Cowboys, Classical Greek Art & America’s Founding Myth

“…To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier…”

The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893

In the turbulent cultural moment that America faces, it is no wonder that the Western as a film genre has risen in prominence. Westerns and their protagonists represent America’s founding myth, and the way their stories are told reflects our relationship with America, its principles, its history, and the nature of its founding. When Americans grapple with cultural changes of the present, so too do depictions of our past change and evolve.

The founding myth, a type of origin myth, explains the origins of a city, people, religion, or ritual. These are tales generally full of allegory and allusions to the contemporary political and social issues of the culture that happens to be propagating the myth. The founding myth connects a generally fictional, sometimes semi-historical figure and their story to a community. Stories like these feature prominently in Greek and Roman mythology. From Theseus’ unification of Athens, to Aeneas’ founding of Rome in Virgil’s Aeneid, to Cadmus’ founding of Thebes, the foundation myth generally focuses on an exceptional individual as a way to display the ideal values and characteristics of the community that the individual in question created, united, or supported.

America’s Epic Heroes

The traditional protagonist of the Western genre, whether he is a cowboy, outlaw, or bounty hunter, is almost always a lonesome wanderer in hostile lands (generally 19th century America) often short of words and even shorter of patience for enemies and fools. While there are protagonists of classical Westerns that are exceptions, in general these men have similar characteristics. Our hero has often experienced the tragedy of war, or the death of a loved one such as a wife or child. He is a perfect shot, perfect equestrian, holds his liquor, is attractive to women but often not overtly concerned with women’s opinion of him. He can be a thief, murderer, or liar, but is never slave to the whims of others. As in classical mythology, heroism in the archetypal Western does not come primarily from values such as altruism, humility (except, occasionally, in terms of the will of the divine), or honesty, but from ability, strength, agency, excellence, and acknowledgement of one’s legacy.

Areté, the greek term for greatness in a broad sense, is the moral value to be upheld. Similarly, cowboys operate with a moral neutrality similar to that of Odysseus or Heracles, and impress not with their moral sensitivity or overwhelming altruism but with their overwhelming skill. In the purest form of these stories, these heroes are not always good, but they are always exceptional.

The Western is America’s founding myth, and its protagonists our epic heroes. That picturesque expanse of the American West, beautiful yet dangerous and full of potential, is a stage for the American ideals of self-sufficiency, brutality, and heroism that characterizes America’s history. The Frontier Myth posits that this stage was one where the strongest, most driven people brought about the transition between wilderness and a new civilization. This view of our history has informed not only our views of America’s founding but views of contemporary American society and its ideals. As such, in the Western contemporary issues are effectively brought into conversation with the ideals of America’s founding. For example, America’s fear of communism and the operations of the House Un-American Activity Committee in 1952 and the in-world narrative of Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon (1952) are almost inseparable; it’s difficult to conceive of the latter without confronting the former.

The American Western is mythology, fiction borne of a narrative created from history. These films are indicative, more than anything, of the ideals important to those creating and propagating the myth, in whatever era or cultural moment that may be. The Western, through various character archetypes and narrative tropes, explores American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism, in this case, meant in a neutral way; America has been forged in a complicated but undeniably unique way, by undeniably adventurous and ambitious people. What makes these people exceptional, what are their characteristics and how those characteristics relate to American ideals, depends on the story, the character, and the perspective of the artists.

Rejection of Wilderness and the Other

The Man With No Name is distinctly superior to most of the people he encounters in the town of San Miguel in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). He is more competent, more austere, a better shot, able to competently settle San Miguel’s conflicts and kill several of the town’s men with very little threat to his life. Again, the values for which the Stranger is applauded are not his altruism or any type of caring for the townspeople of San Miguel, but rather his shrewdness and skill.

If a community is unique and excellent because of its skills, people, and values, it logically follows that there are skills, people, and values that are not. These supposedly inferior communities are the Other, and in Westerns are most often Native American, sometimes Mexican. While criminals, the government, and Union and Confederate soldiers are often the enemy in Westerns, depending on the allegiance of the protagonists, they are generally treated with more nuance than non-White Others. The Native Americans in Stagecoach (1939) and Red River (1948), for example, might as well be a stampede of animals for as much skill, humanity, and complexity with which they are depicted. Important in founding myths is the idea that order and civilization must triumph over both wilderness and those who inhabit the wilderness, often depicted as one and the same.

In the Classical period of Greek Art, (5th to 4th century BCE) images of Greek destruction of amazons, centaurs and giants were a lauding of Greeks, as the rightful craftsmen of order out of chaos, and were also used to parallel contemporary conflicts with the Persians. Centaurs, in particular, were an often-used symbol of barbarity and a rejection of ritual and social norms, and their most well-known myth involving the destruction of a lapith wedding feast has been depicted many times over. Well-known examples of these centauromachies and gigantomachies, as they were called, include the Metopes of the Parthenon (447-442 BCE), and the Pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (470-457 BCE), brutal, beautifully rendered depictions of the battles between the Greek gods and inhuman giants and centaurs.

