Cowboys, detectives, and nature
Westerns and films noir feel like natural stories. Are there natural implications?
One of America’s great contributions to global culture is the format of the Western novel, as adapted into the “cowboy movie.” It’s a tale of individualistic redemption against a stunning natural background. Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John Ford, John Wayne, Kevin Costner: the stories have many forms. Rustlers, savages, railroad magnates, religious zealots, corrupt officials: they have many representations of villainy. Sexism, racism, addiction to violence: they often sadly reflect the societal ills of their times. But their theme of the lone hero conquering external obstacles amid epic scenery makes them natural stories.
So what happens when you remove the nature?
One of America’s other great contributions to global culture is the format of the private-eye novel, as adapted into the “film noir.” And it’s the same tale: an individualist trying to set a moral course in a world full of evil. The detective is the cowboy hero in an urban setting. That is, not just tall buildings, but also the capitalistic and political systems that institutionalized corruption in the 20th century.
To my taste, it works just as well. What makes a natural story isn’t necessarily descriptions of natural beauty, but a strong sense of place. Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles and Lew Archer’s Santa Teresa are the opposite of Wister’s untouched frontier, but the stories immerse us in those half-mythical places in ways that feel like taking a trip there.
Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest birthed the literary hard-boiled detective, and what most fascinates me about it is the setting: the mining metropolis of Butte, Montana. (Hammett fictionalizes it as “Personville.”) From the first paragraph, Hammett explicitly creates the opposite of beautiful Western scenery: “an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” But he was writing about a Butte that had been raw frontier just a few decades previously.
Hammett’s subsequent books were set in San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York. His genius lies partly in the fiendish plotting of The Maltese Falcon, the feverish propulsion of The Glass Key, and the comic disaffection of The Thin Man. He created iconic characters issuing sharp dialogue that onscreen was splendidly delivered by Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, William Powell, and Myrna Loy.
But many scholars see Butte as the key. “Hammett's stories suggest that with the closing of the frontier, with the lack of a wilderness against which to negatively define civilization, civilization must look inward to face the darkness within,” wrote Marvin Severson in a PhD thesis on Hammett. (Another scholar who wrote his doctorate on Hammett: Robert B. Parker, who later authored the Spenser detective series.)
In other words, it’s not nature that contains the evil that the individualist must overcome. It’s people. (As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.” Or perhaps, as one wag pointed out, “Hell is other Frenchmen.”)
One of my goals at Natural Stories is to explore what makes stories feel natural. As a writer, I often focus on structure: the way the beginning of a story should ideally set up a surprising-but-inevitable conclusion. Of course character plays a role, and dialogue and place and philosophy and theme. But for those of us who choose a theme of the natural world, the question is whether that theme is sufficient to make a story feel natural. And if not, how do we convince other nature writers (or editors, or readers) to focus on all the other criteria?
Maybe the way to answer that question is with the 1996 movie Last Man Standing, where Bruce Willis arrives in a gangster-laden town and sets two groups of warring bootleggers off against each other. Roger Ebert called it a “sad, lonely movie” with unhappy characters, absurd macho posturing, and a downbeat ending. But I recall weirdly liking it, feeling that it had some depth. Maybe because, as I later learned, it’s a credited remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai masterpiece Yojimbo.
The films have a complicated legal backstory. Kurosawa’s production company had previously sued director Sergio Leone, saying that his 1964 A Fistful of Dollars plagiarized Yojimbo. To avoid that quagmire, Last Man Standing director Walter Hill refused to make a Western. He toyed with science fiction but eventually decided that the Americanized Yojimbo should be a gangster movie. He set it in 1930s Texas, in an imaginary city that had sprung out of a desolate frontier.
Which means that it was, effectively, Red Harvest. Willis is the cowboy-detective in the brutal new city. Some critics believe that Kurosawa had plagiarized Hammett, and the writer’s estate never sued. Leone tried to argue that they’d all basically plagiarized a deeper, innately human story. The lone figure, the stranger in town, trying to find an appropriate moral survival strategy by setting others’ evil intentions against each other rather than himself.
The format doesn’t matter: Western, gangster, samurai, sci-fi. The location doesn’t matter: Montana, Italy, Texas, Japan. Nature’s elements don’t matter: untrammeled wilderness, Monument Valley, an ugly notch, a dusty plain, an ugly city.
It’s still a natural story.
Discussion:
I wrote about Hammett’s Montana for Montana Quarterly. It relied on Nathan Ward’s very good book The Lost Detective. The Last Man Standing backstory has been told many times; here’s a good version. Although Parker’s thesis is available only on microfilm, here is Severson’s.
One of my biggest college regrets is that as a sophomore I didn’t take Jim Shepard’s course “Westerns and Film Noir” and then it was never offered again. I’ve been thinking about the comparisons ever since.
In the comments, I’d love to hear pushback on any of these theories: that Westerns and film noir are the same genre, that Hammett (or Charlie Siringo?) was the key, or that they don’t need wilderness to succeed.
So, if people are part of nature, human creativity (including telling or writing stories) is necessarily a natural phenomenom. But should we ask more of a "natural story?" Should it tell us something about nature or at least about the human relationship with nature? Should the theme be somehow set in concert with or in opposition to nature?
When I think back to the Westerns of my childhood (many of which I have watched again as an adult) it seems to me that nature, even the spectaculat scenery, was no more than a backdrop to the human drama. It had no role. Some Western novels are a bit better. Louis L'Amour scatters some commentary on the natural world (often, though not always, as a threat) into his better books and Zane Grey loved sunsets. But where is nature in the grandaddy of them all, The Virginian?
A friend told me in, 1971 I guess, that you couldn't really understand life in Wyoming without reading The Virginian. And she was right, at least at the time. LIfe in Wyoming these days makes less sense than it did then. But what role does nature play in that story? As a retreat for the hero and Molly towards the end, mabye? Just before we learn that he is seldom in the saddle anymore because he's too busy making business deals, including for his coal mine?
I am not going down the rabbit hole of how these films and books depict the indigenous. At least not today.
But I wonder about Westerns (and in this I include the Star Wars stories perhaps most of all, as well as the detective stories John writes about) as natural stories. I guess it depends on the definition. Human artifacts are, by definition (for me at least) natural. So if that's all there is to it, sure. But is the lone hero fighting evil a story that reflects (much less respects) natural processes?
I am pretty sure that individualism isn't intrinsic to human nature, that it is taught and learned in certain cultures because it serves certain interests. That's too simple, I know, but I am trying to be provocative here, not comprehensive.
And what about "evil?" Is that really wired in? Are we doomed to be binary? Surely not? So how does the tale of the lonely guy (actually its not always a guy, there's Princess Leia and KInsey Milhone) struggling against those he opposes (who may well think of him as evil) qualify as "natural?"
I was going to say something about the TV series Kung Fu, but will hold back in hopes that there is a dialogue here. A final provocation for the literati. While I admit to a weakness for Louis L'Amour stories that goes back to my teenage years (when a Western cost 75 cents), my favorite novel about the frontier West is David Wagoner's The Road to Many a Wonder, which everyone who has not is hereby instructed to read. Is it a Western? Probably not. Is it a natural story, oh yes.
Helena’s Myrna Loy, no less. Part of the mythology of the West is that somehow “rural” folk are more different than alike in relation to “urban” folk. And, increasingly, it’s getting hard to define “rural.”