The Tartan

By Eshaan Joshi

“They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” he grumbles, sitting on a ratty armchair in front of the family TV. He’s been complaining about anything and everything — politics, culture, food — but he doesn’t seem to want to stop talking about movies. He’s watching one of the old flicks he dug out of an ancient VHS case that looked old enough to star in the newest “Indiana Jones” movie, complaining the whole time about how much better things were back when it was new. He’d blown off the dust, inserted the tape, fumbled a few times with the newfangled rewinder feature (God only knows why you have a VHS player in the year of our Lord 2024 but it serves to tell this story). 

All along, he keeps repeating one, simple phrase. “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

They don’t make ‘em like what anymore?

Of course, my illusory stand-in here, (we could call him Jimbo if you’d like, I think that sufficiently dates him) can’t respond. He’s a macabre creature of my own rhetoric — in short, a strawman. But his beliefs are something I do hear a lot. Not from Jimbo — drinking his coffee laced with some sort of cheap alcohol, lounging in his living room, remote in hand —  but from actual, real people. I usually just write them off; people have been complaining about movies since the Lumiere Brothers showed the world a train arriving. 

At some point, thanks to a small, gnawing voice in my head and entirely far too much free time, I started watching movies again. And, as ashamed as I am to say it, I started seeing it. Just a tiny bit, in the back of my mind, I started seeing the dots connect in some strange tapestry of cinema.

I start, like any good movie does, with a cutaway.

The American Western was one of the most influential genres to ever grace the silver screen, an ambassador of what the United States represented, sent out to the world on spools of 70mm long enough that you could lay it down and the other end would stretch off into the horizon. It was the genre that defined the early 20th century, lasting from the early ’40s to the dog days of the so-called “Cultural Decade” of the ’60s. It was, for so many years, America. The Cowboy fighting off the Outlaw, the Sheriff keeping his sleepy town safe. The heroes and villains of the Old West were immortalized, rewritten, created anew.

It was a genre that died at the end of the post-war boom, whose simple heroes and forever villains slowly died out. It went the way of the gangster flick, that is, the way of the dodo. Dead. Killed. Kaput.

The new American Western was one of the genres that defined the late 20th century, weaving together elements of the rest of the movie landscape to bring itself back to relevance. Perhaps they were not what they once had been but they were something, dammit, and they planned on holding onto that something until it was pried from their cold, dead hands. The renewed American Western was something totally different than its predecessor, unwilling to lionize or embellish in the way it had once found too easy. A second take on a genre that had been a fixation in cinema.What changed?

The American Western of the first half of the 20th century was the Modernist Western. It started before the second World War, then persisted into the ’60s. They would preach rationality and reason. It was an era when we really did believe that anyone true to their principles and sound of belief, would be able to succeed. Meritocracy was real, the individual was king, and Good would triumph. Modernism was unshakeable in its belief that we could — liberal optimism. The war was won, our G.I.s were back, we were rebuilding America. The Nazis were beaten, the world was trending towards something better.

It’s ironic that the second wave of Westerns, the ones that really brought the genre back to the public eye, were created in the second wave of unfettered American optimism, the post-Cold War ’90s. Francis Fukuyama proudly proclaimed it was the “end of history”; it was the final victory of the Liberal Democracy. For all its flaws, the America of the ’90s saw itself as the bastion of freedom, the shining city on a hill. 

And yet, these Westerns did not keep the optimism of the ’50s alive when they made their triumphant return. The heroes were no longer lionized, the villains no longer cartoonish. The Good Sheriff no longer fought the Bad Outlaw with help from the Conflicted Gunslinger. You couldn’t do that anymore. It just wouldn’t sell to the sensibilities of the new American Audience.

The Modernist Western was a product of a little bubble of American optimism untempered by the harsh reality of the post-war. The United States had just taken over as the center of the world, and at the beginning people saw that as worth celebrating. The United States had its flaws and folly, sure, but it was never going global with them. In the post-war world, the U.S. was global. And as more and more of the country’s flaws became readily available to see, it became hard to maintain that Good will always beat Evil, that sense and rationality will prevail, that believing in the individual or in science will always lead to the common good. Who were we fighting in Korea? Who were the Good in Vietnam? Who was the Evil in Watergate? Where was the rationality in body bags coming home from a jungle on the other side of the planet; which part of science demanded segregation of the races?

What had happened to the endless triumph of liberal optimism?

