Professor David Peimer
Cowboy Characters in the Movies: American Myths and Archetypes
Summary
This lecture will explore the following questions about the cowboy character in film: What great American myths and archetypes does the cowboy character embody? Was D.H. Lawrence accurate when he wrote, “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer”? Was Sam Shepard spot on when he wrote, “There’s no such thing as the West anymore! It’s a dead issue!”? David Peimer examines the enduring and fascinating myth of the cowboy image today.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean on, which is another whole part of the story. I’m just focusing here on the movies, and how the image of the cowboy, the invented myth has changed through the movies. I mean, that was the focus here, but absolutely the genocide or the killing, whatever word we want to use of so many of the Native American peoples. The stealing of the land, of course, because ultimately it was about the land being conquered, but that’s a little bit less of the direct cowboy image in the movies. That’s the slight shift.
No it’s not, but it’s, I think less the cowboy. It’s more, you know, the Union Army and many, many others. We can go on and on and on. You know, it’s a conquest of the land. It’s pushing, you know, colonisation, conquest. Spot on, Lorna. It’s, remember cowboys are 1865 to 1895 really. And they really originate, as I said, from Mexico to bring the cows up after the Civil War. And so it’s a whole different function and world they’re living in compared to the huge attacks on, you know, inverted commas Indians or the indigenous people and all the ethnic groups there.