What About Violent Westerns?
I have wondered for a long time just what effect the violent, high-body-count westerns that fill the mass market racks these days have on readers. Maybe this deeply tragic and desolating mass murder in Colorado will throw some light on that grim subject.
There are occasional crime novels that have high body counts and trivialize death. But they don't compare with the western novels of recent vintage that not only trivialize violent death, but celebrate it. The winner, the hero, the victor, is the one who kills the most characters the fastest and with the least inhibition. Unlike mysteries, in which the whole thrust of the story is to stop a criminal and his lethal ways, the contemporary western story celebrates the killer and elevates him.
It is noteworthy that in such stories, the victims are little more than names, and go unmourned, and lack kinfolk or wives or children who might grieve them. Thirty or forty people die in such stories, but the dead are barely named and scarcely portrayed as mortals. I've read western after western in which the focus is on killing, and not stopping the slaughter.
I think there is probably a direct or indirect connection between this sort of literature and some of the recent mass-murderers. Any western story that trivializes violent death, or celebrates it, can certainly be regarded as an incitement to the real-life crimes committed by unbalanced people who kill for the glory of it.
Whether or not the authors of such stories are accessories is not the point. They are contributors to these death rampages. They have celebrated these very things on the pages of western novels. They have stirred the imagination of readers.
I have to some extent become ashamed of a genre I loved deeply. There was a time when westerns were about achieving peace and justice and safety and protection of the weak; a time when the western hero's greatest asset was his character. All that vanished when the genre grew violent. We may well be seeing the consequences in Colorado.
There are occasional crime novels that have high body counts and trivialize death. But they don't compare with the western novels of recent vintage that not only trivialize violent death, but celebrate it. The winner, the hero, the victor, is the one who kills the most characters the fastest and with the least inhibition. Unlike mysteries, in which the whole thrust of the story is to stop a criminal and his lethal ways, the contemporary western story celebrates the killer and elevates him.
It is noteworthy that in such stories, the victims are little more than names, and go unmourned, and lack kinfolk or wives or children who might grieve them. Thirty or forty people die in such stories, but the dead are barely named and scarcely portrayed as mortals. I've read western after western in which the focus is on killing, and not stopping the slaughter.
I think there is probably a direct or indirect connection between this sort of literature and some of the recent mass-murderers. Any western story that trivializes violent death, or celebrates it, can certainly be regarded as an incitement to the real-life crimes committed by unbalanced people who kill for the glory of it.
Whether or not the authors of such stories are accessories is not the point. They are contributors to these death rampages. They have celebrated these very things on the pages of western novels. They have stirred the imagination of readers.
I have to some extent become ashamed of a genre I loved deeply. There was a time when westerns were about achieving peace and justice and safety and protection of the weak; a time when the western hero's greatest asset was his character. All that vanished when the genre grew violent. We may well be seeing the consequences in Colorado.
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