Cowboys, Bikers, and High Desert (1993)

When I was growing up, there were a few games that were popular through the neighbourhood.  Hide and seek was the one that everyone wanted to do.  But there was also tag, which was like hide and seek without giving people the time to hide.  If we wanted to get a little more violent, there was cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians.  Of course, in those ones, people always wanted to be the cops or the cowboys because they were the ones taking down the other people.

Cowboys were cool to the kids around here.  They got the hats, they got horses, they got fun old revolvers, and they had badges.  Even if you didn’t want to actually be a cowboy, you couldn’t deny that they were the figures of legend that had been passed down to us from the Wild West.  They were the North American legend.

The modern equivalent of the cowboy is the biker.  They left the posses of the cowboy days to Leonardo DiCaprio and his pals, choosing to instead band together in biker gangs.  Their horse was their motorcycle, as Bon Jovi alluded to when he sang “I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride.”  They ride off into the sunset, though not always the heroes of the day.  That’s why so many action heroes have some little bit of biker in them.  It gives them that cowboy feel.

Biker gangs tend to be portrayed as the bad guys.  A hero who rides a motorcycle turns them into the cowboy who would stroll into town and clean things up, but a gang of bikers turns into the posse showing up in town to rob the bank, steal the women, and fight in the saloon.  The bigger groups are seen as more threatening and placed as the antagonist, while the heroic cowboy/biker does their thing on their own.

High Desert was a movie about biker gangs and how bad they can be.  A woman on a camping trip with two friends stopped at a bar and played a game of pool against a biker.  She won, and the biker vowed to get revenge.  He took his biker gang on a trip to find her and attack her.  One of his gang members voiced concerns about what they were doing and was shot.  It wasn’t a kill shot, though.  The downed gang member teamed up with the victims to take down the gang he once called a family.

Everything about High Desert helped to highlight how cowboys were turned into bikers in terms of movie archetypes.  It all began with the inciting incident, the moment that pushed the entire story into motion.  It all began in the bar with the pool game.  In westerns, cowboys strolled into saloons when they got to a new town.  They would find the seedy types in there, the ones who most people wouldn’t want to associate with.  There would be a poker table off to the corner.  People would be gambling away their fortunes.  When modernized into the biker archetypes, that saloon became the biker bar.  The seedy types were the bikers.  The poker table became a pool table.  And the bar fights were just as common.

High Desert set things in motion with the bar scene.  The unknowing victims of the movie were in the biker bar for a quick drink.  The biker gang was there.  In the most artfully done, low budget, schlocky game of pool ever put onto a movie screen, the woman who was just passing through beat the leader of the biker gang.  It would be like going into a saloon in a western and winning the poker money from the guy who considered himself the most rootin’-tootin’-est cowboy in the town.  They would want to take you down a peg.  Or two.  Or all of them.

The one biker who set out on his own after being shot was the white hat cowboy.  The white hat was basically the good guy of cowboys.  It came from black and white films when it made the good guys and bad guys easier to differentiate.  If the good guy always wore white and the bad guy always wore black, it would be easy enough to tell the good from the bad.  The good guy, the white hat, tended to be a lone wolf who would clean things up on his own.  Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy was a white hat type, even though his hat wasn’t white at all.  In A Fistful of Dollars, he showed up and rid a town of two factions of bad guys.  High Desert saw one of the bikers filling that role, ridding the area of all other bikers.

Even the area felt like a good comparison between the typical biker movies and the typical westerns.  The movie was called High Desert.  What was the Wild West but the desert-like west of America?  Tumbleweeds, dirt, dust, and open plains.  That was where the cowboys roamed.  The biker gang of High Desert was in that area now.  They were roaming the land that people didn’t normally travel into, and they were keeping it under their jurisdiction.  There were some wooded areas in that territory, though, which led to the other main location comparison.  A big thing in westerns is a secluded headquarters for the bad guy posse.  There would be a cave, or a campsite surrounded by the woods or mountains, where they would hide out and wait for the law to pass them by.  High Desert had a small house in the woods where the gang holed up after attacking the visitors from the bar.  It was at this secluded house that the final showdown happened.

Between the bar, the good vs. bad dynamic, and the isolated homestead, High Desert certainly played like a modern update to the western archetypes.  It took the building blocks that made up the cowboy stories that people loved in the golden age of westerns and placed them into a story about bikers.  It mostly worked.  High Desert wasn’t the best movie, by any stretch of the imagination.  It was entertaining enough, though, and that was thanks to the reliance on the western formula.

Kids have wanted to be cowboys for generations.  Though the game of cowboys and Indians may have faded away with the realization about just how racist it was, kids could still be playing cowboys versus bandits or something like that.  I don’t know.  I’m not a kid anymore.  I haven’t been a kid for a long time.  What I can say is that the people my age and older who grew up with the cowboy lore have turned cowboys into other things.  Bikers, superheroes, and action heroes in general all play into the character types set up through westerns.  The stories still harken back to the classic westerns that our parents loved.  Westerns might not be as popular in their standard form, but they adapted to new genres that we know and love.

Here are some notes to finish off the post:

• Other movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies that featured biker gangs were Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (week 32) and Snake Eater III: His Law (week 320).
• Have you seen High Desert?  What did you think of it?  Do you agree with the idea that bikers are the new cowboys?  Let me know in the comments.
• The comments and Twitter are good places to suggest movies that I should be watching for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Hit me up and tell me about the bad movies I might not have covered yet.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies where I share stuff about the blog.  Check it out.
• That brings an end to this post.  What about the next one?  I’ll be checking out a movie I’ve had saved to my PVR for a long time now.  Ice Twisters is the movie of choice for next weekend, and I hope you’ll all come back to see whatever I write about it.  I’ll see you in a week.