Men, guns and phalluses: how the 'western' became the garden of delights of masculinity

The gender of manhood par excellence has also been the canvas on which to reflect all the types of men that exist and all the relationships that can be established between them, in an increasingly free and explicit way in recent years

El País

By Weldon Penderton

August 7, 2024

Back in the twentieth century they showed a lot of movies on television. Some were westerns, better known as western movies, and were labeled as male consumer products. Films by men and for men, like almost all historical or adventure films, where women had a domestic or romantic function reserved in the background. The protagonist was reserved for the heroes. Between the hero and the woman was the villain, often of border masculinity, also at the service of the protagonist. The vicissitudes of all of them took place in a dangerous territory in the process of civilization inhabited by the Indians, who used to represent the function of the monster.

This is a rather condescending look at a genre that, with more or less freedom to be explicit, has always managed to reflect in depth. However, prejudice is still in force in some way, while the genre evolves with the times and maintains an iron health.

It is curious that a genre located in such a specific way in time and space, the foundational scenario of the United States of America, has exceeded its own limits in such an excessive way. It's not that the western has been mixed with so many genres that the meaning of the term has disintegrated, it's that westerns are shot and written all over the world: spaghetti and chorizo westerns are, respectively, western films made by Italians and Spaniards, and I'll bet my skin that there are also a good handful of curry westerns out there. In Spain, the novels of Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, Juan Gallardo Muñoz or Francisco Caudet Yarza were written by the thousands and were mostly read.

Only in recent years have On the Disappeared Coast (Francisco Serrano), Basilisco, The Spider and Monster Killer (Jon Bilbao), Sheriff Goodman vs. Pinhead (Takeshi García-Ashirogi), Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar), The Wasteland (Carla Berrocal) or the collection of paperback novels Estefanía Project, which already has more than a dozen titles, seen the light. All chorizo westerns. Beyond the undisputed cultural colonizing power of the United States, the West seems to have transcended the category of mythological space that any earthling handles in his personal imagination. Naturally, such an exuberant genre has also transcended its own rules and prejudices, snatching the point of view from the white man to pay attention, either explicitly or clandestinely, to the conflicts of women, natives and even "the other white man", that is, villains and people with complicated sexuality, who are often confused. But let's start at the beginning.

Dorothy M. Johnson (1905-1984), the great lady of the western, was a writer who dedicated her work to distributing the limelight equally among all the inhabitants of the territory. In his stories, women, natives and even native women are as protagonists as the white man. His chronicles and stories are chillingly good, exciting, morally complex. When asked what a woman doing writing westerns, she said that the inclination to write about the border was not a skill linked to sex like hair on the chest. And when she herself wondered if a western could be starred by a man who was not brave or knew how to shoot, she wrote The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance (1953), which gives us the measure of both his talent and his importance. Isn't Johnson's experiment, that of putting the spotlight on the coward, a reflection on masculinities?

It is easier to explain through the film made by John Ford, one of the masters of the western (Irish, curiously), based on Johnson's story. Two very different men, John Wayne and James Stewart. You only have to look at them: hard masculinity and soft masculinity, if I may be allowed the image. Johnson starts with the classic western hero, Wayne and his monolithic masculinity, with his hip gun as a symbol of everything, his virile sobriety that never takes off his boots and his impenetrable face, and adds a novel masculinity with Stewart's body and his trembling hands that do not adapt to the weapon. He also dares to question the official account of events, to suggest that history may not be as it has been told, and to warn of the dangers of relying on appearances when it comes to masculinity.

The classic, gentrifying western often tried to whitewash the origins of a nation built on genocide so recently (at least on the screens, not so much on the pages). Growing up in a place where women are scarce, it also ended up becoming, in spite of itself, a reflection on what it means to be a man, as happens in the prison, sailor or gangster genre. In Gangsters queers: eccentricity and fury in film noir (Juan Dos Ramos and Alex Tarazón, 2022) it is explained how the habitual consumer of film noir has traditionally been unable to see the obvious indications of homosexuality among the overwhelming presence of extravagant masculinity so prevalent in the genre. Often this eccentricity was nothing more than a way of camouflaging homosexuality. The same has probably happened with the western, a direct precursor of gangster cinema. It was something difficult to avoid in a world in which men spend the day measuring their dueling phallic symbols.

