Steve Fore

SOURCE: "Same Old Others: The Western, Lonesome Dove, and the Lingering Difficulty of Difference," in The Velvet Light Trap, Vol. 27, Spring, 1991, pp. 49-62.

[In the following essay, Fore examines the ways in which the television adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove perpetuates racist and sexist stereotypes and endorses the myth of manifest destiny.]

The Red Indians who have been fortunate enough to secure permanent engagements with the several Western film companies are paid a salary that keeps them well provided with tobacco and their worshipped "firewater". . . . They put their heart and soul in the work, especially in battles with the whites, and it is necessary to have armed guards watch over their movements for the least sign of treachery. They naturally object to acting in pictures where they are defeated, and it requires a good deal of coaxing to induce them to take on such objectionable parts. . . . With all the precautions that are taken, the Redskins occasionally manage to smuggle real bullets into action; but happily they have always been detected in the nick of time. . . .

(Dench 92-3)

It is as if you accept the heroes and stories of Western society, not voluntarily, but because of the social and political forces you are caught up in. In fact, as kids, we tried to act out the things we had seen in the movies. We used to play cowboys and indians in the mountains around Gondar [Ethiopia]. .. . We acted out the roles of these heroes, identifying with the cowboys conquering the indians. We didn't identify with the indians at all and we never wanted the indians to win. Even in Tarzan movies, we would become totally galvanized by the activities of the hero and follow the story from his point of view, completely caught up in the structure of the story. Whenever Africans sneaked up behind Tarzan, we would scream our heads off, trying to warn him that "they" were coming.

(Haile Gerima, quoted in Roy Armes, 44)

In the weeks following the unexpected ratings and critical success of Lonesome Dove in February 1989, the CBS miniseries was accorded something approaching mythic status in the popular press and media industry trade papers. The story went something like this: Suzanne de Passe, president of the fitfully successful film and television arm of Motown, Inc., optioned Larry McMurtry's epic novel of the first cattle drive to Montana (the 1,500-page pre-publication manuscript carted into de Passe's office in a wheelbarrow) for $50,000 in 1985 after every major television production house in Hollywood had turned it down.¹ The miniseries was a dying breed, went the conventional wisdom, and the television and movie western's corpse had been cold for years. The novel proceeded to win a Pulitzer Prize, and suddenly the project was a go; CBS bit for $16 million of the $20-million budget, with the Australian communications and resorts company Qintex, Ltd., picking up the difference in exchange for distribution and ancillary rights. The eight-hour, four-night broadcast of Lonesome Dove then surprised just about everybody, as noted in Variety, by winning its time slot with the best ratings (26.1 rating/39 share) for any miniseries since 1984 (Gelman 85). It turned a profit for CBS in its initial airing, a rare occurrence for a miniseries, and it was estimated that it would eventually generate an estimated $30 million in advertising revenue for the network over three broadcasts. Qintex, meanwhile, was expected to clear another $20 million in exchange for foreign, cable, videocassette, and syndication rights, while Motown walked away with a million-dollar fee from Qintex, a cool 2,000% return on its initial investment (Carter). Once again, television history was made at night.

But what kind of history? What does it mean when a genre as apparently moribund as the western is resurrected, or at least refurbished, so successfully? Why did it decline in the first place? And what are the consequences of its revival, in the specific instance of Lonesome Dove?

One could approach these questions from many angles. In this essay, I will deal with them primarily from the perspective of the representation of race, with supplemental commentary on the representation of gender ("supplemental" not because the latter is of secondary concern, but because the question of gender in connection with this program and the so-called revisionist western in general warrants a full-scale investigation beyond the scope of this project). This focus seems appropriate in relation to Lonesome Dove given the project's genesis at Motown, one of the United States's most successful black-owned companies at the time of its sale to MCA Inc. (with which Motown had signed a national record distribution deal in 1982) in June 1988 for $61 million (Castro 51). In a more general sense, a decision to consider the narrative and thematic proclivities of the western in terms of its representation of race is almost necessarily also a decision to look at the genre from a nontraditional perspective. The issue of race always has been implicitly central to literary, cinematic, televisual, and historical accounts of the conquest of the North American continent. At an explicit level, however, these interpretive narratives typically have suppressed, marginalized, grotesquely distorted, or ignored it.²

Nelson George has attributed the gradual decline in the Motown Record Corporation's creative influence and commercial clout since its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s to a combination of factors. These include a general squeeze on independent record companies by the large corporate labels (Motown was the last significant holdout), defection from Motown by most of its major talent (e.g., Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson) coupled with an inability to nurture successful new acts with the same consistency, and a general loss of drive and focused sense of purpose. The company's ventures into movie and television production in the 1970s and 1980s perhaps may be indicative of scattershot corporate goal-making, but Motown's attempts to establish a cross-media base of operations mirrors on a smaller scale the accelerating trend toward diversified ownership among the giant media conglomerates (a trend accelerated, of course, by the Reagan administration's acknowledgment that existing antitrust statutes would be tacitly ignored).

Still, Lonesome Dove represented something of a new direction for Motown. Not only had the company not had a substantial commercial success in the realm of feature filmmaking since 1972's Lady Sings the Blues, but, as George notes, most of its other sporadic productions had leaned thematically and narratively toward explorations of aspects of the African-American experience (e.g., Mahogany, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, Scott Joplin: King of Ragtime, Thank God It's Friday, and The Wiz). Lonesome Dove, in contrast, was a novel by a white Texan featuring an ensemble of predominantly white characters who undergo experiences viewed from perspectives historically characteristic of white-male mythologies of the American West. According to Gelman, Suzanne de Passe says that "Motown maintained creative control of Dove" (101). Nevertheless, it is unclear just what this control entailed, as the adaptation of the novel for television by Bill Wittliff (another white Texan) was remarkably faithful to the letter and spirit of McMurtry's novel. By no means am I suggesting that this choice of projects or the subsequent fidelity of the miniseries to the source novel was a "betrayal" of Motown's deep roots in the African-American experience. Rather, it seems primarily to indicate a new direction in corporate strategy, a signal to the Hollywood establishment that Motown intended to position itself as a broad-based, general interest production company. I do, however, want to explore some of the ramifications for the representation of race and gender implicit in the act of renovating this particular genre in the context of American culture and society in the late 1980s.

