Drawing on a wide range of cinematic productions spanning from The Virginian in 1929 to Golden Age and spaghetti westerns to recent popular TV series like Deadwood and Longmire, this chapter establishes the close connection between Western film and ancient epic, showing that like the poems of Homer and Virgil, Western film places invented or fictionalized characters in a foundational period from history, and thus offer enough truth to be relevant, but enough fiction to provide a comfortable distance. Works from both genres also delineate fundamental values and beliefs and provide models both virtuous and cautionary for male and female behavior while helping to justify national self-image. At the same time, the best productions from both genres complicate the ideologies they promote through devices such as depictions of excessive violence, positioning protagonist and enemy as alter egos, and the hero’s ultimate exclusion from the society he has redeemed. And much as epic both reflected and influenced notions of honor, justice, and manhood in antiquity, the imprint of Westerns on our own belief systems is so powerful that it continues to shape and reflect our own values and ideologies today.
