tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/westerns-48274/articlesWesterns – The Conversation2024-02-21T13:04:40Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2239142024-02-21T13:04:40Z2024-02-21T13:04:40ZThe Settlers flips the western genre to explore cinema’s role in colonial crimes<p>How can filmmakers depict genocidal violence in ways that audiences can both comprehend and bear to watch? Bar the extensive and still-growing number of films about the Holocaust (with recent releases including <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-one-life-gets-wrong-about-nicholas-winton-and-the-kindertransport-story-220965">One Life</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-zone-of-interest-new-holocaust-film-powerfully-lays-bare-the-mechanisms-of-genocide-222017">The Zone of Interest</a> and Occupied City), mainstream cinema has found this challenge daunting. </p>
<p>The challenge only becomes more urgent as contemporary awareness of the enormity of the murderous ethnic cleansing that underpinned European colonialism grows. Such <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674929777">“unmasterable pasts”</a> remain charged and contested political terrain within national mythologies of origin and nation building. </p>
<p>As director Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s ambitious and disturbing debut film, The Settlers, reminds us, movies have themselves often played a crucial role in helping establish and disseminate such mythologies. </p>
<p>The early 1970s cycle of “Vietnam westerns” such as Little Big Man (1970) and Soldier Blue (1970), challenged these mythologies and inverted the frontier narratives of the classic Hollywood western. These movies placed Native Americans, the principal victims of <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/age-of-jackson/a/manifest-destiny#:%7E:text=Manifest%20Destiny%20was%20the%20idea,or%20destroy%20the%20native%20population.">“manifest destiny”</a> (the idea that white Americans had a divine right to settle the continent), at their centre and presented US cavalrymen as mass murderers. For counterculture youth audiences, the analogy between historical settler violence and contemporary US aggression overseas was unmistakable. </p>
<h2>The Settlers</h2>
<p>There are echoes of the western in The Settlers. The film depicts, with unremitting grimness, the genocide of the indigenous <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/03/chile-indigenous-selknam-not-extinct-constitution">Selk’nam people</a> of Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, at the turn of the 20th century. The Spanish landowning elite commissioned the violence, with the collusion of the nascent Chilean state. They saw the native population merely as a hindrance to their sheep-rearing empires. </p>
<p>Spectacular shots of the three horsemen dispatched on this bloody mission, led by Scottish ex-army man and self-styled “Lieutenant” McClellan (Mark Stanley), call to mind countless cinematic odysseys as they travel across the prairies and peaks of the American west. Simone d’Arcangelo’s impressive cinematography avoids pictorialism, rendering the archipelago’s awesome, savagely beautiful grasslands and mountains in muted, sombre hues.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for The Settlers.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The characters traversing Monument Valley in Wagonmaster (1950) or The Searchers (1955) were themselves raised to epic stature by their sublime surroundings. Whereas the protagonists of The Settlers seem to contaminate their pristine environment with their moral squalor. This is underlined by including the veteran “Indian fighter” Bill (Benjamin Westfall) in the party. His unrelenting, vicious white supremacy borders on caricature. </p>
<p>McClennan’s <a href="http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/%7Ethinred/collection/lg2.htm">“thin red line”</a> trooper’s tunic signposts another revision of the western genre. It recalls the upstanding imperialist chaps of old-school cinematic colonial fantasies, like Stanley Baker in Zulu (1964) or Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Unlike them, however, the corrupt, ruthless McClennan is as debased and degraded as his uniform is tattered and stained. He is as murderous and brutal as his local, anything but fond, nickname “The Red Pig” suggests. </p>
<p>A surreal, violent encounter with another ragged British cast-off, the deranged Colonel Martin (Sam Spruell), only confirms the film’s depiction of the entire imperialist “mission” as irredeemably depraved.</p>
<h2>Horror and complicity</h2>
<p>Felipe Gálvez Haberle already has a challenge on his hands, persuading audiences to endure his film’s unbroken succession of killings accompanied by, in one almost unwatchable sequence, sexual violence. But it’s exacerbated further by the perhaps questionable decision to place the dramatic focus almost entirely on the perpetrators, rather than the victims.</p>
<p>Bar a single cutaway shot revealing a group immediately before their slaughter and a small, though significant, female speaking part, the indigenous Salk’nam are barely seen other than as bloodied corpses. The closest to an empathic character is the increasingly appalled, yet inescapably complicit, mestizo sharp-shooter Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who completes the roving trio.</p>
<p>It becomes clear how crucial Segundo’s spectatorship is to the film in the daring and unexpected final act. Here the film leaps forward seven years. It moves straight from the primal, violent scenes on the pampas to the hushed refinement of a palatial townhouse. A tense meeting ensues between a semi-retired and eminent rancher named Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) and an urbane Chilean government official (Marcelo Alonso). The official is ostensibly investigating the now embarrassing bloody excesses of the recent past.</p>
<p>The trail leads him back to Segundo, the expedition’s sole survivor, nursing his traumatic memories and guilt in an isolated hut at the ocean’s edge.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the government’s real agenda is to whitewash, rather than redress, Menendez’s scandalous but hugely profitable crimes and to reincorporate indigenous trauma into the national narrative. This is symbolically accomplished in the film’s unsettling final moments. Segundo and his Selk’nam wife Kiepja (Mishell Guaňa) are made to dress in European costumes and drink tea, for the benefit of the official’s movie crew. </p>
<p>Kiepja’s gazes resistantly back at the camera. Her expression shows her refusal to consent to the charade of a happy Europeanised nation, challenging the crew’s attempt to create propaganda. But it also invites our own reflection on the role movies, images and ideology have played, and continue to play, in framing and repressing traumatic memory.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As The Settlers reminds us, films have often played a crucial role in helping establish and disseminate colonial mythologies.Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2144272023-09-28T08:50:49Z2023-09-28T08:50:49ZStrange Way of Life review: Pedro Almodóvar’s 30-minute queer western is a tender miniature<p><em>Warning: this article contains spoilers for Strange Way of Life.</em></p>
<p>Every genre film is engaged – as self-aware genre pastiches like the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175142/">Scary Movie</a> (2000) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117571/">Scream</a> (1996) franchises cannily acknowledge – in a conversation with its predecessors. The western, the longest-lived of all major genres, has been commenting on and reworking its own traditions <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrbd3">since the silent era</a>. Director and screenwriter <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pedro-Almodovar">Pedro Almodóvar’s</a> new <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/global/pedro-almodovar-gay-western-strange-way-of-life-italy-latin-america-mubi-1235580205/">self-styled</a> “queer western”, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13055264/">Strange Way of Life</a>, is no exception. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mvoiuRAYjqU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Strange Way of Life.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Across its brief 30-minute runtime, Almodóvar reworks classical genre motifs – a stranger riding into town, ageing fellow outlaws now on opposite sides of the law, a desert pursuit and a Mexican standoff. But he does this in the novel context (for the western) of a love story between former gunslingers. Jake (Ethan Hawke) is now installed as sheriff of a small desert town, and Silva (Pedro Pascal) is his sometime fellow outlaw, friend – and lover.</p>
