changing society. Arguably, genres that don’t evolve
lose the audience’s interest quickly and fade away.
The Western, perhaps the most American of all
genres, began to fade away in the 1960s. With cer-
tain exceptions—including Kevin Costner’s Dances
with Wolves (1990), Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
(1992), and the Coen brothers’ True Grit(2011)—the
Western no longer had the same appeal that it had
for previous generations of movie audiences. Part
of the explanation was that most Westerns were
out of touch with reality, made by directors who
ignored the roles played by Native Americans and
women in the development of this country; that they
relied instead on the fatigued nature of the good
guys/bad guys conflict and equally tired myths
about the West; and that they ended up creating
a world that might as well have come from outer
space.
Just when we thought that the Western was
dead—for all practical purposes, meaning severely
diminished box-office appeal—it was transformed
in an original way in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
(2005). The director remains true to Annie Proulx’s
short story, on which the screenplay is based, but
what he transforms is our fixed idea of the conven-
tions of the Western. Gone is the conflict between
the white man and the Native Americans on the
frontier, the saloon, and the shootout on Main Street.
Gone is the cowboy, with his apparently sexless
existence, high moral purpose, and uncanny sense
of nature. In place of these traditional Western ele-
ments, against a background of spectacular West-
ern scenery (a staple of all Westerns), Lee gives us
the story of two ranch hands who fall in love with
one another. In Ang Lee’s process of generic trans-
formation, he has revived some of the elements of
the Western to tell a story that is not about sex, but
rather about loneliness, love, heartbreak, and, ulti-
mately, sorrow—elements borrowed from yet other
genres, notably the melodrama and romance.
Brokeback Mountainis set in the Wyoming of the
1960s, where and when its transformation of the
traditional “boy meets girl” romance would have
been even less acceptable than it would be in many
parts of the country today. Even though some view-
ers recognized homoerotic longing in such classic
Westerns as Howard Hawks’s Red River(1948) and
George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid(1969), this was not a dominant theme in those
movies. Today, in a culture where grappling with
one’s sexual identity is a staple of books and televi-110 CHAPTER 3 TYPES OF MOVIES
Mixed genreThe screenwriter, director, and producer
Joss Whedon has made a career of blending seemingly
incompatible genres. Buffy the Vampire Slayer[1], which
began as a 1992 feature film (written by Whedon, directed
by Fran Rubel Kuzui) before being adapted to a long-running
television series (1997–2003), injects horror into an otherwise
conventional high-school melodrama. The title character is a
cheerleader whose popularity is threatened when she
discovers that she is destined to save the world from a plague
of vampires. Firefly, which began as a short-lived television
series before being concluded in the 2005 feature film
Serenity[2], is rife with Western archetypes, including
righteous renegades, pitiless bounty hunters, earnest
greenhorns, noble prostitutes, and gritty pioneers threatened
by ruthless savages. But this Western is set in space: the
frontier is a distant ring of outlying planets, and the outlaws
ride spaceships more often than horses. The oppressive
high-tech Alliance that constantly threatens the romantic
independence of the brigand protagonists represents both
the civilizing forces that oppose the Western’s wide-open
wilderness, as well as the menace of technology run amok
behind the typical science-fiction antagonist.12