The Western’s Grand Reversion

The army officer passing through Panama was in one of those watering hole conversations with a fellow U.S. traveler that could last all night. After hearing the American journeyman’s endless complaints, the good soldier asked his new drinking buddy why he just didn’t go back to his own country. “Because I’m a Manifest Destiny Man, and my country will be here long before I die!” 

Though the joke’s early variants date all the way back to 1847, it managed to prophesize the ambivalence and the sheer magnitude of America’s westward expansion and its ultimate global dominion. Nearly 180 years later, it remains a cutting statement that tackles the worst tendencies of American hubris while foreshadowing the cultural crisis that would erupt when the nation was out of western land on which to expand and had no choice but to openly flirt with its imperialist tendencies.

Considering that the movies arose as a popular art form right around the time Arizona earned statehood in 1912, it comes as little surprise that the Western captured the popular imagination in ways other film genres couldn’t. From 1903’s “The Great Train Robbery” to the rise of John Ford in the Depression years, it became the most American of genres in the only artistic medium to which the nation can claim dominance. As Thomas Schatz writes in his foundational film studies book Hollywood Genres: “It is interesting in this regard that we as a culture have found the story of the settlement of the ‘New World’ beyond the Alleghenies and the Mississippi even more compelling than the development of the colonies and the Revolutionary War itself.”

Yet the Western’s supremacy would not last. When American film began its Renaissance, movies like The Wild Bunch and Little Big Man challenged the genre’s conventions with their interrogations of violence and parallels between Vietnam and the nation’s policy toward Native Americans. Hollywood cinema reached the pinnacle of its artistry with such revisionist takes, but the result was that its most popular genre collapsed, morphing into the urban action cinema of the Clint Eastwood kind or migrating to television miniseries like 1985’s Lonesome Dove and the shows to which Quentin Tarantino paid tribute in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood… The Western’s popularity never wavered; it merely became the stuff of lower art only redeemable when filmmakers turned classic crowd pleasers into prestige pics (see the Coen Brothers’s remake of True Grit, Eastwood’s Unforgiven, or Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves).

For decades, the Western remained scarce on movie screens largely because land acknowledgements and similar apologetics shrivel in shadow of the 70’s grand genre reinventions. Not only was there nothing much left to say as the next round of Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp mounted, but these pale imitations could not could even match the thematic complexity of an 1847 zinger that itself would result in little more than denunciation today. 

Curiously, in a summer movie season where franchise and formula have broken down, the first chapter of Costner’s Horizon saga and Lee Isaac Chung’s long-awaited Twister sequel are unrepentant about their Western street cred. However, the most radical aspect of the films is not their allegiance to a widely dismissed genre, but their intelligent and attuned senses of history that approach the form with a refusal to wallow in tired retreads of America’s past transgressions. 

Rather than gut American myths or mine the flaws of their hypermasculine characters yet again on the big screen, the central concern of both films is the labyrinth of land titles and ownership that continues to define the region. While Horizon and Twisters are both major works, they could also function as models for the most exciting and subversive real estate ads ever made, a preoccupation that only enhances their artistic achievements. 

The first entry in a proposed five-part series that Costner self-financed, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter One contains multitudes within its 3-hour runtime. Costner structures his epic by weaving three narratives together as his characters draw inspiration from a sleek flyer promoting the future township of Horizon that is making the rounds in every outpost beyond the Mississippi.

The land itself is an empty place full of unadvertised native rebellions where settlers can, at their own peril, live out the promise of the American West during the height of the Civil War. Within its limits, there’s Sienna Miller as the widow falling in love with the lieutenant (Sam Worthington) who rescued her from the Apache attack on the settlement that makes up the film’s masterful first half hour. Luke Wilson leads a cadre of pioneers as he keeps the peace between the rough-and-tumble Scotch Irish and the English wannabee aristocrats. Anchoring the film is Costner as quintessential cowboy loner Hayes Ellison, a horse trader who finds himself on the wrong side of the violent Sykes clan when he rescues a toddler and a call girl moonlighting as a babysitter (Abbey Lee) after a manhunt for one of their kin's estranged wife goes awry. 

