Gunless as Settler Colonial Borderlands Fantasy

Abstract

The Western genre is, at its heart, a fantasy genre because it creatively re-imagines Western spaces as blank slates on which white fantasies about those spaces can then be written. Director William Phillips describes his 2010 film Gunless as a “Canadian Western” – a film that embraces many of the tropes of the classic Western film genre but sets it in the Canadian West to tell a Canadian story. Canadian officials wanted Americans because they assumed that they were usually white farmers with some capital and experience, and because any such recruitment efforts would play into emerging nationalist narratives about Canada’s superiority over the United States. The anti-American narratives are performing crucial nationalist labor in a film set in the borderlands. The audience learns during the shoot-out at the end of the film that Jack is a really good shot, as he is able to shoot the American bounty hunter’s gun out of his hand from a hundred feet away.