The Western Was Never About Freedom
For more than seven months, Walton Goggins watched a Western every day. John Ford’s films, Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, episodes of Gunsmoke—the actor saw them all as he shot Fallout, the postapocalyptic TV series in which he stars. Half the time, he binged for research; Goggins thought of his character, the fictional 1950s-style movie star Cooper Howard, as a peer of cowboy-playing performers such as Alan Ladd.
“I didn’t look at them as Walton. I really looked at them as Cooper Howard,” he told me last spring on the set of Fallout’s second season. “It was like …” He slipped into character, making a dejected expression as if envious of Ladd’s career. “Okay, yeah, Alan got that role, and he was great in Shane,” Goggins, as Cooper, drawled. “I should have taken that, and I should have taken that television pilot.” He laughed. “I should have done Gunsmoke. Why didn’t I do that?!”
But the other half of the time, Goggins explained, he just needed something to stay sane. He also plays “the Ghoul,” a mutated form of Cooper who became a deadly bounty hunter after surviving the end of the world. In many episodes, Goggins switches between playing the Ghoul (in the present) and Cooper (in flashbacks). When he had to sink into the Ghoul’s ruthless mindset—and spend hours getting prosthetics applied—the actor immersed himself in tales of gunslingers, he said, so “I don’t lose my mind.”
After all, Fallout seems designed to make people’s heads spin. The series, based on a popular video-game franchise, takes place in an alternate reality in which World War II yielded a retro-futuristic society thriving on rapid technological development—that is, until a nuclear cataclysm results in civilization’s collapse. Set more than 200 years after, the story involves multiple protagonists, and its tone can careen wildly from moment to moment: a little like The Walking Dead when it leans into dystopian horror, a little like The Last Man on Earth when it indulges in absurd humor.
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Yet the show most often—and most clearly—draws from what became Goggins’s on-set fixation: the Western. Season 1, among Amazon Prime Video’s biggest hits according to the streamer, injected the genre with weirdness. At the outset, the show’s three primary characters each match an archetype presented in Leone’s 1966 classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: There’s Lucy (played by Ella Purnell), an idealistic young woman who grew up in one of the Vaults; she treks across the wasteland to search for her father, greeting practically every obstacle with the phrase “Okey dokey!” There’s Maximus (Aaron Moten), an orphan raised by the cultlike Brotherhood of Steel, who seeks to impress the group’s leadership. And then there’s the self-serving Ghoul, who dispatches with anyone who gets in his way. The show begins with Lucy squarely as “the good,” the Ghoul representing the morally bankrupt “bad,” and Maximus caught somewhere in between as “the ugly”; these designations become intriguingly malleable over time, as both the characters and the viewers become more exposed to the reality of life in the wasteland.
Season 2, which concluded this week, challenges the traditional look of the Western, too. After primarily filming the first season in New York, the show had moved production in part to the historic Melody Ranch studio on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The property was owned by Gene Autry, the actor known as the “Singing Cowboy,” and features an archetypal Western set: a dirt-ridden main street bookended by a saloon and a general store. But, as I discovered when I visited the shoot last year, the Fallout team had built a facade over much of it to represent “New Vegas,” a postapocalyptic version of Sin City. This take on the Strip blended the ranch’s existing features with neon signage, steampunk props, and plenty of dystopian grace notes. A crew member set a car aflame for a wide shot. Another placed more tumbleweed in the path of the dozens of extras milling about. Inside one of the stores, I touched a splatter of gooey fake blood. These details underlined the show’s thematic vision as well: Westerns tend to portray the frontier as a land of opportunity, arguing that a strict set of values provides all the guidance anyone needs. But lawlessness doesn’t grant much freedom, Fallout posits. Neither does having a moral code.
The Western has proved surprisingly enduring. The genre could have easily disappeared after the concept of “manifest destiny”—the idea, explored in many stories, that the United States’ mission was to spread American values westward—grew outdated. But the Western, as the editors of the 2020 essay collection Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre wrote, has “reinvented and hybridized” itself to match the country’s many cultural shifts: John Ford’s silent movies in the ’20s, for instance, reflected the post–World War I era of American exceptionalism, while his 1939 film Stagecoach featured a cast of paranoid, distrusting misfits—an appropriate quality for something released during the Great Depression. Clean-shaven, guitar-strumming cowboys played by actors such as Autry dwindled after the 1940s and ’50s, as Clint Eastwood’s hard-bitten anti-heroes emerged. Yet the genre waxed and waned in popularity amid its many transformations; in The Atlantic alone, writers have repeatedly declared the rise, death, and revival of the Western.
“There is something inherently appealing about the idea of being the master of your own destiny,” Jonathan Nolan, an executive producer of Fallout, told me, “of being in a landscape in which there is no order, there is no civilization, and it’s up to you to make these sorts of decisions.” Stories of untameable frontiers, he argued, persevere because they question society’s purpose. (He would know; Nolan co-created HBO’s Westworld, which imagined an Old West–themed amusement park populated by androids and catering to hedonistic guests.) From the roles played by the likes of John Wayne and Kevin Costner, the fantasy of the cowboy mentality—that an individual can dole out his own form of justice, and that without order comes liberation—persists.
