Western vs. Noir: How Two Genres Shaped Postwar American Culture

West
Initially, there was no such thing as “the Western.” The word was just an adjective that added some local color to a variety of genres ranging from “Western comedies” to “Western melodramas,” “chase films,” “romances,” and “epics.” But the adjective was a geographical one, and it quickly overshadowed the nouns it was supposed to serve, because geography was essential to the new form. Think of the titles: rivers (Red River, Rio Bravo, Rio Grande . . .); states and other large regions (The Virginian, Texas Rangers, Nevada Smith, California, Cimarron . . .); outposts (Fort Apache, The Alamo, Comanche Station . . .); a few cities (Vera Cruz, 3:10 to Yuma, San Antonio, The Man from Laramie . . .); plus an entire lexicon of space and movement (The Big Trail, Destry Rides Again, Stagecoach, The Bend in the River, Two Rode Together, Canyon Passage . . .).

Every story needs a space in which to unfold, of course, but the Western does more; it is in love with space; it foregrounds it, full-screen, whenever it can. The start of the cattle drive in Red River (1948): in two minutes, we get a static background (drovers and herd, at dawn, motionless against the landscape), a panoramic so powerful—this is our cattle, this is our land—not even a legendary continuity blunder can spoil it, a confident sense of direction (“Take them to Missouri, Matt”), and an explosion of joy. Beginnings are particularly good at evoking the immensity of this space: in The Man of the West (1958), a horseman appears on the horizon, looks at the empty expanse around him, and rides calmly off; in The Virginian (1929) and My Darling Clementine, a herd of cows disperses slowly in every direction; in Red River, The Man from Laramie (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959), it’s wagons that advance cautiously this way and that.

Cautiously, slowly, calmly: the initial tempo of the Western: Lento assai. The first ten minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): three men at a station, a fly buzzing, a wheel screeching, a drop of water hitting the rim of a hat. In no other form does waiting—for the train, the attack, the night, the stage, the cavalry . . . —play such a large role: a dilated sense of time, mirroring the enlargement of space. The Big Trail, The Big Sky, The Big Country. Big, and empty: in film after film, the first to “set eyes” on the land is a white man, who sees nothing but an uninhabited country. Native Americans—“Indians,” as the Western calls them—were of course already living in the West (and everywhere else in America, for that matter); but by routinely introducing them only after we have already become familiar with white characters, the Western makes them look like illegitimate intruders. In reality, they were there first; in fiction, they arrive always too late. Seldom has narrative lied so spectacularly about the history it claimed to narrate.

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Wagon train
“Cinema is the specifically epic art,” wrote André Bazin in a famous essay on American film, and “the migration to the West is our Odyssey.” Epic, yes; Odyssey, no. That there is no return is the founding act of the genre. Home is a vague hope, distant in space and in time; for now, all there is is a wagon; two or three generations, together, surrounded by hundreds of other families; all different, and all leading exactly the same life. Life in the open, on unsteadily undulating stoops, under everybody’s eyes; because what matters, in these films, is not the private sphere of the individual family—we never see the inside of a wagon, and the intimacy of a sentimental conversation, or of a good wash, are often met with rough collective humor—but the amalgamation of everybody into a community. Into a nation.

“Gathered from the North, the South and the East, they assemble on the bank of the Mississippi for the conquest of the West,” announces the opening of The Big Trail (1930). Conquest: the tempo remains slow, but it has become unyielding. The eyes of the American people, wrote Tocqueville at the onset of the great migration, “are fixed upon [their] own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature”; they “enjoy dreaming about what will be.”

Dreaming . . . But this is more like an obsession. The march of the wagon train can never stop: a hasty prayer, and the dead are buried and left forever behind; a child is born, and hours later is already on the move. Everyday life is both implacably everyday—always brewing coffee, always mending socks and washing their only passable shirt—and frightfully unpredictable: a danger that comes less from human enemies (although the conflict with “Indians” is present in most films of migration), than from the hostility of nature: it’s always too hot, too cold, too dry, too windy . . . rain, dust, snow, mountains, rapids . . . So much friction, in these films: not a journey in which a wagon doesn’t get stuck in the mud; not a scene in which they go downhill, for a change.