The western, of course, is one of the most venerable and resilient genres in American popular literature. In the field of film studies, it has also been one of the most exhaustively researched.³ Significantly, however, academic scholarship dealing with the western has slowed to a trickle since the late 1970s. This decline roughly coincided with the purported "death" of the genre as a commercially viable product within the American film and television industry. None of the few large-scale cinematic westerns produced by Hollywood in the 1980s (Pale Rider, Silverado, Young Guns, and a handful of others), has been more than a marginally bright star at the box office. It has been observed that some of the traditional thematic and narrative concerns of the western have been transposed to generic forms more currently in favor with movie audiences, such as the science fiction film (e.g., The Road Warrior, Star Wars) and the cop film. (The miscellaneous Dirty Harry films have all outgrossed Pale Rider, suggesting that viewers prefer Clint Eastwood brandishing a .44 Magnum rather than a Colt Peacemaker.)

It is generally agreed that the western is the Hollywood genre most overtly and fundamentally concerned with mythologies surrounding the geographic and cultural expansion of the United States. It traditionally charts the struggle of the forces of (European-derived) civilization against the forces of the wilderness (both natural elements and non-European peoples), ultimately celebrating the promised manifest destiny of a new order consisting of representative democracy and a free market economy. Early in its cinematic and literary history, the western also developed a tendency to be elegiac in tone. By the time Owen Wister's Virginian announced (the novel, set in the 1880s, was published in 1902), "We are getting ready for the change . . . [w]hen the natural pasture is eaten off (362), the American west already had been declared officially closed, and the Virginian himself was planning to shift his prosperous livelihood from the cattle business to the coal industry.

Individual cowboys like the Virginian were the primary shock troops of Anglo civilization in these mythic representations, subsequently personified in the movies by reverberatingly iconic figures such as William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Gary Cooper (the most famous cinematic Virginian), John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Clint Eastwood. Like the protagonists of other genres, the white male western hero lived according to a relatively inflexible moral code that placed him as a mediating figure between "civilization" and "savagery," community and the individual. A romanticized perpetual wanderer, he stood firm with the forces of the new social order, even though he himself would never be comfortably "civilized" (hence civilization's door slamming on Ethan Edwards' backside as he trudges alone back into Monument Valley at the end of The Searchers). As Robert Warshow wrote of "The Westerner" in 1954,

[i]f justice and order did not continually demand his protection, he would be without a calling. Indeed, we come upon him often in just that situation, as the reign of law settles over the West and he is forced to see that his day is over; those are the pictures which end with his death or with his departure to some more remote frontier. . . . The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength. (140)

But whose "honor" is this? "Justice and order" for whom? Whose story is being told here, in these chronicles of American expansionism into a vast but finite frontier? If, as Thomas Schatz suggests, the processes of cultural mythmaking constitute "a basic human activity which structures human experience—whether social or personal, whether physical or metaphysical—in a distinct and consistent fashion" (262), it is important to remember that individual myths are designed and acceded to not just to explain events and patterns of behavior but to justify them in order to preserve a society's political and economic equilibrium. Roland Barthes' famous observation will suffice in this connection:

Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. . . . Entrusted with "glossing over" an intentional concept, . . . [myth,] driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept. . . will naturalize it. We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth-consumer, the intention . . . of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason. (original emphasis, 129)

Thus, for instance, when Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 wrote his famous, influential, and much-debated essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," he was offering a summary analysis of a geographical and social phenomenon—the westward expansion of the United States—that was by then already receding into history. Turner articulated a thesis that provided a justification of expansionism for his contemporaries and served, in conjunction with other complementary ideas voiced in the same era, to establish the philosophical basis of much subsequent policy and action by American public and private interests throughout the twentieth century. He saw the fact and idea of the frontier as the force propelling and guiding all over significant events and movements in American history, from the growth of industry to the Civil War. The American frontier, for Turner, was historically cyclical. Significantly, we always lived on the edge of it, in a perpetual tension between the settled metropolis and the verdant wilderness, and this tension generated in turn a constant urge to expand, to move forward (and always from the metropolis to the wilderness).

American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. (1-2)

Seen as a mythical narrative, Turner's thesis is as interesting for what (and whom) it leaves out as it is for what it includes in its explanation of the American national identity. It "naturalizes" the phenomenon of geographical and economic expansion across the continent on the part of white European settlers as a positive and, in any case, inevitable occurrence. It privileges the wilderness, with its wide open spaces, as a land of unfettered economic opportunity and personal freedom—especially in comparison with the city's hyperregulated and hypercongested environment. Yet at the same time, suggests historian Richard Slotkin, the goal of Turner's and other traditional versions of the myth is less to celebrate the frontier than to "function as rationalizer of the processes of capitalist development in America" (34). The version of American history celebrated in Turner's thesis and in most other conventional renderings of the myth of the frontier, says Slotkin,

became part of a nascent national ideology and mythology. The economic patterns it rationalized and the individual virtues it celebrated were only exotic and melodramatic versions of the characteristic processes of capitalist development—notably the boom/bust business cycle—and the social types thrown up by an expanding middle class. Thus the story of the Frontier and the materials of local folklore were taken up by the literary and ideological spokesmen of "the nation"—a group that had its own localistic loyalties, but which projected from them an ideology capable of organizing America as a unified nation-state. . . . [I]f the Frontier was at once a magic locus of potential wealth, it was also a mirror of its Metropolitan past, and the platform on which future Metropolitan centers would be erected. (39)

