From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western

by Patrick McGee

From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film.

Genres: Film

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2006

Reviews

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, I'm seriously done with Theory for a while. Seduced initially by the badass High Noon graphics on the cover, I stuck with this tendentious snoozer because McGee loves all the movies I love. While I was periodically intrigued if not convinced by his lockstep Marxist/psychoanalytic argument, and while McGee writes engagingly when he dispenses with the jargon, I find that this sort of doctrinaire approach has the joyless, claustrophobic, connect-the-dots, this-really-means-that quality of conspiracy theory or medieval scholasticism. Only once did McGee propose to 'interrogate' ideas, but his examination of the class-struggle-informed subtext of classic Westerns was chock full of 'subalterns,' 'subjects,' 'hailing,' and 'interpellation.' McGee maintains that the plot of the 'gunfighter' Western is a 'screen memory' of the class conflict that underlies the mythic narrative of the frontier. A screen memory, McGee explains, "for Freud, is a recollection of childhood that seems meaningless on the surface, but harbors within its figurative structure, which is the effect of condensation and displacement, a history that has been forgotten but the knowledge of which is both decisive and threatening to the ego." For McGee, the repressed cultural memory at the root of the Hollywood western is class-based oppression, and in particular, the Johnson County War in 1892 Wyoming that pitted a consortium of mostly East-Coast-based landowners (the Wyoming Stock Growers Association) against independent, local smallholders. "The Western movie," he writes, "frequently allowed the spectator to feel the resentment of class and the desire to destroy the class system without having to assume a conscious understanding of that system or its economic impact. It allowed the spectator to contemplate capitalism's use of violence to justify and enforce its commitment to an inequitable distribution of autonomy and free time, even if that violence takes the displaced form of violence against other nations that reinforces the binary logic of nationalism."
Uh, maybe.
On the plus side, From Shane to Kill Bill got me fired up to watch some old favorites (Duel in the Sun, Johnny Guitar) and to check out a few choice oaters that somehow escaped my notice (The Westerner, The Quick and the Dead).

[Grete · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unnecessarily thick Marxist prose. Sometimes interesting, sometimes way too out-there. Who knew Westerns were "really" about class conflict? I can't believe I read the whole bloody thing.