<p>Even after the breakthrough of Ang Lee’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/">Brokeback Mountain</a> (2005) – a project <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/pedro-almodovar-brokeback-mountain-director-b2111831.html">Almodóvar turned down</a>, to his subsequent regret – gay characters in westerns remain rare. Sixties underground or off-Hollywood films like Andy Warhol’s parody <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063236/">Lonesome Cowboys</a> (1966) and the psychedelic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068011/">Zachariah</a> (1971) fleetingly brought a queer west onscreen. But from the 1980s onwards, as the western itself became a heritage genre in the hands of conservative custodians such as Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, the celluloid closet door was firmly slammed shut again.</p>
<h2>Almodóvar and Peckinpah</h2>
<p>Even so – and notwithstanding Almodóvar’s status as contemporary world cinema’s most prominent gay filmmaker – depictions of gay sexuality aren’t the most notably revisionist aspects of Strange Way of Life. </p>
<p>A flashback to the start of Jake and Silva’s romance shows the young bucks embracing one another in feverish, delighted passion. They quickly ignore their female companions, three Mexican prostitutes. The women show no outrage, judgment or even surprise at the men’s unabashed display – just a resigned recognition that they’ve lost this gig. The film depicts male same-sex desire as a difficult, but far from unimaginable, aspect of western life.</p>
<p>In any event, the Jake and Silva of Strange Way of Life’s principal action are not these young (and beautiful) hotshots, but two grizzled, lonely men in late middle-age, contemplating the missteps of their past and the shrinking path ahead.</p>
<p>This helps explain why the surprising key point of reference for Almodóvar’s muted, tender miniature is the notoriously macho director and screenwriter, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sam-Peckinpah">Sam Peckinpah</a> (1925-1984) – specifically, his epic and thunderously violent masterpiece, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065214/">The Wild Bunch</a> (1969). </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Wild Bunch trailer (1969).</span></figcaption>
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<p>No other major director more consistently or deeply explored the trope of the ageing gunslinger, whose impending obsolescence symbolises the closing of the frontier itself. Strange Way of Life’s allusions to The Wild Bunch are specific and distinctive – and have nothing to do with Peckinpah’s rhapsodic, slow motion bloodbaths. </p>
<p>That lovers’ flashback in Strange Way of Life is shared across the miles separating the two men from beside their separate campfires, as Jake tracks Silva across the desert. This scene follows a near-identical pattern to a sequence in Wild Bunch involving Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his friend and partner-turned-pursuer Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). Almodóvar’s flashback also explicitly reworks another Wild Bunch scene, where two gang members indulge in a Bacchanalian near-orgy with Mexican prostitutes. </p>
<p>Peckinpah stays true to heteronormative genre conventions, using the (nameless) female sex workers simultaneously to arouse and repress homoerotic desire. But in Almodovar’s version, that desire is expressed jubilantly and carnally. </p>
<p>More importantly, while The Wild Bunch’s flashback revealed how Pike’s failings led to his friend heading up the posse that tracks the bunch relentlessly through that film, in Strange Way of Life, the shared fireside reverie between the estranged friends and lovers focuses instead on a precious, passionate memory that not only rebukes but may yet redeem their present situation. </p>
<h2>Mid-life intimacy in Strange Way of Life</h2>
<p>Arguably the most distinctive aspect of Almodóvar’s film, beyond its acknowledgment of same-sex desire, is its focus on mid-life intimacy. </p>
<p>Strange Way of Life unfolds mostly in domestic interiors – Jake’s quarters and Silva’s bedroom. Both rooms are meticulously furnished, to the point of fussiness (the film is part-funded by Yves St Laurent, with an executive producer credit for YSL lead designer Anthony Vaccaro). </p>
<p>These are very evidently lived-in private spaces – filled with mementos, tableware, carefully pressed linens and other tokens of their owners’ personalities. This marks a striking departure from the western’s typically spartan male spaces: rooming houses, gaols, mining camps.</p>
<p>The decisive action of The Wild Bunch takes place in one of those lifeless anti-domestic spaces, the cheerless hovel of a young Mexican prostitute where Pike finally acknowledges the hollowness of the values by which he has lived his life – a recognition that for him has only one outcome: wilful, bloody death.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of his own film’s only violent episode (complete with slow-motion gunplay), Almodóvar supplies a kind of gentle corrective to the patterns of intense male bonding and unspoken – or unspeakable — yearning that, in The Wild Bunch and so many other westerns, can perversely find expression only through lethal violence. </p>
<p>Having shot Jake to enable his no-good son’s escape, Silva tends his wound. At his bedside, he offers him a vision of a shared future beyond social – and genre – conventions. The film’s final line affirms the possibility of lives ending not in gunfire but in (queer) love, companionship and care.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The most distinctive aspect of Almodóvar’s film, beyond its acknowledgment of same-sex desire, is its focus on mid-life intimacy.Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1982182023-01-19T21:22:32Z2023-01-19T21:22:32ZWhat is involuntary manslaughter? A law professor explains the charge facing Alec Baldwin for ‘Rust’ shooting death<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505468/original/file-20230119-26-w9y9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=48%2C169%2C5345%2C3315&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alec Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, in late 2021 while filming a movie in New Mexico.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/PropFirearmMovieSet/373f9ec3a3014e6c985d1d165d7bca12/photo?Query=alec%20baldwin%20rust&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=63&currentItemNo=25">AP Photo/Jae C. Hong</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A prosecutor in New Mexico <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/arts/rust-shooting-charges-alec-baldwin.html">intends to charge Alec Baldwin</a> with two counts of involuntary manslaughter it was announced on Jan. 19, 2023, over the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/alec-baldwin-shooting-rust-movie.html">deadly shooting</a> on the set of the film “Rust” in 2021. The shooting occurred while Baldwin was rehearsing a scene with a gun that had been loaded with live ammunition instead of blanks. The prosecutor also intends to charge Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the <a href="https://www.careersinfilm.com/armorer/">armorer</a> responsible for <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-rust-shooting-industry-veterans-say-buck-stops-armorers-movie-n1282743">overseeing the safety of firearms</a> on the set, with two counts of involuntary manslaughter as well. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=X8tNfOsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">professor of law</a>, my job is to understand the nuance of the U.S. legal system. Involuntary manslaughter occurs when a person unintentionally, but still unlawfully, kills another person. And a prosecutor will need to show the unlawful nature of either Baldwin’s or Gutierrez-Reed’s actions to get a conviction in this case.</p>
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<span class="caption">Baldwin thought the gun was loaded with blanks, ammunition that contains powder but not a bullet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buffalo_Blanks_Mounted_Shooting_Blanks.jpg">KenAmorosano/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<h2>A reckless or negligent accident</h2>
<p>To convict someone of involuntary manslaughter, a prosecutor has to prove that the defendant <a href="https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/involuntary-manslaughter-overview.html">acted either recklessly or with criminal negligence</a>.</p>
