The Dead Cowboy Manifesto

Frey Wood
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FADE IN:

Ext. The West — Day

JOHN WAYNE is dead. His bones bleach under the sun of an imagined desert. His voice is now only an echo in a canyon set piece.

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Cinema is often lauded as the medium of empathy. Its multi-sensory nature is purported to allow us, the viewer, to feel as connected as possible to the emotions of the people who occupy the screen. However, we don’t really empathize with the characters as much as we empathize with the frame. Every opportunity for understanding is mediated by the mise-en-scène: choreographed, scored, and packaged. Really, our relationship with cinematic narratives, their characters, and the archetypes they represent, is much more akin to the idea of conspicuous consumption. We desire to embody the storied characteristics that we see in the films that we watch. Moreover, we desire to be seen in the same way that the camera sees the characters that we admire. Cinema has changed culture, in reflecting that innate human desire to create narrative, it has taught us to judge others as would a camera and costume ourselves in character in the face of that judgment. We want to be the cowboy: tough and wise and moral and strong.

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The Fighting Kentuckian, 1949.¹

JOHN WAYNE
If everything isn't black-and-white, I say why the hell not?

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The ways that we mediate ourselves, or are mediated by others, within this consumption of archetype, while sometimes a useful shorthand to express ourselves to our surrounding

community, also boxes us in {the frame, [the frame, (the frame)]}. In his 1966 film, La Noir De…, Ousmane Sembéne reveals the violence of this black-and-white world.² The film follows Diouana, a young Black woman from Senegal as she is indentured into servitude for a White French family. She is initially respected by the family, gifted a fashionable—black-and-white striped—dress and high heels, and sold on the vision of leading a more free and opulent life in France by the French matriarch. However, when Diouana arrives at the family's apartment in the Riviera she finds herself continuously enclosed by a nesting doll of culturally enforced stereotypes. She is tied into an apron and imprisoned in the white walls of the apartment, which she comes to describe as a “black hole.” She becomes entombed by the expectations of the White people who employ her and who fail to see her for anything but her Black identity. She is made to cook “authentic” African food for the family’s dinner guests, after which one man kisses her exclaiming, “I have never kissed a Black girl.” The more that Diouana is required to act the part, the more she is alienated from herself. The white family attempts to ease her malcontent by offering her money, which she rejects, opting instead to attempt to reclaim past symbols of her identity: an African mask that she had gifted the family when they met, as well as the dress and high heels. But it is too late, forced into play-acting Diouana is robbed of her autonomy—her humanity. Diouana commits suicide in the white porcelain bathtub of the French Riviera apartment, far away from home.

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True Grit, 1969.³

JOHN WAYNE
Looking back is a bad habit.

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Some of the very first films were Westerns. Indeed one of history's most infamous filmmakers, D.W. Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation, pioneered many of the early entries in the genre. Even earlier, as film scholar Kevin Stoehr explains, “Thomas Edison, us[ed] early cinema technology [to film] reenactments from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.”⁴ Buffalo Bill’s performance was one of the chief contributors to the creation of the White masculine Cowboy archetype, far removed from the very real lives of often BIPOC, sometimes Queer, and always working-class cowhands that were employed in the western United States. It should also be noted that Buffalo Bill’s show was manifested from the American tradition of minstrelsy, an art form that itself is inextricably tied to the history of cinema, and concerns itself with the manufacturing of a variety of racist representations of Black people in the United States. Cinema became a way for producers to sell the archetype as a product. Morals, worldviews, and identities for 25 cents a ticket.

This socially distilling quality of film, though, is as much a product of its time as it is innate to the medium. The emergence of the late capitalist framework that coincided with the popularization of the moving image created the medium we know today. Philosopher Walter Benjamin famously argued in his 1935 book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that cinema was uniquely positioned to become the art form of the populous.⁵ Benjamin defines two different attributes of artworks as they pertain to a piece’s relationship to its audience: “cult value” and “exhibition value.” Cult value speaks to works that entice a viewer to worship it, that create a system in which art is gatekept by erudite experts in the field who interpret and revere a piece of art. This is most commonly seen in media such as sculpture and painting because of the works’ predispositions to being “out of sight.” The pieces are not readily interpretable, or fully accessible, to the proletariat masses. Yet, as Benjamin explains, with the advent of film and photography, which are more easily circulated widely, artworks were “emancipated [ed]… from the service of ritual.”⁶ This emancipation creates exhibition value, where the ease of a work to be disseminated strips it of any “aura,” that distinct and magical here-and-now of a work, and allows a work to speak truthfully to the general population. However, with the benefit of hindsight on the now century-ish old film industry, we can observe that, while film is certainly much more accessible to the proletariat than other forms of fine art, it is not necessarily more true.