If we begin to reconceptualize the ideological agenda of the western story form as an artifact of American popular culture along these lines, it becomes increasingly clear that the narrative conventions of the genre were designed to serve the interests of society's status quo—and the racial, ethnic, and social groups most directly served by that status quo. It also becomes clearer why the genre—and the frontier myth itself—specifically excluded those groups who were traditionally marginalized within American culture as a whole. Hollywood's version of the West must, like Turner's, be scrutinized in recognition of its implicit acknowledgment and its particularized interpretation of the history of power relations in the United States. That is, the western typically speaks the myth of the American West in terms most conducive to placing the interests of market capitalism and white male entrepreneurs in a favorable light. The genre has traditionally celebrated the unfettered expansionist ambitions of the ruggedly individual Anglo cowboy, whether those ambitions are expressed as a generalized lust for the wide-open spaces (themselves symbolizing the supposed limitlessly exploitable potential of the free market) or as the violent seizure of a specific, and usually substantial, piece of turf. Red River, by overtly making the cowboy a capitalist, is a good example of the ideological framework of cinematic six-gun expansionism. When John Wayne's Tom Dunson shoots the Mexican range-riders in cold blood at the beginning of the film and declares that the entire landscape he is scanning now belongs to Tom Dunson, his act becomes an exercise in an explicitly mercantile manifest destiny. Dunson may be portrayed as a half-mad Captain Bligh in much of Red River, but he comes to his senses in the end (thanks to Montgomery Clift's steady Matthew Garth/Fletcher Christian, the junior partner in the firm), and in any case the film's narrative trajectory is very much in keeping with Frederick Jackson Turner's principles of the "inevitability" of west-ward expansion and of the unquestioned worth of the end result for society as a whole. Ruthlessness pays both emotionally and monetarily, and the film never so much as glances back at those dead Mexicans.

The decline of the western as a commercially viable film and television genre in the 1970s and 1980s is not tied only to its traditional association with white male supremacy, however. After all, other currently popular action genres, including those that have absorbed some of the western's traditional thematic concerns, are similarly dominated by white male protagonists (e.g., the science fiction film; The Road Warrior "solves" the problem of the vanished wilderness by blowing up the world and starting from scratch, placing Mad Max as the reluctant and cynical avatar of a new civilization in a post-apocalyptic frontier). Rather, the western was rendered obsolete primarily because of its close ties with the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century myth of free-enterprise capitalism. In the present postindustrial era, as more and more people find themselves permanently un- or underemployed and underpaid, as distinctions among social groups along race, gender, and class lines grow ever wider and more apparent, as the United States' decline as a world political and economic power grows more and more undeniable, America and Americans are increasingly concerned with keeping pace in this ominous new environment rather than dominating it. In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy alludes to the lingering appeal within the realm of popular culture of the notion of an ironclad American hegemony in world affairs. He suggests that the United States' ability "to reformulate its grand strategy in the light of the larger, uncontrollable changes taking place" is hindered by, among other things, "The still-powerful 'escapist' urges in the American social culture, which may be understandable in terms of the nation's 'frontier' past but [are] a hindrance to coming to terms with today's more complex, integrated world and with other cultures and ideologies" (524).⁴

How, then, can we correlate the popular success of Lonesome Dove with its appropriation of a generic vehicle characterized by such a blatant and ostensibly out-of-fashion celebration of American expansionism? First of all, as a cultural document of the late Reagan era, Lonesome Dove's relatively faithful adherence to generic conventions as they existed in the pre-Little Big Man era of the western marks it as a "return to traditionalism" in keeping with Reaganite ideology's willful conflation of history with myth in its rereading of America's past. (In this framework, for instance, the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the bombing of Libya become strategic and tactical triumphs reminiscent of World War II—the "Good War"—and the Nicaraguan Contras become the moral equivalent of America's "founding fathers.") If "Reaganite entertainment" is characterized by an attempt to reassure the viewer that such phenomena as the civilrights and women's movements have been beaten into submission, then Lonesome Dove to a degree fits within the axis of desire defined most successfully by the selfconsciously old-fashioned films of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, minus the neurotic irony of the Lucas-Spielberg factory.⁵ It celebrates expansionism, the expansiveness of the wilderness, and masculine individuality to a greater degree than any Hollywood-generated western of the last generation or so.

Of course, the circle is never quite joined under these circumstances. In significant ways, we do not, cannot, buy into the frontier myth through means appropriate for audiences of earlier generations. Too much history (Vietnam, Watergate, the decline of America's industrial economy) has intervened between the myth and its material referents. Crucially, though, Lonesome Dove preserves the western's elegiac, nostalgic celebration of a way of life that exists no longer (and, of course, at all times existed only within the limited and orderly parameters of the myth. Characters and events are scaled at a level of epic grandness and historical self-consciousness unavailable within almost any other generic framework. In fact, the world created in this miniseries is rather hermetically sealed in the past. While steeped in the muted mourning for a passing era characteristic of many 60s and 70s westerns, we see in Lonesome Dove none of the markers of Progress that dot the landscape of movies like The Wild Bunch and The Shootist—no automobiles, no electric lights, not even the railroad.

Again, this is not the naively unambiguous celebration of the American West mummified in, for example, 1962's Cinerama spectacular How the West Was Won (considered a pretty stale cookie even by contemporary critics, much less those of succeeding generations). To the contrary, Lonesome Dove is characteristic of the "new traditionalism" in some contemporary American mass media storytelling in its calculated blending of the stately, linear logic of myth and the messy, nonlinear randomness of quotidian realism. In order to buy into a story form as oft-told as the western, to accept the premises of its internal logic, present-day viewers (like viewers in any era) have required the form to retool itself in accordance with current cultural norms, including in this instance a recognition and acknowledgment of the unpredictable nature of human existence. Consequently, the Time review of Lonesome Dove was able to applaud the miniseries both for its adherence to fictional traditions and its gritty realism.

