Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Violence in Westerns and the Law by Justin A. Joyce (review)

In Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Violence in Westerns and the Law Justin A. Joyce demonstrates how what he calls "paradigm shifts" in US legal regulations governing gun use have influenced the representation of gun violence in Westerns. His argument is informed by Michel Foucault's theory of modern disciplinary practices that have led to the formation of subjects characterized by their capability of self-control. Joyce perceives the gunman in a Western movie as an epitome of such a subject. The gunman's self-restraint is key to how Westerns have defined justifiable gun violence and its necessary conditions. Depictions of justifiable gun violence in Westerns tellingly parallel the major changes of the legal doctrine sanctioning its use, the doctrine's fulcrum being the idea of self-defense. Its modifications over time reveal an increasing juridical tendency toward the conception of self-defense based on an individual's recognition of threat. Joyce does not stop there, however; having established a connection between the impact of a series of breakthrough court rulings and the Western's changing firearm iconography, he offers a theory of the evolution of the genre, the primary criteria of which are the representations of justified gun violence and corresponding constructions of masculinity.

The first three chapters discuss key issues in the development of laws regulating the use of gun violence. Joyce first examines revenge as a legal problem, a cultural phenomenon, and a narrative motif marking the normative limits of gun violence across social discourses and artistic representations. He then goes on to discuss the American self-defense doctrine and demonstrates, based on several breakthrough court cases, that the doctrine departed from the English common law duty to retreat and gradually broadened the definition of self-defense to incorporate a greater variety of actions as justified violence. Finally, Joyce puts in historical perspective the problem of gun possession and use, arguing that this right was initially justified as a notional necessity but ultimately came to be sanctioned as an individual right.

The remaining chapters discuss selected Western novels and films. Chapter 4 concentrates on firearm iconography, juxtaposing the precision of the rifle with the speed of the pistol as reflecting changing notions of defensive violence. Here Joyce uses examples ranging from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch to show how the Western has been employed to preclude the radical implications of the increasingly individuated conceptions of self-defense. In chapter 5 Joyce refers to Barbara Cruikshank's term "technology of citizenship," which describes a complex of social discourses and practices shaping individual forms of political activity and self-government and applies it to the Western's cultural work. Analyzing several film Westerns as examples, in particular Shane and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Joyce demonstrates how the Western's construction of an Anglo hero with a gun who is exceptionally skilled with weapons and capable of self-restraint when it comes to using his skills has helped control gun violence. Chapter 6 is devoted to Eastwood's Unforgiven, whose depiction of extralegal violence brings into focus the problem of competing conceptions of justice that may function at any given time, highlighting the processual nature of the law. Chapter 7 problematizes race and justifiable homicide in the neoliberal age on the basis of the TV series Justified and Tarantino's Django Unchained.

One could perhaps wish for a better interweaving of the narratives of the law and the genre in Joyce's book as one occasionally gets the impression they are parallel but separate. A two-paragraph reference to Jarmusch's Dead Man in chapter 3, wholly devoted to a discussion of juridical solutions, exemplifies this structural problem. The future will show whether Joyce's theory of the evolution of the Western genre will have had as much resonance as some of the theories preceding it. What potentially lessens its appeal is...