Introduction

Abstract

Since the publication of John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique in 1971, the Western has been read as a platform for exploring America’s social, political, and cultural concerns. As John E. O’Connor and Peter C. Rollins point out in Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television & History, the Western is a complex genre that expresses a myriad of dramatic relations and situations characteristic of the American experience and values (6). And when one considers the 9/11 attacks, American involvement in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq crisis, and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, it is not surprising that many Westerns produced during the latter half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries have been concerned with questions of violence. As O’Connor and Rollins note, Richard Slotkin’s very popular Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, a compelling American studies approach to the “myth” of the West, has proven to be an excellent jumping-off point for many scholars of the Western (12). However, one only need consult Gary R. Edgerton and Michael T. Marsden’s Westerns: The Essential Journal of Popular Film & Television Collection to see that the last 40 years of scholarship concerning this genre demonstrates that the history of the American West and the West in the Western, as O’Connor and Rollins point out, is a far more complex reality than Gunfighter Nation suggests (12).