Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen, by Flavia Brizio-Skov

Abstract

Flavia Brizio-Skov’s Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen comes at a crucial time for the western. It is no secret that the genre has suffered a loss in popularity in recent years, compared to its ubiquity in the Hollywood golden era—also due, for instance, to high-profile critical and commercial failures such as Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011) and The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013), the latter of which is examined in this book’s final chapter. The conventions of classical westerns have been reappraised many times before. Cahiers du cinéma critics like André Bazin had high regard for the films of Howard Hawks, whereas Laura Mulvey, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, discussed how the western hero was often split between nostalgic narcissism and social integration.