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.

Arizona’s Monument Valley was one of John Ford’s favorite Western settings. I’m no cinematographer, but in the moment of my 2020 visit, the fog made it feel even more naturally profound (John Clayton photo).

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 20^th 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.

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest provides the link between cowboys and detectives (Wikimedia photo)

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.