Even before it premiered at Cannes in May, critics and Hollywood players had their knives out for the film–seemingly the manifestation of anger over Cosner’s abrupt exit from his juggernaut series Yellowstone and the actor-director’s buck-the-system motivation to follow his personal vision. While the movie’s box-office returns have been dismal enough to put the planned August theatrical release of part two on indefinite hold, Costner’s passion project immediately became a megahit on streaming upon its PVOD release last week. 

Truthfully, the venom directed at this self-proclaimed American saga has more to do with Horizon’s full-spectrum representation of the West than petty Hollywood office politics. Costner evades the neo-noble savagism and forced-by-committee agency that diluted Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Instead, he opts for depictions of race and violence more in line with the scholarship of writers like Jeff Fynn-Paul, who have become demonized for their deep research and measured conclusions about Indigenous relations in the United States.

Horizon refuses to treat its Native Americans as monoliths or DEI saints, a strategy it also applies to the Chinese families it sets up as major characters for part two. Its tribal leaders negotiate tensions between unabashed violence and cultural preservation that also reflect the pressing dilemmas of the film’s international settlers drawn to the region. For all of Costner’s self-indulgent montages and oftentimes underwhelming miniseries aesthetic, there’s much to admire in his clear-eyed ruminations on the West–and much danger to the bureaucrat-industrial complex if his magnum opus eventually does tap into the non-Boomer zeitgeist. 

A funny thing happened to Twisters on the way to the type of weekend megawatt box-office grosses that Costner dreamed of: it escaped from the PC shackles to become the breakout movie of the summer the very same week American politics fully reembraced 2020’s most prominent style. On paper, it looked like the type of franchise revision audiences have consistently rejected for most of the past half-decade: a plot ripe for the climate change devout, a painstakingly selected rainbow cast, and a director of Korean descent who unwittingly became the cinematic poster child of #StopAsianHate among those who cared more about his skin color than his considerable talent.

But then, Chung spent the press tour decrying message movies and discussing Hollywood’s disconnect with Flyover Country as the film’s leading man, Glen Powell, became the organic A-List movie star Hollywood and the general public have been longing for. 

The tornadoes of Twisters, like those if its predecessor, are as thrilling as they are metaphoric. But rather than lay VFX on the foundation of a remarriage comedy, Chung’s film obsesses over the reality of the contemporary American West. His dynamic and fully realized supporting characters are less the product of open casting to satisfy the Academy Awards's new diversity requirements than the natural outgrowth of the complex and multiethnic regionalism that made Chung’s 2020 Oscar winner Minari a rejoinder to Hollywood’s one-note South of backwoods racists and the outlander career politicos who exploit them. The tornado outbreak ravaging Oklahoma that galvanizes meteorologist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and stormchasing YouTube celebrity Tyler Owens (Powell) into action is merely an excuse for Chung to investigate the lingering impact of opportunistic real estate despots on many a rural billboard who employ scientific data to predict and enjoy the spoils of devastation. Consequently, it’s also one of the few movies in any genre to take on academic elitism—all the while making the case for Powell as the rightful heir to Burt Reynolds’s equal-opportunity antipathy for dullard good ole boys and credentialed interlopers who think they know better.

Likewise, Chung is the type of filmmaker who can cast the movies’ current shorthand for Hispanic oppression, Anthony Ramos, and imbue his character with such dimensionality and moral scope that he exposes the hollowness of Hollywood tokenism. Taking up the mantle of Western great John Ford, Chung delivers the cinematic spectacle while making good on the Western’s thematic potential in ways lesser filmmakers could never fathom.

Although the Western spent much of the 21st Century lurking at the margins in disguise, it may well prove the genre most primed to parse out the current political moment while, in true John Wayne fashion, establishing itself capable of saving Hollywood from its latest self-inflicted crisis. In the end, we’re all Manifest Destiny men—whether we like it or not. 

Horizon and Twisters are now playing in theaters.