American storytellers' fascination with the expanse west of the Mississippi has never really let up. But how we've imagined it has shifted over the years. Today, with the weight of history behind us, we don’t cast it a sort of Promised Land; the West we see on screen—not confined to the plains and the Rockies anymore—more often resembles a place of judgement than promise. Rarely is it a hopeful vista trod by the courageous. It’s a wasteland purgatory for the doomed and damned.

Westerns have always been the backdrop for men with dark histories, of course. The cowboy rides into town, running from a secret or a shady past. Those stories were their stops on a redemption road, places to atone for one's sins.

But though today's craggier, crueler landscape finds its archetype in the Bible as well, the land is trod by men who are not strong and silent heroes, but wanderers: not characters in pursuit of redemption, but characters pursued by a presence, tortured and possessed souls sure only that the universe is out to get them and kept alive only by some dogged mission they didn't choose themselves. And if he exists at all, the God of today's West more often fits most people's idea of a vengeful, capricious Old Testament God than a benevolent bestower of gifts.

The father of all wanderers is Cain, who in the book of Genesis kills his brother Abel out of jealousy and then is condemned by God to a life as a fugitive away from his home, an echo of his parents' ejection from Eden. There's a sort of severe mercy in the punishment God metes out: when Cain protests that people will want to kill him whenever they meet him, God places on Cain a sign to protect him, swearing that those who mess with Cain mess with God. He goes on to build cities and raise sons. Today his name is synonymous with fratricide.