Rarely do fictional characters work as hard as in early Westerns: keeping the animals together, cutting down trees, crossing rivers, digging passages, overcoming crazy obstacles. After all this, they deserve the West. They have been a stubborn, single-minded human herd; which is the reason Red River, with its supremely unpromising storyline (moving ten thousand cows from Texas to Missouri, imagine that), is the greatest of all epic Westerns. Those cattle are the settlers: and in the film’s terrifying stampede, caused by a man who wants to eat sugar in the middle of the night, the destructive potential of the great migration erupts for a moment, earthquake-like, into the open.

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Seven
The wagon train is an early figure in the history of the Western; eventually, the genre leaves the plains for the towns of My Darling Clementine, High Noon, or Rio Bravo. Somewhere in between, lies the great hybrid of Stagecoach: a film that moves from one town to another, declares them both unlivable, and then concentrates on the microcosm of Frontier society that chance has assembled together for the journey. Seven passengers, in the stage’s cramped public space: an escaped convict; an alcoholic doctor; a prostitute; a Southern ex-rebel and gambler; a corrupt banker; a wife hiding her pregnancy; and, the most “normal” of them all, a whiskey drummer. As if he were running some sort of experiment, Ford slowly raises the temperature around his passengers, and a memorable series of staccato one-minute scenes—framed by external shots of the stagecoach racing through Monument Valley, as if to remind us of the pressure they are under—shows the seven characters clashing over and over again.

During the last of these exchanges, the doctor makes explicit how implausible their encounter has been from the start: “Ladies and gentlemen, since it’s most unlikely that we’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting again socially . . .” Then an arrow whistles through the air, and the fight against the Apaches brings the seven together for a few minutes. Once the threat is gone, they part once and for all: the gambler has died; the whiskey drummer is taken to the hospital; the banker is arrested by the town marshal; the doctor makes his way to the saloon; the new mother joins her husband in the cavalry; the young prostitute prepares to return to her brothel, while Ringo proceeds to the shootout with the gang that has murdered his brother. Then Ringo survives, and takes her with him to his ranch “across the border,” in a Mexico we have never seen; but the real ending had come a few minutes earlier, with the disintegration of the stagecoach seven as a possible metaphor of the Frontier.

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Shadows
Film noir also began as an adjective, used in France for the (mostly American) crime novels of the Série Noire; and then, beginning in 1946, for films that combined a mystery plot with a pervasive naturalist hopelessness. Noir: shadows. Stanwyck paces back and forth in front of MacMurray, and with her walks her double, stamped on the wall; changing shape, disappearing briefly, at times even splitting into two doubles. In The Third Man (1949), someone turns on a lamp near a window, and Orson Welles—who had died before the beginning of the film, and had been buried in front of our eyes—materializes from a dark awning; a shadow, brought back to life. Later, as Joseph Cotten and the occupation powers are waiting for him to show up at a rendezvous at night, all of Vienna turns into a city of shadows: statues, soldiers, alleys, and the unfathomable giant—a clear homage to expressionism—that turns out to be a harmless old balloon peddler.

Shadows harden Clifton Webb’s features in The Dark Corner (1946), and soften Jane Greer’s in Out of the Past (1947: “And then I saw her, coming out of the sun. And I knew I wouldn’t care about those forty grand.”). Shadows intensify our perception of the world, by presenting everything in an equivocal light; they pervade the noir’s visual aesthetics in the same way ambiguity permeates its language. Here, too, titles are a good index of the genre’s perspective on the world: vaguely threatening metaphors (Whirlpool, Nightfall, Vertigo, Impact, Blast of Silence—and, to be sure, Double Indemnity); an enigmatic use of the definite article (The Naked Kiss, The Third Man, The Dark Corner, The Clay Pigeon . . . which corner? what pigeon?); and plenty of allusions to unintelligible events: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Where the Sidewalk Ends, They Live by Night. In this company, Dial “M” for Murder and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye sound refreshingly straightforward.

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Magic Mirror Maze
Though just as haunted by death and killing as the Western, the linear geometry of the duel is unthinkable in film noir. The Lady from Shanghai places Rita Hayworth and Welles face to face, looking straight into each other’s eyes; a few seconds, and a third person emerges from his words (“I thought it was your husband you wanted to kill”), to be immediately multiplied by hers (“George was supposed to take care of Arthur, but he lost his silly head and shot Broome”). They are alone—but they are not; someone else is always between them. A few more seconds, and “Arthur” (Hayworth’s husband, played by Everett Sloane) shows up in person. Now it is he and Hayworth who face each other, guns in their hands; but in the “Magic Mirror Maze” where the scene is set, optics are deceptive: in a particularly baroque moment, Hayworth is aiming straight at the audience, Sloane diagonally, in the same general direction, but also—reflected as he is from several different angles—seemingly at himself: “You’d be foolish to fire that gun. With these mirrors it’s difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover.”