Lonesome Dove is surprisingly nonrevisionist in its picture of the West. The good guys still perform stunning heroics with six-shooters, and Indians are faceless villains who whoop when they ride. Yet in its everyday details—the dust and the spit, the casual conversations about whoring, the pain of a man getting a mesquite thorn removed from his thumb—this may be the most vividly rendered old West in TV history. (Zoglin 78)

Newsweek, meanwhile, used the program's realistic touches as a convenient and cliched means of censuring television's supposedly usual mode of discourse: "In a medium built on cheap, prefab, illusion, Lonesome Dove drips with authenticity" (Waters 55).

In fact, the program's recurrent and deliberate obfuscation of the gap between historical myth and historical reality constitutes a narrative trope entirely characteristic of the fiction of Larry McMurtry. In his novels, McMurtry self-consciously engages in an ongoing comparison of the "old" West with the "new," stirring the ashes of the former until they spark a connection with the latter. His perspective is typically disillusioned, even fatalistic, betraying a nostalgic and sentimental longing to make the myth live and breathe in the here and now. McMurtry himself indirectly acknowledges this contradiction in an essay from In a Narrow Grave. In this essay he describes the down-to-earth "realism" of the working cowboy while continuing to conflate reality and myth. He moves effortlessly between broad descriptions in the abstract—as below—and concrete anecdotes involving his own relatives, who in turn become mythic figures by association. (Incidentally, the description here could also serve as a character sketch of Lonesome Dove's cowboy philosopher Gus McCrae):

The view is often proffered by worshippers of the cowboy that he is a realist of the first order, but that view is an extravagant and imperceptive fiction. Cowboys are romantics, extreme romantics, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are sentimental to the core. . . . People who think cowboys are realists generally think so because the cowboy's speech is salty and apparently straight-forward, replete with the wisdom of natural men. What that generally means is that cowboy talk sounds shrewd and perceptive, and so it does. In fact, however, both the effect and the intention of much cowboy talk is literary: cowboys are aphorists. . . . It is a realism in tone only: its insights are either wildly romantic, mock-cynical, or solemnly sentimental. . . . (149)

In his novels, McMurtry is obsessed with the fragility and preciousness of life and with the ways in which people cope with death, which in McMurtry-land typically arrives unpredictably, without prior narrative warning or motivation. The suddenness and apparent arbitrariness of death in a McMurtry novel send a shock through the surviving characters, who learn in succeeding chapters to cope with their loss. They also send a shock through the reader, who continues to follow the narrative and, on another level, is invited to perceive this story as more "authentic" and more "real" than other stories of the same generic lineage. The insertion of apparently random events (such as deaths) into an otherwise conventionally linear and generically archetypal storyline customarily connotes within the Western (as opposed to western) literary tradition a heightened realism, a closer connection between the fictional construct and reality itself.

This literary trope is absolutely central to Lonesome Dove, both as novel and as miniseries. The story is propelled as much by a series of sudden, random deaths (the Irish boy Sean's horrible poisoning by swarming water moccasins, Joe's, Janey's, and Roscoe's murders at the hands of Blue Duck, etc.) and terrifying misfortunes (Lorena's kidnapping) as it is by the cattle drive to Montana. McMurtry's philosophical perspective on life is embedded in these deaths, and he entrusts various characters—most often Gus McCrae—with verbalizing that perspective. In the television version of the story, for instance, McCrae and his partner Woodrow Call comment in tandem on Sean's tragic and violent demise: "This was a good, brave boy," says McCrae. "Had a fine tenor voice and we'll miss him. There's accidents in life and he met with a bad one. Now we may all do the same if we ain't careful. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Now let's the rest of us go on to Montana." The more taciturn and unreflective Call adds, "He's right, boys. The best thing you can do with death is to ride off from it."

In their blend of straightforward sentiment with masculine stoicism, these are the kinds of cowboy aphorisms McMurtry finds so profound. And well they may be. Viewers may indeed be sobered by the randomness of Sean's death and by its graphic depiction—and moved to assume on that basis that Lonesome Dove is more "realistic" than most westerns because the world it depicts is as disordered as the world in which we live. The narrative construction of the story thus tends to diminish or conceal its status as fiction, although the world of Lonesome Dove can lay no stronger claim to "truth" or "reality" than any other fictional story. In fact, like all narratives, it shapes its world so that some points of view are directly acknowledged and voiced, while others are not; in any reading of this story, as with all stories, we must, as Robert Stam and Louise Spence have argued, "distinguish . . . between realism as a goal—Brecht's 'laying bare the causal network'—and realism as a style or constellation of strategies aimed at producing an illusionistic 'reality effect' (8). The narrative strategies of Lonesome Dove, then, are deployed in part to convince the viewer that this is not "just" a western; by appropriating "realism as a style" and the emotional jolts generated through that style, the program obscures to a degree its ties to this "obsolete" genre. It "naturalizes" the traditional world of the western no less than Stagecoach, say, did in 1939. Differences in the specific articulation of that world in the context of the late 1980s occur because the rhetorical means of reaching that goal must be reformulated in accordance with generalized shifts in historical perspective since the hey-day of the genre.

It seems likely also that Lonesome Dove appealed to viewers because its narrative strategies are specifically geared to the discursive demands of the medium in which it appeared. That is, this is a television western, not a movie western. In TV: The Most Popular Art, Horace Newcomb observes that the classic television westerns of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza, moved "away from the classical problems of the western frontier toward the more human and individualistic aspects of those problems," and that the process of adapting the western for the world of television was marked both by an adherence to much of the genre's conventional iconography and by an infusion of new conventions and emphases, "the elements of family and psychology common to the more domestic types of television" (74-5). The need for these changes was perceived because series television demands repetition and a permanent deferral of ultimate resolution in ways that the movies do not. If the hero rides off into the sunset at the end of the first episode, what do you do next week? Consequently, says Newcomb, rigid fidelity to the narrative patterns of the novelist or cinematic westerns would have ensured that on television "the classic issues of western adventure would have played themselves out long ago. In order to avoid this the producers have applied the western vision to a host of other problems" (82). This redirection of the genre, its scaling down from the epic to the intimate, stems also from the technology of the medium. In "Toward a Television Aesthetic," Newcomb argues that the small size of the television screen and the relatively poor quality of the image muffles the visual possibilities for grandeur and expansiveness (617).

