ON POSTWAR MASCULINITY

 Another day, another messboard topic...

________

With respect to post-WWII gender roles, the first thing I think of is that when the war ended, the surviving American men returned home expecting to return to their status as family breadwinners, while women who had substituted for them in factories et al would return to being homemakers. Some contemporaneous women expressed the same sentiment. Some, like Betty Friedan, did not, and so we got the rise of second-wave feminism. 

How did that affect depictions of men and women in postwar movies? I agree with the general proposition that one major trope to come out of the changes was "men have become weak and there's nothing that can be done about it." That's where your example of INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (and the Matheson novel published the previous year) belongs, and there are surely others in the same vein.

However, we also get the trope "men have become weak but with the right approach they can re-assert themselves." I don't recall the specifics of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but it's strongly suggested that James Dean is messed up due to his mother, and near the end the father puts his foot down and reasserts his authority. HILDA CRANE (1950) spends most of the movie with Joan Crawford manipulating her husband, but then he walks out on her at the end. You can also see this type of trope in a fair number of stories predating America's entry into the second world war, not least the 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND novel.

The movie we're discussing, DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS, is a little different, and it's also not precisely "postwar" since it's based on a play performed the year before Britain entered the war against the Axis powers. It's not that the men in the DOD movie are weak, but they're unable to deal with the ways women think and interact, which constitute a separate social world. You see the same ethos in the 1939 Bette Davis weepie THE OLD MAID, which came out the same year as the GWTW adaptation. The world of men there just barely impacts on that of women, even though the story takes place against the backdrop of Civil War violence. 

ANGEL AND THE BADMAN is a different trope still. John Wayne's bandit character is never weak at any point in the story, but he's a creature that needs to be civilized by the gentle Quaker girl, who takes him off the path of doom. That too is a very "woman-centered" ethos, though it doesn't depend on nullifying masculinity, as does HILDA CRANE and maybe REBEL.

There probably are other movies, not least SF-genre films, that get into the trope of men falling victim to either too much or too little masculinity. You mention NEANDERTHAL MAN, and MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS might be another example of the latter. But I find it interesting that in the late forties and fifties we start seeing a fair sampling of low budget "action girl" (often swashbucklers) and "monster girl" films, far more than I think one can demonstrate from the beginning of sound films through the end of WWII-- and DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS is one of these. But whether that indicates a real shift in genuine gender roles would be food for a second discussion.                            

   

HOW MANY WESTERN MYTHS HAVE I FOUND?

I stated in the previous essay that on my two main review-blogs I had not devoted much space to any isophenomenal westerns, mythic or otherwise. Despite this caveat, I did devote two long posts to two such non-fantastic western works:

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

DJANGO UNCHAINED

So of the all other westerns, or western-associated productions I will list here, they will all have some metaphenomenal content.

Not all of them take place, however, within the same era as the traditional western, or even as the so-called "Eastern western," which concerned the American Revolutionary era. I find that western iconography spans three broad periods:

THE PRE-WESTERN ERA

Stories fitting this heading take place prior to any major European incursions in any of the Americas, North or South. Typically this will concern only stories about Indian tribes who have not yet encountered any persons associated with the colonial efforts from the 16th century onward-- though I would have no problem with stories in which Indians met Viking travelers or even Phoenician sea-traders. In literature, there's really only major pre-western narrative.

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA

In theory, certain comic-book series like Gold Key's TUROK SON OF STONE and DC's SUPER CHIEF would qualify for this category, if they possesses the sort of mythopoeically rendered epistemological patterns that constitutes good mythicity.

Then at the other end of the temporal spectrum, there is--

THE POST-WESTERN ERA

This includes any narrative with western iconography taking place after the dawn of the twentieth century, whether or not the narratives takes place in the American West or even in any physical place corresponding to the North and South American continents. In addition to 20th-century stories with some major connection to western story-tropes or icons, this category can also embrace so-called "space westerns," though the significance of the trope or icon has to be very strong. I for one do NOT deem STAR WARS a "space western," even though the series used western tropes (like the "cantina scene") from western cinema. And I would not regard the entirety of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars series" of books to be space westerns either, though the first one counts, because its 20th-century protagonist starts out his narrative fighting wild Indians. So the first book qualified for high mythicity.

