Updating the Escapism of the Western: The Lone Ranger (2013)

This chapter views The Lone Ranger (2013) as being on one level an attempt simply to provide the audience with a thrilling escapist experience. To this extent the film can be seen as a theme park ride that allows for an intense bodily experience subjecting the spectator’s senses to precipitous combinations of speed and suddenness of movement, and volume and pitch of sound, together with kaleidoscopic changes of shape and colour, a feeling of affect. However, at the same time, the spectator is thrown into uncertainty as to where to position themselves in relation to the material they are being shown. This is postmodernism in action: fact and fiction collide in such a way as to suggest the impossibility of the existence of realism as a genuine field of cultural possibility. And yet, in contradiction to this, the film cannot draw back from taking a definite position on the presence of evil in the world and on how it should be dealt with.