Behind Blue Eyes: Manhood and the Western at the Turn of the Millennium

This study investigates the western genre produced in the last twenty years (1985-2011) through the lens of gender studies. From a theoretical point of view, Judith Butler has evidenced that notions such as repetition and performativity are central to an understanding of how female and male genders take the form in which we know them today. These critical tools can be also applied to the study of the long history of westerns in the United States. Since the western has cyclically emerged in American cultural history, critics such as Jane Tompkins and Clark Lee Mitchell have read its reappearances in connection to repeated crises of masculinity. Building on their considerations, this study reads the occurrence of westerns at the turn of the millennium in connection to the general perception that American masculinity is going through a crisis today. As a cultural product clearly marked by gender dynamics, the western cannot therefore be thought of as simple entertainment; rather, it is a terrain where to interrogate, discuss, and reconfirm a certain kind of masculinity. Specifically, I will consider cultural products such as the films The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), Brokeback Mountain (2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Don’t Come Knocking (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2003), Appaloosa (2005), Open Range (2003); the series Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993-1998) and Deadwood (2004-2006); the novels God’s Country (1994), The Drop Edge of Yonder (2008), Blood Meridian (1985); the new musical genre known as hick-hop. Some of these productions shape the western formula in critical ways, including new actors and themes such as fatherhood, homosexuality, female bodies, and race variables. These are elements that the contemporary debate about masculinity has to deal with, thus expanding the possibilities of the genre and renewing the forms of manhood the western encompasses. Other productions more clearly quote the tradition from which they originate. However, both positions can be often found within one cultural production; indeed, the western’s formula interferes with a downright renegotiation of masculinity that, in westerns, often retrieves traditional and linked-to-the-past gender dynamics.