Modernism died with the first wave of American optimism. It died in the harsh realities of a world that did not acquiesce to the sensibilities of optimism. It died while Jimmy Carter tried — and failed — to tackle stagflation. It died with an America laid bare for her tragedies and her flaws. It was replaced with a cynicism, an abandonment of that optimism which slowly took over the media. Postmodernism was the response to a society plagued with modernism. It rejected “progress,” or at least, narratives about “progress.” It tore them down, remade them, showed the dark underbelly of ideas that we took for granted. It was the deconstruction of tropes, the complete and utter dismissal of what became the “childish” faith in science and humanity that we’d held for so long. It was the twisted Western, the Spaghetti Westerns that became ever so popular in the last year of the 1960s and became the blueprint for the Westerns into that decade and beyond. And while those Westerns really only lasted for a brief moment, they bucked the trends that had defined the genre — and in doing so became the groundwork for the new generation. The hero was no longer heroic, the villain no longer mustachioed, the plot no longer a triumph but a somber retelling.

As we became jaded, so did the stories we told. 

Remember when I called this a cutaway? Well, by my reckoning, this became the main attraction. The “that” people talk about, when they say “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” is linked with that simple optimism, the sincerity of modernist media. But it’s not just that, hell Jimbo probably isn’t waxing poetic about “High Noon” or “Hopalong Cassidy,” he’s talking about something he grew up with. He’s talking about the era that embraced that decay of optimism.

While the Westerns weren’t the clearest delineator of modernism/postmodernism, they are a classic. It was much easier watching a movie growing up in an era where movies believed that things would work out. And even in the early postmodern era, there was still something bittersweet in those endings. “Dances with the Wolves” ends with no victory, but for a moment, we can rest with the knowledge that there was a small victory. In “Unforgiven,” Clint Eastwood plays a retired outlaw, in for one last job (heard that cliche anywhere?), and while the movie betrays no optimism, he finds his escape as well, the individual against the odds. 

That simple story, the meek individual victories in the face of inevitability gave way to a far bleaker expectation. The stories told in that early postmodern era were the stories that hit the silver screen in the ’80s and ’90s, movies that left an impression on the audience, the cult classics that influenced a generation. This was the age where our notions of Sci-Fi were killed by “Blade Runner,” and where “Scarface” put the gangster flick to rest one last time. Movies which took what had been said a dozen times before and showed it in a new light. 

Cinema was dead. Long live cinema.

We remember those early postmodern years (or at least, Jimbo does) because they still gave us someone to pull for,  as flawed, as mistaken, as broken as that hero could be. We rarely got satisfying endings, but we got endings that gave us the flicker of hope that the individual could win — not triumph, as modernism claimed, but something. 

Those grinding gears of postmodernism had their sights set on themselves, soon enough. They were not content to kill modernism. Postmodernism, as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, began to examine what it meant to have victory. In “No Country for Old Men,” there is no justice, no victory. No small inklings that things may turn out all right for the individual. 

The Sheriff stops nothing. The Outlaw disappears. Our hero is another ragged criminal, who was there at the right moment, at the right time, and made nothing from it. Justice did not come swiftly, hell it may not come at all. We were no longer thinking about a world of escapism. We were talking about life.

Man, doesn’t life just suck?

Movies were escapism, a window into a world we could imagine ourselves in, a little tiny doorway to jam our foot into and gaze through. It was our wardrobe to Narnia, it was something so perfectly and essentially beautiful because it was whatever we wanted to make of it. They were the rejection of nihilism. They demanded a hero, a story to tell and a villain to hate. They gave meaning to the meaningless and captivated millions. When that stopped, it changed how people saw movies — no longer escapism when the cinema itself, the ultimate reflection of building meaning upon meaninglessness, embraced that fruitlessness.

Maybe Jimbo, his hands trying to fix another problem in a VHS tape, was right. Maybe they don’t make ‘em the way they used to. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we don’t need to fall in love with movies anymore — it could be that now, we need to think about them.

I’ll say my part. There is a time when the critiques and the deconstructions have nothing left to deconstruct, when a movie becomes a deconstruction of itself and the entire postmodernist paradigm collapses. Postmodernism claims the lessons told by modernism are meaningless — that it isn’t really that simple. We can’t have faith in liberal optimism. The post-war boom ended with the stagnation of the ’70s and ’80s. The post-Cold War peak ended in the morning of September 11, 2001. Liberal optimism never won — to postmodernism, it was a mere distraction. Postmodernism run amok says nothing — which is, to some extent, worse than saying something meaningless. 

There are responses to postmodernism. I’m not qualified to talk about them, though I’d love to one day. Movies are rethinking their deconstructions — they’re taking the building blocks postmodernism gave them and putting them into something new. They’re embracing nihilism in a way that few have. There’s a new age of cinema, of storytelling, and the American Western will be right there telling its own. Telling the story of America, of the heroes of the Old West, of the people who lived in a land whose beauty we can still see, even as their stories fade farther into the sands of time. Telling us about good, and evil, about the Sheriff and the Outlaw, and the Gunslinger who we can never overlook. Because we can’t tell the story of American cinema without the six-shooter and the saloon.