With The Hateful Eight and Forsaken lighting up the silver screen, the “western” seems to be experiencing a resurgence as a genre. However, this time around, modern westerns have a dirtier, grittier, more realistic feel than the campy and clean movies of the 1930s, such as Montana Moon, Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Stagecoach and Dodge City. One theory is that the characters of these earlier films were fairly flat: they were either good or bad, right or wrong, with very little ambiguity. And just in case there was any confusion, the audience was given clues as to the hero and the villain by the colour of their hat. Bad guys wore black hats; good guys wore white hats. Easy.
At some point in the 1980s, the white hat/black hat trope of the American western became associated with the fledgling hacker community. “Good” hackers, who identify a vulnerability and tell the company so they can fix it, became known as “white hats”. “Bad” hackers such as the authors of a virus designed to steal banking information became “black hats”.