As they start firing, and glass shatters everywhere, it’s impossible to say what is happening to whom (at a certain point, it even looks as if Welles is the one being hit); and even after Hayworth and Sloane die, we are left with the baffling memory of a shootout that adds a third person to the usual two. (The unlikeliness of this situation is the secret behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.) But in fact, triangulation is as essential to the structure of the noir as the binary logic was to the Western. It’s the triangle of adultery, of course, as indeed in The Lady from Shanghai, or in George Macready’s toast “to the three of us”—himself; his wife, Hayworth (always her); and her secret ex-lover, Glenn Ford—in Gilda (1946). But beyond adultery, what emerges here is the fundamental figure of the social universe of the film noir: the Third.

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The Third
“The appearance of the third party,” writes Simmel in the chapter “Sociological Significance of the Third Element” of his Sociology, “indicates transition, conciliation, and abandonment of absolute contrasts.” The Third can mediate, and act as an impartial referee; it stands for all sorts of institutions that mitigate conflicts and strengthen the social bond. And it’s all true—just not in lm noir. Here, the Third multiplies conflicts, endlessly postponing their resolution. “Just don’t get too complicated, Eddie. When a man gets too complicated, he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy, his luck runs out” (The Blue Dahlia, 1946). But things always get too complicated here. Robert Mitchum, addressing Kirk Douglas and Jane Greer in Out of the Past:

“All right, you take the frame off me. You pin the Eels murder on Joe [. . .] You will be happier if you let the cops have her [. . .] Somebody’s got to take the rap for Fisher’s murder [. . .] Besides, it’s not a frame. She shot him.”

“I’ll say you killed him. They will believe me.”

“Do you believe her?”

You, me, Eels, Joe, her, somebody, Fisher, they . . . The adulterous triangle is merely the starting point for an incessant proliferation of corpses. Double Indemnity:

“You got me to take care of your husband, and then you got Zachetti to take care of Lola, and maybe take care of me, too, and then somebody else would have come along to take care of Zachetti for you. That’s the way you operate, isn’t it, baby.”

In the Western, killing was definitive: it arose from the discovery of the fundamental conflict, and then—once the enemy was dead—the story was over, and the future could begin. In the noir, killing is just the first step in a series of ever-shifting alliances dictated by the interest of the moment: Stanwick and MacMurray against her husband; Stanwyck and Zachetti against MacMurray; Stanwyck and “somebody else” against Zachetti . . . It’s a multiplication of narrative forces that goes back to the great metropolitan novels by Balzac and Dickens—and in fact even further back, to Hegel’s description of “civil” or “bourgeois” society (the German “bürgerlich” encompasses both), in the Philosophy of Right:

In civil society each individual is his own end, all else means nothing to him. But he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular [person] [. . .] The whole [of civil society] is the territory of mediation.

In this territory of mediation, using others—turning them into the means for one’s own end—is a much better strategy than simply eliminating them (as was the case in the more rudimentary uni- verse of the Western). In the process, the border between legal and illegal becomes blurry, and narrative structure is placed on an inflationary path: it’s always possible to persuade someone to do something they’d never thought of; always possible to add one more character (and another, and another . . .), endlessly expanding the “middle” of the plot.

Legend has it that during the shooting of The Big Sleep (1946) no one could remember whether a certain character had committed suicide or had been killed (and if so, by whom); so they sent Chandler a telegram, and he couldn’t remember, either. The story is absurd, yet plausible: there is a Ponzi-scheme side to film noir, where long-term logic is routinely sacrificed to immediate effect. And it works: one is never bored, with these films; it’s only at the end, when the intrigue collapses like a castle of cards, that you feel a little disappointed—a little betrayed. But after all, betrayal becomes the noir.

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Excerpted from Far Country: Scenes from American Culture by Franco Moretti. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux March 19th 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Franco Moretti. All rights reserved.