<p>To prove someone acted recklessly, a prosecutor has to show that the defendant was aware of the risk they were creating with their actions – like a drunk driver crashing into a car and <a href="https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/crime/driver-convicted-involuntary-manslaughter-killed-baby-2-parents-jefferson-co/63-e9d29793-5187-446e-9067-96e8f29e0806">killing a baby and her parents</a>. In contrast, the charge of criminal negligence is filed when a defendant is not aware of the risk, but a reasonable person in the position of the defendant would have been aware of the risk. For example, if someone rents out an apartment without smoke detectors and there is a fire that kills the occupants, the owner of the apartment could be charged with involuntary manslaughter.</p>
<p>The question for a potential jury is whether Baldwin was guilty of either reckless or criminally negligent actions that resulted in the death of <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/halyna-hutchins-in-her-own-words/ar-AA16wWuh">Halyna Hutchins</a>, the cinematographer on the “Rust” set. </p>
<p>The prosecutor is alleging that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/arts/rust-shooting-charges-alec-baldwin.html?">Baldwin had a duty</a> to ensure that the gun and the ammunition he used were properly checked and that without doing that check himself, Baldwin should never have pointed the gun at anyone. Although that is what the prosecutor is claiming, a complicating factor is that there was another person, an on-set safety person responsible for the weapons and ammunition. </p>
<p>To convict Baldwin of manslaughter – assuming the case goes to trial – the prosecutor will have to convince a jury of two things. First, that Baldwin could not reasonably rely on Gutierrez-Reed to do her job and ensure that the gun did not have any live ammunition in it. And second, that Baldwin acted recklessly, or at least with criminal negligence, by not checking the gun and the ammunition himself before pointing the gun at the person he killed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198218/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter A. Joy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To convict Alec Baldwin of manslaughter for the on-set deadly shooting of Halyna Hutchins in 2021, prosecution will need to show that the actor was either reckless or criminally negligent.Peter A. Joy, Henry Hitchcock Professor of Law, School of Law, Washington University in St. LouisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1038792018-10-02T13:29:55Z2018-10-02T13:29:55ZTom Waits in a cowboy hat: five musicians who were born to be in Westerns<p>As well as being one of America’s greatest songwriters of the past 30 years, <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/tom-waits-9521480">Tom Waits</a>, it must be said, was made to be on screen – and I can’t escape the thought that he was born to be in the Western. He has had a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056827043/">fantastic film career</a> and has even starred in the quintessential (if not so great in my opinion) modern Western: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/19/movies/review-film-rascals-roam-the-new-west-in-cold-feet.html">Cold Feet</a>. Waits has been directed by Jim Jarmusch, Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam, Tony Scott, Robert Altman and can now add the Coen Brothers to his already incredible CV. </p>
<p>Waits plays a gold prospector in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/31/the-ballad-of-buster-scruggs-review-coen-brothers-western">The Ballad of Buster Scruggs</a> – which is split up into six separate, but interlinked stories, beginning with the eponymous tale of Scruggs, a Roy Rogers-style singing cowboy who, under a harmless exterior, is a savage killer. Waits stars in a segment called “All Gold Canyon” as a lone gold miner. The film was first shown at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, where it won an award for Best Screenplay. It is set to air on Netflix on November 18.</p>
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<p>Why is it that musicians and Westerns seem so indelibly associated? It all starts with the archetypal singing cowboy, made famous by the likes of Rogers and his fellow singing cowboy Gene Autry in the 1930s. Since then, many musicians have found themselves attracted to the genre. Meanwhile the Coen Brothers are well-known for using music in their movies: from <a href="https://blogs.longwood.edu/musicintheworld/2012/10/17/o-brother-where-art-thou-music-and-its-role/">O Brother Where Art Thou</a> – which showcased the bluegrass of the depression-era West – to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/05/inside-llewyn-davis-review-coen-brothers">Inside LLewyn Davis</a> – which showcased the 1960s folk scene – and even <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/music/the-definitive-guide-to-the-music-of-the-big-lebowski-4168132">The Big Lebowski</a> – where the soundtrack helps form part of the film’s narrative. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks to continue the Coen’s embrace of this musical legacy. </p>
<p>So here are my five picks for actor-musicians you should check out to warm you up for the Coens’ forthcoming release.</p>
<h2>Kris Kristofferson</h2>
<p>One of the most prolific recording artists to appear in a ten-gallon hat is singer songwriter <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/kris-kristofferson-177860">Kris Kristofferson</a>, best known among mainstream moviegoers as the co-star – with Barbra Streisand – of A Star is Born (1976). Early on in his songwriting career, Kristofferson established his country pedigree with songs such as Me and Bobby McGee and Help Me Make It Through the Night. </p>
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<p>When it comes to Westerns his credits include Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (about which more later), Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Heaven’s Gate. The less said about the latter, the better, except that it’s generally thought to have <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/02/how-heavens-gate-killed-michael-ciminos-career---and-almost-dest/">ended Michael Cimino’s directorial career</a> and it didn’t do Kristofferson much good as an actor either, although the film is gradually being reappraised as a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9a7d72e0-f8fd-11e2-86e1-00144feabdc0">misunderstood masterpiece</a>.</p>
<h2>Neil Young</h2>
<p>When Daryl Hannah came to cast her directorial debut, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/16/paradox-review-neil-young-daryl-hannah-western-sxsw-film-netflix">Paradox (2018)</a> she didn’t have to look too far for someone to fill the role of “Man in the Black Hat” – her partner Neil Young. Young feels like a perfect pick in that not only does he look as if he sleeps in his cowboy hat, he’s also got a pretty impeccable country pedigree, despite being Canadian by birth. </p>
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<p>Willie Nelson, one of the all-time greats of country music, also makes an appearance. Worth a look for either of these two in my opinion (less so for the plot, sadly).</p>
<h2>David Bowie</h2>
<p>In both his music and his movies, David Bowie was a shapeshifter, experimenting between genres. Best known onscreen for his starring roles as an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth and a goblin king in Labyrinth, his role as a gunslinger is less well known but no less worth a view for all that.</p>
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<p>It was probably the prospect of working with composer Ennio Morricone that tempted Bowie to into a role alongside Harvey Keitel in Giovanni Veronasi’s 1998 Italian film, <a href="https://whydoesitexist.com/2011/08/25/gunslingers-revenge-1998/">Il Mio West</a> (Gunslinger’s Revenge). Keitel’s retired gunslinger returns home to his son’s farm, only to be followed by his longtime nemesis Jack – Bowie – who insists on a fight to the death and kidnaps Keitel’s son as motivation. This is a little-seen Western in which Bowie’s murderous character performs a macabre Glory Glory Hallelujah that is so outside of what we have come to expect from The Thin White Duke that it really must be seen to be believed. </p>
<h2>Johnny Cash</h2>
<p>Johnny Cash, aka “The Man in Black” – with his southern Arkansas drawl and his catalogue of country songs such as The Greatest Cowboy of them All and The Last Cowboy Song – was practically made for the Western. </p>
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<p>Cash starred in a good many TV roles for Westerns but <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1009052_gunfight?">A Gunfight</a>, for which Cash composed and performed the title theme, is an unsung and under-appreciated gem of a film which has the distinction of being the first Western financed by American Indians, in this case the Jicarilla Apache Tribe. The film received mixed reviews, some greeting it as a good old-fashioned Western, others as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/08/26/archives/douglas-and-cash-star-in-a-gunfight-with-apache-backing.html">flaccid flick</a> that doesn’t make the most of the Cash songs in the soundtrack.</p>