A PRINCESS OF MARS

And so does this Osamu Tezuka take on Western mythology:

CAPTAIN KEN

I also include here stories where some significant character uses western iconography, even if some other genre is dominant. Thus the story in SPIDER-MAN #10 is predominantly a superhero story, but it is "western-adjacent" because one of the villains wears a ten-gallon hat and twirls a lasso as his only weapon.

THE ENFORCERS

Finally, I come to the meatiest category, taking in all narratives centered within the domain of the Americas from the 16th through the 19th centuries, though obviously not all of these have western iconography. (For instance, stories about the Civil War take place in the same time-frame as the "winning of the West" stories, but only a few of these tales are likely to boast strong western tropes or icons.)  All of my other Mythic Westerns are as follows:

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER 

THE LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD

THE NIGHT OF THE VICIOUS VALENTINE

PURGATORY

THE RANGERS VS. TOMAHAWK

RANGO

THE SHAMAN

SCALP HUNTER

Technically, SCALP HUNTER, one of the "Son of Tomahawk" stories, is not a metaphenomenal story, and might better be listed alongside Django and the Purple Sage Riders. I've also left off this list all of the individual "good" episodes of the teleseries KUNG FU. This program sported a high percentage of stories with either a "good" or a "fair" mythicity rating, and so I prefer to associate the series as a whole with my next category: all the "fair" westerns that weren't quite epistemologically complex enough to be good, but which at least included important myth-motifs.

THE LONE RANGER (1938)

MACKENNA'S GOLD

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920)

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940)

THE MASK OF ZORRO

THE WHITE BUFFALO

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION

ZORRO THE GAY BLADE

And finally, I made brief reference to a very "post-Western" storyline in THE WEST COAST AVENGERS here.

I may add to this list over time, as I encounter new "good myths" or "fair myths" worth collating.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT

The sort of "cosmos" I'm talking about in this essay is essentially the same as the word "mythos" as I've been using it to apply the totality of elements within any narrative, where a variety of Subs-- mostly antagonists and supporting characters-- interact with one or more Primes. This cosmos may be generated within the space of one narrative, as per my earlier example of the novel IVANHOE, or throughout the progress of a series, be it short-lived or long-lived. All subordinate presences within a narrative-- characters, settings, and certain types of artifacts-- are defined by their *alignment* with the stories generated by the superordinate character(s).

I indirectly alluded to this concept, not then named, in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1,  regarding the character of Fu Manchu. Since Fu is the sole superordinate character of the series of books named for him, all other characters in those books are aligned with him, even those opposing him. However, when Fu becomes a subordinate character in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series, he then becomes an aligned figure within the Shang-Chi cosmos.

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future. No matter how often the Joker appears in features other than those of Batman, he remains known as a Batman foe. However, it's possible, particularly when the individual features of a given publisher share continuity, for subordinate presences to cross over into other features. In CROSSOVERS PT. 3,  I reviewed the way in which two villains, Mister Hyde and the Cobra, had debuted in the THOR feature but were recycled into that of DAREDEVIL. The two super-crooks never became firmly attached to the latter feature either, and they subsequently drifted into such venues as SPIDER-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Since the two evildoers never became strongly associated with any single feature, I would still tend to view them as Thor-villains who bring about a charisma-crossover every time they venture into a new character-cosmos.

 OTOH, in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock. However, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the nasty titan becomes an Avengers foe-- and will probably never be re-interpreted further in the movie-medium.

As it happens, a number of famous historical figures also cross paths, though of course these events are not being contrived for anyone's entertainment. In this essay, I addressed the subject of notorious western marauder Billy the Kid, focusing on how little all fictional treatments of the outlaw related to the real historical personage. But even though the real Billy the Kid never met a lot of the famous people of his time, much less Dracula, some "real crossovers" did take place. The Kid's sometimes criminal associate Dave Rudabaugh, for instance, is credited in this Wiki-article with also encountering Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. Earp and Holliday may have met for the first time due to Earp's hunt for Rudabaugh.