If the western was to survive on television, then, it had to tell and sell itself in new ways, and Lonesome Dove is simply a recent manifestation of lessons first learned by writers and producers more than three decades ago. As grand as the scope of the program seems, this expansiveness is informed more by the historical and mythic baggage carried by the western genre itself than by what we actually see on our television sets. This sense of sweep is also suggested by the geographic and temporal trajectory of the narrative and by the form of the miniseries itself (a story so large it must be spread across four evenings and eight hours). Within those thousands of miles and several hundred minutes of story, we witness primarily small-scale events involving various combinations of the ensemble of characters, and these are engaged primarily in conversation, not "action." Despite the attention paid by critics to the amount of blood spilled over the course of Lonesome Dove's cattle drive, the program's most significant and emotionally charged moments are not gunfights, stampedes, or other violently cathartic events usually associated with the western. Rather, the program's fireworks occur mainly in the aftermaths of these events (e.g., the several funerals steeped in Gus's cowboy proverbs, finally including his own deathbed scene) and in intimate conversations, usually involving only two characters at a time, which have little direct lineage to the narrative patterns and thematic concerns of the movie western.

Exemplary here is the sequence early in the drive in which Gus and Woodrow find themselves by a creek outside of San Antonio. This creek holds such powerful and bittersweet memories for Gus in relation to the torch he's been carrying for Clara Allen, the great love of his life, who's now living on a ranch in Kansas with her husband and kids. At the scene's beginning Gus waxes nostalgic over the happy times spent with Clara by this creek (he even openly weeps). The scene's end with him haranguing Call over Call's mistreatment of a former lover, the long-deceased prostitute Maggie, and over Call's subsequent refusal to acknowledge that he is the father of Maggie's son Newt (the young initiate cowhand of the story). In the studied contrast (here and throughout the story) between Gus's loquaciousness and unashamed externalizing of emotion and Woodrow's taciturnity and repression of feeling, Lonesome Dove explores turf upon which the western does not ordinarily tread. Richard Campbell has suggested, in fact, that McCrae's privileging of interpersonal relationships and of the idea of community over the westerner's (and Call's) more conventional isolation and individualism marks Gus as a uniquely "feminized" western hero. Campbell contends that the program as a whole stands as "a stern critique of the perils of rugged individualism and its impulse to cut us off from genuine emotion, from the self, and from our responsibilities for others" (29-32). Campbell's argument is provocative and illuminating, but he doesn't adequately consider the incorporation of "claw-back" strategies within the text that work to blunt the effect of this critique. After all, McCrae "compensates" for his feminine characteristics by wielding his shooting iron with a deadly and unrepentent efficiency. Moreover, unlike the women in the story, he remains free to ride off into whatever sunset he chooses. That is, it can be argued that the character of McCrae does little more than pay convenient lip service to historical and social changes that helped render the western passé. As David Thorburn has suggested, Gus's extended bouts of self-reflection and moralizing

have no impact on McCrae's behavior. They complicate his character for the audience, as they are no doubt intended to do, but they remain essentially irrelevant to the momentum of the action, and represent a characteristic habit or gesture of self-indulgence wherein the story confesses to crimes or failings which it then proceeds to reenact anyway. (16-17)

Still, it is true that Lonesome Dove, like many contemporary male-buddy narratives, is centrally concerned with the process of redefining a (white) masculinity in crisis, pressured on all sides by "threats" to its hegemony. The series emphasizes a melodramatic limning of the masculine mystique characteristic of television ensemble dramas such as Magnum P.I., Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere. John Fiske suggests that these televisual rituals of male bonding develop a goal-centered, rather than relationship-centered (i.e., conventionally feminine), intimacy. Fiske adds, "The hero team also compensates for male insecurity: any inadequacies of one member are compensated by the strengths of another, so the teams become composite constructions of masculinity" (263).

Male melodrama sandwiched between layers of iconography characteristic of the movie and television western, then, constitutes Lonesome Dove's operative mode. It is the narrative and ideological strategies of the western which are of most immediate concern in a consideration of the representation of race. From its mythic perch, the genre traditionally has scanned a landscape dominated by white, male patriarchal culture. In another context, Stuart Hall has identified this slant as characteristic of colonialist literatures in general and has noted the ubiquitous presence of

the "absent" but imperializing "white eye"; the unmarked position from which all these observations are made and from which, alone, they make sense. This is the history of slavery and conquest, written, seen, drawn and photographed by The Winners. They cannot be read and made sense of from any other position. The "white eye" is always outside the frame—but seeing and positioning everything within it. (38-9)

This is Hollywood's West: it is the West seen from the point of view of the colonizers rather than that of the colonized. The western becomes, that is, a rhetorical means of explaining and justifying the forcible Anglo expansion into non-Anglo lands, and the obliteration by Anglo culture of non-Anglo ways of life, not to mention non-Anglo peoples. The genre is articulated in ways that deliberately control and limit the terms of debate over the issues confronted in the historical act of westward expansion. Working from a different but analogous imperial paradigm, Edward Said also establishes this assertion of linguistic control as the ideological basis of scholarly and literary discussions of "the Orient" by European writers during the period of European colonization of the Middle East:

. . . Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (3)

The conventions of plot, character, and setting within the Hollywood western, then, generally work to forward this goal of "having authority over" a geographic and cultural Other by portraying white expansionism in the North American frontier as an epic adventure with generally positive historical ramifications. In Tom Engelhardt's words, "the viewer is forced behind the barrel of [the Westerner's] repeating rifle and it is from that position . . . that he receives a picture history of Western colonialism and imperialism" (270). In an essay on race and American culture, Michael Orni notes the appropriateness of Engelhardt's extended metaphor, arguing:

Westerns have indeed become the prototype for European and American excursions throughout the Third World. . . . The "humanity" of whites is contrasted with the brutality and treachery of nonwhites, brave (i.e., white) souls are pitted against the merciless hordes in conflicts ranging from Indians against the British Lancers to Zulus against the Boers. What Stuart Hall refers to as the imperializing "white eye" provides the framework for these films, lurking outside the frame and yet seeing and positioning everything within. ... (116)

Richard Dyer also addresses this generic agenda in the course of discussing the narrative parameters of Britishproduced films dealing with the British colonial experience in black Africa.

