Western & Gangster Genres

Western & Gangster Genres: An Analysis of Setting and Landscape

Both American Western and Gangster genres have typically associations with social and historical aspects of America. To provide the traditional and thematic structure of the genres, Hollywood had to create the formal setting for both genres including the ambiguous cluster of meanings such as wilderness versus civilization or freedom versus entrapment. Not surprisingly, both genres have similarities and differences in terms of using setting and landscape.

According to Jim Kitses' article, the representation of landscape and frontier in Western movies celebrates purity, freedom, and pragmatism. The openness of the landscape considerably defines the ambivalence of at once beneficent and threatening horizons, but it is still a place for the dream of primitive individualism.

For instance, in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is not able to stay with civilization at the end, so he goes back to the wilderness where he belongs. In other words, the frontier setting is a symbolic metaphor from which the fundamental moral antithesis between man and nature collides. However, the frontier is a place where civilization had to meet with savagery. Its geography is also very important in representing the social and historical aspects of American civilization in the nineteenth century. In Westerns, wilderness is a demonic wasteland in which myth or hero can quest for his identity as a god-like figure, which is invulnerable and superior both to civilization and its environment. Although it is a place for the hero's death and resurrection, it is also a place for First Nations (Called Indians in films) and antiheroes, who pose a threat to the community's stability. Therefore, its openness and inhospitality to human life, and paradoxically its splendor and beauty, surrounded the isolated society or community that is connected to the rest of the world by a railroad or a stagecoach. As a part of the setting, the church sometimes embodies the order that civilization brings to the wilderness such as in the scene in My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946).

Wilderness and Frontier are the only places for Myth to deal with difficult situations and gain his freedom. But for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it to personify it.
According to Robert Warshow's article, in gangster films, the space of the city is presented as a trap more than a place of freedom such as in the final scenes in The Public Enemy (William Wellman,1931), in which Tom Powers and Matt Doyle leave the hideout, or the scene in the hospital where Tom comes to some form of repentance before being delivered home by the Burn's mob wrapped in bandages. Then, the gangs' freedom of movement in this setting is emphasized by their control of spaces such as nightclubs and speakeasies. In the classic gangster film, the control of physical space(the city) and battles for control depend on how the gangster controls the screen. In other words, power is represented in terms of controlling the screen, such as in the final scene in Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) when Toni Camonte dies because he is no longer able to control his movement(entrapped in the apartment) and territory.

On the other hand, the representations of the society and civilization in terms of the setting in both genres are metaphorically threatening and ambiguous, because both heroes are unable to remain restricted indoors, and the wilderness or street is the paradigmatic place of movement, change and liberation from the claustrophobia imposed by community and social order. For both heroes, saloons, bars, and nightclubs are the only places to represent their image to create a place for the self in society. Ultimately, the final scenes in both genres are almost the same, because the heroes, who are unable to adjust to the laws and rules imposed by the community, have to be punished by leaving the civilization and going back to the wilderness or being killed at the end in a trap.

However, the evolution of genres in film history is itself an important aspect in helping us to understand how the elements like settings can be changed to visualize the abstract metaphors dominating the text. In fact, in new gangster films, such as Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990), the city or modern society, instead of being a trap is a nest, and control of space becomes less important rather than the gang's code of survival against economic and political changes.

Kitses, Jim. The Western: Ideology and Archetype, Focus on the Western, Page:64-72.

Warshow, Robert. The Gangster Tragic Hero, The Immediate Experience. Page: 127-133.

Warshaw, Robert The Public Enemy: Modernity, Space, and Masculinity, Modernity and the Classic Gangster Film Page: 17-24.


By: Morad Sadeghi