CONCEPTS TO PURSUE IN THE MOVIE SET VILLAGE

1. imitating the past for present goals

2. habitation, habitus

3. systems as in complex music

4. death

5. ?

A Western story that centers on a town, even an imitation town like the ones meant to be outdoor sets for Westerns, carries conventional tropes and assumptions. A family archive that I have is my father’s photos over the 20th century. In the earliest years he took photos of the places that the family lived, almost all of them “little houses on the prairie.” Nothing so romantic as ranching — they were raising potatoes. But I assembled the photos into a book and called it “Strachans on the Prairie.” More Northern and Mid-Western than strictly Western. Made it into a blog, then self-published it on Lulu.com.

My grandfather’s nephew Gene, South Dakota son of his young brother, insisted on coming to look at the old albums though I tried to tell him this house was too humble for it to be comfortable. In the cover photo he is little boy, but now I knew he was old but he hid the fact that he was dying of cancer. He was almost desperate to find a photo he’d seen in childhood of the house his grandfather, my testy old carpenter great-grandfather, had built on the prairie. It had two stories and was distinguished by mansard windows, that is, dormers cut into the roof up high. He could barely remember the actual house and said it was the coldest, windiest house he’d ever been in. The irony was that Gene came to visit just when the World Trade Towers were demolished by airliners used as missiles.

In Westerns we often witness the destruction of houses by fire. They are small buildings, one step up from log cabins when sawn boards first became available. They are havens against huge geological vistas of valley or mountain or sea. If they were back east they might be hidden in forest or clustered in towns, but in many Westerns they are like small boats in a sea of grass, buoyed by force of will against storm and bandits. Their poignancy, their poetry, is in that juxtaposition.

In a movie Western town, the community that occupies it is represented by the nature and layout of the buildings which are not likely to be residences which are liable to be built a little distance away. And if the town is only a set, it will pulse with people: many during shooting, few in between. No one is a long-time resident. It’s true that a person can buy or build an entire town, at least the facades.

“Keyboard” is in a town with no name so far. I chose music as the best metaphor for human patterns, systems, emotional content. Also, the keyboard of the piano with its connection to the little hammers against taut strings, is an intriguing counterpoint to the keyboard of a computer which may or may not be connected to the larger world, dependent upon a silicon wafer etched with patterns in a language limited to 1 and 0. It contains both math and science, the resources of the entire world, and a specific documentation of a person. Lots of potential for developing a novel.

In fact, search engines can suggest many patterns and criteria for specifically Western stories. One interesting example is https://www.standoutbooks.com/4-golden-rules-writing-western/

The “rules” are more like dimensions. One is the nature of masculinity in Westerns. Two is solitariness, going it alone. Three is the contrast between times with modernity or the industrial revolution crashing in on a pre-existing survival or boom society. Four is a pre-existing mythology of a particular time, celebrated in works both high culture and low. Five is how easily these ideas can be carried into other contexts like science fiction or different places like Australia or Argentina. Mixed races, animals, technologies, steampunk anachronism, motorcycle runaways, can all be used because the genre is so well-established and present in so many minds.

A sub-genre might be stories after the collapse of civilization, so that Cormac McCarthy can easily move from the Mexican wars of the 19th century to whatever the year is that the bomb finally hits, so that the awe of geology is replaced by the rubble of cities. He keeps the sidekick. The horror of crushing nature is replaced by the terror of other humans.

In addition to the idea of music as pattern, which will mean some reading since I don’t know a lot of music theory, I’m tinkering with the idea of gender roles. The big strong man with resources, who bought the town, is dead so must be depicted in flashbacks, which gives a lot of room for variation according to the person remembering, and the hip young boy with a laptop is in a different set of cliches about what it means to be male.

I don’t want to depict the woman as trying to be like a man, but rather keeping the dimension of “Hestia”, the goddess of the hearth, and woman embedded in nature, unintimidated by thunderstorms and earthquakes, sympathetic to animals. I’d better get a dog into this story.

I keep remembering two Western short stories about women. One was a solitary woman who had a little homestead where cowboys stopped by to get water and be friendly. A cowboy brought this woman a chicken — alive and dangling by its feet as was conventional in those days without refrigeration. He thought she would enjoy eating it, but when he passed by many months later, the chicken was happily walking around in the kitchen. The woman explained that the bird was such good company that she would rather the both of them ate something else.

The other short story was about another woman alone who was near a trail. Someone carrying geranium starts for a projected homestead gave her some sprigs which grew easily in a place with a lot of sun. Another wagon traveler left part of a litter of kittens. A third gave her a tomato, too rotted to eat but full of viable seeds. She successfully grew tomatoes, canned them, and sold them. The three sources — geraniums, cats and tomatoes — were enough to provide her with a living.

Sure seems relevant to now. Good writers soak up what other writers have done and tranform them to their own uses. With Westerns, there’s a sensory archive: boots on boardwalk, gunfights on the dusty street, “Doc” pounding an old piano, and “ladies” cribs with windows that open onto porch roofs. I’ll see what my subconscious likes.