...there's a bit of cultural analysis that Bellah et al draw on in Habits of the Heart. They argue that the myth of the cowboy hero is really just the same myth found in hard-boiled detective novels/tv series/films. And the hard boiled detective is really just made over in the action/buddy flix. The hero is always a bit of a misfit who isn't really capable of living among people. He's a loner.
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I've run across this idea too and it makes perfect sense to me.
The hard boiled detective is clearly the cowboy's spiritual heir and brings to the fore ideas that are latent in cowboy legend but usually suppressed in favor of heroic bloodshed.
Raymond Chandler's eternal hero Phillip Marlowe (the pattern for my late teenage self - a good persona for getting laid, cool detachment, married to a disciplined moral outrage - devastatingly effective) is, like the archetypal cowboy, a lone figure cut off from the warmth of hearth and home except for brief interludes.
But while the cowboy is traditionally shown as belonging to a semi-civilized cult of righteous anglo saxon violence that defends the settler class even as he flees its smothering embrace the hard boiled detective is trapped in an immense machine - our modern life of mortgage payments, large-scale and intrusive bureaucracy, everyday cowardice and endless obstructions - from which there is no escape except adherence to an internal code of honor and a nuanced sense of alienation.
Film noir's aura of cosmically enforced entrapment (similar to the ancient Greek notion of moira I think) logically follows from the hard boiled fiction tradition.
Perhaps the best (and most startling) example of this mood can be found in the 1947 film "Out of the Past" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039689/ > directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum at the height of his maximum cool through minimum motion cinematic power.
Modern novelists and film makers (with the exception of a few - such as director/screenwriter Michael Mann) are unable to convey the large scale detachment and existential dread of the classical cowboy and noir genres. Though our techics are more sophisticated and our taste in coffee and exotic pasta more refined we live, in many ways, in a mentally simpler time.
.d.