Hey everyone,
I wanted to update my old western review, and bring up the idea of how the West works as an icon. We’ve discussed a lot in class about how icons get repurposed and reused, and we’ve brought up how those icon get played out in other cultures. Here’s a trailer for a move called The Good the Bad and The Weird a Korean film by Jee-woon Kim, the same director for the most recent Arnold Schwarzenegger movie where he is inexplicably a sheriff in a small town. This is a much better movie, and you can see in the trailer some of the trope images we talked about in class, front and center in this trailer: the railroad and the pistol
Here’s a repost of my original review
The Man who Shot Liberty Valance is a John Wane western focused around the past of a US senator Ransom Stoddard and the story of how his relationship with outlaw in a frontier town. The first notable aspect I noticed in the film is the distinction made between the town as it is when the senator returns versus the wildness of the town when he first arrived. He points out that the newspaper men asking for the story have only known the town “since the railroad came” showing how the train, a symbol of American technology and progress, brings a measure of civilization with it to the towns along the rails. This fits in with the “western” myth which the movie pushes over and over again. The myth, as the movie presents it, is the belief of new beginnings off of meager means in the west. The senator arrives fresh from law school, and meets all sorts of people in the frontier town looking to make a new and better life. Among them are prospectors, farmers, immigrants, women, or african americans, all uneducated and uncultured, but all hard working and honest for the most part. We see the townspeople struggle to keep their hard-earned lives and earn legitimacy through statehood from outlaws like Liberty Vance and the big-time ranchers he works for, who would threaten the homesteaders’ use of their democratic rights for the sake of profit. Truthfully, there are all kinds of Western Icons coming together in this movie, but I found this one particularly drives home the western myth and its final lesson, that democracy and intelligent civilization are good, but out west, a man has to rely on his guns and his own strength. Despite Stoddard’s best efforts to empower the town’s people through democracy, the threat of violence can only be settled with a more righteous violence, so where brains fail, masculine brawn has to make up the slack.
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