Link Appleyard might be the archetypal cowardly wild west lawman. John Ford’s classic 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents the gutless town marshal, played by Andy Devine, as a legacy of the cracks in the system that require strong men like John Wayne’s steely Tom Doniphon to deliver true justice in a time of chaos. When Lee Marvin’s bestial Valance rolls into town to bully greenhorn lawyer James Stewart, it is not the bumbling Appleyard who steps up to help him. Instead, it is the indestructible Wayne, a superhero in everything but name and outfit, who delivers the bullet that saves Stewart’s bacon.
Comic-book movies have been compared to the western before, and for good reason. Both are mass-market confections in which larger-than-life heroes emerge to engage in acts of valiance that would be beyond most normal human beings. Both began by presenting simplistic battles between good and evil forces before arguably becoming more complex as time went on. Each is predicated on a mantra of frontier libertarianism, that peculiarly American belief that the strong individual should be able, and indeed has a virtual duty, to protect himself and those he loves against villainy – rather than expecting the authorities to do so for him.
The latest Marvel movie, Captain America: Civil War, typifies the current of anti-establishment politics that continues to course through the superhero genre like a seam of bitter gold through granite. Its storyline about a superhero registration act that divides the former Avengers into “yes” and “no” camps cleaves tightly to the frontier doctrine that the authorities simply cannot be trusted like a true-hearted, unselfish tough guy hero.
The Link Appleyards here are the hapless government agents, played by William Hurt and Martin Freeman, struggling to control the far more powerful superheroes whose battle rages around them. Chris Evans’s Captain America is the totemic, granite-gutted John Wayne figure, a man who believes only he has the power to keep his world safe from the bad guys, while Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man is the more civilised Stewart, who understands that the rule of law must eventually come to take precedence over even superheroes’ right to do their dreadfully important superhero stuff.
Not long ago, Marvel’s rival studio Warner Bros brought us the DC universe-building Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, featuring a fascistic caped crusader determined to take out the threatening new guy in town. Like a mean-minded wild west sheriff, Batfleck simply cannot handle the idea of an individual who might just be tougher and badder than him staking his claim to the territory. While Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor at least makes a passable pretence of trying to include the authorities in Superman’s censure, the dark knight of Gotham heads straight out to battle his enemy in a kryptonite-assisted superhero equivalent of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies also took place in a world resembling the wild west. Ignoring the US’s radically dropping crime rates since the 1970s, the caped crusader battles criminals who have corrupted officialdom and are running riot across the city. Like the gold-rush towns so bestial in their infancy that basic human decency has not yet had time to catch up, Gotham City is a place where the bad guys rule and the law exists in the form of anyone brave enough to take them on. When Batman picks up the cape and cowl he might as well be pinning on a sheriff’s badge.
Further examples of unreliable authority figures whom superheroes would do well to at least ignore (and preferably remove from office) include Iron Man 2’s nosy Senator Stern (the late, great Garry Shandling) who turned out to be a Hydra agent in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and the latter film’s Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), a leader of superhero agency S.H.I.E.L.D. who ... also turned out to be an evil agent of Hydra. Meanwhile, Don Cheadle’s War Machine is the government-sanctioned, prosaic anti-Iron Man, a vision of what the superhero might look like if he got official permission before embarking on each bad guy destroying mission.
20th Century Fox’s X-Men saga is even clearer that superheroes should be left alone to fight it out in their own personal wild west playground. Bad guy authority figures in the other Marvel universe have included Danny Huston/Brian Cox’s nefarious William Stryker, creator of the evil Weapon X programme, and Days of Future Past’s Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), whose dodgy experiments with robots pretty much end up bringing about the end of the world. If the people in charge are this evil, comic-book movies tell us, who could possibly argue that superheroes are the public’s only real option for protection from villainy?
One difference between westerns and comic-book movies is that the older genre always represented a finite source of precious material. The wild west itself existed for little more than half a century, and films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with its flash-forward segues showing Stewart as a rich senator, make clear that John Wayne-type heroes were only required for as long as societal chaos reigned supreme.
Superhero movies, by contrast, boast a revolving door of constant frontier-style villainy in the shape of ever-more-dastardly superbaddies that must be taken down at all costs. Which probably isn’t great news for those holding out for comic-book epics to go the way of the western any time soon.
