FR
He plays the harmonica... but he also plays the trigger.
Cheyenne, Once Upon a Time in the West
Lost in the Caribbean, in pursuit of some phantom ship, the heroine is Calamity Eyael. Narrowly escaping the clutches of Captain Barbossa, she finds herself propelled (by the Doc's DeLorean) into her great uncle Charley's native Kansas1, on the trail of the Git, the Mad and the Ugly. She can already hear the bullets hissing on Main Street. Better take cover behind the bar, looks like someone's about to bite the dust! Hardly a surprise with that bloody Six of Diamonds heralding unexpected events and change for this month, and calling for caution when socialising. It's therefore best not to upset any of the trigger-happy thugs out there. Especially since the local sheriff strikes me as quite a coward.
The Wild Side of the West
I don't mean to kill the mood, but let me remind you that a cowboy is just a cow herder who tends cattle on ranches in North America. Right now, it sounds a bit less glamourous! According to the online Bible2, the historic American cowboy of the late 19th century arose from the vaquero, popular in New Mexico in the 16th and 17th century, but differs in that the latter is not a farm worker. In the 19th century, livestock ranches in the West would supply the whole country. Since there was no railway, cowboys were thus in charge of herding cattle across the southern Great Plains. The seasonal cycle of moving livestock from pasture to pasture, which ended up in the 1890's, certainly gave a distorted image of the free, lonesome nomadic cowboy, which is mostly a far cry from reality.
Quite unlike the myth conveyed by literature, comic strips and the silver screen, cowboys were no heroic marksmen who would keep their guns at the ready to defend the weak and the oppressed from the bloodthirsty Redskins.
First of all, the greatest threat to cow herders was neither Indians nor cattle rustlers, but the cattle themselves. At night, the slightest howl of a coyote or rumble in the sky over the Great Plains might scare the herd into an uncontrollable deadly stampede. Locating the runaway livestock would then sometimes take them over a week.
Crossing rivers was another major challenge, involving the risk of drowning for both people and animals. While at other times, the peril would come from the lack of water. Let alone, rabid skunk bites and wolf attacks.
Once I was shot by John Wayne.
"Western Stars", Bruce Springsteen (2019)
Yeah, it was towards the end.
That one scene's bought me a thousand drinks,
Set me up and I'll tell it for you, friend
Here's to the cowboys, riders in the whirlwind,
Tonight the western stars are shining bright again.
Ultimately, the worst danger wasn't so much the untamed wilderness, but the call of the sirens and demons of ‘civilisation’. The settler towns depicted in western movies actually had a very bad reputation. A journalist visiting Kansas City3, in the 1870's, writes that "after dark, nowhere on civilised earth are such displays of unbridled, shameless debauchery as those found in the dancehalls of border towns".
These are the infamous places, also known as 'Sodoms of the West', where, in a matter of days, lonesome cowboys give in to the short-lived pleasures of urban convenience, gambling away their hard-earned money on poker, prostitutes — and mostly alcohol.
Actually, it's always the same old story. With just a change of scenery. We're going round in circles, but the blind call it 'progress'. Round and round we go until our bodies break.
Clashes at O.K. Car Park
There is no denying that our Western cities are increasingly looking like the Farwest of yesteryear. But not the one portrayed in Lucky Luke cartoons, spaghetti westerns or the Hollywood myth embodied by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart and the likes. It's more like a low-cost version of the Cities of Lost Children, often with an immigrant background, apparently uncontrolled but perfectly controllable by the matrix, which feeds mainly on chaos and keeps replaying the same scripts over and over again: urban rodeos, scooter riding ambushes, and score-settling on cracked asphalt.
The wind blows in Arizona,
"Nouveau Western", MC Solaar (1994)
A state in America where Harry hung around.
Loony gun-crazed cowboy,
Fond of weapons, horses and bingeing,
With Smith & Wesson,
Colt, Derringer, Winchester & Remington on his tail,
Lonesome and proud, he wanders the lowlands,
Riding his horse mate.
