![]() ![]() His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. ![]() John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series Butcher’s Crossingis one of my favourite books. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. ![]()
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