Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema: Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird

This article examines the operation of genre translation in transnational cinemas through an analysis of Kim Jee-woon’s 2008 film The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which triangulates the genre conventions of Hollywood, spaghetti, and Manchurian westerns. I argue that Kim uses the literal and depthless rendering of genre tropes to create a work whose fidelity to its generic predecessors ultimately dismantles their conventional ideologies. The article presents an overview of The Good, the Bad, the Weird’s discursive contexts, a theoretical discussion of translation in genre adaptation, and a close reading of the film’s key scenes and motifs.