The Western is Dead.  The last major Hollywood produced Western was 1999's abysmal 
Wild Wild West, and given its failure in every way a film can fail, it is safe to say we 
won't be seeing the return of the Western for a while.  However; while the medium itself 
is practically eradicated from American popular culture, its heavy influences can be seen 
in a number of places.  Most science fiction programs are at their core Westerns (Star 
Trek creator Gene Roddenberry pitched the original series as "Wagon Train in space."); and 
even the traditional action film has its roots in the genre.  In fact, one of the most 
popular and successful action films of all time, Die Hard, is a thinly veiled update of 
the Western.  When compared to other Westerns, we can understand why it was so popular, 
and why Westerns are no longer in fashion.



	In a class on the history of prime time television, Professor of Television Robert 
Thompson presented a rather interesting theory on the Western genre.  After watching 
television Westerns like Gunsmoke he described the Western genre as one inherently 
connected to both a time and a place, specifically Cold War America.  The Western genre, 
he believed, acted in several ways upon the American psyche during the heights of the Cold 
War in the 1950s and 60s.  First, the Western was a means of escapism, harkening back to 
a "simpler" or even "better" time when things all came down to a pair of six guns and who 
drew faster.  Women stayed at home, and the "evil, foreign others" were all people that 
could be tamed within the framework of the Western.  Like most of the escapist fair of the 
50s and 60s, Westerns provided an idyllic alternative to the crazy world that was 
happening outside everyone's living room.



	But in a sneaky way, Westerns were also speaking directly to the topics that 
people were trying to get relief from.  Westerns themselves worked as allegories for the 
Cold War.  The cowboy/sheriff/hero figure, representing America, was forced to police the 
untamed frontier, from the forces that looked to keep it wild and lawless (Native 
Americans, outlaws), who represented Communists.  Westerns presented a perfect metaphor 
for Eisenhower's Containment Policies of the 1950s, that were designed to contain the 
spread of Communism from beyond the borders the Soviet Union established at the conclusion 
of World War II.  Marshall Matt Dillon was policing the untamed frontier, and keeping 
lawless elements from injecting their influence, the same way The United States did so 
in Korea.



	As the Cold War waned, so too did the Western genre.  And as they died out, other 
genres became more prevalent, particularly the genre that Die Hard came to represent 
and start.  So perhaps in a way, Die Hard and films like it came to replace the Western in 
American consciousness.



	Die Hard is the story of John McClane (Bruce Willis), a New York cop visiting his 
wife in Los Angeles on Christmas.  When the corporate tower where she works is taken 
hostages by a group of East Germans, John has to fend off the terrorists, the cops, and 
the FBI, while trying to save his wife and stay alive.  Now, of course, this is no typical 
Western.  There are no horses, no big hats, or boots.  And a huge skyscraper housing a 
multinational corporation based in Japan is about as far from "the range" as one gets.  
But examining the details of the film further can lend merit to the argument that Die Hard 
is indeed some sort of neo-western.



	The most blatant examples of Western influence in the film are provided by the 
film itself.  When terrorist leader Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) speaks on the radio to 
John for the first time, he asks him who he is, and calls him a "cowboy...another product 
of a bankrupt culture."  When conversing with his police contact Al Powell (Reginald 
VelJohnson), he needs an alias and decides to be called "Roy" after his boyhood hero (and 
cowboy) Roy Rogers.  Several of John's witty one-liners are direct lifts from the 
vernacular of the Western ("Yippie kay yay, mother f*cker" and "Happy trails, Hans.").  
And in the final confrontation between John and Hans, the film High Noon is specifically 
referenced, and Hans compares John to Gary Cooper's character in High Noon, Sheriff Will 
Kane.



	Clearly the film is aware of the Western genre, and the way it itself traffics in 
a lot of the same territory as the Western in a sort of updated fashion. The basic plot 
elements seem straight out a Western itself.  As stranger from the east (McClane, NYC cop), 
travels to the uncharted West (Los Angeles), where he is thrust into a situation in which 
he is forced to act (Trapped in a skyscraper with terrorists), and in which he must protect 
his wife (Holly Genero McClane, played by Bonnie Bedelia).  After vanquishing evil, the 
drifter hero leaves town in his car, with his woman, and rides off into the sunset.  



	The plot is an updating of a Western.  And we can apply the same principles to it 
that Professor Thompson did to Gunsmoke.  Die Hard, a huge box office smash, was escapist 
fun in every sense of the word, but the film itself still contains a lot of the 
allegorical Cold War elements.  McClane is the protector of the frontier from foreign 
influences, and Gruber and his band of terrorists in the film are explicitly East Germans, 
Communists.  True, they are terrorists motivated purely by money and not ideological gains 
for their cause, but viewed in a different way, one could claim that Communists are 
actually only after money.  



	Die Hard bore two sequels, and a myriad of imitators.  But as the Cold War died, 
so too have the imitators.  Just as the Western died with the Cold War, so too did the 
genre that took its place as Communism sputtered its last few breaths in the late eighties.
And while the imitators have ceased, you can still see one of the Die Hards on late night 
cable almost every week.  The end of the Die Hard genre could probably be blamed just as 
much on a lack of material as on the fall of Communism (After all, how many different 
places can you have terrorists hold hostages?  The early nineties saw them do it in 
buildings, on boats, on trains, and in at least three separate occasions, on planes).  
Perhaps, then, the genre's connections to the Western are less than I make out of them; 
there, but only in the self-reflexive sense that Hans speaks of in the film, "a bankrupt 
culture raised on John Wayne Westerns."  After all, those scriptwriters are part of the 
bankrupt culture as well.



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