Interesting that rufnek brought up Star Wars and other sci-fis. What do you guys think about the proposition that the space opera "replaced" the western in terms of its stance within the collective totality of genres? Or do you think it is more accurate to say that it was essentially the same genre, and that genre is much less a collection of images than a web of relations. I say this only to suggest that maybe rufnek's concept of the frontier is the key to what a western is. Is it possible that everything else---the cowboys, the indians, the vast spaces, the lonely caravans---are just imaginary projections of a fixed symbolic structure? Is the western more than just a period of time in American history? Could it be possible that this concept of the frontier is representative of some universal human experience?
Any kind of a frontier will work for a Western--space, the ocean, even the arctic. Take for instance The Big Country in which Gregory Peck as a New England sailor comes West to marry a rancher's daughter who he met when she visited the East. People keep emphasizing to him just how very big the near-treeless plains are. In one of my favorite scenes, one of the locals asks Peck, "Have you ever seen anything so big?" to which Peck replies, "Yes, I have." The puzzled local asks, "What?" And Peck replies, "A couple of oceans."
Like that Westerner, we forget how big the oceans are and what landmarks and life forms they hide.