Jesús Ángel González López Universidad de Cantabria
gonzalezja@unican.es Abstract
This paper examines three recent American films—Frozen River (2008), Sin Nombre (2009) and Winter’s Bone (2010)—that can easily fit within the post-western category as defined by Neil Campbell. The settings of these films may at first appear to be contradictory with their inclusion in this group, but it is my contention that they use features of the western genre to scrutinize American values and myths associated with the idea of the West. These films use the border and/or frontier settings to examine the West not as a place, but as an idea that, as Nicolas S. Witschi has noted, “shimmers with abstractions such as frontier, opportunity, honor, individualism, and justice”: the spatial representation of the American Dream or, rather, as these three films show, the contemporary American Nightmare.
Keywords: post-western, film, western, genre, frontier, border, American Dream,
The term “postwestern” has been used in Western Studies at least since 1994 when Virginia Scharff called for “a postwestern history” in an attempt “to question the stability” of historical categories of analysis of the American West (Scharff 1999: 167). Susan Kollin’s collection Postwestern Cultures (2007) defines it as an “emerging critical approach” working “against a narrowly conceived regionalism”; Kollin feels that the West has been seen as a
“predetermined entity with static borders and boundaries” and calls for an approach based on the “critical assessment of those very restrictions, whether they be theoretical, geographical, or political” (Kollin 2007: xi).
In the field of Film Studies, Neil Campbell has used the term “post-western cinema” for films which are “coming after and going beyond the traditional western whilst engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values” (Campbell 2011: 414), and has offered films like The Big Lebowski (1998) or Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) as examples of this category. He relates his use of the prefix post to its use in the words post-colonialism, post-structuralism or post-modernism, both in a chronological sense and in the sense of opposing their antecedents, deconstructing them and trying to go “beyond them”. In this sense, post-westerns take the classic structures and themes of the genre to interact, overlap, and interrelate in complex dialogical ways with them.
As a film genre, westerns have been proclaimed dead since their very origins, in 1911 (Creekmur 2011: 407), and so many times that, as Jim Kitses says, if all these proclamations of ending had headstones, they would “overflow even Tombstone’s cemetery” (Kitses and Rickman 1998: 15). But westerns refuse to remain dead and keep on resuscitating in renewed forms, questioning American values and myths as they have been doing from their inception.
Campbell in fact stresses that “the ‘post’ in post-western has a self-conscious reference to and echo of the word ‘posthumous’ and therefore of the specific meaning of something—in this case a film genre—that continues to ‘live on’ beyond its ‘death’ generating a spectral inheritance within the present.” (Campbell 2011: 416)
According to Thomas Schatz, “the significance and impact of the Western as America’s foundation ritual have been articulated most clearly and effectively in the cinema,”
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(Schatz 1981: 46-7) and it is, for example, worth noting that whereas film westerns have always been a quintessential part of the canon of American cinema, literary westerns have generally been kept in the realm of popular literature and are still struggling to be considered worth studying. Even Literature of the American West as a whole could be said to suffer this kind of discrimination, since it is too frequently associated with regionalism, popular culture or formulaic literature.
But film westerns have shown to be resilient and adaptive in their examination of America’s founding values and myths. If classic westerns like My Darling Clementine (1946) asserted myths like Manifest Destiny and the American Dream, contemporary post-westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock scrutinize these myths in order to show their contradictions and problematize their assumptions.
