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Taproot in Tradition. To provide stories for these heroes and for their dozens of less famous fellows. Hollywood keeps 100 or so writers busy. (One of them, Frank Gruber. once wrote four scripts in four days.) A great many of the shows have shoddy plots, ludicrous situations. They are "shot from the hip," as one director puts it, in three days or less, "take what you get." Studio filmed for the most part, they are ironically known in the trade as "four-wall westerns—as big as all indoors." It hardly seems the sort of climate in which creativity could flourish and the legend grow.
And yet, despite all its vulgar errors and commercial excrescences, the western story has given television something that it seriously lacked: a taproot in the American tradition, a meaning beyond the moment. And television has given the western story, the youngest and most prodigiously alive and kicking of the world's mythologies, a fresh chance to express itself, and to change with the times.
Myth into Man. Change it does. Now as always, the legend is primarily concerned with Good and Evil and with man's relation to the powers of light and night. But in recent years a difference can be discerned. In earlier times (Buffalo Bill, William S. Hart), the hero was completely identified with Good, the villain with Evil. In the upshot, Good destroyed Evil. But the victory often proved an illusion. Usually, the prize for which the hero fought was a woman; but in the end he often did not claim her at all, or if he did, what he got was a sexless ninny. Yet in many of the recent westerns, the woman is far less passive. She is continually attempting to bring the hero down to earth, to make him face reality. She is behaving like a real woman, "and the hero, as a result, begins to lose his superhuman disinterestedness and sexlessness, begins to behave like a real man.
At the same time, something of a more deeply problematic nature is happening to the western legend. Good and Evil, it seems, are beginning to understand each other, to be reconciled to each other's existence. Often in the modern western a sudden sympathy flashes between hero and villain, as though somehow they feel themselves to be secret sharers in a larger identity. Often the hero cannot bring himself to kill the villain until fate forces his hand, and then he performs the act almost like a religious sacrifice (Shane).
And now and then there is a western story—more often seen in print, but sometimes on film as well—in which there is neither a hero nor a villain in the traditional sense, but only a man, containing both Good and Evil, taking up the burden of his life and his times. In such stories the myth seems to discover what it may have been seeking all along: a way of rising above itself. The myth is transcended in the individual, the free man. In the freedom of the great plains the story of the West had its beginnings; in the freedom of the heart it seems to seek its end. In its finest expressions, it is an allegory of freedom, a memory and a vision of the deepest meaning of America.