The real-life association of Earp and Holliday became the stuff of many fictional westerns, most of which tended to make Earp a Prime protagonist while Holliday was relegated to Sub status. Nevertheless, Holliday had enough charisma that he occasionally migrated into other fictional cosmoses, dueling with the Rawhide Kid in one comic and making an appearance in an episode of the TV show THE HIGH CHAPPARAL.

Strangely, Holliday gets a post-mortem encounter with three western folk-heroes in the 1999 movie PURGATORY, none of whom he knew in life: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Wild Bill Hickock (though the last character seems more like a faux Wyatt Earp in his characterization, since he's not that "wild.") Again, these would all be high-charisma crossovers, since all of the folk-legends attached to these westerns would be *innominate* by nature.

Moving from folk-legends to folklore, there are a wide number of crossovers which focus on associating figures from folktales and fairy tales. Usually these type of tales are too amorphous to establish a "cosmos" for, say, Little Red Riding Hood. But on occasion the Wolf, aligned as a subordinate character in that story, becomes the star of a given story, or he may become one of many stock folk-figures to cross over with some superordinate character, often a new, non-traditional character like Shrek.

In conclusion, I will admit that full-fledged myths are harder than folk-tales to judge in terms of alignment. Suzanne Langer and others have noted that in mythology proper figures like gods and their monstrous antagonists often become set in their own "continuity," however often this or that detail may change. Yet some gods and heroes, theoretically in the same universe, never really cross paths, despite "continuties" like those of the Iliad or the Argonautica. Does it count as a crossover if Perseus and Jason, who never meet in the old myths, appear in the same story? I would not tend to consider it a crossover if some ordinary schmuck conjures up the goddess Venus. But Venus crossing over with the mythology of Satan would certainly be a different matter. More on these matters later, perhaps.

ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY PT. 2

I concluded Part 1 by sketching out three primary story-tropes used by fictional characters to demonstrate self-mastery:

(1) Combat between bodies, which in fiction usually takes place as "hand to hand combat" between human beings, though it can also include beasts in combat with claw and fang, and all analogous conflicts.

(2) Combat through the use of "extensions," which can range from weapons modeled on those of the real world to unreal "super-powers" not natural to the human form, such as X-ray vision, fire-breathing, or even peculiar uses of parts of the human form, like stretching this or that part of one's anatomy.

(3) Combat through the use of physically independent pawns, which can be other human beings, beasts, robots, etc.

In Part One I stated that with the first category, it's relatively easy to get a sense as to whether the combatants demonstrate greater-than-average dynamicity, what I termed "megadynamicity" in this 2012 essay. The second two, however, can be more elusive.

In my recent essay THE INVISIBLE FORCE OF INVESTIGATORS, I stressed that most "police procedurals" don't allow for "battles of personal glory." Many though not all shows in this genre are all about the power of cops to sweep through the city and overpower the criminal element by dint of superior numbers. The viewer assumes that every fictional cop has been through some form of training, both in armed and unarmed combat, but the stories themselves do not generally stress whatever megadynamic talents the policemen and policewoman may possess. Thus I would not label the cop-characters of HAWAII FIVE-O or LAW AND ORDER as megadynamic. In contrast, some less "procedural" cop-dramas definitely emphasize the violent conflict of order and chaos, ranging from cinema's DIRTY HARRY series to the gleeful absurdity of T.J HOOKER.

Now, in a less "civilized" genre, such as the western, one usually presumes that anyone who wields a gun knows how to use it-- or at least, any man. In every medium, the western tends to represent women as wielding weapons purely in self-defense. A female western character on average is at best mesodynamic, which means more or less that she can wield a gun well enough not to shoot herself with it. Only a precious female characters are touted for their skill with weapons. The real-life trick-shooter Annie Oakley has given rise to fictionalized versions like the 1954-57 teleseries with Gail Davis.

That said, a given character may demonstrate self-mastery, but not in a combative situation. In 1935 Barbara Stanwyck starred in an equally fictionalized version of the famous markswoman's life. However, this version of ANNIE OAKLEY was a romantic drama, with no combative content.

