MOVIE CHRONICLE
203
into a higher fonn of drama. But it cannot supply the values we seek
in the Western.
Those values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun
on his thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and
even that he "believes in violence." But the drama is one of self-restraint:
the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to
its special laws, or else it is valueless. There is little cruelty in Western
movies, and little sentimentality; our eyes are not focused on the suffer–
ings of the defeated but on the deportment of the hero. Really, it is
not violence at all which is the "point" of the Western movie, but a
certain image of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in
violence. Watch a child with his toy guns and you will see: what most
interests him is not (as we so much fear) the fantasy of hurting others,
but to work out how a man might look when he shoots or is shot. A
hero is one who looks like a hero.
Whatever the limitations of such an idea in experience, it has al–
ways been valid in art, and has a special validity in an
art
where ap–
pearances are everything. The Western hero is necessarily an archaic
figure; we do not really believe in
him
and would not have him step
out of his rigidly conventionalized background. But his archaicism does
not take away from his power; on the contrary, it adds to it by keeping
him just a little beyond the reach both of common sense and of abso–
lutized emotion, the two usual impulses of our art. And he has, after
all,
his
own kind of relevance. He is there to remind us of the possibility
of style in an age which has put on itself the burden of pretending that
style has no meaning, and, in the midst of our anxieties over the prob–
lem of violence, to suggest that even in killing or being killed we are
not freed from the necessity of establishing satisfactory modes of be–
havior. Above all, the movies in which the Westerner plays out his role
preserve for us the pleasures of a complete and self-contained drama–
and one which still effortlessly crosses the boundaries which divide our
culture--in a time when other, more consciously serious art forms are
increasingly complex, uncertain, and ill-defined.
