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This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.

Paul Seydor’s essay highlights how Peckinpah drew upon classic forms of cinematic representation while at the same time reconceiving them. By also concentrating on the innovative editing of The Wild Bunch, Seydor helps us appreciate how the film exemplifies both tradition and Peckinpah’s unique talent.

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.

This chapter discusses Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) as a Western. Though the film's hybridity has been mentioned especially in regards to science fiction's interrelatedness with horror, and in the intertextual nods to Shane (1953), it has not been explored at length to sufficiently argue for iconographic slippages that account for the salience of the Western. The chapter's purpose is to widen the possibilities of looking intimately at the way iconographic details can create genre dissonance, what is known as ‘vraisemblance’. Reframing genre readings means retracing the intersections with the horror and science fiction. This includes accommodating for developments such as the science-fiction Western, a sub-genre that has veered from innovation to derision yet continues to elicit new rejoinders. The chapter then offers a consideration of Western themes, notably the savage, the massacre, and revenge, which intersects with the horror genre.

In television and film westerns of the 1960s and into the 1970s, two particular African American performers, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Woody Strode, are repeatedly cast as the representatives of the African American West—in popular televisions shows such as The Rifleman and Rawhide, in classic western films such as Sergeant Rutledge and Once Upon a Time in the West. Through Davis and Strode, this chapter examines the dual strategies developed for representing the African American westerner on screen during the civil rights era: the erasure of race, resulting in the character type of the “raceless (black) westerner”; the exact opposite, narratives that explicitly draw attention to race, resulting in the character type of the civil rights westerner. This chapter traces the evolution of those types in later westerns such as Fred Williamson’s blaxploitation film westerns and the television series Hell on Wheels and The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.

The role of myth in the Western has frequently been understood as that of cultural mystification, naturalizing the systemic violence that accompanied America’s westward expansion. Within this understanding, the sub-genre of the revisionist Western is understood to intervene with “counter-mythic” discourse. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, myth emerges not merely as revisionist cultural narrative, but as a spatiotemporal aesthetic of experience, a sensibility conveying an imagined time-outside-of-time. In distinct ways, both films encourage us to imagine a mythic experience of the past through the soundtrack. Burt Bacharach’s pop score for Butch Cassidy and the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller distinctly position each film within a mythic space of timelessness in which the immediate present of a contemporary experience and the distancing effects of historicity might be imagined as blurring and freely flowing into one another.

This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.

In the first of two chapters that treat promises of an imperial golden age in Aeneid Book 6 in relation to American expansionism as portrayed in the Western film genre, Kirsten Day compares the production contexts of Vergil’s epic, during the “golden age of Latin literature” in the wake of epochal civil wars, to the Westerns produced after World War II during the “golden age” of Hollywood. So too the dramatic settings of the Aeneid, after the Trojan War, and of Westerns, after the American Civil War, enshrine these trailblazing pioneers in the pantheon of founding heroes whose struggles (re)built the nation of the narrative’s audience. Through a wide-ranging survey of many of the genre’s most famous films, such as Red River and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Day examines several key themes, including nation-building as divinely driven labor; the laconic characterization of the Western male hero and his troubling resemblance to the villain; and the sacrificial role assigned to female characters. Day concludes that these ancient and modern texts also share an undercurrent of anxiety about the moral ambiguities of these projects, which belies their superficial optimism.

This chapter presents a background of Michael Reeves, the director of Witchfinder General (1968). Perhaps the best way to understand Reeves is to regard him as a home-grown ‘Movie Brat’. This was the name given to the geeky American cinephiles who were inspired by the critics-turned-directors of the French New Wave. These film-school-educated ‘Brats’ would make a number of innovative genre films which were to revolutionise Hollywood in the 1970s and beyond. Witchfinder General is not notable solely due to its strange status as ‘a disreputable classic’. It also draws on a number of British and American popular forms (such as the costume melodrama, the horror film and the Western). Moreover, it is a striking example of an auteur sensibility in what Robin Wood calls ‘that most discouraging of areas — the British commercial cinema’. Reeves' love of mainstream, Anglophone cinema went hand-in-hand with a rejection of the then-voguish European art cinema.

This chapter focuses on religion as a common motif employed throughout John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1995). As with many Western horror films, Christianity serves as a theological foundation, but Carpenter's film also draws interesting parallels with the Church of Scientology. In its depiction of the all-knowing, omnipotent author, able to alter reality with the mere power of their words, In the Mouth of Madness elevates the figure of the writer to near-religious status. As Sutter Cane types away on his very own ‘word processor of the Gods’, he too becomes one of those Gods, with divine control over those in his literary kingdom. With this notion in mind, the chapter explores the ways in which Carpenter's film repositions the writer from mere cultural commentator to modern-day prophet, or untouchable celestial being. It also considers how the film utilises theological concepts to form the basis of its philosophical framework, ultimately presenting religious cultdom as an extension of Carpenter's critiques on mindless consumerism and his apocalyptic obsessions with the loss of individuality and free will.

This chapter re-reads the work of Alain Badiou as a probing of the problem of negativity. Tracing the history of Badiou’s political involvement in the radical Maoist formations of the 1970s suggests how he tries to articulate a politics of destruction and subtraction. Turning to Badiou’s more recent work on formalising the logic of negation the chapter traces inconsistency in the attempt to subordinate negation to affirmation. Probing Badiou’s dismissal of certain radical forms of politics as forms of nihilism the chapter closes with a consideration, prompted by Badiou, of the Western as an aesthetic form able to convey a sense of political courage. Against his explicit intentions, Badiou’s work gives a sense of what it might mean to depart from the ‘affirmationist consensus’, and the possibilities of an alternative form of political negativity.