I never watched the original version of “3:10 to Yuma” but I suspect it probably didn’t have the nuances of the remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The plot is relatively straight-forward. Ben Wade, the infamous leader of a band of outlaws that have robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad twenty-two times, finally gets caught. Meanwhile, Dan Evans, a veteran of the Civil War who lost his leg, and a rancher who is being forced off his land by the Southern Pacific Railroad, decides to take the job to bring Ben Wade to justice, by escorting him to the prison train that stops in the town of Contention. Of course, Wade’s band of outlaws does all they can to save their boss.

The mythology of the Old West, in terms of honor and what makes a man a man is mostly intact, and the landscape of the barren desert of the Southwest is evocatively utilized, but what is even more haunting is the undercurrent subtext: the Western is a long obsolete genre, and the director Richard Mangold succeeds in capturing the sense of the ending of an age. The mythologic yeoman farmer/freeman rancher is obliterated by the onrushing modernity of the railroad, and outlaws become subject not necessarily to justice, but to economic necessity and the iron will of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, and the Native Americans are swept completely under the rug, literally erased from history. The oncoming age is not about mythic concepts such as loyalty and honor. It is about profit, and every man (and woman) has a price.

In the background of every scene is evidence of the railroad. Despite the fact that it is the railroad that is the cause of his oppression, Evans nonetheless grudgingly allies himself with their cause, and even rides beside the man who had burned down his barn at the behest of a landowner whom Evans owes a considerable debt to, and who wants to clear the way for the railroad. The imagery of the teams of men and women, many of them immigrant Chinese, building that steel road in the middle of nowhere haunts me, and whatever the outcome, we both know that in a sense, both Evans and Wade are doomed, whether they live or die.

What “3:10 to Yuma” especially reminded me of is China Miéville’s novel Iron Council, which actually superficially resembles a rather standard Western plot, focusing on the attempt to capture an outlaw who helped organize a workers’ rebellion against the railroad company, and the eventual confrontation that this leads to. While Mangold narrates the end of the Frontier, paved over by Capitalism, Miéville concentrates on the nature of Marxist revolutions and how they tend to fail, because of individual ego, because it seems like human nature to want power instead of justice, and because the ancien regime simply has more firepower and more resources than the revolutionaries do. But the end is the same: profit supplants any sort of justice, and instead of robbing people with guns, the new outlaws aren’t outlaws because they operate with the sanction of the government and steal your money by manipulating the system in their favor. (For modern day examples, see the present day Republican Party. Also see the perfidy of Walmart and its never-ending quest to break the average man and woman into indentured servitude.)

The thing with Westerns is that you know how it’s going to end. While there are still large tracts of desert out there, it’s astounding to see how we have started to terraform our planet. The last time I flew from the West Coast to the East Coast, we flew over the Imperial Valley, and it’s almost bizarre how green it is, fed by hundreds of miles of aqueducts lined with concrete.

The suburbs of L.A. have started encroaching on the Mojave Desert

My sister reminds me of the quite optimistic thought that one of these days—particularly given the reality of climate change—wars will be fought over water supplies the same way we know fight over oil supplies, and the Colorado River will certainly be up for contention. Will the cities in California, Nevada, Arizona, Baja California, and Sonora band together in adversity? Or will the Colorado River become a war zone?