West Is Best

A sun-bleached mirage of post-war Americana, West Is Best detonates the dime-novel myth of Manifest Destiny by letting pastel-clad co-eds from a Bryn Mawr-ish seminary gallop straight into the parched heart of a frontier that no longer belongs to cowboys. Josephine, summoned home by a telegram whose ink still smells of sagebrush and panic, shepherds a giggling cavalry of flapper philosophers across cracked alkali flats, their silk stockings snagging on barbed wire that once corralled buffalo but now pens the twentieth century itself. Behind them, the lone male chaperone—an effete entomology tutor clutching a butterfly net like a foil—becomes the accidental jester in a landscape where every cactus spine is a punch-line aimed at Eastern softness. In the drought-struck town, dust motes dance like flecks of gold in a miner’s sluice while the local cattle barons, smelling of rawhide and defaulted bank notes, mistake the girls for a traveling harem of heiresses. What unfolds is a kaleidoscopic duel between chromatic optimism and ochre entropy: porch swings creak like gallows, saloon mirrors reflect both debutantes and desperadoes, and a single kerosene lantern swings overhead like a pendulum counting down to the moment when the West must decide whether to swallow these intruders or be gentrified by their ukulele chords. The climax erupts during a moonlit rodeo where academic rhetoric meets brute horn, and the frontier—once a canvas for Frederic Remington—becomes a Jackson Pollock of hoof prints, lipstick smears, and existential gunsmoke. When the girls finally re-board the eastbound train, the desert reclaims its silence, but the tracks hum with a new, disquieting refrain: that history’s last blank page has been annotated in indelible, irreverent ink.