This approach can be found in three recent American films—Frozen River (2008), Sin Nombre (2009) and Winter’s Bone (2010)—that can easily fit within the post-western category as defined by Campbell. The settings of these films (upstate New York, Mexico and the Ozark Mountains in Missouri) may at first appear to be contradictory with their inclusion in this group, but it is my contention that, although they are not set in the American West as such, they use features of the western genre to scrutinize American values and myths associated with the idea of the West. After all, the American West, whether in popular westerns or in canon literature, has always been a symbolic rather than a physical place: the frontier, the place where civilizations and wilderness meet, the place whose “physical aspects (forests, rivers, lakes, clearings, settlements, prairies, plains, deserts) and its social aspects (isolation, simplicity, improvisation, criticism, chaos, restlessness, paradox, irony) [were conceived] as expressive emblems for the invention and development of a new national civilization.” (Fussel 1965: 13). In fact, one of the most obvious antecedents of film westerns is James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (which take place in the East), and, as Nicolas S. Witschi has noted, the American West is both a place and an idea, “an extremely powerful idea, one that has evolved over several centuries in the imaginations of countless people both in the US and abroad… an idea that shimmers with abstractions such as frontier, opportunity, honor, individualism, and justice” (Witschi 2011: 4), in short, the spatial representation of the American Dream.
Frozen River (2008) is set on a Mohawk reservation between New York State, Ontario, and Quebec, and tells the stories of two single mothers who get involved in illegal immigration on the ice-covered St. Lawrence River. Ray is a white woman who has been abandoned and robbed by her gambling husband, whereas Lila is a Mohawk whose son has been abducted by her partner’s family. The film offers the stark contrast between these two women’s contemporary American nightmares and the dreams of the Asian immigrants hidden in the trunk of Ray’s car. The ice turning back to water becomes the turning point for these two women, and offers the chance to explore the racial and gender-related contradictions of the American Dream/Nightmare.
The first images of the film (Figure 1) stress the artificiality of a border that was imposed on a Mohawk territory where there was none: we can see a flock of geese flying over the border before we see all the signs and customs buildings (Figure 2) that make it impossible for people to move freely.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Lila justifies the act of smuggling both goods and people saying that “there is no border here. This is free trade between nations,” including the Mohawk nation. If “Indians” used to be “the enemy”, the “savages” in classic westerns, Frozen River seems to be rewriting the genre’s features to present Native Americans in a completely different light.
Ray is struggling to make enough money to buy a proper house and cannot even afford Christmas presents for her children. When she finds out that immigrants have to pay $40-50,000 to get into the US, her answer is clear “To get here? No fucking way!”. The association of the story with the American Dream and its contemporary nightmares is made clear when we can see the name of the company that sells the mobile home that she is hoping to buy: “Live the Dream!” (figure 3).
Jesús Ángel González López - Borders and Frontiers in Recent Post-Westerns
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The influence of westerns on this film has been acknowledged by female writer-director Courtney Hunt: she asked Melissa Leo (Ray) to watch films with John Wayne in order to imitate his dry acting style and she has also established the association between westerns and immigration: “the western is the story of America in that the story of America is the story of migrants, of people moving forward. The original settlers saw the wilderness and thought 'That's our backyard - we just haven't got to the end of it yet.' That way of thinking persists today: it's why Americans think they can simply go out into the world and sell Coca-Cola.
And yet it works the other way too: it's why non-Americans see America as a brand new place, a land without borders. It's why America is always adapting and regenerating." (Brooks 2009:
no page) The film also shares with previous westerns a similar setting: a contested space where different laws and rules may apply and where the protagonists need to find a moral conscience that will help them to tell right from wrong: “you think of the classic American story venturing into that which is lawless territory. A border is lawless territory. The Wild West was lawless and there was a sense that anything could happen. And that’s sort of the feeling with ‘Frozen River’” (Silverstein 2009: no page)
This lawlessness and the importance of immigration are shared by another recent post-western directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, Sin Nombre (2009). This is an American and Mexican film which was filmed in Spanish and tells the story of a group of Central American migrants who hop on a train to Texas and risk (and lose) their lives while trying to get to their promised land. We follow the story of the migrants as they suffer violence and extortion from local mafias (“Mara Salvatrucha”) but also the story of Casper, a “Mara” member who tries to redeem himself and escape from his fatal destiny.
