JM Weatherston

Northumbria Research Link Citation: Weatherston, Jack (2018) How the West has Warmed: Climate Change in the Contemporary Western. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/39786/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html HOW THE WEST HAS WARMED: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WESTERN J. M. WEATHERSTON PhD 2018 1 HOW THE WEST HAS WARMED: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WESTERN JACK MICHAEL WEATHERSTON A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Social Sciences OCTOBER 2018 2 Abstract This thesis will argue that the contemporary Western, in literature and film, has shown a particular capacity to reflect the influence of climate change on the specific set of landscapes, ecosystems and communities that make up the American West. The Western has, throughout its history, articulated the major anxieties afflicting American culture within the confines of its genre tropes, symbols and character archetypes. As climate change has begun to represent an existential threat to the West, the Western genre has been compelled to address its destabilising, terminal implications. The Western genre is a product of a specific mythology. As such it reflects many of the harmful ideological premises of colonial ideology and the white settler expansionist project. However, the genre has the capacity to establish spaces of resistance and critique within the mythic space of the Western. Responses to climate change are examples of this. This thesis is also informed by ecocritical approaches that emphasise the importance of the material environment, in contrast to anthropocentrism, and that acknowledge the influence of climate change on culture. I will argue that the Western, as an environmentally-located genre, is uniquely sensitive to the changing climate. Although cultural awareness of climate change has only recently begun to emerge, there has been a long history of environmental reflexivity in the Western. Studies such as the edited collection The Landscape of the Hollywood Western (2006), and Murray and Heumann’s Gunfight at the Eco-Corral (2012) have delineated the ways in which “Ecowesterns” have responded to environmental destruction and loss. This thesis will add to the critical debate around the ecological Western by focusing specifically on climate change as it presents itself in contemporary Westerns. I will show the variety of ways in which the threat of climate change has made its presence known in the genre. It is apparent in the politics of the border space, the depiction of extractive industries, sound and visual design, the interaction of scale and time and even in the actual process of filmmaking itself. Genre fiction and film are potent sources of narratives that might begin to come to terms with the representational challenges of climate change. 3 Declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas and contributions from the work of others I declare that the Word Count of this Thesis is 74767 words Name: Jack Weatherston Signature: Date: 17/10/2018 4 Contents Introduction 7 Chapter one: The Western, the Border and the Changing Climate 32 Chapter two: Westerns at the Limit: The Road and Blood Meridian 51 Chapter three: Literary Westerns and Extractive Industry 73 Chapter four: The Sound of Climate Change in the Western 93 Chapter five: Deadwood: Time, Scale and the Anthropocene 115 Chapter six: The Intrusion of Climate in The Revenant 130 Chapter seven: The Homesman and Rango: Possible Futures for the Western 142 Bibliography 158 5 Acknowledgments Many thanks to my supervisor Dr. Victoria Bazin for all her incredible help and support. Many thanks also to Northumbria University and the American Studies department for providing the funding that made completing this thesis possible. Jenny, Mum, Dad and Alice. Thank you all so much. Love you. 6 Introduction This thesis relies on an understanding of the Western myth as an ideological construct that is subject to a complex interaction of power and reception. Despite the overt influence of white, colonialist ideology, the Western genre, as an expression of myth, is capable of producing texts that carve out small spaces of resistance against hegemonic values. Climate change, because it presents an existential threat to the Western, has the potential to further expand spaces of critique and productive resistance within the confines of the genre. Furthermore, this thesis is informed by ecocritical approaches that emphasise the importance of the material environment, in contrast to anthropocentrism, and that acknowledge the influence of climate change on culture. With these twin theoretical buttresses in place, it will be argued that the Western genre has, throughout its existence, responded to contemporary societal crises and anxieties. It has been able to do this because it has retained a reflexive and, at times, critical relationship with its own mythology and the racist and imperialist ideology it was conceived to promote. It is therefore well placed to reflect the emerging discontinuities of climate change. The Western, as a genre, is located in a specific region, encompassing a range of existing landscapes, ecosystems and communities that are currently facing radically uncertain futures. As a result Western myths necessarily stage interactions between humans and particular, contingent, environments. Genre fiction and film provide a productive venue for representations of climate change that may otherwise be eschewed by dominant modes of realism. I hope to show how the Western, as both a genre and regionally- located mythology, reveals the influence of climate on narrative in the Anthropocene. The Western genre, and the mythology of national identity that it represents, is a product of a discrete, physical space. The boundaries of this space have always been subject to interpretation and historical contingency. As the frontier expanded the borderline that defined the West went with it. The Mississippi river formed the symbolic division between the old, settled East and the contested but open West in the nineteenth century. Movement beyond this border was necessarily an act of physical daring and an expression of the nation’s imperial destiny, the land beyond the river was full of promise but also danger and fantasy: In 1800 the trans-Mississippi West may as well have been Mars to most Americans… Learned scholars conjured the West as a landscape roamed by mammoths, giant beavers and other animals from prehistory: a land that time forgot. Narratives spoke of fierce volcanoes, ridges five miles high, 180-mile long salt deposits and a huge mountain from which all the rivers in the continent flowed (Jones and Wills 12). And yet by the end of the century this space of conjecture and superstition had been thoroughly 7 colonised and tamed. In 1898 a group of wealthy businessmen held the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, in Omaha, Nebraska. The world’s fair featured an ‘Indian Congress’, an exhibit featuring ‘living displays’ of Native American cultures. The exposition also had a day dedicated to William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, a legendary figure of the American West and creator of the world-famous Wild West show, which he founded in Nebraska in 1883. The exposition reveals how swiftly the trans-Mississippi West was appropriated, subjected to a regime of ethnic cleansing, and incorporated into the American empire. Simultaneously the imaginative space was metabolised into the pageantry and mythology of Buffalo Bill and the already calcified symbology of the cowboy, the horse and the gun. As conquest and development moved west, and spaces that were once peripheral were absorbed into the core, the line of demarcation between the east and what lay beyond was also compelled to shift. The arbitrary process of splitting the continent made finding consensus on where to draw the line a difficult task. However, in 1879 John Wesley Powell, as head of the U.S. Geological Survey, proposed that west should be divided from east at the line of the hundredth Meridian West. This line of longitude cuts through the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas and is significant primarily because it represents a distinct climatological divide. East of the hundredth meridian receives in excess of twenty inches of precipitation annually; as a result the east does not require irrigation on a large scale in order for productive agriculture to occur. The opposite is true west of the line, where vast systems of drilling for groundwater and enormous civic projects like the Hoover Dam have been necessary to support large-scale food production. The historian and novelist Wallace Stegner, one of the region’s foremost chroniclers, identified the centrality of climate and water distribution to a definition of the West in his 1953 biography of Powell: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.

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