The Revisionist Western and the Mythic Past

Abstract

The role of myth in the Western has frequently been understood as that of cultural mystification, naturalizing the systemic violence that accompanied America’s westward expansion. Within this understanding, the sub-genre of the revisionist Western is understood to intervene with “counter-mythic” discourse. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, myth emerges not merely as revisionist cultural narrative, but as a spatiotemporal aesthetic of experience, a sensibility conveying an imagined time-outside-of-time. In distinct ways, both films encourage us to imagine a mythic experience of the past through the soundtrack. Burt Bacharach’s pop score for Butch Cassidy and the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller distinctly position each film within a mythic space of timelessness in which the immediate present of a contemporary experience and the distancing effects of historicity might be imagined as blurring and freely flowing into one another.