William S. Hart's Hells Hinges: An Ideological Approach to the Early Western

Abstract

For the last decade an allegoresis that reads both character and story as expressions of psychic or social conflicts has dominated the contextual criticism of the film Western. One of the central assumptions of this approach is that popular narratives, because they are products of so-called mass culture, are escapist in the sense that their various discourses are largely esthetic (i.e., symbolically significant) rather than mimetic.1 Speaking of formulaic story types like the Western, John Cawelti, for example, observes that their ''purpose is not to make me confront motives and experiences in myself that I might prefer to ignore but to take me out of myself by confirming an idealized self image." While Cawelti concedes that such patterns do exist "in a complex dialectic with other aspects of human life," he maintains that the escapist functions of popular story are indeed dominant, effective only when presented, of course, "within a framework that the audience can still accept as having some connection with reality."2 In The Six-Gun Mystique, his influential study of the genre, Cawelti therefore emphasizes that the continuing appeal of the Western lies less in its evocation of certain aspects of historical discourse about the West and the frontier than in its various psychological dynamics: "the Western's capacity to accommodate many different kinds of meaning—the archetypal pattern of heroic myth, the artistic imperatives of dramatic clarity and unity, the influence of media, the tendency of popular forms to assume a game-like structure, the need for social ritual and for the disguised expression of latent motives and tensions—as well as its ability to respond to changing cultural themes and concerns- have made the formula successful as popular art and entertainment over many generations."3