The colonial landscape is expansive, enabling the hero to roam and giving us the entertainment of action; it is unexplored, giving him the task of discovery and us the pleasures of mystery; it is uncivilised, needing taming, providing the spectacle of power; it is difficult and dangerous, testing his machismo, providing us with suspense. In other words, the colonial landscape provides the occasion for the realisation of white male virtues, which are not qualities of being but of doing—acting, discovering, taming, conquering. At the same time, colonialism, as a social, political and economic system, even in fictions, also carries with it challenges of responsibility, of the establishment and maintenance of order, of the application of reason and authority to situations. These, too, are qualities of white manhood that are realised in the process of the colonial text. . . . (52)

This symbiotic relationship between landscape and male protagonist is, of course, also very much a part of the western. As an American colonial spectacle, it offers, in Steve Neale's words, "maximum scope for variations and permutations on the relations of the male figure to space, light, texture, colour and so on, as well as for variations and permutations on the speed and mode of its movements" (59). To this I would add only that this central figure is almost always a white male. Even in the socalled anti-westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse), most reversals and negations of generic conventions that historically "speak" the perspective of the white establishment in fact only shift the dominant point of view from the white establishment to the white counterculture. This perspective is more sympathetic to (especially) Native Americans' position on white westward expansion, but even here the colonized people have no authentic voice. Instead, their words and actions are witnessed and interpreted by a white intermediary who is the central protagonist of the film (Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse), Virtually all westerns, then, whether "traditional" or "revisionist," are locked into a colonialist mode of enunciation. As Mikhail Bakhtin suggested:

Language for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. (293-4)

Access to one's "own accent" traditionally has been denied to racial minorities and women in the western. Thus, the western—not unlike other literary, film, and television genres—reproduces and naturalizes historical reality: those groups who are traditionally marginalized and oppressed in the real world of social relations in the United States are similarly marginalized and oppressed in the fictive world of the cowboy movie. This hegemonic relationship leaks within the world of the western as much as within other genres, producing revisionist representations such as those described above, but, again, the western has never completely escaped a mode of discourse in which "the intruder exchanges places in our eyes with the intruded upon" (Engelhardt 270).

What I find unfortunate about Lonesome Dove, then, is the way the creators of the series deal with the ideological baggage it inevitably carries. Whatever else it might be talking about, the western tells a story of imperialism from the perspective of the imperialist, who almost always happens to be a white male of European heritage. In order for this perspective to remain ascendant, all potential "competitors" for the westerner's turf—Native Americans, Mexicans, African-Americans, women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds—must be neutralized or eradicated. This activity is carried out in Lonesome Dove no less than in the average Gene Autry film. The women of the story either are domesticated or want to be. While the cowboys are trekking thousands of miles and engaging in miscellaneous rites of ruggedly individualistic manhood, the women are tied to a parcel of land and/or a man—they're looking for roots. Even July Johnson's wife Ellie, the one woman in the story who wanders as footloose as the male characters, only does so in obsessive pursuit of her ex-lover; if he hadn't been hanged just after she found him, she probably would have settled down, too. As it is, Ellie's wander lust becomes in the context of this story a deeply neurotic flight from a woman's true calling as nurturer of home and hearth. When she abandons her own newborn (male) baby (who is immediately adopted by Clara, the resident earth mother in a tengallon hat), that tears it—Ellie turns up gruesomely dead within the space of two commercial breaks.⁶

The narrative space apportioned to Lonesome Dove's minority characters (all of whom are male) is no less problematic. All are connected by a mutually mystical and mystified closeness to Nature and a metaphysical version of reality. Deets, the black cowhand, is the drive's chief scout and guide—he can smell a storm brewing or a tank of water from 80 miles off. Po Campo, the drive's Mexican cook, is the group's second-rank philosopher (behind Gus) and eventually its seer when he accurately foretells Gus's death. The "half-breed" Blue Duck apparently ranges over the Southwest filling a role as the frontier's demonic id, melting out of and into the landscape at will.

Of these characters, Blue Duck carries the most narrative weight—he is even accorded his own recurrent musical theme, an ominous "Indian-sounding" trill on a flute that modulates into a wail evoking the howl of a wolf. He is the story's most significant manifestation of human evil, an enemy dating from McCrae's and Call's past as Texas Rangers ridding the territory of outlaws and Indians, returned now to terrorize them anew. Menacingly and charismatieally portrayed in the miniseries by Frederick Forrest, Blue Duck robs, kidnaps, and murders with no compunction and no explanations—he exists as the unknowable and lethal Other of which civilized folks are justifiably terrified. He is also a racist caricature worthy of a Cecil B. DeMille epic. When he kidnaps the beautiful-yet-innocent prostitute Lorena, he trots her through a tour of the most horrible psychological and physical tortures he can dream up. Even before he sells her to a band of depraved (and, eventually, yes, drunken) Indians and a couple of white buffalo hunters reminiscent of the street scum who get shot full of holes in the average Charles Bronson movie, he tells the petrified girl, in graphically visual images, what he'll do to her if she tries to escape:

