Escape From Quarantine With a Western Movie

Such binary notions of heroes and villains have been baked into the genre from the beginning, whether via arcs about do-gooding farmers standing up to amoral bandits or plots about “cowboys versus Indians.” In most classic Westerns, Native Americans are a faceless evil, a racist symbol devoid of deeper characterization. Such simplistic storytelling pervades the genre beyond its frequent use of stereotypes. Red River, though a canonical work, is notorious for its sappy conclusion, where Dunson and Garth’s bitter rivalry is healed by a character forcing them at gunpoint to reflect on their love for each other. This resolution is far too tidy, but in this time of extreme uncertainty, I’ve found myself appreciating stories with unambiguous finales.

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If you grow tired of the black-and-white moralism of Hollywood’s Golden Age, look to later decades, as the classic Western fell out of style and new films sought out complexity. Two of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West—are now streaming on Amazon Prime (the latter is also on Netflix). Filmed in Italy in the 1960s, they have some of the most gorgeous photography in cinema history. Clint Eastwood’s extensive oeuvre as a director is always worth checking out, too, including The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and his Best Picture–winning opus Unforgiven; as a filmmaker, he excels at casting a cynical eye toward the frontier supermen he once played.

There are plenty of recent favorites you might have seen in theaters, movies that’ll satisfy the need for mesmerizing panoramas and conjure an experience that many have grown nostalgic for—going to the cinema. Think of films such as Kevin Costner’s Open Range, a painterly tale of cowboys standing up to land barons, or John Maclean’s highly underrated Slow West, a gorgeous and tragicomic subversion of the genre’s alpha male heroism.

As people spend more time indoors, they might notice their attention spans growing shorter. The constant stream of news can make it difficult to focus on anything for too long. For me, dipping into Westerns has helped lend some structure to my viewing diet, but its main therapeutic power lies in opening a window to a world far removed from our own. Perhaps the next genre I’ll venture into will be space movies—where the visual storytelling is that much more otherworldly. But because interstellar exploration requires many enclosed spaces, for now, I’ll feel happy roaming a more earthbound fantasy land: the great American outdoors.

here are more Westerns you can stream today:

on Netflix

Wyatt Earp (1994)
True Grit (1969)
Hell or High Water (2016)

on Hulu

Meek’s Cutoff (2011)
The Sisters Brothers (2018)
The Revenant (2015)

on Prime Video

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The Magnificent Seven (1960)

David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.