Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre ed. by Kerry Fine et al. (review)

Although the cinematic and literary market demand for tumbleweed-strewn and whisky-soaked melodrama of the ‘cowboys and Indians’ variety has undeniably experienced precipitous decline over the last half century, rumours about the death of the western genre now seem to be greatly exaggerated. In fact, the traditional western tropes, infused with horror and fantasy genre material, can be readily seen in contemporary popular cultural expressions as richly varied as television shows such as Westworld (US 2016–), The Mandalorian (US 2019–) and Wynonna Earp (Canada/US 2016–21); video games such as Red Dead Redemption (2010) and its lavish sequel; recent movies such as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen brothers US 2018) and The Wind (Tammi US 2018); or impressive contemporary literary fiction such as China Miéville’s Iron Council (2004) and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (1982–2012). Presumably put prematurely out to pasture in part because of its tediously retrograde ideological underpinnings, the western genre now seems to have been reanimated with stitched-together parts stolen from the equally resurgent American Gothic tradition. The rich essay anthology Weird Westerns (2020) tracks the eldritch undeath of the western across the primordially bleak cultural landscape of today, convincingly making the case that what was once a niche subgenre of horror-infused supernatural or fantastic western stories now spreads its insidious tendrils far and wide in contemporary popular media and literature.

A recurring focus of the anthology revolves around Gerald Vizenor’s concept of the transgressive ‘survivance’ of Indigenous people, which resists the pernicious Vanishing Indian trope. Hence Rebecca Lush, in ‘Racial Metaphors and Vanishing Indians in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Wynona Earp, and Emma Bull’s Territory’, insightfully limns the tendency of genre television to pay problematic lip service to Indigenous perspectives while perpetuating damagingly romanticised tropes of noble savagery, such as the prototypical case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (US 1997–2003), acknowledging that Thanksgiving is a ‘sham with yams’ in an episode (‘Pangs’, 23 Nov 1999) that features the spectral haunting of a Chumash warrior. Another signal scholarly idea articulated by Vizenor that recurs is the notion of the ‘tribal real’, or the concrete, local distinctiveness of complex Indigenous communities that frequently becomes deracinated in popular media and literature. Domino Renee Perez, in ‘Magnificence and Metas in Professional Westerns’, for instance, notes that films such as Suicide Squad (Ayer US 2016) sorely lack any trace of the tribal real and troublingly rely on free-floating Native-seeming signifiers, in the cultural styles of such characters as the Enchantress and Slipknot, to convey edgy, exoticised difference.

Another key concept that variously recurs in the anthology is adapted from Lorenzo Veracini’s framing of the Western imaginary as an outgrowth of ‘settler-colonial’ dynamics, or the exogenous development of sovereignty by a transplanted periphery both wrenched from the metropolitan core and sustained by the extirpation of indigenous people. Hence in ‘Shining a Light on Civilization’, Meredith Harvey interrogates Joss Whedon’s fan-favourite (and short-lived) space western, the Firefly (US 2002–3) television series and its accompanying film Serenity (Whedon US 2005), as both a savvy critique and a dubious perpetuation of settler-colonial iconography, especially in the depiction of the genetically botched, zombie-like Reavers as scalping and raiding ‘savages’ borrowed wholesale from the western genre’s egregious derogation of native people. Likewise, in ‘The Mad Black Woman in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower’, Jacob Burg takes to task the contemporary legacy of such a settler-colonial ethos that privileges the maniacal white-male gunslinger who is viewed as authentically and exceptionally (anti)heroic, an ethos that also promotes a victimisation narrative of the closure of the frontier. Indeed, King critically intimates in the series that the assassination of J.F.K. signalled the death of America’s last gunslinger on the final frontier of the techno-imaginary – while simultaneously othering a major Black...