<h2>Bob Dylan</h2>
<p>Bob Dylan has spent a fair few hours on film, mostly playing himself. But when you read the name Sam Peckinpah you know you are getting a proper Western. Like Heaven’s Gate, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was plagued with problems – and Dylan has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/sep/06/dvdreviews.drama">more feted for his brilliant soundtrack album</a> of the same title than for his acting (co-star Kristofferson’s performance as The Kid was generally better received). Watch the movie if you fancy it, but do yourself a favour and get to know the album which features the classic Knocking on Heaven’s Door.</p>
<p>So Waits is joining a pretty star-studded array of musicians who have donned cowboy hats and boots – and whether they are wielding six-shooters or guitars, there seems to be something about the Western that has drawn in some of music’s biggest names. The likes of Elvis Presley and Nelson deserve honourable mentions, but we all have our favourites, and these are mine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103879/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What is it about Westerns that tempts so many musicians into ten-gallon hats?Martin Hall, Senior Lecturer, York St John UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/988162018-07-03T10:32:27Z2018-07-03T10:32:27ZWhy Americans have long been fascinated by gunfighting preachers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225799/original/file-20180702-116143-1m8k34g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In June, 2009, people were invited to bring their firearms without bullets during a service at the New Bethel Church Louisville, Ky.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Ed Reinke, Pool</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-gazette-shooting-20180628-story.html">mass shooting</a> on June 28 in Annapolis, Maryland, has renewed familiar concerns about America’s gun culture and gun policies. </p>
<p>Yet this was not the only June shooting to make national headlines.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/06/20/gun-owning-pastor-who-shot-killed-would-be-carjacker-outside-walmart-speaks-out.html">Fox News</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/21/the-pastor-whose-steady-aim-ended-a-walmart-shooting-spree-was-practicing-what-he-preached/?utm_term=.fa3c2025bfc7">The Washington Post</a> reported an earlier story involving the quick-thinking actions of a church leader who also happened to be a trained emergency responder. Spotting an armed carjacker exiting a Walmart Supercenter, in Oakville, Washington, the gun-owning pastor took pursuit – then shot and killed the man in the parking lot. </p>
<p>Compared to the Annapolis shooting, the Walmart incident offers a far more convenient narrative for gun-rights activists. At the same time, it highlights the intersection between America’s gun culture and its religious cultures. </p>
<p>In this, the event is hardly unique. As I’ve found in <a href="https://www.stevepinkerton.com/outlaw-preachers-profane-prophets">my research for a study</a> of “Outlaw Preachers and Profane Prophets,” the image of the gun-toting preacher has recurred with remarkable persistence in U.S. history and culture.</p>
<h2>‘With a Bible and a gun’</h2>
<p>The Walmart shooting joins a long tradition of stories about well-armed American preachers – both real and fictional – who seem to embody national attitudes toward guns and religion, violence and justice.</p>
<p>Just picture Jesse Custer, the protagonist of the popular AMC TV series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5016504/">“Preacher.”</a> One typical episode finds Jesse, in his preacher’s collar, firing round after round from a semiautomatic rifle to protect his little Texas church from the malevolent forces that threaten it. </p>
<p>On rock band U2’s 1993 song “The Wanderer,” originally titled “The Preacher,” singer Johnny Cash summons another version of this resonant archetype – that of the preacher who journeys forth with God on his side, armed with the Book of Life in one hand and an instrument of death in the other:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I went out walking
with a Bible and a gun … </p>
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<p>It’s telling that the song’s composer, Bono, should have written “The Wanderer” specifically for Johnny Cash. Growing up in Dublin, Ireland, Bono <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/opinion/20bono.html">had experienced</a> enough of “Bibles and guns” during the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/troubles">decadeslong clashes</a> between (mostly Catholic) Irish nationalists and (mostly Protestant) British loyalists. And Bono ordinarily sings his own lyrics. </p>
<p>In this case, though, it’s as if the Bible-and-a-gun theme required an American icon to sing it. But why should that be so? </p>
<h2>A Christian country</h2>
<p>One answer is suggested by two notable features of U.S. culture. First, this remains a remarkably Christian country. It has <a href="https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the-most-christians-around-the-world.html">the largest Christian population in the world</a>, with some <a href="https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the-most-christians-around-the-world.html">70</a> to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90356&page=1">83 percent</a> of Americans identifying as Christian. </p>
<p>Second, the U.S. has a uniquely robust gun culture, as well as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html">the world’s highest rates of gun ownership</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/11/06/562323131/gun-violence-comparing-the-u-s-with-other-countries">extraordinary levels of gun violence</a>. </p>
<p>Put these national characteristics together – the religion and the guns – and it’s not hard to see the appeal of figures, both real and fictional, that combine the two.</p>
<p>Consider the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-na-pistol-pastor-20130405-dto-htmlstory.html">real-life example of the “pistol-packing pastor” – a Pentecostal preacher, named James McAbee,</a> from Beaumont, Texas. McAbee has earned a reputation for offering firearm training in his own church. </p>
<p>Other such examples are not hard to find in American history. Back in the early 1900s, there was the Reverend J. Frank Norris, one of the country’s most popular preachers, who was widely known as “the pistol-toting divine.” He also once fatally shot an unarmed man during an argument, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=IJQfBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Barry+Hankins&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXzoH5murbAhXly4MKHZ93AoMQuwUITTAG#v=onepage&q&f=false">according to</a> historian <a href="https://www.baylor.edu/history/index.php?id=7724">Barry Hankins</a>. </p>
<p>Norris pleaded self-defense and was acquitted. Few would call his actions heroic, yet they seem only to have increased his appeal for his many fans. </p>
<p>These examples illustrate the extent to which, historically, many Americans have not only tolerated but celebrated the conjunction of preachers and firearms. But this is hardly the full story.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.stevepinkerton.com/outlaw-preachers-profane-prophets">research</a> into the cultural representations of gun-slinging ministers suggests that such figures appeal to Americans’ interest in vigilante justice – in the capacity of a lone hero to save the rest of us when our institutions fail to. </p>
<h2>Righteousness and retribution</h2>
<p>The attractions of such vigilante justice help to explain the popularity of Westerns, especially those – like the classic 1953 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046303/">“Shane”</a> – in which a lone horseman rides into town, has a shootout or two, and then rides off heroically into the sunset.</p>
<p>Country singer Willie Nelson combined that popular narrative with the figure of the preacher in his hugely successful 1975 music album <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/willie-nelson-red-headed-stranger-20120524">“Red Headed Stranger.”</a> That album tells the story of a man, called only “the preacher,” who ultimately shoots and kills his unfaithful wife and her lover.</p>
<p>We may not like that turn of events, but the album itself presents the preacher’s actions as justified, even heroic: a fantasy of righteous retribution.</p>
<p>In the 1985 Western <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089767/">“Pale Rider,”</a> Clint Eastwood plays another character known only as “the Preacher.” Like Nelson’s album, this film marries a classic Western scenario to the weaponized preacher theme. In the mold of other Western heroes, Eastwood’s character rides into a small town from parts unknown and rescues a rural community from the malevolent forces that threaten it.</p>
