Sonny and Duane frequent the movie theater Jacy watches sitcoms on her television set. While Sonny and Duane romanticize their faux-Western lifestyle by playing pool and driving a rickety pick-up truck, Jacy is comfortably settling into her life as one of Texas’s first suburbanites. But unbeknownst to them, Jacy is already living in a post-masculine world. Up until that point, ingrained in their society was the expectation that a “manly man” be a chick magnet-bonus points if he’s in a relationship with a woman where he acts as the provider.īoth men chase after the most beautiful girl in town, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd). Unsurprisingly, their relationships with women are pivotal to their relationship with their own masculinity. And so they do everything they can to cling to masculine ideals: They play football, they disappear to Mexico on a bender, and, of course, they chase after girls. Men like The Last Picture Show’s Sam the Lion, for example, the town’s middle-aged cowboy (portrayed by legendary Western actor Ben Johnson) who bask in memories of how life in Texas used to be, knowing full well that their days are numbered, and that they are among the last of their kind.įor near high school graduates Sonny and Duane, this cultural shift makes finding footing in the world difficult.

These changes ultimately left men whose identities relied on a heightened sense of masculinity feeling stranded. This was largely a product of the swift suburbanization of America that followed the post-World War II industrial boom, paired with the introduction of television into the American household, which changed the way we watched Westerns forever. Beautiful women fawn for their attention.īut what is so potent about Sonny and Duane watching this film in 1951, exactly a century after Red River’s 1851 setting, is that kind of masculinity is rapidly becoming obsolete-and even passé.

A mysterious, brooding Montgomery Clift effortlessly mounts a horse. Barren, virginal terrain stretches behind a hunky, gun-slinging John Wayne. Above all else, Red River is the ultimate ode to masculinity.

At the end of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The Last Picture Show, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) sit at their local cinema and watch Howard Hawks’ iconic Western Red River.

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