But Fallout giddily toys with the genre’s legacy, too, at times turning homages into punch lines. In the scene I watched being filmed, the Ghoul and his newfound fellow travelers—Maximus, suited up in the Brotherhood’s coveted power armor, and Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), Maximus’s former squire who’s begun to mutate after an incident in Season 1—stride confidently onto a crowded main street as if they’re the stars of a Leone movie. Bystanders gawk and cheer from the sidewalks. A parade forms in their wake. And then Thaddeus’s arm falls off, embarrassing his companions.
The show isn’t always so silly. Season 2 explores where this chaos comes from, and the difficulty in distinguishing the sheriff from the outlaw. The answer comes in part from how hard it seems for the characters to hold fast to their beliefs. Lucy, for example, has been raised to respect everyone; the Golden Rule works against her in the wasteland, however, especially after she finds her father, Hank (Kyle Maclachlan), and learns of his misdeeds. The Ghoul, who takes a serum to help retain his human memories, hasn’t found salvation or satisfaction in his barbarism, just more pain. And Maximus discovers that those in the Brotherhood he most admired are fools—a harsh truth that goes for most of the authority figures in Fallout. No white-hatted cowboy can exist, the show suggests, when the world has to be saved from too much at once, including: autocratic, power-hungry leaders; warring factions across the wasteland; and, of course, the mutated creatures that haunt once-thriving cities. The notion of a virtuous do-gooder saving the day is too simplistic for this story.
[Read: Why TV is so worried about free will]
In that sense, Fallout reimagines the Western’s stakes. The show’s landscape has long been mapped—and ravaged. The frontier is instead ideological, about interrogating how to reconcile a complex world into something comprehensible when doing the opposite seems easier. Over and over, people are pushed toward ignorance: Lucy’s former community is led by a woman who handles the first complaint about her alarming behavior by promising to escalate it to herself. Cooper’s wife, a Vault-Tec executive, tells him in a flashback to move past what he heard about the company’s plans to nuke the planet. Hank finishes designing a device that turns strangers he meets into sedate worker bees.
The show’s real villain is mindlessness, in other words. But this type of placid acceptance in the face of obvious danger isn’t unique to this ensemble. Fallout uses the Western’s familiar imagery and machinations to scrutinize all-too-resonant, deeply American themes: how end-stage capitalism and corporate overreach breed resentment and economic anxiety; how overzealous technocrats and self-interested leadership sow division and disorder; and how blind patriotism can undermine democracy. “All sides of the political spectrum right now are talking so much in end-of-the-world terms,” Fallout’s co-creator Geneva Robertson-Dworet told me when we spoke on set. “It actually feels like the show is sort of alarmingly prescient in a way that we’d prefer to not have.”
In Los Angeles’s Autry Museum of the West—named for Gene—hangs a painting by the artist George Carlson of a dead coyote, titled “Mayday!” The creature, left impaled on a barbed-wire fence, caught Carlson’s eye as he drove through Northern Idaho in 2022. From far away, it had looked decorative to him; close up, it was more disturbing. Dead coyotes are strung up throughout today’s rural West, but the tradition varies in meaning: Sometimes, ranchers consider the carcasses trophies; other times, they use them as warnings to other coyotes.
The painting, which I saw on a visit to the Autry last month, reminded me of a scene from Fallout. Late in Season 2, the Ghoul ends up impaled on a pillar, left for dead by Lucy after she pushes him out of a window. In this position, he’s unable to reach the serum that prevents him from losing his human consciousness, so he desperately repeats a mantra: “I’m a human being,” he says, again and again. Trapped there, Goggins manifests both versions of his character at once, flickering between flashbacks of the steady Cooper and the present-day, tortured Ghoul.
Like the strung-up coyotes, the Ghoul typically looks normal from afar but terrifying up close. That illusion epitomizes the Wild West of Fallout: The Ghoul—or whoever Cooper has become in the wasteland—rejects the Western’s either/or approach. He’s neither fully feral nor civilized, neither an avatar for freedom nor one for oppression. This season has also upended the notion presented in Season 1 that he has to act alone. A cowboy is a symbol for quintessential American values: independence, problem-solving, self-sufficiency. But obstinately embracing those qualities is, Goggins pointed out to me, “not necessarily the right way to look at the world.”
Not when the world, Fallout argues, requires reestablishing what right and wrong actually mean. The protagonists may have been forced into roles they never asked for, but they have an opportunity to question their circumstances—to find the middle ground between succumbing to basic, selfish instincts and depending on others for help. If anything, Fallout is defined by an uneasy sense of hope. “It’s not really about the end of a world; it’s about the beginning of a new one,” Nolan told me. Hitting reset without forgetting what came before is perhaps “a weird thread of optimism” for the show to follow, he conceded. But at least it’s the kind of weird that keeps people from losing their mind.