WOMEN MAKE HORROR: FILMMAKING, FEMINISM, GENRE. Edited by Alison Peirse. Rutgers UP, 2020. 270 pp. $29.95 paper.

Abstract

Feminine Turn in Postwar Westerns”; Martin M. Winkler’s “Clytemnestra and Electra under Western Skies”; and Christopher Minz’s “‘Never seen a woman who was more of a man’: Saloon Girls, Women Heroes, and Female Masculinity in the Western.” Studlar examines the movies that present psychological drama and focus on family dynamics. Such films, informed by the growing popularity of Freudian theories, have a subversive potential because, in Studlar’s words, they “complicated American myths, whether by calling subtle attention to contradictions in them, or through more overt questioning of assumptions about gender and sexuality as well as race and class” (84). Winkler’s study shows affinities between the Western and classical myth, analyzing transpositions of Electra and Clytemnestra archetypes to film. Winkler quotes director Anthony Mann. saying, “You can take any of the great dramas; doesn’t matter whether it’s Shakespeare, whether it’s Greek plays, or what: you can always lay them in the West. They somehow become alive” (100). In Winkler’s assessment, the Western has always been conscious of its potential to provide a backdrop for classical drama and archetypal characters. Minz in turn argues that “the Western has never been specifically about men in its mythological structure” (107), describing the Western as a “masculinist” project and situating it within the masculine, rather than biologically male, frame of reference. Minz probes the “unconscious of the Western” and shows the pervasiveness and importance of a “non-male masculinity” (108). The chapters in the second part focus on contemporary Westerns and analyze them in the light of recent political events, reading the movies as a reflection of wider cultural narratives in which these events are understood, digested, and represented; many take 9/11 as a pivoting moment. Robert Spindler argues, “Western cinema after 9/11 seems to follow along two parallel and contradictory lines that either attempt to resurrect the traditional Western and the supposedly proto-American values the genre represents, or deconstruct its rigid forms further” (162); the essays in the second part confirm this assertion. Fran Pheasant-Kelly’s essay points to the women-as-victims trope and cowboy rhetoric in the post-9/11 Western. It starts with a strong statement: “At the core of the classic Western exists a mythology founded on convictions of American exceptionalism and white racial superiority” (121). In a similar vein, Kelly MacPhail continues with an examination of revisionist Westerns in his contribution: revisionist Westerns, as he stresses, highlight majority society’s anxiety concerning such issues as the “assimilation, miscegenation, and contamination of women” and provide a challenge to essentialist assumptions about gender, race, power dynamics, and identity (142). A particular brand of a revisionist Western, a feminist Western, is the focus of Andrew Patrick Nelson’s essay. Nelson discusses the validity of the label and examines the politics of representation at work in the films. The volume includes sixteen figures and an attractive cover, appropriately showing a still from a Western in which a woman’s whip keeps gazing men at a safe distance. She yields power and commands authority. She is simultaneously fascinating—going against our expectations of what femininity in horse operas might be like—and paradoxically unsurprising—as her authority derives naturally from her skill. She is much like the essays collected in Women in the Western. By turning its critical gaze to women in the Western, this volume does important corrective work. It forcefully and convincingly goes against the vast majority of research on the Western and its representations of gender, which has been overwhelmingly skewed to discuss masculinity, with the representations of femininity taking a marginal role at best, and a complementary and dependent one at worst. Just as the woman is essential to the Western, this volume is essential reading to anyone interested in the history of the genre, its critical reception, the latest developments in its theorizing, and to any lover of the oaters. Put succinctly, it has the potential of becoming a classic of Western criticism.