what is manifest destiny in relation to westerns

By  · Published on August 2nd, 2011

A genre nigh every bit old as filmmaking itself, the western thrived throughout the years of the studio organization but has zigzagged across rough terrain for the past forty or so years. For the terminal fifteen-ish years, the struggling, commercially unfriendly genre was either manifested in a neoclassical nostalgic grade express in potential mass entreatment (Appaloosa, Open Range) or in reimagined approaches that ran the gamut between contrived pap and inspired deconstructions (anything from Wild Wild Westward to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).

But last December, True Grit – a bona fide western remake that relied on the opportunities available in the genre's conventions rather than bells, whistles, or ironic tongues in their respective cheeks – became a smash hit. Did this movie reinvigorate a genre that was on life back up, as the supposed revitalization of the musical is thought to have washed a decade ago, or are westerns surviving by moving forth a unlike road altogether? Three westerns released so far this yr – Gore Verbinski's Rango , Kelly Reichardt'south Meek's Cutoff , and, as of this weekend, Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens— propose mixed directions for the dusty ol' genre.

Rango

The western formula traditionally demands that a rugged alone stranger roll into town through ane circumstance or some other, provide the key to solving one of the town'southward primary issues that may take arisen specifically because of him, save the town from a threatening intruder, and then go on his alone mode. Both Cowboys & Aliens and Rango follow these conventions with comparable postmodern excess, simply to wildly different results.

Rango's titular grapheme is a self-made thespian who sees the isolated drama manufactured in his Platonic cave of a cage equally only as authentic as that which goes on outside. But adept news: the movie itself feels the same way. Unlike Johnny Depp'southward similarly uncut-for-the-w protag in Jim Jarmusch'south Dead Homo (1995) who is slowly transformed by the borderland, Rango's strength is his irreverence and his impatient eagerness to come across any given environment as the phase for which he is presupposed to occupy the center. Rango is a blank slate, not because he lacks psychology or graphic symbol development, but because of his foolhardy and resilient adaptability (he's a chameleon in more ways than one) whose "name" appears only considering he gives it to himself (perhaps a reference to the Django spaghetti westerns, or a short-lived TV series, who knows?). Rango, in short, is a comprehensible hero in his item universe only considering he'southward reliably amorphous and consistently inconsistent.

Rango, then, is the perfect postmodern vessel for the cinephilic environment the character himself resides in. While brief references to other films occur with blink-or-miss-it regularity throughout the motion-picture show, Rango's narrative is also more heavily constructed through intertextuality, from its basic narrative framework lifted from Polanski's Chinatown to an Apocalypse At present-parroting action sequence complete with Wagner to a prophetic appearance of The Homo With No Name inexplicably driving a golf cart. Rango demonstrates the blissful potential of freewheeling pastiche, using picture palace history not as a reserve for empty in-jokes only as carefully placed building blocks, and with enough gall forth the way not to accept the whole endeavor the least fleck seriously.

Cowboys & Aliens

Cowboys & Aliens similarly opens on a bare slate of a protagonist, with an amnesiac Daniel Craig wandering through the desert complete with a mysterious bracelet and surliness to spare. Despite not fifty-fifty remembering his own name, Craig's character rather confidently employs the motions of the lone western wanderer in his initial exercises of borderland justice that suggests more of an instinct of genre rather than an instinct of temperament. In a better moving-picture show in another universe, Craig's character may as well have stepped onto the ready of western tv bear witness and done the exact same thing.

Unsatisfied with the self-imposed limits of its own narrative world, problems ascend when Daniel Craig never becomes anything merely Daniel Craig, and Harrison Ford Harrison Ford, every bit if 007, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Jack Ryan were enough to bestow an understanding of Jake Lonergan and Woodrow Dolarhyde (replace these performances with lesser-knowns or unkowns and these characters suddenly get unambiguously paper-thin). Cowboys & Aliens, its genre-play complete in title lonely, relies on outside films to stratify its ain storytelling and character development rather than using genre convention and existing plot structures to its reward as a narrative blueprint.

