Tabula rasa: the Western under erasure in The Rider and Jauja

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article aims to realise a methodological de-Westernisation of the Western film genre through a comparative analysis of Chloé Zhao's The Rider and Lisandro Alonso's Jauja. Through the Derridean concepts of sous rature, différance, the trace and hauntology, several conventions of the Western genre are discussed and analysed, including the landscape, masculinity and the denial of climactic endings. The search for meaning is present in the two main male characters, but whereas Brady (Brady Jandreau) crafts a gentle approach to a cowboy masculinity in the twenty-first century through both riding and a sense of belonging to the landscape, captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) in Jauja finds himself lost because of his rigid colonial approach to the Patagonian landscape. The endings of the two films are deferred, indicating, in The Rider, the continuity of the search for meaning beyond the conventions of the Western, and the disjuncture of time as a result of colonial violence in Jauja. Ultimately, this article proposes that this Derridean methodology, when suffused with a World Cinema perspective, can debunk established notions of centrality and ownership in relation to genre studies.