It is by instinct that we have learned that the ultimate epitome of cool is the cowboy. Stetson pulled over his eyes, toothpick in mouth, fingers twitching by the trigger, the cowboy is an otherworldly hero, gracing us normals with his presence in film and folklore history. Of course, we all know that cowboys are actually real but nevertheless, we have transformed them into something more, elevated them beyond their lowly human origins. Ever since we had notions of good and bad, we had the cowboy movie. Nomadic by nature, roaming the open plain lands of the harshest environment, the cowboy seemed to exist in a world removed from our own, fighting for things beyond our comprehension, moving in circles unseen by normal human eyes. Of course, there were times in which the cowboy would come violently into contact with normal civilisation, clashing against society like oil against water. When placed in comparison to the rest of us, it’s not hard to see why we all dreamed of becoming cowboys.
The cowboy was the ruler of nature; he took on the harshest wilderness and made it his playground. Moving from place to place without rest, the cowboy made our societies seem tepid and weak by comparison, as if the rest of us just couldn’t hack the realities of the natural environment. And truthfully, who could? The reason that the cowboy flourishes in the wild is because he is an alien in civilisation. He was forged from a place unlike any other, at odds with the society in which he was born. Cowboys are the ultimate antisocial figures and yet, we love them for it.
Over time, the western movie has changed and adapted. Heroes have come and go, the societies around them have risen and fallen and still, the legend of the cowboy remains unscathed. Tommy Lee Jones’ recent release The Homesman marks yet another change in the genre. Lead by a spinster farmer and an outlawed drunk, three mentally deranged women are transported across the barren wilds to a care home in the North. The two central figures and immediately unlikeable, stubborn, argumentative and self-serving. And yet, they both display elements of the cowboy, they both have been rejected by their societies and must find themselves in the wild. The somewhat cyclical ending of the film doesn’t really solve any of the character issues. However, it shows us, perhaps for the first time, that the cowboy figure is not reduced to a certain type of lone male. We can all contain parts of the cowboy nature, we can all conquer those who deny us a place in society. Ultimately, we all have the strength of the cowboy.
Since cinema’s inception, cowboys and the Western have been shown to us in a variety of different forms. The Great Train Robbery is perhaps the most famous silent Western, which, despite being only ten minutes long, sets the genre and the figurehead very specifically in a time and place. The plot of the film is fairly straightforward and culminates in the expected triumph of good over evil. However, the cinematic techniques used in the film set the film in motion towards a place much more experimental. The final shot of Justus D. Barnes looking into the eye of the camera and shooting his gun is perhaps one of the most iconic in cinema. Directly facing the audience, the bandit seems to be warning them. He may have been thwarted in the film but there are many lining up behind him. The cowboy film had only just begun.
The Magnificent Seven has gone down in history as one of the quintessential Western films. Whilst standard cowboy movies give us one loveable nomad, this film gave us seven of them. Seven times more adventure, seven times more action, seven times more shoot outs. In this case, however, the cowboy film was taken from something altogether different. The film was based on the earlier Japanese epic Seven Samurai, given to us by the master Akira Kurosawa. Telling the story of a struggling village that enlists the help of a group of disparate samurai soldiers to protect their village, the film displays all the guts and vigour of a cowboy movie with just a little bit more nuance. The figure of a samurai is similar to that of a cowboy in so many ways: Lonesome, highly trained and predominantly antisocial. And yet, the samurai seems to have something more that is lacking from the cowboy. Their actions are dictated by a very specific and long tradition, something which a cowboy seems inherently to balk at. Samurais know their place in society whilst cowboys tend to want to escape it. In Seven Samurai, the figure of the cowboy seems to be born, just with a few alterations made.
Of course, the Western can have a much sillier side and none is more silly than the third installment of the Back to the Future series. In the third film, Marty McFly finds himself flung back a few hundred years to the land of cowboys and desert. Using locomotives and engineering with verve, the film has a definite steampunk vibe about it, marvelling at the wonder of the era’s new technological inventions. Whilst the film is essentially a send up of the Western film, it does teach us some valuable lessons. Early and classic Western films are so beloved because they gave us the figure of the cowboy and the notion that you can break away from the society that made you. However, the thing that they so often lose is fun.
Being a cowboy isn’t all serious and testing, there’s a lot of fun in riding around all day, sporting a battered hat and gun pack. The thing that we must not forget is why we came to love the cowboy in the first place. They taught us to question the world around us and move to our own beat. And, most of all, they taught us that life is too short to listen to the people around us. We should have fun and stand up for what we believe.