Already light on the sci-fi, Cowboys & Aliens doesn't know what blazon of western it wants to be. Favreau and co. conflate John Ford and the Sergio Leone westerns as products of the same stock, the genre's "classical" class. Information technology introduces u.s. to its own Man With No Name merely places him in the aseptic world of The Searchers, a foreign juxtaposition that denies its audience John Wayne's charisma and the hyper-stylized mural occupied by Clint Eastwood's mysterious gunman (a beginning credit sequence as bland as the one chosen for Cowboys & Aliens is the first sign of a incorrect turn in Leoneland).

The premise of Cowboys & Aliens had obvious potential, and non only because of its cheekiness (for a truly groovy sci-fi/western hybrid, see Michael Crichton'due south Westworld instead). Information technology's conceptually compelling to take a genre which celebrates western expansion and civilizing the borderland through the vanquishing of those who threaten this endeavor (beginning Native Americans, then bandits, and after corporate vultures) and contain sci-fi to have the invaders invaded instead. And while revealing the aliens' motive every bit (spoiler alert) prospecting was a touch in the right tonal direction, the movie reduces itself to a dry-as-desert Independence Twenty-four hour period-esque collaboration of all humans (Cowboys, Indians, and Bandits, oh my!) against the common, nonhuman enemy. Olivia Wilde puts it all-time when she says to Daniel Craig before attempting to blow up the alien mother ship, "You need to stop thinking."

Meek's Cutoff

Besides sharing a similar fundamental scene with Rango in which a cherished object rolls downwards a colina, Meek's Cutoff admittedly lacks the precise narrative ties to the traditional western that Rango and Cowboys & Aliens have. But that's exactly the bespeak. Rather than further demystify a routinely demystified genre by injecting pastiche or inter-genre experimentation, Meek'due south Cutoff rejects the western's primal conceits altogether, chronicling the treacherous and impossible day-to-day job of actually expanding westward. Any aspirations toward "realism" are complicated by the picture's minimalist aesthetic, anachronistic score, and artful composition of landscapes (the rare i.33:1 aspect ratio is more claustrophobic than immersive). All the same in that location still seems to be a "this is how it actually was" contention persistent in Reichardt's filmmaking, especially in the film'due south feminist interventions. One scene in particular quickly summarizes the pic's critique of the west as a frontier explored by resilient men when the women wake upwards well earlier the men (or, for that matter, the sun) to prepare for the day'due south excursion.

Meek'southward Cutoff has its own "lone hero" in the haggard and talkative eponymous graphic symbol portrayed by Bruce Greenwood. Stephen Meek uses his autobiography of frontier lore every bit social currency. The potential veracity of his tales matters less than how deeply he portrays himself as the western hero of whatever given narrative, every bit if Meek's Cutoff is suggesting that the myth of the due west grew contemporaneously with the germination of the west itself. That Meek eventually becomes suspected of deliberately guiding the settlers in the wrong direction suggests a correlating discrepancy between the value-structuring tales of the west and its more complicated reality. Even more and so than the protagonists of Rango and Cowboys & Aliens, Meek is a character wholly and cocky-consciously shaped by convention and tradition.

Final Thoughts

Why continue reinventing, subverting, or deconstructing a genre that has been habitually torn autonomously and reassembled for over four decades now? Is in that location whatever more to say with an anarchistic western, or has the lack of convention itself become the convention? While I'd similar to see more films that dear the genre as unapologetically as Truthful Grit does, I doubtable that the western isn't finished being retooled only in the nearly superficial terms à la Cowboys and Aliens. Merely Rango and Meek's Cutoff thankfully present appealing alternatives by suggesting that there still exists great potential in toying with this otherwise weathered genre.

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Source: https://filmschoolrejects.com/culture-warrior-the-manifest-destiny-of-the-westerns-expansion-in-2011-38ad927c074c/

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