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Stagecoach, 1939.⁷

JOHN WAYNE
Well, there are some things a man just can't run away from.

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We might say that the judgment of “the other” and the desire to be seen in any particular fashion—the social performance—is as old as humanity. What, then, is so different about this process as it is informed by film? In most societies before that of the Western capitalist structure, one's “character” was not so important. In feudal societies, one was assigned a role by a higher religious power—there was very little opportunity for social mobility. In more egalitarian proto-socialist societies, the burden of survival was spread more equally—there was little desire for social mobility. Yet, the capitalist system relies on people buying into the myth of the bootstrap. If one is just stoic, strong-willed, and hardworking enough, they may elevate themselves to a higher echelon of society, no matter any other social forces. Thus, film becomes very useful as a tool to sell these sorts of archetypes—myths and legends—to the masses. You too can find RomCom love, wallow in dramatic self-pity, or set out West to become the Cowboy. What becomes obfuscated, however, is the power structures that get to set the rules for these archetypes. La Noir De… represents how attempts to gain social standing by embodying a new character, whether willingly or through force, generally leads to more subjugation rather than more freedom. Even the Cowboy, who is ostensibly the most powerful of the many filmic archetypes is enclosed in cycles of misogynistic violence, emotional repression, and made to perpetrate harm. Just because someone is trapped at the top of the hierarchy, doesn’t mean they aren’t trapped (the frame, the frame, the frame).

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The Comancheros, 1961.⁸

JOHN WAYNE
Monsewer, words are what men live by.

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What does this mean, then, for the filmmaker (or artist for that matter)? Is she condemned to be a cog in the machine of capitalist propaganda—endlessly selling shallow human-shaped boxes to be fitted to society? No, I think… I hope. It is inevitable, I concede, that film will contain archetypes. Cinema, fictional and nonfictional alike, is populated by characters who live under the tyranny of the frame. Further, film is just one method in a long lineage of human narrative; we will never stop telling stories, nor should we. Barring the undoing of Western hegemonic capitalism—freeing the many from the dictatorship of the few—it is our responsibility as artists to understand that we will be forced to become salesmen. In the current state of the world, we cannot live without contending in some way with the industries of art that are ruled by profit and exploitation. So, we must choose our words, images, and sounds, carefully. We must do our best to recognize what we are being made to sell, and to whom. Finally, as those who have been given the unique opportunity to construct the frame, we must teach ourselves, and others, to see beyond it. We must do whatever we can to show the Cowboy that there is so much more he can be.

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Ext. The West — Day
JOHN WAYNE is dead. The sun bleaches his bones. The sun bleaches a lot of things and grows many more.

PAN TO:

Ext. Everywhere — Outside the Frame
The sun looks down and sees all the ways that we try to know each other’s humanity and all the ways we fail. She sees love and she sees harm. She sees that we play many parts: that in one instant we are everything, and at the same time we are nothing at all. Her world is not black-and-white, but the full spectrum of light.

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HAFIZ

The Sun Never Says⁹

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,

“You owe me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

FADE OUT.

THE END

Frey Wood is a writer and performer; she is trying to figure out who she is and what to do about it.

Notes

The Fighting Kentuckian, directed by George Waggner (1949; Los Angeles, CA: Republic Pictures).
La Noir de..., directed by Ousmane Sembène (1966; Paris, France: Les Actualités Française).
True Grit, directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen (2010; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures).
Shannon Vittoria, “The American West in Film.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 30, 2014. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/the-american-west-in-bronze/blog/posts/american-west-in-film. Accessed April 30, 2025.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others, 19-56. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
Stagecoach, directed by John Ford (1939; Los Angeles, CA: United Artists).
The Comancheros, directed by Michael Curtiz (1961; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Studios).
Hafiz, “The Sun Never Says,” in The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master. Translated by Daniel Ladinsky, 34. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999.

Other Sources

Joan Didion, “John Wayne: A Love Song,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 29–41. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1968.
Lyn Hejinian, “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” in The Language of Inquiry, 209–31. University of California Press, 2000.
MDC, “John Wayne Was a Nazi,” Millions of Dead Cops. R Radical Records, 1982.