The ongoing cultural dominance of the superhero film, which has lasted for over two decades now, can really only be likened to one trend in Hollywood history: the prevalence of the Western. A long-lasting genre that occasionally gets a modern-day deconstructionist or revisionist take (like Django Unchained or Logan), it enjoyed its peak from the 1940s through the ‘60s.
The spirit of the American Western is inseparable from the values that drove Manifest Destiny 100 years earlier — that America is a predestined inheritance, and its savage landscape must be tamed into a home. Films like The Searchers, Shane, and The Last Wagon all depict the struggle to lay roots in America while contending with the wilderness, outlaws, and outdated depictions of indigenous tribes as unwelcoming brutes.