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<span class="caption">Clint Eastwood in ‘Dirty Harry,’ a 1971 American crime thriller.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/21591159560">Paul Townsend</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>Watching Eastwood’s preacher at work, audiences can enjoy some of the same pleasures provided by Eastwood’s other famous vigilante character, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066999/">Dirty Harry</a>: a ruthlessly effective police officer whose methods often run afoul of what’s strictly legal. But with “Pale Rider,” viewers enjoy the additional thrill of watching a “man of God” take down the bad guys – with the aid of his trusty six-shooter.</p>
<p>Where other vigilantes might appeal to their own, individual codes of justice, the preacher figure carries the authority to discharge God’s justice. His vengeance carries always the suggestion that it’s divinely inspired.</p>
<h2>The avenging preacher</h2>
<p>The idea of the gun-toting preacher thus showcases the power of individual self-assertion, while also often emphasizing the importance of protecting and preserving a wider community. </p>
<p>It also resonates with specific features of American religious life today. These include <a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/pistol-packin-christians/">public debates</a> among pastors over the appropriateness of concealed carry in the pulpit and of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/26guns.html">“open-carry celebrations”</a> at church – not to mention <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/12/21/167785169/live-blog-nra-news-conference">the NRA’s contention</a> that only “a good guy with a gun” can stop a bad guy with one. </p>
<p>With a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, the avenging preacher confirms the view that true justice cannot be enforced by institutions alone – and that God is on the side of those who would take the law into their own hands when necessary.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98816/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steve Pinkerton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is a long line of well-armed American preachers – both real and fictional – in US history and culture, confirming perhaps the view that true justice cannot be enforced by institutions alone.Steve Pinkerton, Lecturer in English, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/962062018-05-10T20:35:42Z2018-05-10T20:35:42ZFriday essay: the complex, contradictory pleasures of pulp fiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218048/original/file-20180508-34021-83vvvc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Australian pulp fiction: these works can be read as a symptom, laying bare the unspoken fears, desires, dreams and nightmares of the time</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>That <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_images_on_the_cover_of_Sgt._Pepper%27s_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band">Sergeant Peppers album cover</a> roll call of heroes seems a rather quaint exercise now. We’ve still got lists of heroes and anti-heroes but indie culture watchers and streetcorner critics have long since worked their way past the big figures like Elvis, Marilyn, Marlon and so on to people and places further out and further down.</p>
<p>Cinephiles have combed the ranks of B-grade directors, low-rent auteurs and semi-forgotten <a href="https://www.amazon.com/K-You-Mugs-Writers-Actors/dp/0375700927">character actors</a>, working down to low rung schlockmeisters and trash merchants. Age of Rock geeks and music journalists forever trawl through little-played B-sides, obscure old jukebox records, the dusty outputs of small and regional record labels. Likewise, fans and collectors of pulp publishing continue to produce entire new canons and anti-canons of shadow literatures, starting with hardboiled and noir crime, and moving on to every possible sub-form.</p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>The term “Pulp Fiction” refers to what is actually a sprawling category of cultural product, covering a wide range of mass publishing enterprises, mostly of the mid-20th century. There are competing definitions, but generally the term “pulp” is used to include magazines, comics, paperback novels, novellas, non-fiction books and booklets, cheaply printed on low grade paper, often in monstrous print runs, sold at newsstands, railway stations, corner shops, or distributed to armed forces, with the cheapest possible cover price – a dime in the US, sixpence or a shilling in Australia. </p>
<p>Product was offered up to the savagely Darwinian competition of the newsstand, with new titles appearing constantly. So pressure was always there to hype up cover illustrations, with saturated colours, sexy or even pseudo-pornographic illustrations. </p>
<p>Pulp was the natural home of genre narrative: science fiction, crime, romance, westerns, horror and “weird” tales, and nearly as much (purported) nonfiction, in the form of true adventure and crime stories and bogus ethnography of the shocking-exposes-of-carnal-practices-in-exotic locales type.</p>
<p>We’re talking trash, exploitation, flagrant misrepresentation, tastelessness, and a general striving for pure textual energy. With a high premium on visuality. Plenty of splash, bang, pop and shock, pushed to the limits of acceptablility. There’s a lot there to love. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218054/original/file-20180508-34035-pinakz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Like B-movies and rock’n’roll, pulp culture mostly came from the USA, with a substantial British contribution, and those two suppliers between them pretty thoroughly colonised Australian markets. But not totally: since the late 1800s there had been a trade in locally made paperback reading matter (such as the then scandalous “bushranger stories”, which were said to be inflaming urban delinquents to rebellion and lawlessness). </p>
<p>When the supply of US comics and paperback trash was abruptly halted in World War Two, local publishers rushed to fill the gap, offering hastily conceived superhero comics, crime magazines and a range of sexy novels. (The text rarely matched the salacious promise of the cover.) The content was nearly entirely Australian, providing a living or at least some extra pocket money for a bunch of artists, letterers, young wannabe authors and quite a few moonlighting journalists. It was the 1940s precursor to today’s gig economy. </p>
<p>A handful of local pulp publishers, mostly centered in Sydney limped on through the 1950s, fending off as best they could competition from bigger, bolder, newer and cheaper US product. Newsagent shelves of the time displayed racks and racks of material – much of it locally made – with some surprisingly raunchy cover art, and bold strap-lines promising lurid content within. (Australian pulp factories rigorously observed a few simple rules: show as much feminine breast and cleavage as possible, for example, but use careful shadows to hint at – never directly show – a nipple.) </p>
<h2>Australian adaptations</h2>
<p>The life of the freelance creative artisan was precarious anywhere, but in Australia it had its own special circumstances. Britain and the USA had populations large and dense enough to sustain entire industries devoted to all aspects of pulp production, often concentrated in specific districts. It was a much riskier game in Australia, with its dispersed population and smaller markets. </p>
<p>Still creative labourers did their thing, albeit in semi-isolation. Product <em>was</em> made and distributed; ideas, styles, genres, riffs, and tropes were adapted for local audiences, often crudely but sometimes brilliantly, or at least energetically – like the wonderfully odd, now highly collectible <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/pulp-confidential-hustle-and-art-20150203-133yfq.html">comics</a> produced by Frank Johnson Publications and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frew_Publications">Frew Publications</a> in the 1940s and 1950s.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218040/original/file-20180508-34012-hzw0x4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Foundational researcher <a href="http://www.mysteryfile.com/Australian/Pulp_Fiction.html">Toni Johnson-Woods</a> and more recently <a href="http://www.pulpcurry.com/">Andrew Nette</a> and <a href="http://australiancomics.wikia.com/wiki/Kevin_Patrick">Kevin Patrick</a> are building a growing and diverse body of research into the mysterious world of Australian pulps and comics. They move smoothly from assessments of the works themselves (often affectionately ironic in tone), to biographies of forgotten artist-authors-makers. (Very few of Australian pulp writers, it turns out, could ever afford to give up their day jobs, as journalists, school teachers, accountants whatever, or in the case of prolific author of westerns and detective stories, Gordon Clive Bleeck, a railway worker.)</p>
