The Western, Media, and Masculinity by Norman M. Gendelman A
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Coming Home: The Western, Media, and Masculinity By Norman M. Gendelman A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film & Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kristen Whissel, Chair Professor Mary Ann Doane Associate Professor Abigail De Kosnik Professor Emeritus Scott Simmon Fall 2020 Copyright 2020 by Norman Matthew Gendelman 1 Abstract Coming Home: The Western, Media, and Masculinity by Norman Matthew Gendelman Doctor of Philosophy in Film & Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Kristin Whissel, Chair In its analysis of four postwar Westerns (the films The Last Sunset and Gunman’s Walk, and the television Westerns Have Gun—Will Travel and The Rifleman), this dissertation finds a contradictory ideological strain intrinsic to the genre’s frontier legacy, as well as a critical semiosis specific to its production era. By centralizing the postwar era’s domestic concerns over and against the genre’s typical emphasis on the frontier mythos associated with Theodore Roosevelt, these Westerns subvert the stereotypical frontier/civilization dyad. By reconceiving the genre in a way that privileges “civilization” over “frontier,” this dissertation shows that the crucible of “savage” Nature, which formerly determined the exceptionality of the Westerner’s masculine character (as a synecdoche for an exceptional national one), is a cultural production that turns against civilization itself. Denuded of their naturalizing origin, and depicted as social productions within the dramatic action, the gunmen protagonists of each of these four Westerns additionally appear as complex gender constructions. By juxtaposing allusions from each Western to the ideological and aesthetic history of the genre and the socio-political context of the postwar era, the dissertation approaches the Cold War era as similarly mythological, constructed, and contradictory. I demonstrate that the conventions of the genre correspond with the conventions of domestication and nuclearization specific to the postwar era. In the process, this dissertation locates and defines a semiotic function for, and of, each Western that highlights the distinct narrative modalities respective of their mediums. In this sense, Coming Home: The Western, Media, and Masculinity continues a scholarly tradition suited for American studies and gender studies, while approaching the genre via the modalities of comparative media studies and television studies. i For my father, Seymour Gendelman, M.D. January 16th, 1932–November 24th, 2020 ii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... xv Section One: Itinerant Gunmen ..................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: The Last Sunset: Screening Incest .............................................. 2 Figures to Chapter One .................................................................................... 29 Chapter Two: Have Gun—Will Travel: Televising the Gunslinger .................. 38 Figures to Chapter Two ..................................................................................... 60 Section Two: The Domestic Westerner ........................................................................ 64 Chapter Three: Screening American Filicide: Masculine Generation as Media Contraction in Gunman’s Walk ........................................... 65 Figures to Chapter Three................................................................................... 104 Chapter Four: The Rifleman: Masculine Spines and Electronic Mediations ..................................................................... 113 Figures to Chapter Four .................................................................................... 140 Chapter Five: Queering the Cold Warrior: The Domestic Western Embraces Influence in The Rifleman ..................................................... 145 Figures to Chapter Five ..................................................................................... 177 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 188 Bibliography and Works Cited ...................................................................................... 192 iii Introduction Overview This dissertation analyzes the Western, media, and masculinity during the years 1957 to 1963. Organized around four objects produced during this period—the films The Last Sunset (Aldrich 1961) and Gunman’s Walk (Karlson 1958), and the television series Have Gun—Will Travel (1957–1963 Sam Rolfe, Herb Meadow) and The Rifleman (1958–1963 Arnold Laven)—my work analyzes how the postwar era’s domestic orientation inflects the already fraught generic legacy of the Westerner as a white masculine hero both free from, and tethered to, the civilization he ostensibly produces. By centralizing the postwar era’s domestic concerns, these Westerns invert the order of the genre’s emphases and challenge Theodore Roosevelt’s dominant influence on the Hollywood film Western and the dialectical exchanges that accompany it. While the postwar era brings returning veterans “home” (from World War II and the Korean War, both ideologically and literally), its film and television Westerns, similarly, bring the Westerner home. Placing pressure on a characterization already riddled with ambivalence, the postwar Westerns under consideration here express a critical reappraisal of the genre instanced by a critical encounter with the era. This dissertation focuses on Westerns that centralize the ideological construction of masculinity now coded with the civil and familial disposition reflective of the postwar era. While each of these Westerns magnifies and complicates the characterization of the Westerner, their thematic magnification of the Westerner induces a formal magnification as well. As a gender construction, the Westerner implicates the film and television Westerns of the study as productions specific to the fiction-bearing structure of their respective mediums. By situating these four Westerns within both the broader context of the era’s ideological changes and two hundred years of frontier allusions from the genre’s formative legacy, this project locates a self-destructiveness at the nation’s cultural and socio-political core. The four Westerns interface with the social, commercial, and martial tendencies of the postwar era, and reveal the characterological and national progress story attendant to the genre and the era. A Brief Cultural History Coming Home: The Western, Media, and Masculinity grounds itself in the dominant political and aesthetic paradigms that respectively influence and organize the cinematic A-Western and its televisual counterpart for the postwar era. The late nineteenth century produced historical narratives emphasizing the centrality of the American “frontier.” As originally thematized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the mass development of the American landscape over the country’s first two centuries had “closed” the frontier that nourished the country’s core democratic values.1 Setting the foundation for Turner’s subsequent work on the economic history of cultivatable land and its industrialization and corporate centralization, the initial essay champions the country’s agrarian past and the 1 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 3, 29. iv yeoman farmer with his self-sufficient homestead as cultivating and sustaining the nation’s nascent democracy via an evenly distributed and modest share of wealth.2 Contemporaneously noting the importance of the early American frontier, Roosevelt alternatively valorized the lost warrior culture he recounted in his Indian War histories.3 Turner’s focus on a social and civil collective supported by peaceful communal relationships stood in sharp contrast to Roosevelt’s focus on the heroic travails of an early “hunter/Indian fighter” whose individual prowess in an unforgiving and violent frontier produced the exceptional man capable of leading a burgeoning nation.4 Developmental myths emphasizing Turner’s civic beneficence (the symbiotic relationship between man and land) and Roosevelt’s martial imperatives (the almost primal conflict between savagery and civilization that produces vigorous American masculinity) inflect the characterization of the Westerns I analyze in this project. Where Western scholar Richard Slotkin has stressed the legacy of Roosevelt’s writing as largely defining and determining the generic story form of the A-Western,5 I argue that the Westerns under consideration here re-establish Turner’s homesteader past. Reversing the terms of the frontier/civilization binary, Westerns such as The Last Sunset and Gunman’s Walk reanimate the civil compact central to Turner’s vision by positioning its Westerner protagonists as enmeshed within the social fabric of a settled nation; the influential landscape the Westerner now traverses is a civil and socio-cultural field. Throughout the dissertation I apply aesthetic scholarship related to the Frontier Thesis