Costumes and clothing in the western

Costumes and Clothing in the Western

1. Introduction

2. The Western as a genre

3. Costume and clothing in cinema

4. Western role-models and their costume
4.1. The classic: John Ford's “My Darling Clementine” (1946)
4.2. The death of the hero: John Ford's “The Man who shot Liberty Valance” (1962)
4.3. Post-western: Jim Jarmusch’s independent “Dead Man” (1995)
4.4. Female heroes?: “Bad Girls” (1994)

5. Conclusion

6. Bibliography

7. Filmography

1. Introduction

Throughout the history of film over the last little more than 100 years, the Western has not only proved to be the oldest of genres, it also was one of the most popular Hollywood-products ever. Surely, in recent years the Western has probably been more absent than any other genre, but it still remains, if nowhere else, at least in young boys’ rooms as comics, books and DVDs – and in fashion. During the last two seasons, the cowboy-boot has had an enormous comeback and it has not been not so long ago that you could see pink, glittery cowboy-hats becoming fashionable through a video-clip by pop-star Madonna. This western-fashion communicates a certain massage of freedom, wilderness and strength, a message which derives from the pictures we remember when we see those boots and hats, pictures of the western-films or series that probably everybody has seen in some way or the other.

The Western is, as we will see, a distinctively male genre. Clothing and costumes, on the other hand, are often handled as more or less purely feminine subjects (cf. Street p.1), and, in compari­son to other areas of film studies, “film costume has not been researched extensively” (Street p.102). Considering the fact that women are pretty much underrepresented in the Western, both when it comes to literature on Western and in the movies themselves, it maybe is no wonder that Western-costuming until now has basically not been dealt with at all^[1].

“Above all, studying films “through clothes” enhances an appreciation of cinema which is pri­marily visual. It also draws attention to complex and often contradictory narrative structures; questions of stardom [...]; and to representation of gender on screen.” Street p.11/12

These are only a few of the topics I will try to tackle with regard to the Western. Where can we find symbolic meaning in costumes? To which extend is clothing part of the character, and where does costume get the status of an object? How does costume create paradoxes in a character and where does it underline special features of a figure? What happens when we find cross-gender clothing in the Western – women in men's clothes or men in women's dresses? How do we distin­guish between heroes and villains just from their looks?

To answer these questions, I will, after an introduction in both the Western as a genre and the use of costumes in film, analyze the use of costume in four examples. I chose two movies by John Ford, one of the best known Western-directors, his “My Darling Clementine” from 1946 as an example from the height of the classical American Western, followed by the adult-Western “The Man who shot Liberty Valance” from 1962. Taking two examples from one director implies on the one hand the possibility of tracing changes within the genre and the work of a key-director. That the choice fell on John Ford has various reasons. First of all, his name is tightened to the Western as no other director's in Hollywood, over the years he made numerous Westerns and a lot of them are masterpieces. Second, it was through him and his feature “Stagecoach” (1939) that the genre became modern (cf. Hardy p.97) , and as well, it was this film that made John Wayne a major star, thus creating a symbol for American masculinity which lasted for almost 30 years (cf. Tompson p.5). On the other hand, I am aware of the problem that this choice goes on the expense of the analysis of the broad range of the genre and its many great works by a lot of different people. Nonetheless, I will try to amend my remarks with examples from other films by for example Howard Hawks or William A. Wellman.

The other two examples I took are both from the 1990s. The first one is “Dead Man” by indepen­dent director Jim Jarmusch, a very experimental film, using well-known images from the Western against the genre. He uses costume in such an interesting way, not only with his leading actors but also for the supports, that this example might turn out a bit longer than the other ones. “Bad Girls”, finally, is a Hollywood-production from 1994 with four women in the leading roles, thus allowing me to take a closer look on gender-related questions. I consciously decided not to take examples from so-called Spaghetti-Westerns. For me, they represent a huge “genre within the genre” and I felt that taking them into the paper would beyond its scope. Like this, all examples have an American background which also might ease the discussion.

2. The Western as a genre

Westerns are stories, and not only movies but also novels, radio plays and comic-books, which are clearly defined in the place and time they take place, namely the North-American West, near the frontier, in the second half of the 19th century. Just the same, everybody is probably familiar with the whole range of characters, buildings, landscapes and actions involved: whores and schoolmarms, cowboys and rancher, marshals and hired gunmen, Indians and horses, stagecoach­es and trains, saloons and churches, desert and mountains, rivers and wide open towns, the jail-break, the train-robbery and the shoot-out and many more (cf. Faulstich p30). The beginning of the Western as a movie-genre is dated back to 1903 with Edwin S. Porter's “The Great Train Robbery”, a time which is more or less identical with the beginning of cinema (cf. Kiefer, p.665). The genre's history is then often described as a double aging-process starting in the 1950s, with the “Adult-Western” presenting the corruption of the American Dream of courage and freedom (reaching it's height with the Vietnam-crisis in the late 1960s), paradigmatically with aging heroes, John Wayne being the frontman here with films such as “The Man who shot Liberty Valance” (1962) and finally portraying himself as a cowboy dying from cancer in “The Shootist” (1976) (cf. Kiefer p.668). While the American Western was in decline, both in popularity and in the number of features that were made, the genre gained a special popularity in Europe, espe-cially in Italy and Germany, where hundreds of movies, now known under the label “Spaghetti-Westerns” were made. Their directors, the probably most famous one being Sergio Leone, made films that distinguish from the American original both in their brutality and in their negativness towards civilization and the American society (cf. Kiefer p.668). After the financial fiasco of the Hollywood-epic “Heaven's Gate” (1982) there was a general pause in the production of Westerns, and the genre often got declared as dead, until Kevin Costner's “Dances with Wolves” (1990) brought it back into the cinemas, both as dark, serious versions such as Clint Eastwood's “Unfor-given” (1993) and as comedies such as “Shanghai Noon” (2000).