As a reaction to the canonical western and its attachment to the official account of the events, the spaghetti western emerges, which incorporates the dirt and freedom of the lack of means to witness all the disgusting things that happen on the border. Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone (Italians) made five westerns together that are legends. From the nameless character of Clint Eastwood, who starts from John Wayne himself to point out by contrast the entire gallery of new men, he traces a journey that becomes less and less playful and more melancholic, a western that finds the epic more in pettiness than in greatness, a feast of vultures, that licks its wounds for the wasted opportunity when it is already evident that the New World will make exactly the same mistakes as old Europe. Leone and Morricone revolutionized the West through music, which expanded on the landscapes of Almeria, Granada and Burgos, and from rhythm and close-up, which turned faces into landscapes. Faces that challenge each other, scorched by the sun, chewing dirt with half-closed eyes. Not a trace of heroes: convicts, ruffians, scoundrels, hustlers, gunmen, bandits, chieftains, bounty hunters, miners, settlers, missionaries, deserters, desperados, soldiers who have lost faith, good, ugly and bad, a formidable collection of rascals covered in filth that constitutes a veritable bestiary of masculinities. Many of these ruffians who put their faces on were Spanish, and there is even an Almerian with the face of Henry Fonda who is just the same age as the film Until His Time Came (1968).

But Leone's case is not representative of spaghetti, which is usually a low-budget cinema determined to curl the curl. We already know that the relationship between the presupposition and the grotesque is inversely proportional, and how fertile the grotesque soil is when it comes to embodying projections of the subconscious and representing what cannot be said. In Cursed Gold (Giulio Questi, 1967), a band of outlaws who are friends of gold and handsome boys indulge every night in a joint drunken party. Naturally, we cannot see the heart of the party, but the dawn, with the bodies piled up on the stage, reminiscent of The Fall of the Gods (Luchino Vistonti, 1969), could not be more eloquent. In Los Marcados (Alberto Mariscal, 1971), a Mexican western, the villains outside the law are two homosexuals who are involved, are not effeminate and, as if that were not enough, they are father and son. Like extravagance, it is a classic resource to embody deviants in the role of villains so that the exemplary punishment that is invariably applied to them softens the heart of censorship. In Requiescant (Carlo Lizzani, 1967), where Pasolini himself appears playing a revolutionary priest, the draculian cacique is in love with the most handsome and blondest gunslinger in the place. In Wages to Kill (Sergio Corbucci, 1968), Franco Nero, the hero with full lips, decides to humiliate an evil Jack Palance by stripping him naked in the middle of the bullring and painting his face as a clown. Palance, by the way, is in admirable physical shape. The archetype of Ringo, the gunslinger angel face, whose beauty makes that of the women around him pale in comparison, is a constant in spaghetti, probably propitiated by the need to take advantage of the excess of heartthrobs in Italian cinema. Gian Maria Volonté, Giuliano Gemma or Carlo Palmucci are good examples. And even Sancho Gracia appeared from time to time in the desert of Tabernas.

But rascals, miserable people, villains, dandies, lettuce and puppets aside, the explicit presence of homosexuality, without alibis, begins to be normalized in the genre. Some of the most popular examples, despite being considered westerns, are already developed in the twentieth century. This is the case of The Power of the Dog (a novel by Thomas Savage in 1967, a film by Jane Campion, Australian, in 2021), where the protagonists are already in a car even though they live on a ranch and, more shamelessly, Brokeback Mountain (story by Annie Proulx in 1997, film by Ang Lee, Taiwanese, in 2005), whose action is later than that of Grease or Dirty Dancing. The first is the American version of Rebecca, but changing Mrs. Danvers for a bachelor, asexual, maniacal and cruel rancher. The second is actually a classic story of faggots in the closet. Okay, the boys are cowboys, so their stories will be westerns. The first one was quite crepuscular, let's say the second one was postwestern. Cases such as Midnight Cowboy (1969) or Dallas Buyers Club (2013) are excluded from the western category because they take place in urban environments. As Willie Nelson sang and Orville Peck, the singer of the mask, sings now, jeans often make a splash of each other without anyone noticing.

