Western Landscape and Pioneer Spirit in Classic Western Films

Introduction: Landscape and the Pioneer Hero

When "spaghetti Western" auteur Sergio Leone set out to make Once Upon a Time in the West, he was determined to shoot in Arizona using the same breathtaking, authentic backdrops and landscapes that great American Western filmmakers such as John Ford used in films like Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946). These locations and landscapes were iconic images — Monument Valley has appeared in several of Ford's Westerns — that evoked a sense of foreign territory, of something almost prehistoric for the viewer. For the hero of the Western film to be seen against a backdrop like that of the "desert wilderness" is enough to draw the viewer into a relationship that is at once hostile and precarious: "the encounter of home and wilderness," wherein ideas of family, shelter, unity, and life are juxtaposed with the spare and sparse Western landscape of bleak desert horizons, mesas, plateaus, and barren wasteland (Budd, 1976, p. 134). This paper discusses the relationship between the Western landscape and the social construction and pioneer spirit depicted in the Western film.

In a sense, the surrounding landscape of the Western film intrudes upon the serenity of the pioneer family and yet unwittingly serves to bolster and support the spirit of the pioneer hero — he faces the challenges of the "wild west," its desolations, and comes out victorious. The landscape encompasses the marauding Indians, and its sprawling vistas and desert serve mysteriously as shelter and home for these nomadic tribes — the enemies of the Western hero, who has arrived at the frontier for some unnamed reason but is bent on surviving even as his defenses are lost (the home is ransacked, the fort is overwhelmed, and finally there is, commonly, a "shoot out" in the streets, where the hero faces the villain man to man in the open). The Western landscape is thus there to remind the audience of the important social construction of the film hero: he is on a quest to prove himself, his manhood, and his ability as a leader — and he will do so by standing tall amidst the stark and harrowing mesas and the sinister implications of their long, forbidding shadows, which seem to stretch onward and outward toward his ever-nearing fate.

Monument Valley as Cinematic Meaning

What the desert frontier — like Monument Valley — does is imbue the film with a meaning that an ordinary Texas landscape might not easily convey. Buscombe (1995) notes that "Ford's genius for framing and camera placement drew from this one location an astonishingly rich and evocative variety of meanings" (p. 120). Ford's photographing of the Valley in Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine serves a twofold purpose: first, it conveys the "puniness of humanity measured against [Ford's] towering mesas," and second, it suggests something about Time — namely, that it is staunch, older than Man, forbidding, and monumental, challenging the efforts of men seeking to overcome obstacles as they move toward their happy endings.

The landscape, in this sense, reflects the inner challenge within the lives of the heroes of Western films — whether in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West or in Ford's Stagecoach, The Searchers, or My Darling Clementine. Ringo Kid, for example, faces the challenge of escaping Indians and remaining free from the law long enough to settle a score — and also to win the girl — and the daunting mesas of Monument Valley reflect the daunting tasks he must overcome on his path to redemption in the West. In My Darling Clementine, Ford's Wyatt Earp faces the challenge of the Clanton gang as he assumes the role of lawman, and the same mesas of Monument Valley reflect the turmoil ahead for Fonda and his companions.

Social Construction and the Western Landscape

The social construct and the pioneer spirit of Ford's My Darling Clementine are much more light-hearted than in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, wherein Ford plays the über-villain — a child-killing pursuer of the "pioneer" railroad-station dreamer. In My Darling Clementine, the hero is sweet-natured, and the title itself signals the nature of the plot: the hero is competing as much for love as he is for law and order. The landscape is therefore there to remind the viewer of the grandness and epic nature of the hero's pursuit — of the remarkable aspect of seeking both love and justice — and of the sizable obstacles one can expect to encounter. Through the lens of romance, some of the more menacing and harrowing qualities of the landscape are softened, yet it is significant that Monument Valley still finds its place in the film — standing there as a monument indeed, a testament to the struggles that the pioneer in love, and in the wilderness of the West, will face.

Ultimately, the landscape speaks to the "unruly force of nature which resists the 'natural' development of the West into an agrarian paradise," pitting the hero against the obstacles that keep him from domestic happiness, peace, and prosperity (The Making of the West, n.d., p. 211). Whether this force is represented by Indians, cruel lawmen, corrupt officials and town leaders, or the Clantons is immaterial: the landscape of Monument Valley reminds the viewer that they are all of the same cloth — the same fabric of anti-society that the hero's social construct is fashioned to overcome. The landscape acts as a relief of the pioneer spirit of the hero, much like a sculptural relief, allowing the foremost parts to stand out from the background. In the Western, those foremost parts are found in the hero's commitment to a plan of action, set on a collision course with the "unruly force" of nature.