Westerns on TCM

Remember westerns, those horse operas with tumbleweeds and heroes with guns?

They were movies that reflected our national self-image across the decades — at first idealized and distorted into a war against native savages and later, with the likes of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller’’ and “Little Big Man,’’ made more complex and anti-heroic. The trumped-up nostalgia of the early days of the genre gave way to the pessimism and cynicism of Watergate-era America.

You don’t see many westerns at the movies anymore, except for “True Grit’’ and one or two others, and certainly not on TV, except for “Hell on Wheels’’ and the dark brilliance that was the short-lived “Deadwood.’’

We’re somewhat willing to go back and take on painful American moments involving slavery, with “12 Years a Slave’’ and the remake of “Roots,’’ and we certainly have dug deeply into the moral twistiness of the law in our many, many contemporary crime dramas. But mining the “Wild West’’ — revisiting those violent times, the American myth, and its legacy of hatred, cruelty, and greed — remains unpopular.

Perhaps it’s because these days our youth culture is far more focused on escapist genres involving superheroes, vampires, and high-tech alternate worlds. There’s not much need for video-game-style digital effects out in the desert. Also, I’m betting westerns don’t lend themselves to success in the all-important global movie market.

TCM continues to feature the old westerns, though, with all their simplicity, injustice, anarchy, and frontier beauty. The channel is running a day of westerns, including “Stagecoach’’ at 8 p.m. and “The Searchers’’ at 9:45 p.m.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.