Could the resurgence of the western in film and on TV be a reflection of the political turmoil of Trump’s America?

From Gunsmoke to Deadwood: why the US turns to the wild west in times of crisis

Coen brothers turn to TV with western series The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Read more

Liberal America is scared. People feel cheated and lied to. They recoil in horror at what’s being done in their country’s name under the guise of national security. Meanwhile, in Hollywood and on the small screen, westerns are going back into production. Joel and Ethan Coen announced their next project, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a movie/TV hybrid that will unfold over the length of a miniseries and a cinema release. Steven Soderbergh recently exec-produced the Netflix series Godless, starring Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery. When the United States is facing a crisis, there is no genre better suited to represent how the nation wants to see itself.

“The western really tells you where the world is,” says Antoine Fuqua, director of the remake of The Magnificent Seven, which, released nearly 18 months ago, tells a fairly prescient story of where the US is currently heading. “We’re still dealing with people who are terrorising other people. We’re still dealing with people abusing other people, burning up the churches, killing people in the streets.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jane’s got a gun ... the women of Godless. Photograph: Ursula Coyote/Netflix

Quentin Tarantino, director of 2012 western Django Unchained, told Vulture before the release of The Hateful Eight back in 2015: “There’s no real film genre that better reflects the values and the problems of a given decade than the westerns made during that specific decade.”



It is not hard to imagine him looking at the authoritarian chaos of Trump’s America and envisioning a bloody shoot ’em-up. All the elements are there: the egomaniacal robber baron and his band of thugs who invade the small town, pit the locals against each other and ride roughshod over the law. Indeed, in late 2016, HBO’s leisurely paced Westworld attracted a mystified but engaged audience to its vision of a future where jaded executives relieve stress by gunning down cowboys and engaging in rough sex with cyborg saloon sex workers.

When the world seemed simpler, however, westerns echoed that simplicity. In 1959, there were 26 western shows on primetime US TV. America, just emerging from a recession and on the brink of war in Vietnam, was in need of uncomplicated stories of good guys triumphing against threats to civility. Shows such as Rawhide (featuring Clint Eastwood) and Gunsmoke comforted its audiences with tales of simple morality harking back to the 1930s.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration: Paul Blow

By the 70s, and echoed today, the ritual of eating family dinner while watching the nightly news took on a nightmarish aspect. Dispatches from Vietnam, the oil crisis, civil unrest, airline hijacks and the Tehran hostage situation combined to dent the national psyche. The broadcast networks attempted to salve those wounds with shows such as Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons – westerns scrubbed clean of gunplay that concentrated on treacly images of small-town life at the turn of the century.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Space cowboys ... Adam Baldwin, Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres in the short-lived Firefly. Photograph: Allstar/Fox

In 2002, with George W Bush pushing for war in Iraq, two landmark TV westerns debuted, one set in the past, the other deep into the future, both of them united by a distrust of government and the rule of law. Set in the year 2517, Joss Whedon’s sci-fi series Firefly featured a rag-tag group of civil war survivors-turned-smugglers, but only lasted 14 episodes. David Milch’s HBO series Deadwood, meanwhile, took some of the legendary figures of the old west – Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Wyatt Earp – and gave them Shakespearean soliloquies, taking creative liberties with their lives.

Timothy Olyphant’s flinty-eyed haberdasher-turned lawman Seth Bullock is the new resident in the gold-mining settlement through whose point of view audiences were supposed to see the corrupt, blood-and-bullet-ridden town of Deadwood. However, it was soon evident that Ian McShane’s saloon owner and pimp Al Swearengen, whose every utterance was broken up with a “cunt” or a “cocksucker”, was the irritable embodiment of the town and its many sins.

Conceived by Milch as a study of lawless society, Deadwood was an absorbing, at times difficult show. But the last great modern TV western was perhaps the cable series Justified, based on a short story by Elmore Leonard and taken off air in 2015. Timothy Olyphant may not have had a chance to shine among the ensemble of loquacious monologists in Deadwood, but in Justified, playing Marshal Raylan Givens, he relished the opportunity to play the deadpan, shoot-first, ask-questions-later character who returns to his crime-ridden home of Harlan County, Kentucky.

Saddle up and head for the cinema: the western is back in town Read more

Marshal Givens is described by his ex in the series pilot as “the angriest man I’ve ever known” – and, indeed, as we were reminded before and after the Trump campaign, the American heartland is filled with furious middle-aged white men clinging to their right to bear arms. Givens outdrew and out-quipped several seasons of hillbilly miscreants, but he felt their pain; a thin line separated the hero with the gun and the psycho he was shooting full of holes.

In shows such as Westworld and Godless that line, you sense, is disappearing altogether. Because Americans are only getting more scared.