Paul Cantor on The Western

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2020

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What was the Old West? How did Westerns emerge as a quintessential American art form? What are the greatest Westerns and what accounts for their enduring appeal—in America and around the world? In this Conversation, Paul Cantor explains how the Western rose to prominence—and the philosophical, political, and cultural themes that the greatest Westerns address. Cantor shares an extended interpretation of the films of John Ford and particularly Ford's two masterworks, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. He also explains how Ford’s work and other Westerns influenced Akiro Kurosawa’s Japanese Samurai films. Cantor and Kristol also discuss how the Italian Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone influenced Clint Eastwood and other more recent American films. Here we see how an American art form spread around the world and later returned to reshape American culture. This is a must-listen Conversation for anyone interested in American culture and popular culture around the globe.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Welcome to Conversations, I'm Bill Crystal and I'm joined today by Paul Cantor as I've been several times before.
0:21.0	We've discussed topics ranging from Shakespeare to popular
0:25.2	culture in various forms and today we're going to talk about the Western. That's
0:29.2	okay with you? That's fine. I'm glad to do it. I am too. I've always been a fan of the Western and it's generally considered a great American jar I guess and so we'll talk about its history and in movies and maybe other little bit in other media as well but what is the
0:45.8	Western okay that's a very difficult question to answer and I've been thinking
0:50.0	about for years and I think I finally figured it out after writing three books on
0:54.6	popular actually in the course of writing this is going to hurt the sales of
0:58.0	the first of those three books if you only just forget it out now you know
1:01.0	well you learn while doing I'm going to try to separate popular
1:06.3	culture out into two broad categories and it's works that are set in the middle class world versus works that are set in
1:16.4	alternatives to the middle class world. It sounds overly simplistic, but let's see
1:21.9	if it works. That is, I think a lot of works in popular culture
1:27.6	are set in contemporary America, in a world that's both
1:32.2	basically middle class and its values, world that's a liberal
1:35.8	democracy.
1:36.8	Have in mind here things like situation comedies, romantic comedies, most shows about
1:42.4	professional life, doctors and lawyers and so on.
1:46.4	And what I'd say is in these works, the regime is invisible.
1:51.1	It's just there. It's what we ourselves live in and people accept it.
1:56.0	They don't notice its presence.
1:58.0	It's like fish and water.
1:59.0	They don't notice the water.
	...

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