Cowboys and Aliens

This chapter traces a trajectory within a genre, the Western, whose doubling is almost invariably implicit, to the point at which explicit doubling dawns — arguably, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Subsequently, the ‘final frontier’ of American consciousness moves to outer space, from legends with a real-world origin to an unabashedly fantastic base possibly chosen to preserve them from the real-world disconfirmation and critique the Western suffered in the 1960s. As the prototypical American story migrates from Monument Valley to the cosmos, it recovers the links to a 3-D aesthetic originally implicit in the Western, as the shot fired out of the screen in The Great Train Robbery (1903) violently connected screen-space with that of the auditorium; and so in Gravity (2013) the auditorium itself is populated in part by fragments of space- junk. Each genre, of course, is a story of impressive distances and their traversal, but the supplanting of the Western by science fiction may have occurred to render possible the explicit invocation of 3-D, whose glasses are a primitive form of the technology it privileges, rendering audiences themselves extensions of the film-machine.