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151 4. “THE ‘WESTERN’ IN QUOTES” Generic Variations Its roots continue to spread under the Hollywood humus and one is amazed to see green and robust suckers spring up in the midst of the seductive but sterile hybrids that some would replace them by. André Bazin In the long run, feature films will be the truly important documentaries of our time. Wim Wenders As I discussed in the previous chapter, Sergio Leone’s films were seen by some as the death knell of the Western and by others as its regenerative force, breathing new life into a tired, mythic formula and seeing the genre as the site for cultural critique and counterhegemonic practice. The established generic grid of the Western proved elastic and porous enough for new filmmakers looking to utilize its broad expectations and codes for different purposes, building on the promising works of directors such as Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman. Often these innovations came from outside the Hollywood mainstream, working, as André Bazin wrote, “under the Hollywood humus,” from directors whose work was more eclectic and certainly not primarily associated with the Western. In working from within this established and major Hollywood genre, these films represent a version of what Deleuze and Guattari would call “minor languages” capable of a kind of “creative stammering” by which the codes are interfered with, causing “procedure[s] of variation”—“variables of expression and variables of content.” Thus the established and taken-for-granted “major language” and codes of the Western genre are made to “stammer” in these renewed forms, drawing attention to its mythic constructs and to new thematics within the texts—“Conquer the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages.” I would argue, however, that this is a continuation of Leone’s filmic experimentation and his development of “critical cinema” in movies where the effect is “To be a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue. . . . To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language.” For filmmaking this involves the strategic manipu- “the ‘western’ in quotes” 152 lation of existing genre “language” and convention, “[u]prooting them from their state as constants,” in order to challenge the viewer and expand the generic form and theme “towards the limit of its elements.”1 Such a process of variation or “mistranslation” from the established codes is what Deleuze calls a “line of flight . . . which affects each system by stopping it from becoming homogeneous” and creating some new perspective “different from that of the constants . . . an outsystem.”2 The dangers of genre are that it can become a closed circle of meanings, endlessly recycling ideological notions without reflection or questioning , and appealing to an ever-narrowing audience with set expectations. As we have seen throughout this book, the West has been a particular focal site for the inscriptions of national identity, and one of its primary mythic vehicles has been the Western generic “system.” Thus generic traditions of community building, individual sacrifice, acceptable violence , hypermasculinity, and racial and gender division have too often become unquestioned elements within this system. What I propose here are filmic examples of rhizomatic generic lines of flight that shift the Western beyond its traditional boundaries, encompassing different perspectives , new themes, and more complex dialogical structures. Although Leone had created his own “outsystem” by usurping the authority of the American Western in the 1960s, and innovators such as Altman, Peckinpah, and Eastwood had continued to explore the genre, it was in 1980 that Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate attempted to unsettle this generic “circle” from within with a powerful, and much maligned, “new” Western that displaced traditional perspectives with a nonlinear , symbolic film rethinking issues of class, gender, race in ways that disturbed America’s deeply held, mythic consciousness. Its rejection of traditional narrative in favor of “big impressionist blocks” that work rhythmically, requiring the audience to “participate imaginatively in its construction, to use our own judgment in making connections back and forth,” gives the sense of the film as “an immense fresco” that may never be complete, since the wall may have “patches . . . left uncovered” and the space “could be infinitely extended.” Overall, Cimino’s sprawling architectural film, with its detailed building blocks, makes us work hard as viewers, denying us the ease of linearity and the clues and hooks of suspense, demanding instead our total immersion in his visual drama, [3.139.86.56] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 15:03 GMT...

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