Content area
Full Text
Dream West: Politics and Religion in Cowboy Movies Douglas Brode. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
The Western genre has almost disappeared from the silver screen, but, in Dream West, Douglas Brode, a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, argues that the genre continues to cast a giant shadow over American politics. Employing the current media tendency to characterize states as blue, liberal, and Democratic, or red, conservative, and Republican, he suggests that contemporary politicians tend to misinterpret the historical West as well as the imagined Flollywood West in an effort to justify ideological positions. Challenging the conventional wisdom of the cowboy film as embracing conservative values, Brode maintains that a close reading of the Western genre suggests a more liberal interpretation of Hollywood's Western film.
To support this argument, Brode demonstrates an impressive grasp of Hollywood Westerns from the silent era into the twenty-first century. For example, in cinematic depictions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral between the Earp and Clanton clans, Brode points out that one of the background reasons for the conflict was the attempt of the Earps, representing the legal establishment, to disarm the rebellious cowboys. Thus, films such as John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), which tells the story from the perspective of the Earps, actually end up supporting more liberal policies such as gun control.
Expanding upon his thesis, Brode also looks at BWesterns from the 1930s starring Gene Autry and often featuring greedy capitalists as villains threatening the Western environment. These films are not anticapitalist per se but are critical of...