Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West by Neil Campbell (review)

A blowing tumbleweed from the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski provides Neil Campbell with a compelling image to describe what he calls the “post-Western.” Inexplicably restless, the Coens’ vagrant weed drifts off the scrub desert of Arizona and eastern California to mingle with the neon lights of Los Angeles and the sunbathers of Santa Monica’s beaches, introducing ghostly incongruities into the look and feel of these contemporary landscapes. Post-Westerns takes its inspiration from this icon of dislocation, as Campbell seeks to explore the “spectral inheritance” (37) of the Old West that lurks under the surface of the new. The result is a perceptive analysis of the transformation that the Western genre has experienced in the late twentieth century and beyond.

The book is Campbell’s second contribution to an ambitious University of Nebraska series called “Postwestern Horizons,” which collectively articulates a revisionist view of the American West, essentially a set of challenges to the Anglocentric narrative of Frederick Jackson Turner, with its obsessive interest in the “frontier” as the crucible that produced the archetypal American. Much influenced by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, relentless enemy of essences and categories, Campbell disowns the Turnerian archetype, replacing him with an array of inept, sometimes unmanly protagonists who seem to remember the Western heroes of Owen Wister and John Ford but can imitate them only ironically or by way of parody. Post-Westerns also demythologizes the western landscape, turning away from the eye candy of Monument Valley to the West Texas of films like Lone Star, a place chiefly remarkable for dust, junk, and the broad expansiveness of an abandoned drive-in movie theater.

Although this book is well grounded as a stand-alone monograph, it assimilates the thesis of Campbell’s earlier volume, The Rhizomatic West, which, echoing Deleuze, apprehends the Western genre as a “rhizome”—in other words, not as the taproot of a tree with exfoliating branches but as unpredictable sprouts from a thousand points of fertility, which yield countless shapes and forms when they break through the ground. This conception simultaneously expands and destabilizes our understanding of genre, allowing the post-Western to include everything from John Huston’s Fat City, with its narrative of a past-his-prime boxer, to No Country for Old Men, which most viewers would describe as the story of a sociopathic drug dealer. Surrogate cowboys? Not exactly. But their lives touch upon issues of masculinity and provoke eruptions of violence that the classical Western has long incubated. That’s why, “as we watch and listen, the Old West and the New West fold into each other, disturbing familiar iconographies, to simultaneously be both of and more than the classic Western, . . . a ghosting where one form haunts the other, and thematically each ghost relates to some darker past” (30).

Post-Westerns is chiefly memorable for its close reading of about a dozen films. Of these, John Sayles’s Lone Star perhaps best fits the paradigm of “ghosting” because the plot evolves from an archaeological dig, which literally unearths the skeletal remains of a frontier sheriff, together with a dark tale of racial tension, incest, and a fatal shootout. Other films seem a little more arbitrarily chosen, though the rhizome is persuasive enough as a metaphor to legitimate a pretty wide-ranging selection. Campbell rescues from undeserved oblivion Donna Dietch’s Desert Hearts, a lesbian narrative that finds “ways to construct a women’s love story using the iconography of the Western and the romance and, in so doing, to make us think differently and critically about both” (277). But the real strength of Post-Westerns is the author’s firm grasp of the whole field of American studies—not just the revisionist, contra-Turnerian historiography of Patricia Limerick or Jack Forbes but also ethnic history, gendered relationships, and the struggle to achieve a civilized urban world. This is the work of a mature, well-informed scholar very much at the top of his game.