To segue a second time, I've sometimes debated with myself as to when a character with a gun registers as *mesodynamic* rather than "megadynamic." Prison-films-- particularly of the species known as "women-in-prison"-- can prove highly variable in this regard. A lot of guns are fired at the conclusions of THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, THE BIG BIRD CAGE and SWEET SUGAR, but I derived no sense that most of the character shooting off big guns were especially skilled. As with the character of Mayhem, discussed in Part 1, their power comes not from themselves but from the sheer power of the weapons they acquire.

In contrast, though a number of female characters in the 1974 CAGED HEAT wield guns, the big shootout at the conclusion shows that the two characters played, respectively, by Erica Gavin and by Roberta Collins are skilled at picking off armed enemies from a considerable distance. I don't plan to review HEAT in the near future, as I found it somewhat boring. But at least director Jonathan Demme set up a situation in which his "femmes formidables" had to exchange sustained fire with a bunch of unsympathetic prison-guards, thus satisfying the combative mode.

Moving on to the second of the difficult categories, it's a given that there are many characters in fiction who are capable of unleashing vast armies against other armies: kings and queens, emperors and empresses, popes and popesses (?) But countless stories merely imply this power without seeing it in operation, just as numerous police-types do not demonstrate their dynamicity but simply imply it. Shakespeare's kings are forever going to war about this or that, but it's not a given that all of them are megadynamic figures, particularly when the wars are conveniently offstage. Henry V is easy to pronounce as "combative" in part because he's out there fighting with his troops. But Macbeth comes to power by assassination, and though there's a fight between Macbeth and Macduff while their respective armies contend, it's hard to state outright that either of them is a megadynamic type.

In this situation, female rulers may be no less complicated. Shakespeare's Cleopatra does not fight in the trenches in the fashion of Henry V, or even the Bard's tough-gal version of Joan of Arc. But the play does attribute to her the indirect power over Egypt's armies, so that one might indeed regard her as satisfying the combative mode. However, there are numerous Cleopatra tales-- not least Shaw's CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA-- in which the queen displays no queenly dynamicity, and thus she would register as mesodynamic at most. I might say the same for the Timely Comics version of the character Venus, though since she's given a definite super-power in later stories, the determination is perhaps moot.

THIRD PRESENCE, PERIPHERAL

I return to the subject of the narrative-significant value-schism with respect to the ways in which a narrative value, such as that of the combative mode, may appear in a given story, and yet fail to acquire a concomitant significant value.

One of the foremost examples in my system was mentioned in 2013's OUR ARMIES AT WAR, WITH MONSTERS. The 1953 George Pal film THE WAR OF THE WORLDS pulls off one of the cinematic decade's most impressive displays of contending megadynamic forces, but that battle does not decide the war, or the mode. The Martians are defeated by a third presence in the mix, the microscopic germs that bring death to the invaders. The movie credits the victory to God himself, which was probably not an interpretation H.G. Wells seriously supported. But even if God himself had entered the fray, I might tend to regard the Deity as a "peripheral" presence to the struggle between humans and aliens. Certainly the germs are peripheral to the struggle, since they aren't consciously coming down on either side.

In DJINN WITH SUMMONER PT. 2, I cited four examples where protagonists were empowered by presences peripheral to them. In THE COURT JESTER comic hero Hubert is given the skill of a great swordsman by a hypnotist, but because he loses that skill, and because he defeats the villain largely by a contrivance rather than with megadynamic potency, this victory also lacks the significant value of the combative mode. The other three examples all involve protagonists receiving aid from genies, or genie-like entities, who are similarly peripheral to the protagonists themselves. Going by this train of logic,not only are none of the cited works in the combative mode, neither are any of the protagonists.

While the genies allied to those protagonists are powerful, the protagonists are not empowered by their influence: what is lacking is what I'll term the "transitive effect," using the definition provided by the Free Dictionary:

Expressing an action carried from the subject to the object;

requiring a direct object to complete 

meaning. Used of a verb or verb construction.

The same inconsumation of the transitive effect can take place in regard to the effects of phenomenality upon the combative mode.

Shakespeare's HAMLET is a narrative in which it's clear that the protagonist dwells in a world where strange, metaphenomenal events take place. However, though it may be some Satanic power that inspires Hamlet, it certainly does not empower him, and everything that transpires between the melancholy Dane and his opponents takes place on an isophenomenal plane.

