VLVL2 (10) Old-time oaters, 192

[Paul Nightingale]

(192.14-17) "A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here--she'd watched
some, Saturday mornings on the Tube--but where stagecoaches had rolled and
posses thundered ..."

The expense of shooting on location meant that production soon became
studio-based. The shift to sound films in the mid-20s also encouraged studio
production and thereby threatened the Western genre in the early-30s. See
Janet Staiger, "The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930" in Bordwell,
Staiger & Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985). Also Peter
Stanfield, Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s' Singing Cowboy,
2002.

The Western became the quintessentially American genre, associated with a
national mythology, pioneering and settlement: manifest destiny. However, by
the 1970s and 1980s, the Western described a loss of innocence, the
beginnings of a modern world. See Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 2000.
Also John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 1984. Cawelti refers, eg, to the
ominous role played by automobiles in Peckinpah films.

One might also consider the way Westerns debunked their own mythologies:
Hearts of the West and Unforgiven each foreground the writing of myth, as
did The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

Hence, the development of the Western in the period covered by VL differs
from that of the private-eye/crime film, although each proceeds by claiming
greater realism.

(192.17-23) "... now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and
futures into tiny telephone mikes no bigger than M&Ms, crowds dressed to
impress came and shopped and sat on tile patios eating lunch, deals were
made high overhead in legal offices that weren't always legal, sharing these
altitudes with city falcons who hunted pigeons in the booming prisms of sun
and shadow below."

Prairie sees another kind of movie set, so to speak on location, actors
speaking into mikes.

The "legal offices" that "[share] these altitudes with city falcons" might
also recall the threat from the air at the end of the previous chapter (from
helicopters "that weren't always legal").

Furthermore, think back to Prairie's introduction to the (horror-movie
setting of the) Retreat: "... nothing looked especially creepy to her. She
was a California kid, and she trusted in vegetation" (108). Like an old-time
film heroine, she is a country girl come to town.