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Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Neil Campbell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 432 pages, $65.00.
The question "What is the post-Western?" is the catalyst for Neil Campbell's Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Those who study the post-Western understand that the genre's elasticity lends itself to varied theoretical applications. However, this same elasticity raises questions and debates regarding how "Western" the post-Western remains through the ever changing cycles of cinema. Campbell maintains that post-Western films critically recycle and respond to the conventions of the Western. Post-Westerns is comprised of ten chapters. Apart from an introduction, conclusion, notes, and a functional index, these include a chapter on the films of Dennis Hopper that touches on Easy Rider (1969) and The Last Movie (1971) as well as a chapter-length critical discussion of the urban post-West. In many ways, this study serves as a suitable conclusion of Campbell's trilogy on the West, following his previous two book length studies, The Cultures of the American West (2000) and The Rhizomatic West (2008).
Focusing on films released after the year 1945, the author uses the end of World War II as a point of departure from which to map shifting attitudes about the American West. Campbell's readings often position classic Westerns as reference points for the critical frameworks he claims post-Westerns reuse and recast. Campbell contends that the classical Western is defined though its tropes, which validate the "establishing of roots in the New World," condone the "taming" of land removed from its native inhabitants, "domesticate the feminine," and articulate "a renewing masculinity as the source and engine" for the settlement of the West (11). Accordingly, Campbell defines the mythic Western hero as a man who stands for moral good as reflected by one or more of these major tropes (11). Films such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and Red River (1948) serve as archetypes of the classic Western. Campbell defines the post-Western, on the other hand, as a genre that views the West "no longer...