<p>The spotlight has recently turned to the entrepreneurs themselves – those fleet-footed, sometimes ruthless small businessfolk who by turns scammed and flattered their contributors and managed the government censors and risk averse national distributors, while keeping a sharp eye on trends and fads. </p>
<p>The survival of a local pulp industry at all is something of a wonder. Nearly anyone who was alive in 1950s or 1960s Australia will remember the ubiquitous, 300- plus series of detective novels written by “Carter Brown”, with their titillating cover art, carefully placeless, or explicitly US setting, written by a prolific local author Alan Yates. Publisher Horwitz indeed managed to turn the series into a lucrative <a href="https://www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/the-mysterious-case-of-carter-brown-or-who-really-killed-the-australian-author">export</a>. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>A few years ago I was invited to put together an <a href="http://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/events/exhibitions/2015/pulp_confidential/index.html">exhibition</a> drawing on the sprawling papers of Sydney pulp outfit, Frank Johnson Publications, held at the State Library of NSW. The original idea had been to simply display the racy cover art and true crime illustrations, but my attention was also drawn to the volumes of correspondence between Johnson and his far flung network of authors, journalists, artists, illustrators. Whole working lives were revealed, if obliquely, in the nitty-gritty back and forth between Johnson and his schleppers. There was hope, disappointment, rejection, self-doubt, anger, sometimes a certain neediness, other times outright manipulation, and occasionally, great dignity. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218047/original/file-20180508-34015-i7q6no.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A Peter Chapman cover for My Love, a 1950s collection of romance fiction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>It became clear too that for some freelancers, there was a living to be made. The late <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Chapman_(cartoonist)">Peter Chapman</a>, for example, was a comics author, cover artist and general illustrator who got his start as a teenager freelancing for Frank Johnson in the 1940s (at “30 bob a page” – pretty good money for the time), and went on to make a lifelong, four decade-plus career of it.</p>
<p>As well as possessing an appealingly loose but accurate line and a vibrant sense of colour, Chapman had storytelling nous. He authored a number of successful “true pirate” and superhero comics and invented the “Sir Falcon” character – a pistol-wielding medieval knight. His later western and war novel covers always retained a strong sense of unfolding story, often deftly encapsulating the narrative pivot-point. </p>
<h2>Lost in pulp’s crazy labyrinth</h2>
<p>For the contemporary reader, the pleasures of pulp are complex and contradictory. Start digging and it is possible you’ll find unexpected literary finesse – plenty of people who eventually graduated to high literary respectability, such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/14/david-markson-obituary">David Markson</a>, paid the bills early on by writing serviceable pulps. The early work of Patricia Highsmith and William Burroughs first appeared in very pulpy editions. And there were plenty who never graduated, but whose work ranks high on modern literary criteria: balance, flow, economy, freshness of image and language. Natural writerly grace and all that stuff. </p>
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<span class="caption">A locally made Peter Chapman cover for a licensed pulp collection of US Detective Stories.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>You might find earlier versions of the punk aesthetic – the textual equivalent of harder, faster, louder. Pulp fictions regularly managed to be way more out there. Because no one was paying all that much attention. There wasn’t time to sand down the sharp edges.</p>
<p>I’m not a collector of any stripe, but I’ve done my time in the second hand shops, and have my own beloved finds, among them Dan J Marlowe’s, The Name of The Game is Death, from 1961, with its great cover art and back cover text which is almost rock’n’roll poetry in its own right - “On the day they sentenced Olly Barnes to fifteen years I quit the human race. I never went back to my day job and I’ve never done a legitimate day’s work since.” The novel is fast, the prose spare, but never rushed. The first person narrator is a sort of psychopath with principles. The story has three different time frames, and the switches are deftly handled. The plot is totally uncompromising. One of the story strands brilliantly narrates the character’s humdrum middle-class childhood, and his emerging outlaw weirdness. The <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gunshots-Another-Room-Forgotten-Marlowe/dp/0985891106">author</a> himself turns out to be a dark and enigmatic figure.</p>
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<span class="caption">Blurb on the back cover of The Name of The Game is Death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>But pulps that stand the test for literary value are relatively rare. You might more commonly read them as symptom, to see laid bare the unspoken fears, desires, dreams and nightmares of the time. Doubly, trebly so when it comes to sex and sexuality. Among the preoccupations of 50s smut pulps there’s a dogged and recurring fascination with queerness, lesbian sex, bondage and sadism, gay sex, teen sex. Pulp as cultural Freudian slip, loony bulletins from the collective Id. Maybe not so loony.</p>
<p>Or you might say to hell with that, and just go with the flow, enjoy pulp for its couldn’t-give-a-shit attitude. There’s deep, dark, perverse mad - the amazingly twisted noir novels of Jim Thompson for example - and then there’s fun mad. John Franklin Bardin’s wacko novels (such as The Deadly Percheron) are the sort of mad that the author is complicit in. </p>
<p>And then there’s the naïve and unselfconscious, weird obsessive, medication-all-wrong mad, the kind the artist seems to be entirely unaware of. Great, but tormented US pulpster David Goodis, favourite of the French <em>Nouvelle Vague</em> might qualify, as might Richard Allen, British author of bovver boy youthsploitation classics including the much revered Suedehead. </p>
<h2>Fossicking</h2>
<p>Most cultural product – be it high, low or of the middle, nobly or cynically intentioned – sinks quickly into obscurity; headed for the dump, unread, unseen, unheard and uncelebrated. Live fast, die young etc.</p>
<p>Which means there’s a lot there for the latter-day cultural ragpickers. It’s not that easy to spot the diamonds in the rough. Most of us need a gently eye-opening pointer now and then in order to see the value. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time spent combing through junk shops, flea markets, eBay sales. It can be gruelling. You can find yourself soon hating everything – yes, it’s called trash for a reason. More scarily, a kind of rapture of the deep can set in, and you start loving everything. Finding virtue everywhere.</p>
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<p>A recently released collection, <a href="https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=892">Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980,</a> edited by Melbourne-based researchers, Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette, shows wonderfully how trash can change, how new riffs can quickly emerge. How our contemporary understanding of it changes and evolves and how much careful husbanding and thoughtful interlocution the whole process demands. (Disclosure: I wrote a foreword for the book.)</p>
<p>It’s an old story now that successions of youth subcultures, each more bad mannered than the one before, provided so many of the panic refrains of post war public life in the west, publicised by ad hoc alliances of tabloid journalists, social workers and media commentators. In the early 1950s it was juvenile delinquents. Then came beatniks. And bikers. Gays and lesbians. Hard dope fiends. Later on hippies and countercultural types, mods, rockers, surfers, skinheads, revolutionaries. Trippers, potheads and ravers. Rock musicians and groupies. Portrayed as a kind of tribe, obviously. With secret rituals, which most likely involved something sexy and forbidden.</p>
