So I love westerns. They are one of my favorite genres of film that I grew up with.
I have a hypothesis that two movies killed the western genre.
Those two movies were Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves.
Let me tell you why:
1)

The ways these two films killed the western is because Unforgiven demystified the noble gunslinger and made the violence distasteful while Dances with Wolves took away the faceless horde that the cowboy could blow away heroically by humanizing Native Americans.
2)

In Unforgiven, William Munny, a former gunslinger, gets hired to avenge violence done to a prostitute.
The way William does this is committing unheroic acts of violence on the perpetrators.
One way is by shooting a man in the gut and letting him scream and cry as he dies.
3)

The violence is awful. William Munny never comes off as a hero after the men he kills.
Is it justified? Probably.
But it’s horrific. Something we shouldn’t be watching. A far cry from the John Wayne films before it.
It showed the horrors that men do in all its nastiness.
4)

Native Americans were always the go to enemy in all of westerns since the beginning.
If you needed a villain or a chance to show how great the hero was, just throw the mindless, screaming horde at them.
They were there to be killed.
5)

Then comes along Dances with Wolves.
This changed the western is by humanizing the Native American. It changed us from the war cry, bloodthirsty monsters into what we are: humans.
Humans who love and feel and have emotions.
Showing our family and us not as monsters.
6)

While I have my issues with Dances with Wolves, it’s hard to deny the way it changed the discourse around Native representation.
I remember hearing white people relate to the Native characters in ways they never had before.
They could relate to us and feel empathy to our cause
7)

These two films were the death nails in the coffin of the western.
Showing a more realistic portrayal of the violence and the humanization of Indigenous peoples changed the landscape of the western as filmmakers could not go back to the old tropes of the genre.
8)