De-Suturing the Cinematic American West: Pushing Beyond Revision and Exploring a Re-Spatialization of the Frontier

This project looks at Frederick Scott Turner's Frontier Thesis which posits the Western United States as a crucible of American identity formation and uses it to analyze the cinematic representations that unfold in the scope of the Western Genre, seeing traditional Westerns as socially limited in their portrayal of the frontier. Using spatial theory of Edward Soja's Thirdspace and film theory of Stephen Heath's "Narrative Space", this work highlights the problems of the Western as it dominates and excludes the possibilities for alternatives of spatial understanding of the region by using popular revisionist films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven. Seeing how these films fall short of reinterpreting space and instead reinforce exclusionary, problematic perspectives, this thesis looks to Meek's Cutoff, Smoke Signals and My Own Private Idaho as films that create Thirdspaces in constructing spatial meanings with those in alignment with perspectives of people marginalized by hegemonic power structures rampant in Western film and its mythic structure. Following this, Paris, Texas and Chungking Express will be explored as each offers us a new frontier of understanding of space and cinema by highlighting the problems of mediated spatial meaning. Their characters find freedom in de-suturing myth from space and media and ultimately provide an example for how to actively create a Thirdspace of a culturally laden locus.