Fellow Americans who never got into westerns and/or haven’t seen one, is there any particular reason?

26 comments

1. Westerns went out of style decades ago, and I’m not an old movie person.

2. Eh, I just…don’t like them. Cowboys and bandits were never my childhood obsession.

   On the other hand, Laura Ingalls Wilder and other “girly” works of historical fiction like the American Girl Doll books/movies or Anne of Green Gables where

3. Nah not really. There are things in the genre I like it just isn’t something I actively seek out.

4. Define “got into”. Cause I like a few western movies, but it’s not a genre I actively seek out. And it’s not a super popular genre anymore at all. Probably due in part to the amount of gross racism and stereotyping that happened with Native Americans in the genre for a long time.

5. Just doesn’t really appealed to me. Only “western” I’ve liked is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

6. They aren’t very relatable to me. They aren’t too entertainment to me too since they tend to follow the same set of storylines. There is only so much you can do in Western style shows when it’s a small town with maybe 50 people in it, 1 sheriff and a lack of depth outside of the few main characters. Just doesn’t do it for me.

7. There are Western films I enjoy, but I’m not “into” Westerns, in the sense that I seek out the genre or prefer that stories be told in that format.

   Is there any particular reason? No? I find it a fairly tired medium for storytelling tbh after decades and decades of myth upon myth upon myth.

   I’ve studied US history quite a bit, as well, particularly the history of the West (since I grew up here) and the myth of the “Old West” is almost entirely a fabrication.

   There wasn’t an extended period of time where there were lawless high desert towns throughout the Western United States, where sheriffs and criminals duked it out for control of the homesteads.

   In reality, the “old West” is basically a moment in time in any given place between when the first settlers showed up and the first regular railroad service connected that place to major institutions.

   This means it would exist for a year or two at a time in a given town, at most. And for the most part it was uneventful. And the locations these conditions existed in would move with the settlers, and then recede with the expansion of transportation infrastructure and commerce.

8. I like John Wayne movies.

9. I dont particularly relate to cowboys, though the concept of the wild west is cool

10. I’ve seen a few. Probably the biggest reason I never got into them was that they were long since out of fashion by the time I was a teen. Sure there were a few, but disaster movies, spy thrillers, and by my 20s, superhero movies were all bigger. I associate westerns with my parents’ generation, so while I didn’t dislike them, I wasn’t really going to seek them out.

    I did enjoy Cowboys and Aliens. One of those movies that’s so bad it passes over into something I enjoy just for the absurdity of it.

11. I live in a western, I don’t need to watch them.

12. There was an old lady that my ex-step mom used to take care of about 7-8 years ago who would always have old western movies about cowboys on her TV, I always found it so boring whenever I’d pay attention to it. I associate it with something a lot of old folks are into, I just didn’t like it.

13. I never got into them. Too much test on steroid driven machismo. Not my style

14. For the same reason I don’t watch a lot of old movies, they’re just not that compelling from my modern perspective.

15. You haven’t seen the right one yet if you don’t like Westerns

16. Just never had anything about them that really grabbed my attention or imagination. I’ve seen a few, some of my family likes them so they’ve been on, but I never sought them out on my own.

17. Probably a generational thing. I grew up in the 60s & 70s so I like Clint Eastwood westerns but John Wayne does nothing for me. I have been told The Searchers is the best western ever made and I was like meh watching it. My grandparents generation loved all the 40s & 50s western stuff but I never got into it.

18. I prefer stories that have magic and dragons or spaceships and lasers.

    Or magical spaceships and dragons with lasers.

19. I’ve been studying the Southwest for three years, living there for 19. Westerns are all lies, in service of empire. In fact, Wild Bill started his Wild West show using Indians whose people the US military had only recently systematically murdered, back in the 1880s. The show ran internationally for three decades, sowing the seeds of bullshit about Indians, “manifest destiny” and the West. Then the Jews created Hollywood and started shooting Westerns out in the California desert. The lies go back to the beginning of movies, and before.

20. There is a big misconception about who cowboys were, especially compared to frontiersmen. A lot of Western movies are heavily romanticized. In the end, a lot of the “heroes” who “settled” the West were just another axis of colonialism.

21. Not a smart move by the manager, now he’s short staffed tomorrow also.

22. Never seen a western, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with westerns, but I can’t think of any reason for *me* to watch a western. It’s just not something that’s crossed my mind or my realm of interests.

23. If you’re trying to get into the genre, Of recommend either *True Grit* or *Tombstone* as jumping off points.

    If not, no worries.

24. It’s not 1955 anymore?

25. It’s party generational I’m sure. I’m a historian who teaches Western history to college students, so I screen a lot of films and TV shows for them in the process. I run into a LOT of students who have never seen a Western because it’s really not part of youth culture anymore– but it was at the core of American pop culture in the 1950s/1960s. In fact, from about 1955-1970 television was dominated by Westerns, and while they fell out of fashion in Hollywood by the mid-1960s they continued on TV into the 70s in a few cases (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Kung Fu, Little House, etc.).

    “Most people” today came of age after Westerns fell out of fashion. People who are older were likely raised on them. My kids, who are 17 and 21 currently, have seen some but only because I’ve basically told them to watch– including my eldest, who is a film student.

26. I am super into the time and history so most of them are lacking.

    There’s a few good ones. Just most of them suck – most were made in an era of people going to movies weekly. There was a huge audience and a lot of terrible movies got made.

    I do like Stagecoach. Only John Wayne film I liked.