I got a treatment for women that try to run away. I cut a little hole in their stomachs, pull out a gut, and wrap it around a limb. I drag 'em thirty or forty feet and tie 'em down. Then I watch what the coyotes are havin' for supper.⁷

While Gus rides to Lorena's rescue in this instance, efficiently dispatching all of the Indians and street scum with one bullet each, Blue Duck escapes. We expect a climactic confrontation and shoot-out between him and the ex-Rangers, but this would be out of step with Lonesome Dove's messily "realistic" version of the Wild West. Instead, Call encounters Blue Duck entirely by accident near the end of the story, in the course of his journey back to Texas with McCrae's pickled body. The indian has been captured and is about to be hanged by the good people of Santa Rosa, New Mexico Territory. The curious Call visits Blue Duck in the local jail, where the "breed" is wrapped in chains and guarded by a battalion of lawmen. He is also utterly unrepentent. After declaring that he should have "caught . . . and cooked" Gus when he had the chance, he states with considerable pride, "I raped women, stole children, burned houses and shot men, and run off horses and killed cattle, and robbed who I pleased all over your territory and you never even had a good look at me until today." Then, as he is being escorted from his cell to be hanged, Blue Duck breaks free and, taking a hapless deputy with him, plunges spectacularly out of a fourth floor window to his (and the deputy's) death on the street below. Even here, he successfully eludes the letter of the white man's law. But this is no defiant gesture characteristic of 70s revisionist westerns, symbolically asserting the strength and character of the Native American way of life. Within the world of Lonesome Dove, Blue Duck is not a revisionist hero—he deserved to be hanged, and the circumstances of his demise evoke only a renewed wonder and fear of the nonwhite Other he represents.

The characterization of Deets (played by Danny Glover) is in a way more perplexing than that of Blue Duck, who is at least unambiguously and flamboyantly portrayed as evil incarnate. Deets is one of the good guys—a veritable saint among men, in fact. And here lies the "problem" with Deets—there's no "there" there, no personality to speak of except for his unfailing kindness, sunny disposition, generosity, and competence. In a narrative environment full of prickly, rounded, strikingly individualized characters, Deets is distinctive only in his utter blandness. The western still doesn't know how to fit an African-American cowboy into its generic framework, although Deets' presence does implicitly acknowledge the fact that approximately 25% of all ranch hands and cowboys during the period of American expansion across the western plains and mountains were black.⁸ The genre does, of course, have a racial agenda, but this agenda usually has been directed toward rationalizing the eradication of Native Americans by whites. Movie and television westerns generally have been content simply to ignore the fact of black people in the Wild West except as an occasional novelty, typically in stories specifically focusing on the issue of race (e.g., The Legend of Nigger Charley, Blazing Saddles, single episodes of Lawman and The Rifleman, the late 60s series The Outcasts).⁹

Lonesome Dove makes a valiant effort to normalize Deets' presence by not calling attention to his racial heritage, by making him one of the boys, but no narratively or thematically significant niche is ever found for him in the story. A moral leader by example, he never seeks to usurp the worldly power of Call and McCrae. He engages in little banter with the other cowboys (although he does sit at the same table), and he is forever riding on ahead. He thus drifts into the periphery of the story, progressively becoming just another invisible man. Deets' most spectacular scene is the one in which he meets his shockingly violent and irony-laden death, skewered by a lance wielded by a starving Native American boy (who is in turn shot dead by Call and McCrae) who apparently reads hostile intent in Deets' kindly concern for the welfare of another child, "Take him, Captain," whispers the dying man as he holds the baby out to the others. "Don't want him to fall."

But even here Deets is marginalized. His death, which concludes the third part of the miniseries, and his funeral, which begins part four, become in tandem just another vehicle through which the central characters conduct further explorations of the capriciousness of existence. McCrae, as usual, says some plain but eloquent words and gets a little choked up. The usually stoic Call carves a eulogy into a wooden grave marker. Young Newt flashes back to Deets waving him, in slow motion, a final, smiling farewell. The music swells. The sheer quantity of emotion poured out through these scenes seems out of proportion to Deets' previously peripheral presence in and importance to the story. Everybody likes and respects him, but until he dies we don't see much significant interaction between him and the other characters. Newt's teary remembrance rings especially false; not only is it overwrought, but we've never really had a clue that he felt so deeply about Deets. As a result of all this melodrama, Lonesome Dove's treatment of Deets, and especially his death, smacks uncomfortably of paternalism. The program wants to present a "positive image" of an African-American person in the context of a semitraditional western, but the strategy for doing so involves bleaching him of all markings of a distinctive identity. Robert Slam and Louise Spence have forcefully addressed the problem with this strategy.

Much of the work on racism in the cinema, like early work on the representation of women, has stressed the issue of the "positive image." This reductionism, though not wrong, is inadequate and fraught with methodological dangers. The exact nature of "positive," first of all, is somewhat relative: black incarnations of patience and gradualism, for example, have always been more pleasing to whites than to blacks. A cinema dominated by positive images, characterised by a bending-over-backwardsnot-to-be-racist attitude, might ultimately betray a lack of confidence in the group portrayed, which usually has no illusions concerning its own perfection. . . . We should be equally suspicious of a naive integrationism which simply inserts new heroes and heroines, this time drawn from the ranks of the oppressed, into the old functional roles that were themselves oppressive, much as colonialism invited a few assimilated "natives" to join the club of the "elite." (9)

