Spaghetti Westerns and the ‘Afterlife’ of a Hollywood Genre

Abstract

This chapter examines how Western movies (and their attendant themes and tropes) have functioned since the genre ceased to be a major part of mainstream American cinema, and how these changed generic conditions have affected the ways in which Westerns are produced and understood. It compares this situation with another historical moment in which the conventions of the Western genre found themselves transformed by a different set of surrounding contexts: the Italian adoption of the Western in the 1960s. It argues that the Italian Western makes the genre ‘strange’, and alienates the viewer from the world of the Wild West. It makes a compelling case for how the seemingly familiar codes of the Western have in fact been rendered alien in differing ways upon contact with various contexts, and thereby offers insights into the representational practices of twenty-first-century Westerns such as Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008), 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007) and True Grit (Ethan and Joel Cohen, 2010).