MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH

 

I've finished reading the second edition of Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS, and I'm resisting the temptation to record assorted niggles about errors or omissions. But the project is relevant to my phenomenological outlook thanks to Green's definition of "weird westerns," which offer not only those that are overtly marvelous but also a smattering of those I would deem "uncanny."

Of Green's four categories, three of them depend entirely on marvelous content, ranging from stories set in the actual Old West, in which supernatural or science fiction concepts appear, or stories set on futuristic Earths or in outer space, but with western motifs included. The fourth category deals almost entirely with the category I call "phantasmal figurations," in which, generally, ordinary human beings pretend to be supernatural boogiemen. Though this trope dates back to the Gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, Green chooses to name this category "the weird menace western," explicitly taking this term from the so-called weird menace pulp magazines of the 1930s.  To be sure, these periodicals seem much more concerned with torture and mayhem than with people dressing up like ghosts, but I suppose Green wanted to emphasize that the source of the horrors in both cases were purely human in nature.

Not surprisingly, though, Green does not view what he calls "masked cowboys" as relevant to this category. In my system, characters like the Lone Ranger, the Two-Gun Kid and Zorro (more a masked cavalier than a cowboy, I suppose) are intrinsically uncanny by the virtue of their wearing "outre outfits." But Green only includes such characters if an adventure, or series of adventures, make use of either phony horror or of real supernormal phenomena.

I suppose. for Green and others of similar leanings, there's nothing intrinsically "weird" about a hero deciding to dress up in a mask and fight evil. And of course, the masks of the Lone Ranger, the Two-Gun Kid and Zorro don't evoke what I term the "antipathetic affects" associated with the genre of horror. However, I would counter that such masks-- even one like Zorro's, which might be worn by any ordinary bandit-- do conjure up "sympathetic affects" that verge into the phenomenology of the uncanny. 

At the same time, one can only judge the presence or absence of the uncanny on a case-by-case basis, for as I mentioned in PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, it's possible for an author to have some major character run around for awhile in a mask for purely functional reasons. It's certainly possible that someone could write a Zorro story so down-to-earth that the hero did not attain the larger-than-life persona he has in Johnson McCully's original story. 

On a similar note, I can't be sure how uncanny the original radio dramas of the Lone Ranger were, since I never have (and probably never will) listen to any of them. But the Ranger I encountered was a larger-than-life figure, a knight using a mask rather than a helmet, selflessly devoted to the establishment of justice throughout the unruly frontier.

To be sure, even Green can't entirely avoid touching on some of the "masked cowboys" who aren't pretending to be haunts. Presumably he only includes the 1940 serial DEADWOOD DICK not because the titular hero wears a bandanna-mask, but because the villain, the Skull, goes around wearing a skull-mask. Yet to the best of my recollection, the villain isn't wearing the mask to convince anyone that he's a spook. He's just masked to conceal his identity, which is the same basic motive ascribed to Zorro and the Two-Gun Kid.

To be sure, had Green tried to compile all the masked cowboys who followed in the wake of the Lone Ranger, his ENCYCLOPEDIA might have been twice its current size-- and how many readers would have cared about non-entities like, say, early Marvel Comics' first entry into the costumed cowpoke genre, "the Masked Raider?"