"Representations of the Villain in Westerns have altered to meet the values of a changing society. Discuss with reference to The Searchers (1956) and Peacemakers (2000 )."

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“Representations of the Villain in Westerns have altered to meet the values of a changing society.  Discuss with reference to The Searchers (1956) and Peacemakers (2000 ).”

Over time audience’s change and as a result of these changes film has altered, to reflect and appeal to the society.  Audiences like genre because it plays on their expectations and allows them to predict and therefore be at ease with what they are viewing.  The altering of key areas in the Western has allowed films to meet the needs of each new audience, so therefore pieces do not become static and formulaic; each reflects the views of the producers and society.  The villain here is as important as the hero at illustrating society’s values.

In order for narrative to be entertaining the introduction of a hero versus villain is necessary.  Villains are primarily important because they allow the audience to experience a vicarious thrill releasing them from their morals, cultural boundaries and allowing for moral escapism – so that we experience life through characters which have abandoned their own moral boundaries.  By watching the piece audiences engage with the characters and enjoy being a voyeur to the journey which they partake in.  A countercultural reading of a piece of media such as this is referred to by Stuart Hall as negotiated, as unless you, yourself are a villain you would never be able to fully understand the piece.  Altman also refers to this countercultural experience as abandonment from moral and legal regulations, so that an audience follows the plot and in some circumstances rather than identify with the so called ‘good guy’ can instead temporarily suspend their own morals to associate with a darker character.  This way the audience does not feel uneasy about what they are watching and can still enjoy the film as the pleasure lies in the twists and turns of the resolution.  How far audiences feel a need to experience this effect is dependent on what they experience in their ‘real’ world,  and it is these conditions which change this altering the viewing demands of audiences and filmmakers.

A villain usually represents the disequilibrium stage of Todrov’s narrative structure, which is the disruption allowing the narrative to progress, and within this characters (good guys) progress by over-coming the disruption, and restoring the sense of equilibrium by the end of the text.  Another theory about narrative is the morphology of the folk tale by Propp: this theory can also be adapted to film texts because as the years have passed the art of story telling or folk tale has progressed into film making.  So that old tales such as Westerns are made visual tales as the majority are based on historical events.  The theory explains how each character can be classified into clearly defined roles and functions based on their actions i.e. the hero seeks something and the villain is simply there to oppose the hero during the stages of complication, transference and struggle stages.

Within the Western villains are also necessary to show binary opposition, this is because the make up tends to rely on conflicts such as law and order versus anarchy and civilisation versus the wild, examples of films which show this kind of behaviour include High Noon where there is one good guy upholding the law throughout, and as with most pieces law and order prevail.  This film also illustrates and allegorical villain that contemporary viewers would have spotted.  His lone stand against bullies is a metaphor for the McCarthyism of the time.

The Western villain or group who represent the opposition has seen a drastic shift over the past 100 years, and this has had a lot to do with a changing society.  Early film productions, especially before the late 1950’s, within the genre cast Native Americans as almost extras in films, and hardly ever with real acting roles; These ‘Indians’ were shown stereotypically as savages, who went around burning homesteads, raping women and kidnapping their children, film makers who produced these westerns were doing so to meet expectations of a ignorant white society, who has disregard for other cultures.

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The unfortunate images of Indians in pre-1960s westerns were virtually, universally negative.  Indians in film did really stupid things, in such classics as Stagecoach; they rode right up next to the coach which contained John Wayne and his rifle. They jumped from their ponies to the wagon’s team, usually causing the harness to come loose and the wagon to fly off a convenient cliff, just after the hero helped the heroine to jump off, all of these images fit right in with the mid-twentieth century ideal of the new version of Manifest Destiny. White men reigned supreme in the movies ...

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