The film starts rather surprisingly with the beautiful image of a forest and a path that seems to be leading to a future full of promise (Figure 4), but, as the camera pans out, we soon find out that the picture is just a poster that Casper is looking at and that the path leads to nothing but a wall (Figure 5). This visual metaphor prefigures the future not only of Casper, but also of Sayra and the other Central American migrants, most of whom will lose their lives in their futile search of the American Dream.
Figure 4
Figure 5
Critics have recognized the western elements in Sin Nombre: “the vast landscapes, the frontier justice, the gangs of outlaws, and a train noisily slicing through the frontier. They are just reorganized in a different way” (Five in Focus, no page) and its director has also related the film to the genre calling it a “good old-fashioned post-industrial Western tale of redemption.” (quoted by Neil Campbell in Campbell 2009: no page)
Both Sin Nombre and Frozen River were very successful at different editions of the Sundance Film Festival and have been saluted by critics as a renewal of the western genre
“Hunt and Fukunaga's tales play out in a tangled, messy present, spotlighting a modern strain of frontier lawlessness and implicitly debunking the notion of America as a promised land of unbridled opportunity. They do not simply breathe new life into the genre. They may also have reclaimed it for a fresh generation of American pioneers” (Brooks 2009: no page). Both, according to Neil Campbell, are essentially westerns that remind us that “the post-western’s chameleon shape-shifting continues deep into the twenty-first century, looking to re-energize its generic elements into new and different patterns” (Campbell 2009: no page).
The last film that I would like to include in the post-western category is Winter’s Bone (2010), a film directed by Debra Granik based on Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel, and which also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of Ree Dolly, a teenage girl who is forced to take care of her family and look for her father’s corpse so as not
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to lose her house. The film shares with Frozen River a very interesting redefinition of gender roles which could arguably be considered a feature of post-westerns.
If classic westerns used to be a fundamentally male genre where women were either absent or secondary characters, post-westerns seem to be rewriting the genre’s features to give them a more prominent role. Both Ray in Frozen River, and Ree in Winter’s Bone are women who have to fight in a male-dominated world, so they need to use male weapons and female friendship (Figure 6).
Figure 6
These women fight not for money or freedom, but in order to save their families, and, significantly, their homes (we can actually see images of both houses with playground equipment by their side, and children—Ray’s sons and Ree’s siblings—playing on them:
Figures 7 and 8). Both women have been abandoned by their male, ”protecting” figures (Ray’s husband and Ree’s father) who, instead of protecting them, have actually made them lose their houses (Ree’s father has run away to gamble with the money, Ree’s father put their house on his bond and then disappeared).
Figure 7
Figure 8
Tom Byers has talked about these two films, directed and starred by women, as allegories of the film-making process. They are both independent productions, directed by independent women who tell the story of women who need to act as men, women who need to be strong in a male-dominated environment. He has also related Ree’s and Ray’s knocking on doors to the directors’ search for funds for their films.
The film is set in the Ozark Mountains (Missouri) and it combines western and ‘noir’
generic conventions. It does not use a border as setting, like the other two films, but rather a kind of frontier in the sense of the place where civilization and wilderness meet, an inner frontier that shows us how civilization has been lost. Once again we find a solitary hero(ine) in a lawless territory where she needs to resort to her own moral conscience in order to save, not herself, but her family and home. If Frozen River and Sin Nombre show us the futility of pursuing the American Dream, Winter’s Bone shows us the American Nightmare: a community spoilt by meth production and consumption.
Winter’s Bone, like the two other post-westerns, “comes after” and “goes beyond” the Western genre, redefining its features and adapting them to reflect and comment on contemporary American reality. As Xan Brooks has said, the western “has not died out. It has simply changed shape, colour and compass point” (Brooks 2009: no page).
References
Brooks, Xan 2009 ‘In the Hands of the Devil’. The Guardian, July 17 2009.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jul/17/film-frozen-river-sin-nombre> (Accessed 4 March, 2013)
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