What Do Westerns Tell Us About Today’s America?

The Western is hot again in Hollywood, and there may be more to that fact than the cyclical nature of the movie business. Some of the new breed are the same as the old breed – simple stories stripped of the complications of modern life so as to tell pure tales of the human condition. But other new Westerns are seemingly using the form “as an allegory to comment on the existential anxieties facing America today.”