In Westerns, Native Americans and Mexicans were a means to express contrast, between American civilization and the lawless inhabitants of the wilderness and their chaos, barbarity, and lack of capacity for advancement. It is, in these stories, America’s fate and destiny to become an advanced civilization, and these heroes’ destiny to bring this future to fruition. If one culture’s exceptionalism and excellence is due in part to a divine right, then the rejection of the Other must be as well. Iron Horse (1924) acknowledges the people of color, primarily Chinese immigrants, as those who put in the most strenuous work to build the first intercontinental railroad in the 1860s, and that this marvel of transportation was not a miracle, but back-breaking labor done under dangerous conditions.  Despite that, the film still relies on themes of America’s fate and destiny, using the following lines:

The connection to the divine and fate in founding myths creates a perfect combination of destiny and earned ability in these kinds of narratives, a combination that creates both a moral defense and a heroic narrative. The 19th century philosophy of Manifest Destiny and subsequent philosophies of American expansionism have similarities to Aeneas’ divine duty and fate to found Rome. Just as Virgil, in the 1st century BCE, reverse-engineers the fateful survival of Aeneas and the founding of Rome and the creation of its people, in Western films because we know America will be founded and tamed, and the Native American population will be rapidly and brutally pushed aside, we can reverse-engineer a story of seemingly inevitable and God-willed victory and superiority. But as a culture’s views of the present becomes more unsure, so too do the approaches to the past. As people begin to question and discuss American exceptionalism, depictions of the past must also change.

Revisionist Westerns and Hellenistic Art

In the Hellenistic Period (around 4th century BCE and 1st century BCE), techniques improved, some of the Greeks’ most important philosophical concepts were blossoming, and depictions of the Other became more nuanced. One way in which this manifests is an increased pathos in art, in particularly in battle scenes depicting Greeks fighting their enemies. The Pergamon Altar at the Temple of Zeus at Pergamon of the early 2nd Century BCE is a well-known example of this. It depicts a gigantomachy, a popular subject in the history of Greek Art, but with a remarkable amount of emotional complexity given to the enemy — the faces of giants are contorted in pain, their expressions and mannerisms depicted with sensitivity and attention that marks them as worthy, albeit defeated, enemies.

More examples of this developing artistic practice include the Dying Gaul and Ludovisi Gaul of 230 BCE to 220 BCE, both of which depict a subject that is not Greek, but rather Gauls of Galatia, but are nonetheless depicted with the same emotional range and pathos. A moment of immense tragedy and suffering is rendered with respect and empathy. Foreigners and defeated people are depicted in a way that challenges the lack of humanity in their earlier depictions, and complicates the once-simple ideas of victory and superiority.

Art, culture and Americans’ views of America rapidly changed during the 1960s and 1970s. So too did Westerns of this period aim to depict more varied and complex perspectives, in what is called the revisionist Western. Opinions of American exceptionalism changed in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in terms of participation in military operations and interactions with other countries, and this is reflected in the art of the time and subsequent depictions of the taming of America. Historical event after historical event — the fight for Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the assassination of John F. Kennedy — instilled in many Americans doubts, fear, and uncertainty toward America and its values, and this manifested in art.

In films like Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Native American characters are given arcs and human motivations, and interact with white characters in meaningful, complex ways. Buck and the Preacher (1972) acknowledges the Black presence in the American West that had been often disregarded in Westerns, and is dedicated to former slaves searching for freedom after the Civil War — “those men, women and children who lie in graves as unmarked as their place in history.” Characters once seen as one dimensional Others and even enemies are given stories that feel emotionally grounded. These stories depict the stories of those outside the archetype of the white, male cowboy, and explore American heroism while acknowledging the complexities in every human being. As the white, male, masculine archetype was brought under scrutiny in reality, so too was this archetype questioned in art.

There has been resurgence of the Western in both television and film in the 2000s and 2010s, including The Magnificent Seven, Django Unchained, In A Valley of Violence, The Revenant, Hostiles, and Slow West to name a few from just the past decade — and they explore the emotional and existential reality of living in the lawless West from a distinctly modern viewpoint. These stories are less about heralding the unimpeachable values of early America and more about character-driven narratives that explore the nuance of individuals in the varied and dangerous world of the American frontier. In tackling this historical moment, these films and others approach not only the founding myth of America but the existential reality of present day Americans as well. Upcoming and even more recent films like Damsel, Woman Walks Ahead, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs mark more interest in the revisionist Western to appear on screens this year.

The Sisters Brothers (2018) is a fantastic example of a Western that has an approach almost entirely divorced from the original conceit of the Western. (Whether this is due to director Jacques Audiard‘s French origins or not likely warrants more discussion, as does the fascinating perspective that Westerns made by non-American filmmakers provide.) It depicts, with empathy and artistry, the destructive cycles of greed and violence in the American West in the lives of four people with distinct backgrounds, motivations, and moral failings, without any lauding of conquest or violence. Death is almost always unfortunate, personal violence is childish, and pursuit of excessive wealth through shortcuts can only lead to disappointment. It is a very modern Western, one that depicts four men in desperate hope for their own individual visions of the American Dream, whether that be wealth, freedom, or to found a community based on one’s values, and how they alternately fail and succeed to achieve that dream based on their own actions.

Conclusion

The purpose of the origin myth is to relate to one’s cultural past, whether to examine negatively or to laud the values of people’s past. These heroes, in both Greek and American iterations, are inevitably connected to both artist and viewer, and whether good or bad reflect us. If an American hero is lauded in a Western, it is only natural to extend his values of exceptionalism into the present. In the society in which we currently live, nationalism, national identity, and depictions of American history are constantly part of the national discussion about American culture.

Who is a part of American history, who gets to tell these stories, who gets to be a part of them, how they are depicted – these are discussions that have in the last decade come to the forefront of culture, art, and entertainment. The Western film is a worthy medium for all of these issues, just as the American West was a stage for conflicts between differing races and cultures, a pivotal stage for technology, and a defining moment for both internal development and foreign relations. 21st century America finds itself in a similar moment of transition, and yet again we are using our own founding myth to confront these realities.

What are your thoughts?