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The cowboy film was typically the vehicle America used to explain itself to itself. Who makes the law? What is the order? Where is the frontier? Which ones are the good guys? Why is it that a man's gotta do what he's gotta do-and how does he do it? Each Hollywood Western, no matter how trite, was a national ritual, a passion play, a veritable presidential election dramatising and re-dramatising the triumph of civilisation, usually personified as the victory of the socially responsible individual over "savage" Indians or outlaws. "They tell me everything isn't black and white," John Wayne growled in 1969. "Well, I say why the hell not?"1
Writing in 1992 for a general rather than a scholarly readership, Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman could permit himself in his portrait of the Western a degree of hyperbole barred to more academic discussions of the genre. Yet the very unguardedness of this passage renders it especially revealing, and its working assumptions are furthermore entirely representative of the dominant tendency in cultural criticism of the genre over the last three decades. The traditional justification for discussing Westerns seriously is precisely that the Western's imaginative reinscription of history has played an important part in helping constitute what is sometimes called the American "social imaginary;" or, in a different disciplinary vocabulary, that Westerns have provided American audiences with, in Jürgen Habermas' phrase, "interpretive systems that guarantee social identity".2 Hoberman's adoption of this approach is moreover perfectly representative in the way it virtually abstracts the genre from any recognizable material context of film production or audience reception, rather situating it immediately as a numinous cultural experience. Thus, even as Hoberman subsequently notes in passing that prior to Dances With Wolves in 1990 the highest-grossing Western was in fact a parody Western, MeI Brooks' Blazing Saddles, this is not allowed to qualify the claim that "each Hollywood Western, no matter how trite" constitutes an utterance in an ongoing national conversation of the utmost urgency. In fact, if box-office returns were taken as the sole index of cultural significance, the Western's alleged cultural centrality would be hard to sustain: individually and collectively, Westerns comprise a fairly small and consistently shrinking share of Hollywood's take since at least the mid-1950s. Hoberman...