There are many different possibilities to divide this huge genre into smaller categories. Most of these rely on the plot, which, considering the fact that the Western to a large extend is an action-driven genre, only is logical. Frank Gruber, a writer of Western-novels, suggests for example a list of seven different typical plots which include, among others, “The Revenge Story”, “The Out­law Story”, “The Marshal Story” and “The Cavalry and Indian Story” (cf. Cawelti p.35). John G. Cawelti suggests in his study “The Six-Gun mystique” “that there is a kind of action pattern that the Western tends to follow [...] but the possibility of such diversity of plot patterns suggests that we know a Western primarily by the presence of ten-gallon hats and horses” (Cawelti p.35), defining, again, the setting as basic distinguishing mark. In another study, Will Wright differenti­ates between four types of Westerns, the classical plot, the vengeance variation, the transition theme and the professional plot (cf. Wright p. 29). His typification leads to one problem, his “classical plot” does not totally correspond to the group of Westerns which often are referred to as “classical (American) Westerns”, in comparison to “Adult-/late Westerns” and “Spaghetti-Westerns” which is a classification depending more on when and where the feature was made than the plot. In this paper, I will not use Wright's classification, especially as the examples I chose do not appear in the list of films his study relies on, but his categories are set up in a way which will help when studying the costumes in Westerns. His categories follow the constellation of hero, villains and society and their respective position towards four important pairs of opposites - inside society/outside society, good/bad, strong/weak, and wilderness/ civilization – which “comprise the basic classifications of people in the Western myth” (Wright p.59).

A third study which I here want to mention is Jane Tompkin's “West of Everything“. This is one of the few female approaches on the Western film and novel and it provides a few insights which I find do touch my own study in some points. Tompkins has a clear gender-perspective on the genre, which will have a influence on my analysis. She traces the origins of the Western story back to the first half of the 19th century, as an anti-movement against the predominant feminized literature in America, against the domestic novel (cf. Tompson p.39). “The Western”, she writes, “distrusts language” (Tompson p.49), and because language always is associated with women, religion and culture (cf. Tompson p.55), you might as well say that it distrusts women, and every­one else who talks. So, “the Western itself is the language of men”, the male genre per se and my aim is to try and find traces of this in the Western's use of costume.

3. Costume and clothing in cinema

In the analysis of feature films, no matter if it is a group of films or just a single one, the approach which can be rated most important after to the approach through story and plot appeals to the act­ing characters in the story. Because of the limited time of the usual feature (around 100min), both the number of characters and the extension of their presentation are limited (cf. Faulstich p.95). So, in comparison to novels, a deep ingoing characterization of persons is a lot more difficult: “The film as an audiovisual media tends to the visible, the outside and has to make a special ef­fort to construct the inner life – thoughts, feelings, mental states etc. of a person” (Faulstich p.95, my translation). Faulstich differentiates between three possibilities to characterize both main and supporting acts, which are self-characterization, external characterization and narrative characterization (my translation). The latter functions through specific stylistic devices such as camera-angle, music, filters, lighting, length of shot and so on. When it comes to external characterization, the character is presented through other characters who form an opinion about him or her. Another possibility here is that other figures in the movie serve either as copy or contrast to the presented person. The first way in which a character is shown is through him- or herself, being the sum of many factors such as the person's voice, language, way of acting and talking, mimic, gestures – and clothing (cf. Faulstich p.97-99).

So, an approach to film through its costumes is strongly connected with the analysis of the char­acters. On the other hand, costume is a lively part of a movie's setting, it helps defining the period of time when and the place where the story takes place, thus being an important factor when it comes to generic conventions. The clothing and make-up of the extras therefore provides a back­ground and a kind of reflecting standard for the analysis of the main and supporting acts' cos­tumes. Still, “films seldom reproduce exact replicas of, say, historical or contemporary fashion.” (Street, p.9) The costumes of a particular film basically always “conform to notions of realism but also need to employ notions of cinematic spectacle” (Street p.9). This includes, in the case of historical topics such as the Western is, a slight, almost unnoticeable adjustment of the protago­nist's costume to contemporary fashion, something which eases the viewer's identification with him or her.

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^[1] I want to make a short revision on this statement. One day before the deadline of this paper I found information about two books on Western-clothing. As I, unfortunately, could not obtain them in such a short time, I can not tell if they deal with film-costume and if I missed any important research on my topic. Those books are the fol­lowing:

Beard, Tyler and Jim Arndt (1993): 100 Years of Western Wear.

George-Warren, Holly and Michelle Freedman (2001): How the West Was Worn.