(1) Spoiler alert. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely. Actually, I’ll reverse it: The original allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity in the form of the law book and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable). My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary fiction, of contemporary experience in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird, persistent denial of a terrific number of artistic strategies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that’s to say, of any forthright address of what’s called postmodernity, and what’s lost in avoiding it (a sacrifice I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental to fiction).

(2) The chewy center of TMWSLV is a gunfight. A man stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man. The victim—for this is, technically, murder—represents chaos and anxiety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkillable, almost in the manner of a monster or zombie from another movie genre; his dispatch is regarded by the local population with astonished relief and gratitude, such that they will shower the killer with regard (he’s destined to become his party’s nominee for vice president of the United States). The secret the movie reveals: the killer was not the man in the street, but another.

(3) The three persons in TMWSLV: James Stewart, a.k.a. “Ransom Stoddard,” the upstanding, even priggish young lawyer from the East, defined by his naive sincerity and dedication to the rule of law; John Wayne, a.k.a. “Tom Doniphon,” cynical veteran of the frontier, who tends to an isolationist-libertarian approach toward civilization but is essentially lovable and will become heartbreaking by film’s end; and Lee Marvin, a.k.a. “Liberty Valance,” a sadistic, amoral thug who delights in sowing chaos and exposing the fragility of social convention (by terrorizing family restaurants, newspaper offices, elections, etc.).

(4) Stewart/Stoddard believes he’s “the man who killed Liberty Valance” (he stood, after all, in the center of town, visible to all, with a gun in his hand). More important, the witnesses believe he’s the one. In fact, it was Wayne/Doniphon who did the deed, while hidden in a shadowy alley, after having elaborately conspired to goad the helpless and pacifistic Stewart/Stoddard into his public role as a gun-toting defender of public peace against the savage anarchy of Marvin/Valance.

(5) Liberty Valance,...