Get ready for the cowboy renaissance

Marvel is at death’s door. What’s next? Some say we can track an incoming recession by the length of women’s skirts, others by the popularity of dance music. Film, as the composite of a million images, comes out as a more sophisticated forecaster – and not just of the economy, but of lifestyles and mentalities. Styles rise and fall with the times. They’ve been doing so since the early days of commercial cinema.

Take the original shift from film noir to Western. Noir, which peaked in popularity in the latter half of the 1940s, dealt with the leftover anxieties of world war two. Sometimes this was obvious: in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, a Nazi war criminal descends on a peaceful Connecticut town. Sometimes the Teutonic skulked at a deeper level. The most memorable noirs dealt in a dark, symbolic sensuality, as if the Brothers Grimm had received convenient injections of Jung and Freud.