You know the kind of film this is. Border crime, terse visuals, sudden violence, melancholy prairie. Texans in stetson hats ride muscle cars instead of horses but it's still very much a western that we see. We still have the grizzly old sheriff in pursuit of bank robbers (and being casually racist to his Indian deputy). We have a posse of townsfolk giving chase, in SUVs nowadays. The notion that the two outlaw brothers aren't all bad, they do what they do to save their momma's ranch from the paws of greedy bankers.
And as customary in westerns the last fifty years we have all of this tied to the passing of the West. The tone is elegiac. We stop to see cowhands in horseback rustling a herd away from a prairie fire that no one is bothering to put out, it will simply burn down to the river. The small towns we see along the way look decrepit, a far cry from their Roy Rogers days.
It's not a completely wistful take. The Indian deputy reminds us that this was all someone else's smalltown America before you people came along. But as plaintive music now and then swells over shots of dusky prairie, the fundamental point here is a sense of inadvertent loss.
The notion is that America is no longer great; that some essential purity of America is gone. Bankers took it away. Huge swathes of the country would agree of course; it's a fitting western for the Trump years, meant broadly. It would have been written and began production long before Trump came along on the back of outrage.
It's what has come to be the worldview of the modern western, fueled by angst, fatalism and resignation to the passing of a way of life. Any worldview that laments change and looks back with nostalgic attachment to some purer past has no place in my home. But here's the cinch. These people would not look at their muscle cars and gas-guzzling SUVs, or TVs and cell phones, as part of modern change that sweeps away a way of life. They would not bat an eye at rock bars or getting a tattoo, which their grandfathers would have found abhorrent.
In the western (both as film and mentality) so many things can change in other words, except the notion that a purer way of life is being swept. It's interesting to note that out of the many possible threads of what the western could mean, it has been reduced to this. What would it be like for example for modern westerns to celebrate the resilience of community, or the joy of banding together for common work? Sulking is a powerful impulse.
And as customary in westerns the last fifty years we have all of this tied to the passing of the West. The tone is elegiac. We stop to see cowhands in horseback rustling a herd away from a prairie fire that no one is bothering to put out, it will simply burn down to the river. The small towns we see along the way look decrepit, a far cry from their Roy Rogers days.
It's not a completely wistful take. The Indian deputy reminds us that this was all someone else's smalltown America before you people came along. But as plaintive music now and then swells over shots of dusky prairie, the fundamental point here is a sense of inadvertent loss.
The notion is that America is no longer great; that some essential purity of America is gone. Bankers took it away. Huge swathes of the country would agree of course; it's a fitting western for the Trump years, meant broadly. It would have been written and began production long before Trump came along on the back of outrage.
It's what has come to be the worldview of the modern western, fueled by angst, fatalism and resignation to the passing of a way of life. Any worldview that laments change and looks back with nostalgic attachment to some purer past has no place in my home. But here's the cinch. These people would not look at their muscle cars and gas-guzzling SUVs, or TVs and cell phones, as part of modern change that sweeps away a way of life. They would not bat an eye at rock bars or getting a tattoo, which their grandfathers would have found abhorrent.
In the western (both as film and mentality) so many things can change in other words, except the notion that a purer way of life is being swept. It's interesting to note that out of the many possible threads of what the western could mean, it has been reduced to this. What would it be like for example for modern westerns to celebrate the resilience of community, or the joy of banding together for common work? Sulking is a powerful impulse.