American Frontier Myths in Film and Literature Compared

The Myth of the American Frontier

How factual are entertainment portrayals of the American frontier? How much of what has been written about it is myth, and how much is fact? According to history professor Richard W. Slatta, scholars have "debunked three of the West's central myths," including rugged individualism, frontier violence, and American exceptionalism (Slatta, 2010). Writers and filmmakers have gone about creating a western frontier "the way they want it rather than the way it was" (Slatta, 84). This paper examines three works set against the American frontier — Luis Alberto Urrea's In Search of Snow (1994), Sam Shepard's True West (1981), and the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men (2007) — in a comparative analysis focusing on values, setting, conflicts, and way of life.

Contrasting No Country for Old Men and In Search of Snow

Whether or not fictionalized tales about the American frontier accurately reflect historical reality, the books and film examined in this paper are of excellent quality and stand on their own as worthy entertainment. After watching No Country for Old Men (referred to hereafter as Old Men) and contrasting it with In Search of Snow (referred to as Snow), it becomes clear that these two works share a frontier setting but are as far apart in theme as Mars is from the Moon.

The opening salient theme of snow — Mike's fantasy — is a reasonable quest for someone living amid the bleak Texaco station setting, with its "brittle desert heat" and "blue stink of exhaust." That atmosphere contrasts dramatically with the horrific violence and bloodshed in Old Men. Among the most immediately striking differences between the two works is the fine detail — petty sometimes, silly at others, deadly at still others — that helps embellish the characters in Snow. An enormous portion of the novel consists of dialogue: tight, short bursts of simple and sometimes ludicrous thoughts. Old Men, on the other hand, uses grim, deathly serious, and dark imagery to cast a spell on viewers that does not let up until the film is over. The Coen Brothers' direction creates a murky and sinister effect; for viewers who enjoy a film that keeps them tense and on the edge of their seats, this is precisely the right movie.

The opening chapters of Snow embrace humor, absurdity, isolation, simplicity, and innocence. There is some violence — Mike and Rames brawl with each other — but it is mild compared with the opening of Old Men. The sound of Tommy Lee Jones's voice reflecting on the boy he sent to the electric chair sets the tone for a film that is a series of frightening, bloody, and deeply evil situations.

The American frontier in this film is transformed into a gruesome, outrageous landscape of dread, driven by the search for — and the desire to conceal — a large sum of cash. Horrors seem to be waiting around every corner. After the protagonist discovers the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, a chillingly scary hunt for two million dollars begins, one that changes lives. Audiences are introduced to an astonishingly brutal antagonist, Chigurh, whose murder of a deputy in a hideous scene of raw power and spilled blood is night and day from the almost comical opening of Snow. Nothing of this sort appears in Snow or in True West.

Character, Isolation, and Desire in In Search of Snow

Juxtaposed with those ghastly scenes of hatred in Old Men, but still set against the American frontier, Mike in Snow — when not dreaming of snow or carrying on trite banter with his father — is cleaning the women's bathroom at the Texaco station. He kisses the mirror where a woman had left a lip print ("he ached inside") and sniffs a discarded pair of torn nylon stockings, then hides them under his bed like a boy discovering the scent of a woman for the first time. The aroma of the stockings sets "…his bones aglow with indescribable longing" (17).

Readers come to understand how isolated and out of touch with society Mike is through his behavior in the women's restroom and through the skulls — coyote, crow, and steer — that adorn his room. His initial resistance to his attractive cousin's advances reveals a character enamored with the allure and fantasy of women (lipstick, stockings) who nonetheless temporarily falls apart when an actual woman attempts to seduce him. He is afterward consumed by guilt.

True West in Contrast with Snow and Old Men

It is fair to say that while portions of both True West and Snow demonstrate their respective writers' ability to create whimsical, off-color scenes, finding any genuine whimsy or silliness in Old Men is an exercise in futility. Old Men is diabolical, bloody, and mean-spirited, while True West offers something close to comic relief by comparison. There is antipathy in Snow as well — the hostility Mexicans feel toward Caucasians and vice versa, and the distrust Apaches feel toward both — but that tension resembles a minor social friction compared with the venomous fear and loathing that pervades Old Men.

The natural world plays a pivotal role in any story, and the desert serves as a strong thematic presence in all three works. The direction in Old Men brings viewers into a landscape that is barren, stark, and unforgiving, yet also beautiful — making it the most vivid actual depiction of the American frontier among the three works, as cinema is hard to match in that regard. A well-written novel can conjure pictures of desert beauty and desolation in a reader's imagination, and Snow does so very competently.

In True West, the two brothers revere the desert, and it holds an almost mythical attraction for them. In Snow, the desert is not portrayed as any great attraction; it is simply a raw and isolated setting. In Old Men, the desert is a place where both old and young men can be killed when things go wrong. In Sam Shepard's True West, Austin — a screenwriter — leaves suburban life for the desert to house-sit for his bewildered mother, drawn there because the vast, sometimes uncharted terrain symbolizes open possibilities for his creative work. For Lee, the desert is simply another place to get drunk and steal things. The visions the two brothers hold seem to set them apart, but in the end they are birds of a feather.

Conclusion

While Slatta's argument about the American frontier is certainly close to accurate — if not right on the money — writers and directors can use the frontier theme in any creative way they choose, and they do. In the case of these three works, the desert frontier plays an important role in setting, theme, and conflict. Each work arrives at a fundamentally different vision of what the American West means: Snow renders it as a place of longing and slow awakening, True West as a space of mythic possibility and brotherly ruin, and No Country for Old Men as a merciless landscape where violence and moral emptiness reign. Together, they confirm that the frontier remains a powerful — if endlessly reinvented — symbol in American western fiction.

Works Cited

Slatta, Richard W. "Making and Unmaking Myths of the American Frontier." European Journal of American Culture. 29.2. 2010.