult to “break.” Every failure to tame Dean only increased our father's resolve. Every redoubled effort to domesticate him boomeranged.

And you know what happens when things don't go a cowboy's way. Whiskey bottles get emptied. Bullets fly. Stuff catches fire.

In Westerns, there's often a scene where something irrevocable happens. There's no turning back, all hope of salvaging the situation goes up in smoke. From that point on in the story, a sense of inevitability takes over.

How far back you'd need to rewind the reel in my family movie to get to the scene of no return isn't clear. For sure, pretty far. Maybe even before I hit town. I do know this: We could have used a lot less old West Dad and a lot more Lucas McCain. That and a lot less whiskey.

If only the former farm boy version of our father had shown up more often, the one who grew up caring for animals and who loved the 4-H club so much. That would have been mighty welcome. A sight for sore eyes.

Notes

There is a family rumor that I was named after John Wayne, which supplies me with yet another reason to despise my given name.