Alongside a review of a 1969 film-production of HAMLET, I also reviewed the 2006 film SERAPHIM FALLS. The presence of metaphenomal entities is even more ambiguous than it is in HAMLET, and the questionable entities have no visible effect upon the struggle of the film's two protagonsits, which also takes place upon an isophenomenal plane.

I haven't yet reviewed 1998's MULAN, but although the heroine receives aid from two unambiguous metaphenomenal entities-- a tiny ancestral dragon and an intelligent cricket-- nothing that they do makes any difference to Mulan's isophenomenal struggle against the invading Huns. So, even though Mulan exists in a metaphenomenal world in terms of dynamcity, in a combinatory sense-- as described here--Mulan's conflict is also isophenomenal.

In this group-review post, I scrutinized three low-budget westerns, one of which was unquestionably metaphenomal in terms of the potency wielded by the villains against the isophenomenal hero. However, the other two films dealt only with a cowboy-hero fighting other mundane crooks. The only metaphenomenality in either PHANTOM OF THE RANGE or its remake is that the crooks hire a henchman to pose as a ghost-- albeit in one of the least convincing disguises of all time.

Because the phony ghost adds no power to the villains-- the main hero doesn't even contend with the ghost, who is shot by his confederates-- his slight metaphenomenal presence does not activate the transitive effect, any more than do the cricket and the dragon in MULAN. Thus PHANTOM OF THE RANGE is an unusual example of being a combative film with a peripheral metaphenomenal precence, but not actually a film that is both combative and metaphenomenal in a transitive sense-- which is what brings all such films into the realm of what I still call the Superhero Idiom.

MORE QUICK HU POSTS

Damnit, it's like eating heroin-laced potato chips. I go in to make one lousy post and I'm sucked in again.

Noah Berlatsky contends that the film FOXY BROWN marginalizes womankind's historical experience with rape and racism because the narrative doesn't dwell overlong on the psychological consequences of her rape and forced drug-addiction. I posted:

There's a reading that I'm sure that neither you nor [Stephanie] Dunn are likely to favor: to wit, Foxy shrugs off the ordeals of rape and heroin addiction not as a means of some "disavowal of history" but because she's a super-tough heroine who can do such things. Male film-heroes rarely have to suffer rape, of course, but I'll bet there have been heroes who had to overcome forced drug addiction just through manfully gritting their teeth. And of course male heroes survive all sorts of elaborate tortures, a representative example being Conan being hung on a cross and left to die in the desert.

So if Conan recovers from his ordeal and apparently never has so much as a bad dream from the experience, is that too a disavowal of some aspect of "history?"

Noah also chose to judge the entire "spaghetti western" subgenre on the basis of two examples, so I wrote:

Is [your] point that--

(1) it's wrong to judge people as "types" based on superficial impressions ("such-and-such a woman is a bitch, therefore all women are bitches")

(2) but it's OK to judge a body of works based on looking at one or two works from that body?

No, Noah, nobody expects you to reserve comments until you've read every work in a given genre or subgenre. But if we're dealing with a body that has, say, a couple hundred films overall, a few more than three would be good before making any pronouncements.

We shall see what comes of this latest plunge into the depths...

------

ADDENDUM:

As I half expected, NB didn't really engage with my idea that Foxy Brown was being a typical tough-ass hero by shrugging off her traumas. He even managed to make it seem like even an archetypal hardass like Conan was also participating in psychological erasure (or some damn thing) by not wallowing in his trauma.

Amusingly, though, while on one hand he thinks that fictional characters ought to be judged by the same terms than real people, he doesn't think he has to show to fictional genre-works the same deference that people ought to show to other people.

Yes, because stereotyping people is morally wrong, but talking about works of art is talking about works of art.

Somehow I suspect that NB's inconsistencies are not evidence that he "contains multitudes" a la Whitman...

LAST ROUND-UP FOR THE JUVENILE WESTERN (IN FILM AND TELEVISION)

In my essay THE LITTLE NEOPURITANS I wrote:

...I feel revolted by the base Werthamism that crops on some comics-fan boards when those fans choose to rail against any and all use of pulpish sensationalism.  It doesn't matter if it's as well done as Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT or as badly done as Mark Millar's WANTED; anything that keeps funnybooks out of the hands of kids is part of the vast evil conspiracy of nasty pandering comics-companies, usually though not invariably "the Big Two."