<p>So, that’s a promising set of circumstances for the low-end fiction factories of the day: there’s anxiety mixed with genuine curiosity mixed with sexual frisson. The cheap paperback industry knew how to churn out some appropriate product. Nette, McIntyre and their contributors have assembled a dizzying catalogue of fascinatingly tawdry exploitation lit: stories about dark and forbidden doings among secret enclaves of artists, dykes, bikers, drug addicts, jazz musicians and the like. Novels would typically tell of an ingenue drifting into some cultish social underworld and being initiated into its forbidden practices. It would usually end with the ingenue’s ruination and death, often by murder or suicide. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218053/original/file-20180508-34035-16hs9kl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>But the ground started shifting. Pulps in the 1950s and 60s had typically depicted the “other”. The people on the train to work who read about lesbians bikers or boho artists or ghetto dope fiends probably weren’t part of those groups, and that separation of domains was core to the cheap kicks the books delivered. But during the golden age of “tribe” pulps, the tribes themselves went from being weird and marginal to being visible and even central to global cultures. </p>
<p>By the early 1970s there was nothing very exotic about long haired young people who smoked dope, shared houses, played in bands and slept with one another. Queerness and genderbending were moving rapidly towards mainstream visibility, and the idea of “youth gangs” had lost much of its terror-clout. </p>
<p>A typical old school pulp writer might have been a World War Two veteran, maybe, or a middle-aged literary lady, turning their unsympathetic gaze to some upstart, youth craze or other. But by the 1970s that pulp author might be a pot smoker or tripper, a surfer or a hippie chick. Maybe of non-mainstream sexual orientation. Or a New Left sympathising, anti law and order, social change person. Or a crazed gun-toting survivalist. While that might help the authenticity, it could compromise the prurience.</p>
<h2>Second life</h2>
<p>Pulps through the 1980s went on to embrace ever more violent Serpico and Rambo-styled revenge sagas, as well as super tooled-up espionage, Mafia, mercenary and paramilitary adventure yarns – often with a massive gun barrel represented in hyper-perspective on the cover. Fans continue to debate where pulp went from there – maybe the internet simply consumed it. </p>
<p>So when that early material gets rehabilitated there’s a lot to deal with. There’s the whole artefactual package: cover art, strap-lines, back page, title font, colours, design. There’s the text content – the story itself. (Do we just go with it, or do we keep our distance, botanize it. Like a weird specimen?) And the author, should their life and career be attended to. Is it of interest? (Often resoundingly, yes.) And we might consider, or just enjoy the clever ways the whomp of the visuals interact with the wham of the story.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218049/original/file-20180508-34038-1aki7pp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>You could argue that pulp material culture is a direct precursor to the clickbait aesthetic. Digital screen culture is reconfiguring how image, design, text and story interact. Some media theorists believe this is way more than simply advancing the fashions and practices of design and publishing, but in a much deeper way is remaking the ancient distinction between “pictures” and “writing”. Looking at the work of pulp illustrators and comics makers of half a century ago we can see that they were quietly and cleverly dealing with the myriad problems, tensions and artistic opportunities that are commonplace today.</p>
<p>It takes a nuanced understanding, and a huge amount of time and energy to bring all that together for the time-poor modern reader. And to see the glimmerings of value there in the first place. To recognise that a thing can change: a thing which last month was junk, really was junk, has quietly become something else.</p>
<p><em>A selection of Peter Chapman’s art is the subject of an exhibition at Macquarie University Art Gallery, 16 May-29 June 2018.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96206/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Doyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mid-20th century pulp fiction was trashy, tasteless, exploitative and lurid. There’s a lot there to love. You might read pulp as a cultural Freudian slip, loony bulletins from the collective Id.Peter Doyle, Associate Professor of Media, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/888992018-01-09T11:20:59Z2018-01-09T11:20:59ZFrom cowboys to commandos: Connecting sexual and gun violence with media archetypes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200754/original/file-20180103-26169-ze7nnz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Stars of TV Westerns embodied a Cowboy Code.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warner_Brothers_television_westerns_stars_1959.JPG">ABC Television</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you feel as if there’s been an uptick in the frequency and lethality of mass shootings in recent years, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mass-shootings-20171120-story.html">you’re not imagining it</a>. The time between mass shootings (involving four or more casualties) in the U.S. <a href="https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/mass-shootings-and-the-future-update/">has been shrinking</a> since the 1990s, and the death rate in these massacres has almost tripled since 2000.</p>
<p>And if it also seems that <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-way-we-tell-the-story-of-hollywood-sexual-assault-and-harassment-matters-85658">reports of sexual assault</a> on the part of celebrities, politicians and journalists are coming in almost daily, you are, once again, not mistaken. It is probably not coincidental that the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network reports “a record number of survivors [who] turned to RAINN for help,” with a <a href="https://www.rainn.org/news/2017-review-rainn-supports-record-numbers">26 percent increase in hotline traffic in November</a> alone. </p>
<p>No, I’m not equating sexual assault and mass murder. But as a psychiatrist, I think there is an indirect connection between the rising rates of each. To understand why, we need to explore the shifting media role models to which young American males have been exposed since the 1950s and ‘60s. As sociologist Daniel Rios Pineda has observed, the <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4310/2eed1693252e79c0da7af58cb5aa13f49613.pdf">influence of the mass media</a> begins at a very early age. Based on my own cultural observations, I believe that the emergence of a more violent male “archetype” in the media has been internalized by many young men, and may be one factor contributing to increased sexual and gun-related violence.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200755/original/file-20180103-26172-fwir5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emulating cowboys meant trying to embody certain ideals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/charliedave/3127723951">Charlie Dave</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The cowboy’s code</h2>
<p>Once upon a time, the archetype of the cowboy stood tall in the American male psyche. Growing up in the 1950s, my friends and I had plenty of admirable cowboy role models, drawn from TV Westerns like “Gunsmoke,” “The Rifleman” and “The Life And Legend Of Wyatt Earp.” Broadly speaking, the heroes of these shows were decent, honorable and law-abiding individuals, trying to survive in dangerous times. Early TV Westerns <a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/12/01/tv-westerns-1950s-and-60s">aimed to teach the values</a> of honesty, integrity, hard work, racial tolerance and justice for all.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to claim that the cowboy archetype is totally supportive of today’s progressive values. For many Native Americans, the term “cowboy” probably evokes distasteful images. For some feminists, the archetype may seem exclusionary and patriarchal, representing an idealized (and violent) male vision of the “Old West.” </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the real American West reflected some progressive ideals, often enshrined in law. For example, in contrast to today’s clamor for unrestricted “gun rights,” pioneers in the American West established many <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/did-the-wild-west-have-mo_b_956035.html">regulations designed to reduce gun violence</a>. According to <a href="https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/%7Ercollins/scholarship/guns.html">historian Ross Collins</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Pioneer publications show Old West leaders repeatedly arguing in favor of gun control. City leaders in the old cattle towns knew from experience what some Americans today don’t want to believe: a town which allows easy access to guns invites trouble.