There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society.ħ. The society does not completely accept the hero.Ħ. The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero the hero is given a special status.ĥ. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability.Ĥ. What does that all mean? Well, I'll share his breakdown for Classical Plots with you to give an idea, and then I'll give you examples of various famous westerns that typify each of those plot categories.ģ. There were only a few of the Transition westerns that he discussed, and I hadn't seen most of them, so I can't say much one way or the other on that one. And I realized that I am not really a fan of Vengeance westerns, for the most part. And not only that, but my own stories tend to be pretty straight-forwardly Classical. There are a few that are Vengeance, but most of my favorites are either Classical or Professional.
Six guns and society professional#
And I discovered that nearly all my favorite westerns have the Classical or Professional plots. Wright found that the films fell into four plot categories, which he termed Classical, Vengeance Variation, Transition, and Professional. That gave him more than 60 films to study, and while he didn't delve into every single one, he did study them all and looked for patterns in the stories they told. Basically, Wright studied the top-grossing western films from every year beginning in 1930 and running through 1972, when he did his study. I'm not going to delve too deeply into everything he said, simply because there was so much - I was underlining and making notes like crazy. What interested me were the story structure similarities that he pointed out. But the sociological implications aren't what interested me the most.
It's a cool theory, and he's pretty well convinced me.
Will Wright posits that westerns are America's version of great myths and legends (which I'd heard/read before), and that America's taste in western storytelling changed because American society changed. I thought I pretty much understood what westerns were about. I've read western novels and nonfiction books, I've written westerns, I've played cowboys for countless hours. I have loved western movies since I was about 2, and I have watched hundreds of them over the past thirty-some years. Once in a while a book opens your eyes and makes you look in whole new ways at something you thought you knew and understood.