The Western
Over the course of the twentieth century, the cultural significance of the Western has overwhelmed the borders of a simple film genre. The Western film's many incarnations remain the most obvious and popular frame for the mythos of the American frontier, but the Western itself is usefully conceptualized as a widely transitory aesthetic mode comprised of recognizable conventions and icons that have spread across the face of international culture. From early-nineteenth-century examples like wild west shows, wilderness paintings, and dime novels to the legions of celluloid cowboys and Indians that ruled American movie houses from the 1930s through the 1960s, the full scope and majesty of the Western also made substantial contributions to radio dramas, television series, comic books, advertisements, rodeos, musicals, and novels. As the Western's various forms continue to coat our cultural landscape, its apparently simple images have acquired a prolific range of meanings. Today, the Western constitutes a truly international entity, but its visual and ideological roots retain a distinctly American sense of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship. At the heart of its mythology of cowboys, Indians, horses, and six-guns, the Western can be read as a potent allegory for American society. All the hopes, triumphs, failures, and anxieties of American cultural identity are subtly written into the Western's landscape.
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