the western

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

- Mark Twain

Genre fiction walks a very fine line between the good and the bad. Partially, it might be just that genre classics – the romance, the mystery, the sci fi thriller – tend to evoke such powerfully instantaneous gag reflexes. We have preconceived notions in our head, and more often than not, we're right. Why? Well, because the very nature of genres makes it so easy to duplicate and rehash and recycle something that was once so brilliant and novel into something that's downright comical and even sad.

Then there's always that picture of the people who write some of this stuff. Take, oh, I don't know, the romance writer, or the fantasy junkie. . . I'll spare my own details, but I'm sure you can draw your own picture.

Sometimes it's just hard to take the new books, the new movies, the new shows, well, seriously . . . which is sad considering how much great literature has come from genre fiction. Great works are always rare and far between.

So that brings me to the Western. We all know and, even if we don't at first realize it, love the western. You might not go crazy about them, but just try and tell me you've never envisioned yourself victorious in a shootout, saddling up, and riding into the sunset, and I won't believe you. I'm fortunate enough to have found myself in a class all about westerns this semester. From to to , we're gonna cover it all, even managing to prove that the history of cinema and the history of the western are somehow in direct correlation to each other. I'm curious to see how that works.

The first movie clip we saw - the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Oh yeah. Granted, it's no Raiders of the Last Ark, which I made sure to point out as one of my favorite movies of all time on my little "who am I" index card at the start of class, but it's Indy nonetheless - you can't go wrong.

We were also asked to write down what weapons we're most familiar with, so I'm expecting a question or two one of these days as to why I'm proficient in the spear and broadsword. . .

On the whole, it looks to be an interesting class. We'll take a long, hard look at genre fiction - the good, the bad, and the ugly (I couldn't help it!!) - and see if there's any hope left for the western.