Nothing Wrong: Law and the Contemporary American Western

This dissertation explores the representation and function of law in contemporary American Westerns of fiction and film, arguing that the Western revolves around a constitutive exception wherein the founding of law by the heroic, autonomous protagonist within the fantastic lawless space of the Frontier is possible only through—indeed, is nothing but—the exclusion of the racialized Other from law’s aegis. The first chapter examines Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove tetralogy, focusing on how the eponymous novel’s thematic and diegetic use of law reflects McMurtry’s attempt to de-mythologize the Western—an attempt that paradoxically results in a Western par excellence. The Coen Brothers’ cinematic adaptation of True Grit is the subject of the second chapter, which avers that the film’s central premise of extralegal capital punishment reflects the use of drones in the ongoing War on Terror, and that its attempts to undermine representations of state and patriarchal authority are in fact direct expressions of that authority’s stability. The third chapter analyzes the Westerns of Cormac McCarthy, asserting that McCarthy achieves a critique of the Western by adhering precisely to its conventions and thereby exposing its limits: its ritualized depiction of law's founding depends on the projection of lawlessness into Native American space and onto the ideological figure of the Indian. The coda that closes this dissertation reads James Welch's Fools Crow as an inverted Western to consider the Native American literary response to the genre’s bifurcating effect upon indigenous cultures and identities. Slavoj Žižek’s critique of contemporary ideology and his analysis of the political dimension of enjoyment, along with Giorgio Agamben’s interrogation of the structure of political and legal authority, furnish this work with its theoretical foundation, which thereby addresses the Western from a combined sociopolitical and psychoanalytic perspective. This dissertation is the first scholarly consideration of the role law plays in Westerns, and it is one of few to examine the contemporary Western, thereby filling in two major gaps in the critical appreciation of one of the most significant yet understudied endemic American genres.