FROM SHANE TO KILL BILL: RETHINKING THE WESTERN Patrick McGee. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 280 pp.
DANNY: I like Westerns, like Shane.
CHRIS: It's interesting that you pickone where the hero dies.
DANNY: What are you talking about? He doesn't die. He rides off into the sunset, and that kid says, "Come back, Shane!"
CHRIS: That's a common misconception, in the last frame he's slumped over on his horse.
DANNY: So he was slumped, slumped don't mean dead.
CHRIS: Well I guess you think Butch and Sundance lived too.
from The Negotiator (1998)
Why do we need to rethink the Western genre? As an instructor of film history, I have found the genre to be a tough sell to the contemporary college student. White men on horses do not have the immediate cultural connection to students like other genres such as crime/gangster or film noir, yet few other genres approach the hold the Western has on the cinema's relationship to American cultural identity. John Wayne, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, and Clint Eastwood loom large in the collective consciousness of America and how we see ourselves. Recent entries into the genre from such diverse directors as Jim Jarmusch, Robert Rodriguez, and Tommy Lee Jones as well as referential elements in films such as Die Hard (1988) and Batman Returns (1992) all point to the enduring influence of the most American of all film genres. In From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western, Patrick McGee, a critical and cultural theorist/scholar, has written a well-structured and exhaustively researched approach to the genre that puts the spotlight not on the frontier mythos and rugged individualism so near and dearto our identities but on the uniquely American relationships with capitalism and class that are articulated In post-1939 Westerns.
Whether or not Shane comes back is an oftdebated point, and using this film as a framing device for the opening and closing chapters of the book is a neat device. Many of us have films that stay with us emotionally, and McGee's recollection of seeing Shane (1953) as a boy draws the reader into the study. Growing up, I was never fond of Westerns. I found the macho posturing tiresome and the values questionable, but seeing Shane changed that for me. Shane is cut from a different cloth than the standard "shoot 'em up." With its emphasis on the hardscrabble family life of homesteaders and their battle with the ranchers to carve out their own piece of the American Eden in the vastness of the frontier, Shane was different from anything I had ever experienced in the genre. The protagonist is not your run-of-the-mill Western hero/bully. Shane is a conflicted and complex man who has an emotional depth that speaks to many viewers on different levels. By casting the diminutive, almost pretty Alan Ladd, the film subverts many physical and emotional conventions associated with more traditional Westerns. The delicate features of Alan Ladd, combined with his wearing of his inner conflict on his sleeve, so to speak, are an extreme opposite of the tall, masculine, and stoic protagonists that John Wayne specialized in.
Indeed, as McGee points out, Shane is really the original "Man with No Name" from the Sergio Leone Westerns or, as McGee puts it, "The Man with No History" (5). We do not know Shane's last name, if Shane is his real name, where he came from, what happened to him, or even if he does indeed die at the end. McGee posits that Shane does not come back because he cannot. His use of violence is something that will never allow him to enter a world of domestic tranquility. There is no place for him in this world that he has helped create through violence directed at the unbridled capitalistic entitlement embodied by the ranchers. Shane "puts on the symbolic blue collar" (11) when he goes to work on Joe and Marian's farm, but civilization and the family unit require the embrace of social order and peaceful coexistence that Shane cannot be a part of. Shane and many other Western heroes discussed here (such as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers [1956] and The Man With No Name in Leone's Dollars films) get to what I feel is at the very heart of cinema and its meaning to the viewer. We look at cinema as an extension and validation of our wants and desires as well as a way to characterize our relationship to those who wield power, either socially or economically. Shane and his absence of a backstory "awakens in the spectator the nomad that questions every officially sanctioned identity in the quest for a history that can resolve the contradictions inherent in his or her immediate social context" (6). Cinema and particularly the Western speak to this nomad in all of us.
McGee goes on to historically frame the Western with the genre-defining historical event that is referenced repeatedly in post-1939 Westerns, the Johnson County War. The altercation between cattlemen and homesteaders (or the wealthy and the working class) has been fodder for Western plots from Destry Rides Again (1939) to Heaven's Gate (1980). McGee gives you the necessary details of the war and the seminal tome inspired by it, Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902). McGee writes an ideological examination of the novel and how it both establishes and subverts the "code" of the West. Wister's novel lands on the side of the ranchers. The settlers are "rustlers and thieves" who are ruining the capitalist economy of the West. McGee then traces the development of the Western from crime caper through its pre1939 period and the genesis of the post-1939 genre conventions. He delves thoroughly into the contradictory nature of the Western code as it relates to our culture as well as our own complex and conflicted relationship with class and capitalism.
Each chapter has a thesis explored at length, with analysis of selected films. The selection of films analyzed is well chosen with celebrated classics as well as the offbeat. McGee runs the gamut from Hawks's classic Red River (1948) to the madcap Destry Rides Again. "Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" examines High Noon, Rio Bravo, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. "Revolutionary Hysteria" uses the brutal Duel in the Sun and the campy feminist johnny Guitar. Other films examined include Stagecoach, The Westerner, My Darling Clementine, and of course, The Searchers. McGee also does great justice to such revisionist classics as The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Unforgiven, and the rarely screened, cruelly maligned mother of all Hollywood cautionary tales, Heaven's Gate. Sergio Leone's Dollars films, with their absence of heroes and the implication that "anything good can only come from a willingness to risk the possibility of doing something evil" (168), are put in their proper place as heirs to Shane in the revisionist years. The chapters can be taken together for an indepth look at class and capital in the Western or individually to augment the study of a particular film or set of elements within the genre. The scholarship is extremely thorough with references from Lacan to Marx and Arendt to Freud. Historical context is a large and welcome presence in all the film analyses. Although the language can sometimes be dense, the reader will be rewarded with a new perspective on the genre and its take on class resentment as well as the paradoxical nature of American society.
So where does Kill Bill enter into all of this? What does a female protagonist in a martial arts epic with the stylish, contemporary flash of Quentin Tarantino have to do with the Western? Rife with allusions to many classic Westerns, as well as numerous other genres, and the obligatory pop culture references, Kill Bill: Vols. 1 and 2 represent the evolution of the genre's sensibilities and conventions. The Bride, or the Woman with No Name, seeks to enter the world of normality and domesticity with her unborn child but is savagely cut down by Bill, the personification of violence and capital, at her wedding. In getting her revenge against all of those who partook in the massacre, she systematically destroys her identity in orderto become "Mommy." Bill thus becomes a Shane-like figure in that he must die so the Bride- now Beatrix Kiddo, aka Mommy- can live. Self-transformation, McGee maintains, is why Shane can never come back as well as why he always comes back. Shane always dies because he cannot live in this world, yet he always comes back as that symbol of the possibility we can transform ourselves and achieve that self-sufficiency and independence for which we all yearn.
BILL: And you know I'm all about old school. . .
from KiIlBiII: Vol 2 (2004)
