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Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosopy Robert B. Pippin Yale University Press: New Haven, 2010. 155 pages. Paperback. $23.00
Occasionally, I find myself questioning one of Robert Pippin's film readings in Hollywood Westerns and American Myth. Is Tom Dunson's "epic heroic" stature any less epic in Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) because it begins as a "commercial enterprise" (29)? Does not the film intentionally marginalize Dunson's profit motive in favor of the grand adventure of his thousand-mile cattle drive? But if Pippin's book raises such reservations, that is because it always makes us think; indeed, this splendid work accomplishes nothing more effectively than to pose serious questions about a Hollywood genre, which, Pippin argues convincingly, should itself be treated less as a commercial enterprise than a source of the modern American foundation myth.
A political philosopher and Chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Pippin has written books on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Here, he takes the bold and singular step of placing Howard Hawks and John Ford on a par with the likes of Plato, Rousseau, and Foucault (how many books about westerns twice deploy the descriptor "Foucauldean"?) and treating their films - specifically, Red River and two Ford classics, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Searchers (1956) - as a means of exploring "the problem of political psychology, the problem of mythic narration, and the relevance of great Westerns to the distinctly American imaginary" (11). The core question these films pose for Pippin (especially the first two) is: what is gained and what is lost in the American political psyche when one parts ways with a "mythic and largely feudal"...