Books have been much more daring than cinema, to be honest. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991) is a novel written by Tom Spambauer, a homosexual man who grew up on his parents' farm, next to an Indian reservation, but who emigrated to New York in time to face the entire AIDS crisis. It's one of those novels that, if you're lucky enough to stumble upon it in adolescence, leaves you in turmoil. It tells the story of an Indian raised in a brothel in Idaho in the middle of the gold rush. Naturally, he is dedicated to the oldest trade in the world. The novel has a tremendous erotic charge and tells, among many other things, that in the West no one was surprised to arrive at a brothel and find an Indian working there. She also falls in love with her father (and there are already two cases of incest). Surprisingly, no one has dared to make it into a film, although Pedro Almodóvar has expressed his intention to do so on several occasions. He would recently get rid of the thorn with Strange Way of Life (2023), a very brief and referential domestic western that brings together several of the most recurrent ingredients of his filmography, with an arachnidly female rancher and a tribute to Grupo Salvaje (1969) that does the pirouette by introducing a trigger in the first carnal encounter between the two lovers. If we remember the gun and the duel as symbols, we must recognize that never was a trigger used in a more suitable way. The film also takes the opportunity to reflect on masculinities by making use of the classic homosexual positions, active and passive, rigid masculinity and flexible masculinity once again

Cormac McCarthy puts the point of view in human eyes that witness in amazement the ineffable grandeur of the territory and its atmosphere. His novels are probably the most cosmic novels of the West, and they demonstrate the insignificance of people in a lush world that can kill you at any moment of cold, thirst, sun, a shot, a stone, a lightning strike or a stendhalazo. War, blood and corpses are part of the landscape, just like a storm, a bush or a vermin. The territory remains atrociously beautiful after the annihilation of the great herds of buffalo or the annihilation of people. In Meridiano de sangre (1985) he underlines this insignificance of the human being by introducing a character hyperaware of it. Judge Holden, an albino without a single hair on his body, an enlightened man connected to the violent beauty of the world, shows behaviors that could be described as homosexual, yes, always atrocious, impassive in the face of suffering and in a scenario where the collapse of ethical codes typical of times of war reigns. Holden is one of the most unforgettable characters that the books have revealed to us, a kind of man-eating god, related to Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen (Alan Moore & David Gibbons, 1986). Ridley Scott pursued the film adaptation for years, but the project never went ahead. At the moment, it seems that a film by two white men, one Australian and the other openly gay according to Wikipedia (John Hillcoat and John Logan), is in pre-production.

In Days Without End (2016), Sebastian Barry, another Irishman, also makes use of the atrocious beauty of the territory to locate the story of two soldiers of the Civil War who spontaneously become married and travel the country together, sometimes posing as a heterosexual couple. They invent cross-dressing in a world where no one seems prepared to imagine a man being hidden inside a woman's dress. A much more anthropocentric view than McCarthy's, more biblical.

The tandem of Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond (director and writer respectively) surprised us in 2010 with Meek's Shortcut, a western without shots in which the territory allied with the psyche of the settlers is enough and more than enough to crush them and in which Meek seemed to once again implement the archetype of the lone ranger, always suspicious, more for being a bachelor than for being a loner. They returned to the fray with First cow (2019), a story of friendship between two men who don't shoot, a cook and a fugitive. The novel (The half-life, 2004) also told the story of a second friendship, this time between two women, in the same place but a hundred years later. Friendship, psychogeography and a sense of wonder is the specialty of this couple determined to reflect on how close in time the events of the western are.

The author of this text has little information to offer you regarding how Native Americans decode this whole matter of being a man. The lists offered by a hasty investigation are always headed by Sherman Alexie (a Spokane married to a Dakota), with several works translated into Spanish. Navarre Scott Momaday, a native of the Kiowa, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 with his first novel, The House Made of Dawn. The Wikipedia category Native American women novelists contains only 12 names. The question of virility in indigenous cultures is probably not so exotic. One only has to take a look at the importance of rites of passage (ceremonies that turn boys into men), how bardaxes or people who were sexually difficult to classify were automatically considered sacred beings or the relationship of the Indian proman with manes, headdresses, war paintings and beads in general, which, on reflection, It is not so different from the military finery of the white man, the plumage of the male peacock or the pistol on his hip, the boots with his good spur, the scarf around his neck, the sheriff's star and the gunslinger's hat. Of John Wayne and of the entire garden of delights of masculinities that the western has deployed behind him for our enjoyment and reflection.

[Weldon Penderton is the author, together with Albert Kadmon, of the pulp and homosexual western The Ballad of the Golden Hand, published by Niños Gratis.]