Lonesome Dove treads very nervously and delicately on the issue of race; clearly, its creators would prefer to tiptoe around it altogether. They apparently fail to grasp, however, that using the voice of America's most overtly imperial storytelling genre to tell their tale not only inherently weaves the issue of race into the fabric of the narrative, but also makes it extraordinarily difficult to eradicate racist notions from that narrative. It is inexcusable that the characterization of Blue Duck resorts to priming the pump of an undifferentiated fear of (cultural, racial) difference that pollutes most cinematic and televisual representations of Native Americans. It is in a way no more defensible to "naively integrate" the character of Deets into the world of the western without ever acknowledging the historically problematic nature of his presence there. Consequently, an attempt to ferret out the preferred meanings within this miniseries' narrative strategies would probably stamp Lonesome Dove, in the context of late-Reagan/early-Bush era cultural production, as a mainstream liberal tract. That is, its views on race and gender, communicated obliquely through deliberate and often thoughtful disruptions of the conventions of the western genre (Gus's "feminine" attributes, Clara's strength and managerial ability, the matter-of-fact presence of Deets as an equal member of the team), are more enlightened than those of Ed Meese, the Rehnquist court, or certainly the Great Communicator himself or his successor. But Lonesome Dove (as liberals will) also makes a series of narrative, thematic, and political compromises. While it is willing to stretch the boundaries of the western ever so gently, it finally adheres to and embraces the more sexist and racist connotations of the genre (e.g., through the celebration—ambiguous, admittedly—of a specifically masculine rootlessness and individuality, as well as the disingenuous martyring of Deets).

Is this genre therefore by definition incapable of expressing a more progressive, egalitarian point of view? Is there some way out of the prison house of the western? I think so, but it will involve rewriting the genre by first rewriting the history that informs it. In his BBC television series The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke tells of the peasants in eighteenth-century France who informed scientists working for Louis XVI of their repeated sightings of rocks that seemed to fall from the sky. This news was immediately discounted by the scientists, since it had come from the mouths of noncredible sources, i.e., peasants. Come the Revolution, whereupon the voice of the peasant commanded a new and unprecedented respect, et voilà, these rocks were quickly identified as meteorites. The key is, as Stuart Hall puts it, to make "visible what is usually invisible; the assumptions on which current practices depend" (47). A truly "progressive" and popular movie or television western, then, is possible, but its realization depends on a radical reconceptualization of our mainstream notions of "difference" and "otherness"—and that will happen only when historically marginalized voices within American culture find the means of seizing and holding center stage without resorting to debilitating assimilationist strategies, when it becomes possible to "populate" that rock with a "new intention" and call it a meteorite.

NOTES

¹ Very briefly summarized, Lonesome Dove chronicles the adventures of Augustus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones), former Texas Rangers who at the beginning of the story are marking time with some haphazard ranching in the tiny, isolated south Texas settlement of Lonesome Dove. When their former Ranger compadre Jake Spoon (Robert Urich) rides into town after an absence of several years with tales of wide-open spaces in Montana, Call's insatiable wanderlust and sense of adventure are stimulated. He decides to embark on an epic cattle drive to the new territories, taking Lonesome Dove's miscellaneous ranchhands and a reluctant McCrae (he's by nature more philosopher and raconteur than man of action) along for the ride. The important supporting characters introduced here include: Newt (Ricky Schroeder), an ingenuous and promising teenaged hand for whom the drive serves as an initiation into manhood and who, it develops, may be Call's illegitimate son; Deets (Danny Glover), also a longtime compatriot of Call and McCrae and the most competent cowboy on the drive; and Lorena (Diane Lane), the young town prostitute, who tags along with the irresponsible, footloose Jake because he promises to take her to San Francisco. Most of the rest of the miniseries is an episodic account of adventures encountered over the course of the drive, including: the kidnaping of Lorena by the evil "half-breed" Blue Duck (Frederic Forrest) and her subsequent rescue by McCrae; the bittersweet reunion of McCrae and his former lover Clara (Anjelica Huston), who is now the matriarch of a ranch in Nebraska tending to a herd of horses, two young daughters, and a comatose husband; and the death by various ironic means of several members of the party, including Spoon, Deets, and McCrae. Miscellaneous other supporting characters weave in and out of the story through interactions with members of the drive; most significant among them are July Johnson (Chris Cooper), a young sheriff from Arkansas, and his wayward wife Ellie (Glenn Headly), who abandons her husband and embarks on her own ill-fated trek in search of a long-lost lover. Finally, Call and the remaining hands reach Montana and stake out a new homestead. The last section of the story describes Call's solitary trek back to Texas to bury the body of his old friend McCrae. For a good general account of themes and narrative strategies in Lonesome Dove, see Richard Campbell and Jimmie L. Reeves, "Resurrecting the TV Western: The Cowboy, the Frontier, and Lonesome Dove," Television Quarterly 24.3 (1990): 33-44.

² For a very useful single-volume summary of much recent revisionist work on the various mythologies of the American West, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1987).

³ See books by the following authors: John Cawelti, The Six Gun Mystique, 2d ed. (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984); George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (New York: Penguin, 1977); William T. Pilkington and Don Graham, eds., Western Movies (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979); Jim Kitses, Horizons West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); John H. Lenihan, Showdown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); and Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

⁴ Among recently popular Hollywood films, Black Rain, with its extremes of paranoia and schizophrenic racism, is an especially interesting genre-based attempt to work out the new rules of the game.

⁵ See Andrew Britton, "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment," Movie 31/32 (1986): 1-42; and Robin Wood, "Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era," in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 162-88.

⁶ For an overview and bibliography of women in the historical American West, see Limerick above. For an extremely provocative and useful recent interpretation of women's place in the literature of the West, see Jane Tompkins, "West of Everything," South Atlantic Quarterly 86.4 (Fall 1987): 357-77.

⁷ This speech is lifted verbatim from the novel except for the last line which was apparently considered inappropriate for family viewing. In McMurtry's novel, the last line reads: "That way they can watch the coyotes come and eat their guts" (419).

⁸ See Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, The Negro Cowboys (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965); Kenneth W. Porter, The Negro on the American Frontier (New York: Amo Press, 1971); William Loren Katz, The Black West, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973); and W. Sherman Savage, Blacks in the West (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976).

⁹ For information on African Americans in television westerns, see J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983).