The goal of the explorer is to map the previously uncharted territory. The pioneer tames the wilderness, turns the unknown realm into a habitable country, makes a home out of the hostile world. This pattern is seen all throughout the various strata of human endeavor across all cultures, and it is prominently ingrained in the myth of the American frontier.

From Columbus to the conquistador to the cowboy, from the Santa Maria to the Mayflower to the prairie schooner, the collective Western mind has perceived America (in both continents) as a frontier for quite a long time. Every place from Newfoundland, Florida, Sonora, and California has had its turn as the edge of civilization. All of these places are relevant to this discussion, but I’d be remiss not to indulge in this case my fascination with and love for the wild, wild west.

What can be said about western cinema in particular that hasn’t already? Such a rich cultural lineage is quintessentially American. The best of its fruits are engrossing, exciting and even quite contemplative. The spaghetti westerns fill out the genre edifyingly with perspectives helpfully distant from their subject matter. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is perhaps my favorite in the vast western catalogue, if not my favorite film of all time.

The film is visually masterful and the performances are impeccable, but these are not the reasons the movie is pertinent to this topic. John Wayne plays his typical rough-and-tumble, no-nonsense pistolero, but his iconic persona winds up serving primarily as a springboard for an earnest, if naïve, lawyer played by Jimmy Stewart. The lawyer gets the girl, the fame, and the credit. He is the one who establishes civilization. If the love interest, Hallie, is analogous to civilization itself, then her sensible decision to marry the lawyer Ranse Stoddard instead of Wayne’s Tom Doniphan presents a paradoxical juxtaposition of the necessity for civilization to cling tightly to that which follows the pioneer and the simultaneous necessity of the antecedent world in which the pioneer exists. The pioneer must exist to be left behind.

I love the film for its focus on the question: where does the cowboy go when the West is won? Further, is there any need for a gunslinger in a society of law and order? What is a frontiersman without a frontier? At the end of the story, there is seemingly no place left for the eponymous killer of the dastardly Liberty Valence, embodiment of the menace of lawlessness. And yet, the story could not have ended as it did without his actions.

I think American culture bears out two easy answers to this conundrum in various places. One is to cling unflinchingly to the mythic past. I do not mean merely in the honorary, memorial sense, but also in a popular, more frivolous manner. This does not consist so much in reenacting or commemorating the past, but in insistence that the present day bears the same characteristics. This is the often-tacky, commercialized, mass-marketable version of the values of the pioneer, diluted perhaps beyond recognition, found especially in the subculture of country songs about suburban lifestyles, big trucks driven in big cities, and iconographic facsimiles of frontier paraphernalia. These cultural artifacts often do not represent a lifestyle of wilderness taming, but rather its faint, commercially viable echo. Ruggedness in particular, as an encapsulating element of these values, is often reduced to its aesthetic qualities at the expense of its substance. (This is something I may write on more specifically at some other time.)

The other easy solution to the problem of the missing frontier is to fantasize about a new frontier. Outer space is an obvious candidate in the cultural consciousness, but it is hardly a direct analog to the American West. We cannot expect tales of young men and women with little to their names seeking their fortunes among the cosmos. The infrastructure required is simply incomparable. A horse, a team of oxen, a wagon, or a pack mule even centuries ago cannot be directly compared in terms of its availability to the average individual to an interplanetary rocket.

Even if space is compared to the sea, with which it shares more similarities, one will find the sea is teeming with food and habitable islands. Space is, as far as anyone knows, dead. With regard to the barrier of entry, once again, it is worthy of note that the various seafaring peoples of the Pacific, for example, constructed adequate craft for traversing vast stretches of ocean with immediately available natural resources like wood, while space travel requires a global economy of materials, manufacturing, and engineering. I do not see any reason we should expect this to change.

Perhaps more useful an analog than space travel, another popular fantasy is the post-apocalypse. If there is no currently known new world that may serve as a frontier, then one must find the frontier on this world. The problem of the dried-up frontier can be solved with a clean slate, or at least the introduction of a new unknown. This is perhaps part of the reason why a civilization so well-fed as America might revel in admittedly grotesque fantasies about its own collapse through post-apocalypse and disaster stories. The horror of civilizational destruction contains the tantalizing promise of a new frontier. After all, no one fantasizes about dying in the apocalypse (unless something is seriously wrong with him). The fantasy is about survival. It gruesomely offers the audience a reconnection to the primal, natural struggle against death in the thick of renewed wilderness.

