The myth of the cowboy

  From 1903's The Great Train Robbery – arguably the first American action movie – until the 1950s, Westerns accounted for anywhere between 20% and 40% of all American-made films. In many ways, the Western was the film that built Hollywood, and its ubiquity helped shape collective cultural ideas about everything from masculinity to history to morality. We see characteristics of the traditional Wild West hero – the lonesome, gunslinging cowboy – celebrated in everyone from mob bosses to Silicon Valley CEOs. We invoke phrases like “shoot from the hip” and “quick on the draw” without a second thought. The classic era of Westerns crystalized America's self-mythologizing as a “wild” country, tamed only by the rugged individualism of cowboys, sheriffs, and dreamers who traveled West to pan for gold, both literally and figuratively.
  The Western's central place in American consciousness has made it the perfect vehicle for modern filmmakers to flip expectations and poke holes in our national mythological fabric. The genre has long served as a national mirror – and what filmmakers and artists see in the reflection tells us something about how we live now, long after the era of the cowboy.