Masculinities in American Western films, 1950-1972: a hyper-linear history

This thesis puts forward a unique paradigm for understanding the nature of history on film: hyper-linear history. Whilst previous conceptualisations of history on film have tended to emphasise either the possibility for film to represent the past ‘as it was’ or the capacity for film to only represent contemporary concerns this thesis proposes an alternative. This alternative is hyper-linearity, whereby films construct historical connections between the represented past and the period of the filmic release for the purpose of illuminating historical relationships between the two temporalities. Thus, just as historical revisionism in other mediums reflects an attempt to understand the past in a way that is tempered by the present context of the historian, a hyper-linear understanding impresses the capacity of film to construct meaningful historical relationships that privilege both the past and the present. A hyper-linear paradigm creates the possibility of seeing film as a vehicle that makes the significance of the past immediately explicit and relevant, rendering historical understandings complex. This sits at odds with an understanding of the filmic past as removed from historical‘reality’. Hyper-linear history is explored in this thesis through an analysis of American Western films released between 1950 and 1972. Specifically, it is argued that hyper-linear history is communicated not only through explicit historical cues that locate films in a distinct place and time but, more importantly, through the conceptualisation of masculine gender performance as a distinctly historical category. In Westerns masculinity is conceived as both a form of personal identity and a manifestation of national forms of identity; as both a mediator of an individual’s access to power and as reflective of broader patriarchal institutional power relationships; and, thus, as a historical connection between past attitudes, identities and modes of being and then-contemporary concerns regarding hegemonic masculinity and its manifestation in national values. The thesis argues that examining hyper-linearity through the prism of gender allows distinct connections to be made between the represented post-Civil War past and the then-contemporary Civil Rights movement present; particularly that each period presented white American men, and associated patriarchal institutions, with a gendered crisis that caused enormous fissures in men’s personal identities and left tears in the national fabric. This hyper-linear history on film thus provides insight into the ways in which masculinities are performed and gender crises expressed, explored, and ultimately resolved to meet patriarchal ends.