Lifelong Learning Institute: Hollywood Studios: Spring 2002
From Jim Kitses' book, Horizons West (1969), pp. 11-12:
The community in the western can be seen as a positive force, a movement of refinement, order and local democracy into the wilds, or as a harbinger of corruption in the form of Eastern values which threaten frontier ways. ... Thus central to the form, we have a philosophical dialectic, an ambiguous cluster of meanings and attitudes that provide the traditional thematic structure of the genre. This shifting ideology play can be described through a series of antinomies, so:
|
|
|
|
The Individual |
The Community |
|
freedom |
restriction |
|
honour |
institutions |
|
self-knowledge |
illusions |
|
integrity |
compromise |
|
self-interest |
social-responsibility |
|
solipsism |
democracy |
|
Nature |
Culture |
|
purity |
corruption |
|
experience |
knowledge |
|
empiricism |
legalism |
|
pragmatism |
idealism |
|
brutalization |
refinement |
|
savagery |
humanity |
|
The West |
The East |
|
America |
Europe |
|
the frontier |
America |
|
equality |
class |
|
agrarianism |
industrialism |
|
tradition |
change |
|
the past |
the future |
In scanning this grid, if we compare the tops and tails of each subsection, we can see the ambivalence at work at its outer limits: the West, for example, rapidly moves from being the spearhead of manifest destiny to the retreat of ritual. What we are dealing with her is no less than a national-world view: underlying the whole complex is the grave problem of identity that has special meaning for Americans.
bgs: 04-02