I understand that such overreactions may come from a "good place," in that most devoted superhero fans are introduced to the genre as kids. When these fans become adults, it's not unreasonable to want their own kids to experience something like the same "joy of superheroes," and that's only possible when there are at least some viable superheroes in the vein of "juvenile pulp." For my purposes juvenile pulp would include both those narratives expressly aimed at juveniles of  various ages-- for instance, the DC Comic TINY TITANS-- and those narratives defined as "all ages". I'm cognizant that there are many "all ages" narratives that are capable of appealing to adults, and indeed this amphibian capacity explains much of the success of Silver Age Marvel Comics. In THE DIVIDING LINE PART 2 I noted that I found a "juvenile tone" in some "all ages" comic books like GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW and THE VIGILANTE.

I've spoken before of a juvenile "tone" in works like CONAN, GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE that in my consideration do not qualify as "adult pulp," as opposed to Miller's DAREDEVIL and Chaykin's AMERICAN FLAGG, for two. (Side-note: I might view the Thomas/Smith CONAN as at least a transtional work between the two states.) This tone I evaluate based not on the presence or absence of taboo material but on the degree to which, even in an escapist work, the story's content is influenced by the adult concept of "work" rather than "play." The adult's consciousness not only of "work" as a profession but as an insight to the way the world and all its elements "work" is what provides the dividing-line between "juvenile" and "adult." Across this Maginot line of maturation, both the narrative aspects of extreme sex-and-violence and the significant aspects of deeper and more portentous cognitions are united to create all manner of adult entertainments, both "escapist" and "realistic."

The closest I could come to defining what separates "adult tone" from "juvenile tone" is that the former possesses a quality I termed in the above essay "rigor." I didn't use the term again, but the concept underlies many of my other distinctions between "work" and "play."

Key to the Neopuritans' argument is the desire to keep superheroes accessible to juveniles. However, the possibility has occurred to me more than once superhero comic magazines may have reached a point at which they can only be sustained by adults, at least in the United States. And moreover, the specific genre-medium blend of "superheroes in comics" was preceded many years ago by a similar "adult-eration," with the death of "juvenile western films."

In the 2010 essay STANDARD BARING PART 2  I went into some detail about the parallel ways in which adult and juvenile narratives co-existed in Classic Hollywood cinema, perhaps to an even greater extent than they had for that genre in the pulps and dime novels. But one thing this overview neglected was the huge number of juvenile westerns that appeared during the Classic period. Dozens upon dozens of cheaply-made B-westerns offered only the most elementary plots, inhabited with all-good heroes and all-bad villains. The reign of the many cowboy-heroes of the period-- Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Durango Kid, Lash LaRue, and many others-- came to an end in the 1950s, when television usurped the economic logic of the juvie-western, and offered similar fare free of charge. As I was a baby-boomer, this was the only form of juvenile western I ever knew, so I grew up enjoying programs like LONE RANGER and CISCO KID-- though by the time that I saw any of the earlier films on television, they seemed far more cheap and repetitive than the TV westerns that I grew up with.

For whatever reason, westerns did not endure in the realm of live-action television aimed at the juvenile. The only western theatrical films aimed at juveniles were a smattering of western-comedies that appeared throughout the sixties and early seventies: things like 1968's THE SHAKIEST GUN IN THE WEST, 1969's SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF (and sequel), and 1978's HOT LEAD AND COLD FEET. Admittedly "all ages" westerns prospered in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the mid-1970s the TV-western had begun an almost irreversible decline. As for the world of the cinema, the "all ages" westerns had been all but displaced by the movies' version of 'adult pulp." Aging John Wayne was the last viable exemplar of the "all ages" form, and despite scattered films from other aging icons like Burt Lancaster and Henry Fonda, the wave of the future had been launched by Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood in 1964 via the seminal A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and the majority of successful westerns were increasingly aimed at a purely adult audience. Any kid who grew up in the 1980s and had a yen for westerns would have been forced to watch genre-works aimed primarily at adults, such as HEAVEN'S GATE or THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER-- though of course there were the inevitable exceptions, like the YOUNG GUNS series and the megaflop LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER.

