The Competing Tunes of "Johnny Guitar": Liberalism, Sexuality, Masquerade

Abstract

Johnny Guitar's allegorical uses of politics and gender are highly contradictory. The film mounts liberal critique of McCarthyism that is undermined by its binary politics, which merely shift blame onto another 1950s bad object: repression in the form of sexually pathological woman. This apparent misogyny is tempered by other characters' performance of Joan Riviere's masquerade, which ultimately validates playful gender mobility. Nicholas Ray's eclectic 1954 western Johnny Guitar has supported dramatically divergent readings by its critics over the years. American journalists at the time of its release were disappointed by Johnny Guitar's nontraditional use of generic conventions. It has not only male, but female gunfighters, writer for the New Yorker sneered, declaring: It was probably inevitable that sooner or later somebody would try to change the pattern of Westerns, but I can state authoritatively that this twist is doomed. Time proclaimed it a crossbreed of the Western with psychoanalytic case history, while Commonweal criticized it for selfparody, refus[ing] to take the script or ... actors seriously, and Variety accused it of having too much pretentious attempt at analysis.'1 In fact, these critics were correct in apprehending the film's revisionism, for Ray indeed set out to challenge convention by making his hero female (and by casting Joan Crawford to play this hero[ine]) and by turning the paradigmatic western conflict between individual and community into an anti-McCarthyist allegory. What is less perceptive and more symptomatic about the above criticisms is their disapproval of this generic revisionism.2 These critics, in fact, represent just the attitudes about convention that I will argue Johnny Guitar wants to challenge. Contemporaneous with and in direct contrast to the film's American critical rejection, French New Wave critics applauded it, celebrating Nicholas Ray as an auteur, poet of nightfall. Frangois Truffaut praised the film as a Western that is dream-like, magical, unreal to degree, delirious.'3 This positive appraisal demonstrates concern with poetics and pathos rather than aesthetic conventionalism and seems inspired by the film's overinscribed stylistic elements (highly saturated Trucolor film stock, quirky sets, flamboyant acting); in fact, it is precisely the film's unconventionality that attracts Truffaut. By presenting itself as an exploration of conventionality and unconventionality, Johnny Guitar has produced several decades of criticism