Emile Durkheim Rides Again: The Death of the Western Hero and the Rise of the Moral Individualist

Abstract

his article examines the function, transition, and ultimate removal of the hero from the Western film genre in the late 1960s. Most examinations of the genre, especially of its mid-twentieth-century heyday, have assumed that the Western requires a “hero.” Even “antihero” Westerns of the late 1960s depend on this assumption, for although the hero is often absent from antihero narratives, the hero and antihero exist on the same spectrum. The result has been a remarkably binary approach to the genre, with heroic figures played by the likes of Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Alan Ladd, and John Wayne used as lenses for understanding largescale cultural movements. This article argues instead that revisionist Westerns, which arose as early as The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman 1943)