The Western Genre is a broad topic of American films and novel. A genre that was popular in the twentieth century and is still today a genre that looked upon highly. The idea of Politics and Economics are ideas of the western genre that are a trendy and used frequently. Novels like Shane, Blood Meridian, and the film Unforgiven all explore the use of politics and economics. The use of money and other transactions are ideas used in these Western films and novels and are still used in Western entertainment today. By looking at specific scenes and quotations from the novels and films, the western genre idea of politics and economics will be explored and explained. I In Jack Schafer’s novel Shane, the Starett family is put into a situation…show more content… A bounty is put on a person or something so that the bounty hunters or anyone captures fugitives for a reward. A quote from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven helps inspects this topic, “A Thousand Dollars reward, Will. Five hundred apiece” (Clint Eastwood 1992). This is a quote from the Kid where in this scene he a using a bounty reward of a thousand dollars to land Munny, so that he and the Kid may chase the men who cut up the prostitute together. The bounty also represents politically how the law is incapable of catching those bad men on their own. Rewards and bounty’s are popular in western novels and films to show how most cowboys earn their living. As how it was in the old Western days, sheriffs had a flat salary, which made them not want to work so hard. The way a bounty worked was the worst the criminal, the higher the reward but also the higher the risk. In contrast to Shane, this use of money is used as a way reward and getting money for ones own purpose. In Shane, the money that the Starett family would be receiving would not be a reward. The Starett’s family farm is not for sale, so the money that they would receive from Fletcher would not make them feel the same way that a bounty would make them feel. While the use of money in the film and novel create a similarity, they really differ because one use of the money is the way of a reward or prize while the use of money in…show more content… Where the idea and value of money in both the novel and film cause problems. In a essay from the Western Reader by Doug Williams he says, “The money that draws him is exactly one of those traps to which the pilgrim is exposed. Munny seems fearless. But when his identity is discovered; when his friend Ned is killed; when it becomes apparent that the money he sought is not a shortcut to his pilgrimage, but a trap; when the extent of his degeneration from where his Wife had led him is undeniable, then the sleeping Avenger becomes fully awake. Munny's terrible competence and wrath emerge directly from his hatred, not of Little Bill, but of that savagery in himself that Little Bill shares, and so freely and sinfully indulges in his pretense of civility.” The situation that Munny has put himself in where he is looking to earn his bounty reward has pulled the “savagery” out of him and really has showed his monstrous side. Nothing good comes from money in the novel Shane either where many deaths end up