Hollywood’s Western frontier myth masked TV violence as law-and-order service

Evidence

In the view of William Orr, the executive producer of television films at Warner Brothers, slaying evildoers not only builds character but also instills moral standards that undergird a civil society. Orr was the producer of the hit Western series Cheyenne: “As a matter of fact, I believe that a certain amount of violence, as it is portrayed on ‘Cheyenne,’ has a good moral effect.” Orr justified excess violence in television programming with a historical myth created by Hollywood. “The winning of the West was a victory for law and order. Such violence that is shown occurred because law and order were absent. With the coming of the sheriffs and the marshals and the growth of their influence, the West became a respectable part of our community” Contrary to this mythical frontier ethos, according to historians of the West, “prohibitions against carrying guns were strictly enforced, and there were few homicides” (Spitzer, 1995). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 829

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral justification framing; the fabricated frontier myth parallels how violent enforcement is narrated as restoring order in contemporary policing discourse.
• SEED: An essay angle: how a fabricated historical narrative gets conscripted to launder violence as civic virtue — could trace the Hollywood Western myth from Cheyenne to modern cop dramas.