The Western didn’t die. It metastasised.
Bounty Hunter:
“A Man’s Got To Make A Livin'”Josey:
The Outlaw Josey Wales
” Dyin’ Ain’t Much Of A Livin’ Boy!”
The lone rider. The hard man with the gun. The myth of the West was never about freedom. It was about abandonment. These weren’t stories of liberty. They were rehearsals for loneliness. A man rides into town, kills for justice or revenge, and then vanishes. He’s never allowed to stay. There’s no space for him in the world he clears. The frontier is always closing behind him.
He is the figure of American individualism: silent, broken, always vanishing. What he leaves behind is scorched earth, a woman in mourning, a boy looking up to the wrong role model. America keeps rebooting him. The settler becomes the cabbie. The cabbie becomes the recluse. The recluse builds a city no one lives in.
And now in 2025, the myth isn’t just alive. It’s in production. Trump’s second presidency isn’t about policy, it’s cinema. He’s not playing the cowboy. This is no Ronnie. He’s directing the grindhouse remake: one part Roger Corman, one part fascist TikTok feed. Think Alcatraz: Blood and Liberty—alligators in the Everglades, conspiracies in the script, carnage in the cut. It’s not Ford. It’s found footage. And it’s being shot in real time with real bodies.
Every cabinet pick is a casting call. Every grievance is a Truth Social post. Every “patriot” with a badge is just an extra in a rerun of a genre that should have died with the VHS tape. The alienated man hasn’t disappeared. He’s been given a gun, tactical gear, and works for ICE.
Let’s kick it ICE, ice, baby ice, ice, baby.
I. The Vigilante Rides at Night – Taxi Driver and Urban Frontier Justice
“Loneliness has followed me my whole life.”
Travis Bickle
Travis Bickle doesn’t ride a horse. He drives a cab. No saloon. Unless you count the yellow car. Just porno theatres and coffee shops. He doesn’t watch cattle rustlers; he watches sex workers, junkies, black men. He calls them animals. Scum. The voiceover is Biblical. The tone is prophetic. But the plot is pure Western: one man against the rot.
Visual: rear-view mirror at night, mohawk in profile, gun tucked in waistband.
He buys guns, lifts weights, plans his act. A girl to save. A villain to kill. The film ends with applause. Not from us, but from the world around him. He becomes a hero. The story affirms the lone man’s righteousness. The streets remain unchanged.
This isn’t fiction anymore. In July 2025, Jared Wise, a former FBI agent who stormed the Capitol, screamed “Kill ’em!” at police, and called officers Gestapo. Now works at Trump’s Department of Justice. LOL. He advises the pardon office. The vigilante didn’t ride off. He got a desk and a salary. Frontier justice is back, and it has a presidential seal.
II. The Homesteader with No Land – The Whale (2022) and the Collapse Inward
“With no health insurance?”
Charlie, after being told he should have called an ambulance
Charlie isn’t riding anywhere. The settler stayed too long. The frontier closed decades ago, but he didn’t move. He teaches online with the camera off. He apologises constantly. He eats not from hunger but grief.
Visual: Four walls. Stacked pizza boxes. Breath like wind through dry grass.
His body is the ruined landscape. Soft, swelling, aching. He wants to do one good thing before he dies. He’s not the sheriff or the outlaw. This is the one who stayed behind when the credits rolled.
He’s not tragic because he’s large. He’s tragic because he’s kind, and the world doesn’t reward that. He belongs to a genre that doesn’t know what to do with sorrow unless it turns it into a punchline or a death scene.
This is the other face of the Trump Western. Not the proud man with the gun. But the discarded man on oxygen, body wrecked by history, left behind while the next spectacle loads.
III. Ghost Town Mindset – Synecdoche, New York (2008) and the Failed Frontier of the Self
“I will have someone play me, to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he’ll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god! Get to work!”
Caden Cotard
Caden Cotard doesn’t fight. He doesn’t even ride. He directs. Builds a city inside a warehouse, then another inside that. Rehearses life instead of living it. The myth internalised becomes madness.
Visual: Warehouses inside warehouses. Empty stages. Blueprints curling at the edges.
There’s no justice to enact, just scenes to reshoot. The self becomes the only frontier left, and even that is unreachable. Time melts. Language collapses. He gives stage directions to ghosts.
Caden is what happens when the Western myth reaches the therapeutic age. There’s no world to conquer, so we perform the old one endlessly. He knows the story is broken, but he can’t stop playing all the parts. The curtain never falls. No one claps.
IV. The Last Campfire – After the Myth Collapses
Travis enacts vigilante justice and gets absorbed. Charlie withers, good-hearted and unseen. Caden simulates himself into oblivion. No one rides off. No one wins. Each is left alone. Alienated not because they failed, but because the system worked exactly as designed.
Visual: the cab idling, the wheel chair on its side, the stage lights dimming.
This isn’t a masculinity crisis. It’s a narrative collapse. The Western taught men to act alone. But the range is gone. The enemies are algorithms. The problems aren’t moral, they are baked in, like beans, This is systemic. Think you can shoot your way out of medical debt or climate collapse?
Race was always part of the story. The white cowboy rides over ground already cleared. Trampled on by genocide, slavery, conquest. The myth is soaked in it. But that’s the part they never show at the end: who isn’t in the frame. Who never got a line. Who built the town he rides away from.
The Western lives on. Not on screen, but in Trump’s stage-managed presidency. Every border crackdown, every pardon, every re-election ad is a new take. But this time, the town doesn’t get saved. This time, the hero is the villain. Still, the show must go on.
The last men don’t ride into the sunset. They circle the campfire, waiting for a story that’s already betrayed them.
The End.
