The Westerns

I am thinking for some reason about movies that are the essential summation of the uniquely American myth of the Old West and our own history. It seems to me you have three, in no particular order: The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Not that there are not other great Westerns. It's just that these seem to sum up the whole genre just right.

All three exhibit the theme that the effort to carve out a country on this continent demanded a particular American character type, the rugged, honest, individual, who was the only one tough enough to do what needed to be done to bring law and civilization to the wilderness of the West. In certain respects, this theme critiques an unacknowledged gap in one component of our national intellectual history, that of the English political philosopher Hobbes, who famously opined that government is instituted to elevate and protect people from the State of Nature, where life is "nasty, brutish and short." However, before government, it is necessary that there be rare individuals with the guts and determination to tame the State of Nature on behalf of us all.

Or, as Liberty Valance makes plain, before Ransom Stoddard could find his place in the Old West, there had to be a Tom Doniphon.

The power of the American myth of the Old West comes from the fact that the Great Wilderness did not simply represent Hobbes primeval State of Nature, it was literally a State of Nature, and it was in fact tamed by real life individuals in real historical time. Founding myths are in the usual run of things idealized Perfections that challenge a people on to unreachable heights. In America this process has been reversed: our gritty historical reality is the ideal that has pulled our myth-makers in Hollywood to try to create adequate depictions of the Olympian heights of character, fortitude and bravery exhibited by our ancestors.

In many great Westerns, Hollywood achieved this. The three I list in my opinion are the creme de la creme.