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Old West also had an unwritten <a href="https://montanapioneer.com/the-code-of-the-west/">code of ethics</a>, sometimes called “the cowboy code.” Historian Ramon Adams, in his 1969 book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cowman-His-Code-Ethics/dp/B0043K2K10">The Cowman and His Code of Ethics</a>” noted that one of the strictest codes of the West was “respect of womanhood.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200757/original/file-20180103-26145-xprxi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gene Autry advocated respect.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gene_Autry_1950.jpg">CBS/Columbia Broadcasting System</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 1940s, famous cowboy <a href="http://www.autry.com/geneautry/geneautry_cowboycode-code.html">Gene Autry developed his own version</a> of the cowboy code, which included this notable commandment: “[The cowboy] must respect women, parents and his nation’s laws.” Though not explicitly aimed at a young audience, Autry’s code had a natural affinity with, for example, <a href="https://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/boyscouts/thebuildingblocksofscouting/values.aspx">values promoted by the Boy Scouts of America</a>.</p>
<p>In short, peaceable and law-abiding behavior – including respect for women – were integral parts of the early American West’s “cowboy ethos,” which many American boys of the mid-20th century tried to emulate as it reached them via Hollywood. As the Museum of Western Film History puts it, early TV Westerns “<a href="https://www.lonepinefilmhistorymuseum.org/articles-with-out-menu-items/tv-westerns">offered morality plays for the juvenile audience</a>.”</p>
<h2>Commandos and pseudocommando killers</h2>
<p>Unfortunately, as the cowboy receded into the sunset, he was gradually displaced in the 1980s – not long after the Vietnam War – by the far more violent figure of the commando. Enter John Rambo (played by Sylvester Stallone) and John Matrix (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie, “Commando”). As <a href="http://www.dvdmg.com/commandobr.shtml">one reviewer put it</a>, “Matrix just kills, kills, kills… If you look up 'gratuitous violence’ in the dictionary, you’ll see a link to ‘Commando.’”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200758/original/file-20180103-26151-12c1ymv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Matrix has a different m.o.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.talkfilmsociety.com/articles/the-rampage-is-a-force-of-nature-unstoppable-protagonists-on-film">'Commando'</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Though the relationship between media violence and childhood aggression is controversial, child psychiatrist Eugene Beresin has observed that <a href="http://www.aacap.org/aacap/Medical_Students_and_Residents/Mentorship_Matters/DevelopMentor/The_Impact_of_Media_Violence_on_Children_and_Adolescents_Opportunities_for_Clinical_Interventions.aspx">violent heroes become role models for youth</a>. Psychologist and former Army Ranger Lt. Col. Dave Grossman <a href="https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/on-killing/9781497629202">sees a direct link</a> between today’s violent and vengeful movie “heroes” and the mass killings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech.</p>
<p>Indeed, I believe there’s a link between the cinematic archetype of the “commando” and the recent spate of “pseudocommando” killings in the <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/machiavellians-gulling-the-rubes/201510/profile-oregons-pseudocommando-killer">real</a> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-did-texas-shooter-devin-kelley-die-2017-11">world</a>. According to my colleague, <a href="http://jaapl.org/content/38/1/87">forensic psychiatrist James L. Knoll IV</a>, the pseudocommando often kills indiscriminately; comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons; has no escape plan; and harbors strong feelings of anger and resentment. </p>
<p>Psychologists believe the pseudocommando’s rage is fueled by a quest for power – usually in a desperate attempt to redress his deep-seated sense of powerlessness.</p>
<p>And herein lies the nexus with individuals who engage in sexual assault. These aggressive acts are fundamentally <a href="https://sapac.umich.edu/article/52">about power and control</a>.</p>
<h2>Link between sexual and gun-related violence</h2>
<p>A number of studies support the view that most mass shootings in the U.S. are <a href="https://theconversation.com/most-mass-killers-are-men-who-have-also-attacked-family-87230">preceded by domestic or family violence</a> – often directed against women. For example, both the Orlando Pulse club shooter and the Virginia Tech shooter had a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-need-to-talk-the-link-between-sexual-violence-and_us_59fb6146e4b09afdf01c412c">history of abusing or harassing females</a> prior to carrying out mass murder. The nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety analyzed mass shootings between 2009 and 2016 and found that in <a href="https://everytownresearch.org/reports/mass-shootings-analysis">54 percent of cases</a>, the shooters killed intimate partners or other family members. </p>
<p>It must be said that <a href="https://sapac.umich.edu/article/52">men, too, may be victims of sexual violence</a>, at the hands of either males or females. However, mass shootings are carried out <a href="https://theconversation.com/most-mass-killers-are-men-who-have-also-attacked-family-87230">almost entirely by men</a>. </p>
<p>There are compelling reasons to believe that sexual and gun-related violence spring from the same cultural roots – a culture that <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-need-to-talk-the-link-between-sexual-violence-and_us_59fb6146e4b09afdf01c412c">lionizes and glorifies male aggression</a>. </p>
<p>Thus, Charles M. Blow, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/sexual-harassment-men-.html">in a recent New York Times op-ed</a>, alluded to the “toxic, privileged, encroaching masculinity” that pervades American culture. He argued that our society has fostered the dangerous notion that aggression is a prized part of male sexuality. In effect, boys are encouraged to be aggressive, while girls become their victims. </p>
<h2>Some caveats and qualifications</h2>
<p>The causes of violence are complex and overdetermined. The two archetypes I’ve described are expressions of the zeitgeist of their respective eras, as much as they are forces that shape men’s psychological development. Furthermore, young males today are faced with many <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44293/">risk factors for violence</a>, including abusive parents, bullying in school, and the allure of gangs. Psychologists believe that “<a href="http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/violent-video-games.aspx">no single risk factor</a> consistently leads a person to act aggressively or violently.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200759/original/file-20180103-26172-kjy7xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The #MeToo moment is confronting the culture that accepts sexual aggression.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/PGroup-Faye-Sadou-MediaPunch-IPx-A-ENT-IPX-MeT-/9ba7acf9ea8141b3bd90f4a2120ce536/10/0">Faye Sadou/MediaPunch/IPX</a></span>
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<p>Nevertheless, I suggest that the confluence of the commando mentality and our culture’s way of raising boys and young men has contributed to an uptick in sexual and gun-related violence. Too often, young men learn that macho is cool and that you can get away with anything you want. And as the <a href="https://metoomvmt.org/">#MeToo movement</a> demonstrates, these attitudes have infected men’s behavior at the highest levels. </p>
<p>The cowboy code may no longer be suited to our modern needs. But it is not too late to renounce the commando mentality, and to raise boys – as Gene Autry would have it – to respect both women and the nation’s laws.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88899/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronald W. Pies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With mass shootings and sexual harassment reports on the rise, a psychologist reflects on how the evolving nature of male role models in the media may be contributing.Ronald W. Pies, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine, Tufts UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.