(Re)Consider the Cowboy: An Assessment of a Cultural Icon
Make it stand out
Consider the cowboy. Lone ranger, feral gunslinger, roving bandit, shooting from the hip. Beholden to no one, bound by no law and no master. Just him and his horse, free in this wild wild west. His cowboy boots clink, his jeans fit perfectly, he’s got the cowboy hat and the little neckerchief and everything, the whole outfit. Yes, yes — that perfect airbrushed cowboy. Out in the world, there are men on horses lassoing cattle and squealing pigs, of course there are *actual* cowboys. Yeah! But not them. We must consider the glossy Hollywood cowboy.
It’s interesting —the image we understand as the cowboy is completely a product of mythology. But mythology is real, old, sometimes it is also true. And film has always been the cowboy’s mythological horse. The first feature length silent film was a Western: The Story of the Kelly Gang. It narrates the adventures of Ned Kelly and his gang of outlaws. And more after, from the Kelly Gang and onwards through history. Film is full of cowboys.
The cowboy is macho and heroic. He straddles two mythological worlds. The *BARBARISM* of the Wild Wild West, he’s on the frontier, out there in nature’s rolling backdrop of open lawless country. And *CIVILISATION* itself, he’s Europe and America’s conquering hero, an avatar for that white settler-colonial fantasy. Warrior, knight, crusader defending against the barbarous hordes banging at the gate of the saloon doors. Edward Said would have you believe that BARBARISM and CIVILISATION are at odds with each other. Enter: cowboy. Cowboy provides neat resolution by collapsing the distance without a single word. If there is no law then he *is* the law. If the West is Wild then he is Wilder. If civilisation has a frontier then he can ride out past it, expand the limits of it, or pass right through beyond it into entirely new space. He rebels against civilisation, he makes civilisation. Hero rebel interloper romantic, and also petulant individualist.
Yeah, fuck the cowboy, actually. Or, maybe… Reconsider the cowboy.
In Margaret Atwood’s poem, Backdrop Addresses Cowboy, the star-spangled cowboy leaves ‘a heroic trail of desolation’. ‘What about the I confronting you on that border, you are always trying to cross? I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso […] I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.’
The landscape, the object and the space itself testifies and acts as witness to its own brutalisation. Good for the landscape! Mitski said BE THE COWBOY, that lonely figure up on stage and in the spotlight. Girls want to walk into town, wreck shit and walk out like the hero too. Girls want to do mindless swagger, complete arrogance and self destruction too, want to howl at the moon like a wounded coyote. Yeah, BE THE COWBOY! It’s an ironic rallying cry.
In October 1966 André Bertrand used Strasbourg University funds to make, print and distribute a 4 page Situationist comic at a student protest. It was called La Retour de la Colonne Durutti, after the Spanish Anarchist and Civil War hero Buenaventura Durruti. It featured an iconic image of two drifter cowboys discussing ‘the scene’ on horseback. The cowboy as Situationist drifter, wandering passively through the urban landscape. They encounter ‘realisations’ and are compelled or repelled by them, maybe doubtful, but all the same — the realisations wash over them as they pass through. Nothing changes around them, they are not forces of destruction, but *observation* or *perception*. They only receive.
In August 1975, a t-shirt appeared on the racks of SEX, a boutique on King’s Road run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Two cowboys are facing each other, one is adjusting the others’ neckerchief. They are wearing boots and jackets, but no jeans. Their bottom halves are actually completely naked. The tips of their penises are so close they’re almost touching. The image itself was a drawing by the artist Jim French, made in 1969.
“I think Strange Way of Life is about desire: restrained, unspoken, and pure — it has never fully surfaced, but instead sits beneath the skin like a splinter.”
But on the t-shirt, someone had added dialogue underneath them. BILL: ‘ello Joe been anywhere lately’ JOE: ‘nah it’s all played aht Bill. Gettin too straight’. Even in that tender embrace of a moment, the boredom and apathy of Britain’s mid-70s cultural slump won out. The day it went on sale, the first customer to wear it in public was arrested. 24 hours later, the boutique itself was raided and 18 cowboy t-shirts were seized, on a count of pretty archaic indecency laws. It’s a funny anecdote about little England, a cultureless slump, I guess. In 2004 Helmut Lang made a tshirt with the word COWBOY in big black capital letters, printed in reverse. They’re still on sale now.
Pedro Almodovar’s film, Strange Way of Life is kind of about cowboys. Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal are middle aged men, ex-hired guns. Hawke plays a gruff sheriff, Pascal a vague rancher from far away. It’s a beautiful film. The costumes are by Saint Laurent and Anthony Vaccarello, so Pedro Pascal rides into town wearing a bottle green denim jacket. Scenes unravel with Georgia O’Keeffe soft pastel landscape paintings in the background. The cowboys meet again after 25 years and the air around them is thick with unspoken desire, stoic tension. They are tight figures that deliver fast dialogue that’s wrapped up like neat aphorisms, melodrama, cliche. The tension, the drama, the plot itself is not the point. That’s just a component in something else, something bigger. The film asks to be held at a kind of distance — not ironic distance! But just so you can see it from the outside. At that distance it is delirious, ridiculous, beautiful, full of artifice. At that distance, it’s just a vehicle for desire. I think Strange Way of Life is about desire: restrained, unspoken, and pure — it has never fully surfaced, but instead sits beneath the skin like a splinter. But desire is also liquid. It doesn’t wait to be liberated, it leaks out of its cowboy container anyway and regardless.
In Noah Davis’ 2007 painting, 40 Acres and a Unicorn, a man sits on a unicorn. They are not emerging from darkness, the pitch black surrounds them, it has a kind of mass. This is not a painting of a star-spangled Hollywood cowboy in his hat, with boots and holstered gun. No. But he is a mythic traveller moving between worlds. He is a kind of ghost, haunting, returning. These are strange times to be talking about necropolitics, hauntology, the blunt fact of death. 40 acres and a mule was America’s promise to the enslaved, a debt that was never paid. These are strange times to be talking about the way colonial enterprises industrialise racism and death, hand in hand. A strange time to talk about how we should all fear the prayer of the oppressed, because there is no barrier between that prayer and whatever God. This is not a painting of a star-spangled cowboy, this is a painting that is also a prayer.
I place my hands together, palms touching in prayer. Reconsider the cowboy. Amen.
Words: Zarina Muhammad
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