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Full Description
For more than a century the cinematic western has been America's most familiar genre, always teetering on the verge of exhaustion and yet regularly revived in new forms. Why does this outmoded vehicle-with the most narrowly based historical setting of any popular genre-maintain its appeal? In Late Westerns Lee Clark Mitchell takes a position against those critics looking to attach "post" to the all-too-familiar genre. For though the frontier disappeared long ago, though men on horseback have become commonplace, and though films of all sorts have always, necessarily, defied generic patterns, the western continues to enthrall audiences. It does so by engaging narrative expectations stamped on our collective consciousness so firmly as to integrate materials that might not seem obviously "western" at all.
Through plot cues, narrative reminders, and even cinematic frameworks, recent films shape interpretive understanding by triggering a long-standing familiarity audiences have with the genre. Mitchell's critical analysis reveals how these films engage a thematic and cinematic border-crossing in which their formal innovations and odd plots succeed deconstructively, encouraging by allusion, implication, and citation the evocation of generic meaning from ingredients that otherwise might be interpreted quite differently. Applying genre theory with close cinematic readings, Mitchell posits that the western has essentially been "post" all along.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Same, Yet Always Different
I. Enigmas of Genre
II. "Postwestern"?
III. Thematic Shifts
IV. Borders
V. Conclusion: Anticipations
Ch. 1. Ghostly Evocations in Bad Day At Black Rock
I. An Alien World
II. A Craven Town
III. Menace and Masculinity
IV. Conclusion: False Resolutions
Ch 2. Catching the 3:10 to Yuma
I. A Minimalist Style
II. Conflict and Implication
III. Mangling Plot
IV. Conclusion: Claustrophobias
Ch 3. Border-Crossing in Lone Star
I. Temporal and Generational
II. Legal and Cultural
III. Cinematic
IV. Conclusion: "Forget the Alamo"?
Ch 4. Alternative Facts in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
I. Corpses and Questions
II. Disquieting Sequences
III. Gestures and Scenes
IV. Conclusion: The Journey to Jiménez
Ch 5. Defying Expectations in A History of Violence and Brokeback Mountain
I. Family Lineaments
II. Suasive Syntax
III. Shifting Identities
IV. Misleading Semantics
V. Conclusion: Identities Denied
Ch 6. Dueling Genres in No Country for Old Men
I. Disappearing Landscapes
II. Inscrutable Closeups
III. Angling Up
IV. Conclusion: Western Undone
Ch 7. Subverting Late Westerns in The Counselor
I. Rapacious Visionary
II. Cautions, Costs, and Closeups
III. Fragmentation and Quietism
IV. Conclusion: Implicating Viewers
Epilogue: Habits of Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
