This course examines seven Hollywood films, released in the mid 1950s through 2003, which consider racial identities, gender roles, and sexual behaviors in U.S. society. Three of these films are historical westerns; the remaining four are contemporary westerns. In examining these films, we will focus on how filmmakers make use of historical settings and events (the settling of the United States, Battle of Little Big Horn, American Indian Movement, for example) to reflect on contemporary problems such as race relations, interracial relationships, masculine ideals, feminism, and homophobia. We begin with John Ford’s classic western, The Searchers (1956), whose plot involves a white man’s attempt to rescue his niece who has been abducted in an Indian attack in the 1870s and who comes close to killing her because he considers her to be irredeemably sullied by her marriage to an Indian. Then we will move to the period of the late 1960s, early 1970s, when in the midst of the Viet Nam War protests and Civil Rights movements of that era, some filmmakers began to create new narratives about Indians and Cowboys (decades ahead of Dances with Wolves). We will analyze how one of these revisionist westerns, Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), offers a satiric retelling of the Indian wars and the settling of the West. From there, we move into the 1990s to look at how a feminist director, Maggie Greenwald, reworks other themes of the classic historical western in The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), a film that is also set in the 1865-1890 period and is purportedly based on the “true story” of a white woman who passes for a man, and who– as Greenwald imagines—voluntarily engages in a clandestine sexual relationship with her Chinese servant. In our second unit, we will look to westerns set in a contemporary moment (rather than the nineteenth century), and explore romantic relationships that cross either racial or gender boundaries as a metaphor for thinking about the impact that history has had on individuals and society. First, we will examine Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996), which is set in the 1990s but uses flashbacks to reflect on the 1960s, and which is also a murder mystery, featuring several interracial romances as part of its plot to raise fundamental questions about what purposes U.S. history should serve. Then we will turn to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), which is also set in the 1960s and explores homophobia—both internalized and external variants. Finally, we will look at two films made by native-American directors that directly challenge Hollywood’s racial constructions of the Indian, ending the course with Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998) and Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing (2002). 

Students will learn how to situate these seven Hollywood films in various historical contexts so as to speculate about how they were understood by audiences at their original release dates, along with what meanings these texts may hold for us today. One of our central concerns will be to ask whether the meanings of these films have changed over time—taking us into the thorny area of how best to interpret cultural texts that are produced in one historical moment (about another historical moment) but continue to circulate in a third historical moment. We will also explore what makes a Hollywood film “good” from a historical, as opposed to aesthetic, perspective. Is it some correspondence/affirmation of an already-known past, or an ability to offer new insights and perspectives about history? Is it because it lends itself to competing interpretations or generates meaningful reflection? Or perhaps the historical value of a film lies elsewhere— in the way it changes our understanding of both past and present, as well as how we think about the possibilities for the future.