The War on Terror and Intersecting Film Genres in Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex was created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga for DC Comics in the early 1970s. In the course of time, he became a hero of a long-running series of comic strips (1977–2005, two volumes) and was featured in a variety of crossovers with other characters from the DC universe. He then appeared in a series of Batman cartoons in the 1990s. The choice of Jonah Hex for the protagonist of a feature film was thus a natural outcome of his continuing presence in the American popular imagination. Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex premiered in 2010, featuring an impressive cast, with Josh Brolin as the eponymous hero, Megan Fox as prostitute Lilah, his beloved, John Malkovitch as Quentin Turnbull, his enemy, and Michael Fassbender as Burke, Turnbull’s most trusted helper. This article offers an analysis of the film, focusing on its two aspects: the modification of the convention of the Western and the construction of the political subtext. Jonah Hex is based on a confusing, excessive combination of genres, but the Western remains its most easily recognizable narrative schema, which testifies to the resilience of the Western in films that undo its rules through some kind of exaggeration. The present chapter demonstrates that even though a number of conventions come to mind in reference to Hayward’s film, its generic status essentially depends on a parallel employment of the Western and the superhero action film in which the protagonist with a superhuman gift fights with an obsession-driven villain who has control over a weapon of mass destruction. The connection between these two genres