Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema * Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: the Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy

Abstract

Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema, written by a young film scholar (this is Boaz Hagins's first book), aims to chart the various methods and meanings of death in a number of classical Hollywood films and genres from 1925 to 1955. It is a work that is to some extent informed by philosophical conceptions of death – the names of Plato, Heidegger, Deleuze, Lyotard and others are sprinkled throughout – though these philosophical stakes tend to be somewhat underplayed. By contrast, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth is a first foray into film studies by a prominent US philosopher (Robert Pippin is the author of several groundbreaking books of philosophy1) and it is as much a work of philosophy as one of film studies. These two works, then, both promise dialogue of some sort between philosophy and classical Hollywood film. Hagin sets out to reveal the ‘different ways in which death can be made meaningful’ in Hollywood films (p. 2). He aims, therefore, not to reduce Hollywood cinema to one overarching view of death but instead to affirm the many ways in which the films he examines deal with it. Hagin's analysis is grouped according to genre, so that discussions of gangster films, melodramas, Westerns and war films form the core chapters. The films are also categorized according to the ways in which death functions in them, a form of classification which leads to three primary groupings: films with a death at the beginning (initial death), those with a death which brings the film to closure (story-terminating death) and those with a death in the middle of the story (intermediary death). This leads to various mixings of genres so that, for example, Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948) is both a Western and a war film, Shane (George Stevens, 1953) both a Western and a melodrama, and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) both a melodrama and war film.