By now the parallel I'm suggesting should be obvious: the juvenile form of the western was largely marginalized by the successful growth of the western in its primarily adult form. And while I'm loathe to define any genre's success or failure purely in terms of socioeconomic factors, it seems that parallel factors have caused a similar marginalization of the "juvenile pulp" superhero comic book-- and not, as some fans, like to think, merely the greed of pandering comics-companies.

Admittedly, juvenile westerns do seem to remain vital in other media, as one can see from this list of young adult historical novels.  But in the world of cinema and live-action television, they seem to have been effectively displaced.

ADDRESSING DISTRESS PT. 2

In keeping with my remarks in Part 1, in this essay I'll deal strictly with some of the problematic aspects of Brittney-Jade Colangelo's essay on "damsels in distress."

First up is a minor glitch in this sentence: 'Film theorist, Budd Boetticher, stated “what counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”'

I don't doubt that Budd Boetticher made this statement, but he was never a film theorist, but rather a writer and director of films, one best known for a series of westerns starring Randolph Scott. He probably did make ample use of the "damsel in distress" archetype, as the archetype was almost de rigeur in the western. However, Boetticher is not the best example of this tendency, for a fair number of his projects include the type of gutsy females I have termed "femmes formidables." Admittedly, in such films as 1953's WINGS OF THE HAWK and 1959's RIDE LONESOME, these female characters are narratively subordinate to a male hero, but one may argue that such figures anticipate the sort of "badass women" Colangelo sees as a conscious renunciation of the "damsel" archetype.

My second niggle has more to do with opinion than fact, as I take issue with this statement near the essay's end:

The slasher film has arguably the biggest fanbase and brought more iconic characters to the horror world than any other subgenre. Although a bit formulaic at times, they all contain the all mighty Final Girl. 

Unlike many online critics, I do respect many slasher films for birthing "iconic characters" such as Jason Voorhees, whose first eight films I reviewed on my film-review blog, beginning here.  But I certainly wouldn't say that there are more iconic characters in this horror-subgenre than in its most prominent competitor: the Gothic horror subgenre that dominates the horror films of the Classic Hollywood period.  I would allow that most of the Gothic horrors are based on literary predecessors, so that many of the early cinema-icons are not original creations, though this is not a condition of Colangelo's statement. Nevertheless, I would have to say that the early cinematic versions of Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, Mister Hyde, and Doctor Moreau far outstrip Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, while original creations like Imhotep/Kharis and the Wolf Man are easily the equals or superiors of Leatherface and Freddy Krueger.

And though I agree that the evolution of the Final Girl is highly significant in terms of "reading gender" in cinema, they certainly don't appear in *all* slasher films.  Just to cite the most prominent counter-examples, both FRIDAY THE 13TH:THE FINAL CHAPTER and FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING use a male character as the narrative focus.

Finally, I disagree that the archetype of the "badass female," or "femme formidable" as I term it, is *purely* generated as a reaction against the offensiveness of the "damsel in distress" archetype, as Colangelo describes here:

Without the “damsel in distress,” we wouldn’t have a character to be offended and angry towards. That may sound silly, but it’s true. If we weren’t so intensely offended by this archetype, we wouldn’t have rebelled and tried so hard to disprove it.

I don't doubt that certain individual creators have sought to redress the offensiveness of "the helpless female" by evoking the opposite.  But I believe that the appeal of the femme formidable archetype does not depend upon such a reaction; the archetype has its own innate appeal, which I explored in the series WHAT WOMEN WILL, beginning here. I'll touch further on this appeal in the third part of this series, where I will deal with the historical aspects of Colangelo's assertions.

STANDARD BARING PART 2

In SEITZ WARNING I goggled at Matt Zoller Seitz's notion that future superhero films should model themselves after the "spectrum of moods and modes" represented by a certain pop-cultural manifestation:

The ZOMBIE film?

Not the horror genre as a whole? Not even some genre that more closely resembles the superhero flick's emphasis on heroic violence, like the western, but--

The ZOMBIE film? That's what he thinks has "poetry" and "soul?

Though in that essay I didn't pursue parallels between the western and superhero genres, I will do so now in order to talk about how the idea of standards both "high" and "low" can come to alternate within a given culturally-accepted genre.