I have called these solutions ‘easy’ because they are simple but not really solutions at all. The fact remains that the American frontier is largely gone and that this is reflective of the state of most of the world. Barbed wire largely killed the cowboy, the iron horse drove out the horseman. The vestiges that remain are, not always, but often ceremonial. There is no obvious recourse in light of what I perceive to be a disorientation this causes for the U.S. in particular.

The U.S. is a nation founded on these myths. Her very flesh and bones are the ideals of freedom, the reality of which inevitably requires material conditions conducive to material liberty, including wide open space. The constitution breathed life into a spirit of manifest destiny that thoroughly colored the development of the country over the days of westward expansion. But herein lies the fundamental difficulty, if I may attempt to distill it from a culturally particular to a more broadly confounding paradox: the settling of the frontier is what kills the frontier. How is a country defined against the hardship of nature meant to reckon with decadence, and how is an individual separated from those hardships meant to orient himself materially? We see the difficulty is one for the collective and the individual both.

On the individual level, this appears to me to manifest primarily in the pervasive frustrations of post-industrial existence. Some have argued that the infrastructure of the world today separates mankind from nature, but, if I may accept for the moment this paradigmatic dichotomy between the two, the separation is largely illusory. Man has not somehow departed nature, but perhaps only blinded himself to it with layers upon layers of technological change. Thinking in the terms of King Solomon, it is clear that cosmically the novelty of these changes is vanity. If this is so, then why do so many Americans today feel out-of-touch with nature? Why do they yearn for a simpler existence?

I’m sure this problem is wildly multifaceted, so I will continue to discuss it here strictly in terms of the frontier myth. While it may not be true that we have somehow fundamentally separated ourselves from nature, it is true that most Americans today enjoy an existence that is removed by many degrees from the wilderness. Across all economic strata, people in the U.S. today have their basic needs met more thoroughly than their socioeconomic peers from ages past. Without giving Marx too much credit, post-industrial people do not usually reap the rewards of their own labor directly. While we have established the relative superfluity of this fact already, it is doubtlessly still a relevant factor in the navigation of the world for a continually growing number of individuals.

More personally, as someone who is emotionally moved by the aesthetic of the frontier myth as it is made culturally relevant to me in the myth of the wild west, I desire ultimately to grapple with the question of the myth’s apparent inevitability. There is a disheartening doom in the thought that those who tamed the west eliminated their own usefulness, that the very fulfillment of the act itself annihilates its purpose. To appropriate some more archetypally evocative language, this problem is one of a hero who can find no more monsters to defeat. He has rendered himself obsolete — and yet, what choice did he have? The dragon cannot remain alive, but there is a bitter burden placed on the good king who survives. Beowulf had the pleasure of dying in the struggle, so what of the warrior who doesn’t? Where is the son of the victor to find an opponent?

I cannot pretend to fully comprehend this thought problem, but it would verge on negligence to end on such a dour note. I must admit that I often remedy this sense of doom by indulging in daydreams colored by a survival-oriented connection to the primal struggle. I think the best these daydreams can be for any person is harmless and the worst they can be is delusional. They are by no means a solution. They certainly serve to distract from the present. For the Christian, it should go without saying that this problem is one of immediate relevance rather than eternal, and the rejuvenating hope of Christ puts the stakes in proper perspective (as displayed nicely in a previous post by Nate M.). It is also hopeful to remember the wisdom of Solomon that this problem is, in a critically important sense, not new.

I know that the emotional significance of this problem to me is a bit eccentric taken in the context of broader culture. I am in a minority of Americans my age who has an emotional investment in the particular aesthetics of the wild west, but I am convinced that, generally, I am in a majority of my peers who grapple with longing for a time they did not know. But, more importantly to my point, I personally find the mythic wild west emotionally poignant not only for its aesthetic qualities but for the narrative model it establishes and transmits through culture. The tragic salience of the end of the pioneer hangs suspended in midair in Liberty Valance‘s finale. If the legacy of the pioneer is one that we indeed inherit, then we must grapple with its confusing ending — because we are living in it.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

– Genesis 1:28 (KJV)