The Secret History of the Left-Wing Western
Boomer dads excepted, most people don’t watch Westerns. Even among cinephiles, Westerns are easily shunted off into their own niche that—in a world that rarely produces new Westerns, at least unless they’re Yellowstone spin-offs—is easily imagined as separate from film proper. There are lots of genres for which this is true to one extent or another, but unlike swashbucklers, screwball comedies, or Commedia sexy all'italiana (look it up), lack of exposure does not deter anyone from thinking they know exactly what Westerns are like. The Western is judged on a collage of second- and third-hand sense impressions. The Western is pre-emptively dismissed based on myths and assumptions, the most damning of which are political anathema to the average leftist. Eileen Jones of Jacobin concedes only that one may “enjoy aspects of old Westerns, in spite of their generally nightmarish Manifest Destiny ideology.” Everyone knows that Westerns are racist, sexist, imperialist propaganda valorizing the conquering white man. But when I got into Westerns in my twenties, this collaged Western I had culturally absorbed turned out to be like the shadows on Plato’s cave wall: not a lie, precisely, but nothing like the complexity, color, and depth of reality.