The Ethnographer’s Nostalgia in Hollywood: Towards a Dialectic of the Frontier

Abstract

The historical encounter between indigenous populations and colonial powers in North America has been a central issue for any theory of American history and culture. It appears that now, more than ever, images of the “Frontier” resonate in the Hollywood tradition. This dissertation proposes that existing critical studies of this issue, whilst productive, have been brought up short in accounting for the peculiarly seductive qualities of the American West. It argues for a new critical approach anchored in philosophical issues that emerge along with ethnology in the eighteenth century. The first chapter introduces a theoretical vocabulary running from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Baudrillard to Jacques Derrida’s proposed turn to Friedrich Nietzsche. The second chapter detects this vocabulary in the classical Western, examining George Stevens’ Shane (1953) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as foundational examples of imagining the American West. The third chapter examines how visions of the West persisted in the post-classical Hollywood era, surveying Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005). The final chapter examines how the narrative encounter with the “savage” first projected in the early nineteenth century returns forcefully in the Hollywood cinema of the 2000s. Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005), Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006), and James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) indicate a new mode of ethnological fantasy emerging. Concluding with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015) as a profoundly Nietzschean repudiation of this tradition, it proposes a developmental trajectory in which the fantasy encounter with a radically different form of society at the Frontier serves an increasingly Utopian function: the collective attempt to crystalize a vision of human existence freed from the afflictions that characterize our own historical moment of late capitalism.