
Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, with their laborers, clerks, merchants, teachers, sheriffs, entertainers. Where philosophers from Plato to Rousseau sought to imagine the development of civil society from first principles, the makers of Westerns—John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh—showed it being created from the ground up, by hands-on labor.
Unlike the blank pages awaiting philosophers’ fancies, the American West was already inhabited, and the Indigenous peoples living there had well-developed social orders, so Westerns are, unavoidably, tales of conquest and subjection. Westerns, which emerged around the dawn of the twentieth century—while the westward expansion that they depicted was still going on—have often served to whitewash a bloody past and ease the mainstream conscience. If the genre has a particular bent toward mythology, it’s because this episode of American history admits of no honest telling without shame and dishonor. The Western, at its worst, is a series of convenient lies, but the genre also encompasses works that look frankly at prejudice and at crimes against humanity. In John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956), an Indian-hating warrior goes into self-imposed exile; Robert Aldrich’s “Apache” (1954) dramatizes the heroic struggle for freedom of Geronimo’s subchief, Massai.
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THE FRENZY Joyce Carol Oates
Early afternoon, driving south on the Garden State Parkway with the girl beside him.

UPDATED KENNEDY CENTER 2025 SCHEDULE
April 1—A. R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” with Lauren Boebert and Kid Rock

YOU MAD, BRO?
Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS BETTING ON THE FUTURE
Lucy Dacus after boygenius.

STEAL, ADAPT, BORROW
Jonathan Anderson transformed Loewe by radically reinterpreting classic garments. Is Dior next?

JUST BETWEEN US
The pleasures and pitfalls of gossip.

INHERIT THE PLAY
The return of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Ghosts.”

LEAVE WITH DESSERT
Graydon Carter’s great magazine age.

INTERIORS
The tyranny of taste in Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection.”

Naomi Fry on Jay McInerney's "Chloe's Scene"
As a teen-ager, long before I lived in New York, I felt the city urging me toward it. N.Y.C., with its art and money, its drugs and fashion, its misery and elation—how tough, how grimy, how scary, how glamorous! For me, one of its most potent siren calls was “Chloe’s Scene,” a piece written for this magazine, in 1994, by the novelist Jay McInerney, about the then nineteen-year-old sometime actress, sometime model, and all-around It Girl Chloë Sevigny.