192
PARTISAN REVIEW
there
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no point in being "against" these things: they belong to his
world.
Very often this woman is from the East and her failure to under–
stand represents a clash of cultures. In the American mind, refinement,
virtue, civilization, Christianity itself, are seen as feminine, and there–
fore women are often portrayed as possessing some kind of deeper wis–
dom, while the men, for all their apparent self-assurance, are funda–
mentally childish. But the West, lacking the graces of civilization, is the
place "where men are men"; in Western movies, men have the deeper
wisdom and the women are children. Those women in the Western
movies who share the hero's understanding of life are prostitutes (or, as
they are usually presented, bar-room entertainers) -women, that is, who
have come to understand in the most practical way how love can be
an irrelevance, and therefore "fallen" women. The gangster, too, asso–
ciates with prostitutes, but for
him
the important things about a prosti–
tute are her passive availability and her costliness: she is part of his
winnings. In Western movies, the important thing about a prostitute is
her quasi-masculine independence: nobody owns her, nothing has to be
explained to her, and she is not, like a virtuous woman, a "value" that
demands to be protected. When the Westerner leaves the prostitute for
a virtuous woman-for love-he is in fact forsaking a way of life,
though the point of the choice is often obscured by having the prostitute
killed by getting into the line of fire .
The Westerner is
par excellence
a man of leisure. Even when he
wears the badge of a marshal or, more rarely, owns a ranch, he appears
to be unemployed. We see
him
standing at a bar, or playing poker–
a game which expresses perfectly his talent for remaining relaxed in the
midst of tension---or perhaps camping out on the plains on some extra–
ordinary errand.
If
he does own a ranch, it is in the background; we
are not actually aware that he owns anything except his horse, his guns,
and the one worn suit of clothing which is likely to remain unchanged
all through the movie.
It
comes as a surprise
to
see
him
take money
from his pocket or an extra shirt from his saddle-bags.
As
a rule we do
not even know where he sleeps at night and don't think of asking. Yet
it never occurs to us that he is a poor man; there is no poverty in
Western movies, and really no wealth either: those great cattle domains
and shipments of gold which figure so largely in the plots are moral
and not material quantities, not the objects of contention but only its
occasion. Possessions too are irrelevant.
Employment of some kind-usually unproductive-is always open
to the Westerner, but when he accepts it, it is not because he needs to
make a living, much less from any idea of "getting ahead." Where
