The inner frontier. Images of the USA in recent Western cinema (2000–2020)

Abstract

At the heart of the American western cinema lies the myth. And the western myth is closely linked to the frontier, that boundary between civilization and wilderness that is constantly being negotiated. The frontier mythology is an integral part of scholarly writing on the western, and especially works well with the classical western of the studio era, where the dichotomy of wilderness and civilization had been considered the key to the genre. The following study will go back to the original term frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of frontier mythology and Matthias Waechter’s re-reading of this mythology, and will seek for a new angle to discuss recent westerns in the light of current events. This is necessary as most of the exemples may look like westerns, but most of them are only told in the mode of a western or use the classical form and iconography to aim for something different than in earlier decades. Genre cinema has become more of a discourse today which is not created according to a classical formula any more. This article takes this fact into account and will furthermore show that the outer boundary between civilization and wilderness is turned inward in films of the last decade: This means that the ‘stranger’ is part of the self, the abject lurks in one’s own forests and mountains–or in one’s own micro-society, even if films are only told in Western mode, such as the crime thriller ‘Wind River’ (2017) by Taylor Sheridan.