The iconic boots are discarded in favour of mofo Nike trainers; junk food restaurants standing for traditional saloons — but the script remains unchanged: edgy, stabby egos, quick to dispense the rough injustice of blind retaliation, are being forced to operate in pitch darkness due to a severe brainpower failure, fumbling their way around in the dim light of the spark plugs of the cars they burn when they're happy (or unhappy), plus a couple of stray bullets as punctuation marks.
It might even sound funny if it were a cartoon from Charlie Hebdo.4. Except it isn't. But the offspring of the demiurgic Adam can get used to a lot. Too many scattered pieces, not enough consciousness to pull them all together. What's the point, anyway? 'Life' is much too short to ever expect to complete the puzzle on time. That's why the matrix favours shorter simulation times and and more frequent recycling, even if it means saturating the souls. In other words, dying young reduces the risk of sudden realisations.
Quarter to Midnight Cowboy5
The modern-day urban cowboy only rides his collective ego.
In a lot of places in the United States and certainly even more places around the world, the image of the cowboy has become, for some people, a negative one. The word 'cowboy' implies a strong, stubborn individual whose individualism depends on pulling down other people's individualism.
Viggo Mortensen
He's not lonesome: he travels in packs of preyed-on predators. He poses as loud and unruly, but he's actually a coward of the worst kind — a quiesling unconsciously serving the system, with more control buttons than the dashboard of an airliner.
Except there are so many squares missing on his chessboard, it looks more like a old PacMan (or Minesweeper) on uppers than a game of chess.
I'm a cowboy,
"Dead or Alive", Bon Jovi (1992)
On a steel horse I ride.
I'm wanted dead or alive.
Wanted dead or alive? Who cares! Not even a raider of the lost identity. Just an extra on the set, who thinks he's the star of the movie — the one on a loop.
Spoiler alert: as long as we believe that chaos is outside, we'll stay in the film. And it's rarely ever us who write the final scene.
Wild Wild West
Who remembers the famous 1960's cult series featuring James West and Artemus Gordon, two secret agents operating in the American West circa 1869-77? Featuring Will Smith, it was resurrected, at the end of the 1990's and modernised into an explosive (and somewhat chaotic) remake, which turned the old-fashioned western into a laboratory for retro-futuristic experimentation. The West became a backdrop for all kinds of technological fantasies and preposterous conspiracies — as if fiction had sensed that this Farwest had never been real, but had already been simulated.
What if that actually was the real 'conspiracy' of the Wild Wild West? A territory already out of reach, populated by myths, overacting cowboys, unlikely machines, and vigilantes with flawless brushing. In short, a mental theatre, ideal for testing narratives of power, control and coded heroism.
Forty seven dead beats
"Wild Wild West", The Escape Club (1988)
Living in a back street.
North, east, west, south,
All in the same house,
Sitting in a back room,
Waiting for the big boom.
I'm in a bedroom,
Waiting for my baby.
She's so mean but I don't care.
I love her eyes and her wild, wild hair.
Dance to the beat that we love best,
Heading for the nineties,
Living in the wild, wild west.
Perhaps the West has never existed other than as a backdrop — a backdrop that the matrix can recycle at will. Even today, it is still being projected onto our cities, our screens and our fantaisies of independence.
Same spiral. Same cast. Different scene. No real change on the western front of the demiurgic cube.
As French actor and screenwriter Jean Yanne might have said, had he survived the TikTok era: "We're all cowboys… except we've had our saddles nicked and we're shooting blanks."
Endnotes
- ^ It's all true: my great-uncle, born at the end of the 1890's, was really called Charley and did come from Kansas.
- ^ Wikipedia.
- ^ Philippe Jacquin, Vers l’ouest : un nouveau monde (Westwards: A New World).
- ^ Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical weekly magazine, featuring cartoons, reports, polemics, and jokes.
- ^ A cross-referenced cinematographic hint at John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) featuring Jon Voight, and Jean Yanne's Quarter to Two B.C. (1982) featuring Coluche.
© La Pensine Mutine. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.
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