In this essay I asserted:

Before [Owen] Wister, the subject matter of cowboy adventures was mostly known through dime novels which played to an audience much like that of later pulps and comic books: to juveniles and to (occasionally) adults whose tastes were considerably less than literary. But Wister's novel took that subject matter and raised it to a new level that might have been juvenile in tone but was adult in the concerns it addressed.

In this essay, then, I demonstrated that early "Ned Buntline" westerns were "juvenile pulp" and thus paralleled the content of most early action-adventure comic books, while Owen Wister's VIRGINIAN was aimed more tellingly at an adult audience that desired "adult pulp." The same division according to adult and juvenile appeal can be just as easily observed in the western genre's cinematic history.

I confess I've seen very few of the extant silent westerns, but from online histories it seems demonstrable that a lot of early "oaters," such as those starring Tom Mix, were essentially aimed at an uncritical juvenile audience. In contrast, summations of 1916's HELL'S HINGES seem to evince a headier, more maturely-rigorous view of life than one would find in Tom Mix, even if most of the generic
expectations are still satisfied. HELL'S HINGES even duplicates the basic "gunfighter/schoolmarm" opposition formulated by Wister's VIRGINIAN, itself first transferred to film two years before.

With the coming of sound to the cinema, "adult pulp" westerns seem to have faded from view to a great extent, and the genre seemed dominated for most of the 30's decade by juvenile oaters essayed by Buck Jones, Roy Rogers, and a very young John Wayne. But 1939 seems to have broken the spell and ushered in several major pictures of comparative adult sensibility: Henry King's JESSE JAMES, Michael Curtiz's DODGE CITY, Cecil B. deMille's UNION PACIFIC and both STAGECOACH and DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (sort of an "Eastern western") from John Ford. All of these I regard as "adult pulp" in contradistinction to more consciously "arty" cinematic works of the time, though not all address the issues of "heroic violence" in quite the same way.

Backtracking a bit, what I find most objectionable in Seitz's careless essay is that in his quest for emotional "moods and modes" he says nothing about how superhero films should achieve this while still satisfying the audience's dominant expectations, one of which is that superhero films will offer them the pleasures of spectacular violence. The history of the western, however, does offer some clues.

First off, saying that all of the 1939 westerns above qualify as "adult pulp" does not mean that they all used identical narrative mythoi. For instance, take DODGE CITY and STAGECOACH.

Curtiz's DODGE CITY is a story of adventure, in which noble sheriff Wade Haddon (Errol Flynn) is challenged to "clean up" Dodge or get the hell out by its ruthless
outlaw boss (Bruce Cabot). There isn't a great deal of time spent expounding on motives or personal conflicts, though in keeping with the film's appeal to an older audience it does present a more well-rounded picture of life than a Roy Rogers film. From what I can gather the film may best be known for sporting one of the best-executed saloon-brawls in cinematic history.

Ford's STAGECOACH falls within the mythos of drama, though some critics may choose to view it as more of a "melodrama." The elements of violence and physical danger

are no less present than in DODGE CITY , as the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) protects an assortment of stagecoach-travelers from marauding Indians. But here, concerns of interpersonal interaction between the travelers take precedence over the action set-pieces.

As a pluralist I don't esteem dramatic adult pulp for being any better than adventurous adult pulp: the two are oriented at doing different things and each does its job quite admirably. I contrast these films to show that it was (and still is) possible for a genre which emphasized heroic violence, and which was once considered dominantly juvenile in tone, to become accepted by an adult audience without sacrificing the pulpier aspects of said genre.

I've already given examples of exemplary superhero-genre films within each of the four Fryean mythoi that have evinced higher standards than Matt Zoller Seitz allows that they have. Perhaps neither WATCHMEN nor SPIDER MAN 2 have won approval with Seitz himself, but I think he would be hard pressed to claim that the two films lack *ANY* of the "standards" he advocates. But the two are as instructive as paradigms for the future of superhero films as the Curtiz and Ford films have been for the history of westerns, and anyone interested in the aforesaid future would be well advised to give them at least as much attention as one gives to ZOMBIE ISLAND MASSACRE.