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  • Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American West and South by Susan Courtney
  • Jennifer Peterson (bio)
Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American West and South by Susan Courtney. Oxford University Press. 2017. $105.00 hardcover; $36.95 paperback; also available in e-book. 328 pages.

Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American West and South by Susan Courtney. Oxford University Press. 2017. $105.00 hardcover; $36.95 paperback; also available in e-book. 328 pages.

Susan Courtney's Split Screen Nation is a historical study of US films that visualized the West and the South in the mid-twentieth century. This is such an immense and complex topic, and it potentially bears on such a vast range of films, that it might have faltered under the weight of its ambition. However, the book succeeds by focusing on visualizations of race and identity in these two regions. Specifically, the book demonstrates the complex ways in which moving [End Page 189] images avoided, displaced, or disavowed the racial injustices the nation was beginning to contend with in the civil rights era. The book covers other topics along the way—amateur films, landscape, gender, and the atom bomb, to name just a few—but Courtney manages to keep all this under control by repeatedly returning to the question of how moving images at midcentury did or (more often) did not contend with the American legacies of colonialism and slavery. The book argues that the screen West and the screen South exist together in a productive tension—a split-screen logic—in which the South functions as a "blot" on the national image and the West appears as an "empty" space of potentiality. By serving as the blemished region in which America's racism can be quarantined, the screen South thereby secures the larger ideology of the Cold War United States as a nation of freedom and equality, an ideology that is then spatialized in iconic visions of natural landscapes in the West.

In Courtney's analysis, films function as "screen maps" that trace not actual geographies but imagined regional identities: "two mythic American scenes, one of national promise and one of national disgrace."1 The West and the South are particularly significant (as opposed to the Midwest or the East), Courtney argues, because of the way they negotiate "our most paradoxical national narratives," specifically the ideology of the United States as the "land of the free" (visualized cinematically in wide-open western landscapes) and the national shame of the United States as a "land of slavery, conquest, and segregation" (represented on film in stories set amid southern ruins).2 As Courtney points out, there is a vast body of critical scholarship on the West, but studies of the South as internal Other for the United States are less frequently produced. Moreover, the volume of western images and product tie-ins ballooned at midcentury as western films and TV shows peaked in popularity, overwhelming visualizations of the South in terms of sheer numbers. This imbalance only further verifies the South's role as abject Other, a holding pen for containing national embarrassments.

Courtney draws on Benedict Anderson's concept of nationalities as imagined communities to theorize the screen West and the screen South as imagined regions that present "oppositional styles of imagining the nation."3 Thus, the West and the South come to signify a host of antithetical qualities such as desert versus swamp, mobility versus immobility, and freedom versus constraint. The relationship between these geographical regions is at once oppositional and complementary, a kind of shimmering exchange of energy in which two discrete parts hold together a larger American national identity. In fetishizing the West as a space of freedom (for white characters) and cordoning off the South as a space of bigotry and violence, moving images contributed to the ideology of American exceptionalism after World War II by visualizing its dreams and nightmares as hardwired into the landscape.

It takes a fair bit of structuring to bring the book's argument into focus, which Courtney does by alternating between short close-reading sections she calls "teasers" that analyze films such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969...

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