UC Berkeley

In its analysis of four postwar Westerns (the films The Last Sunset and Gunman’s Walk, and the television Westerns Have Gun—Will Travel and The Rifleman), this dissertation finds a contradictory ideological strain intrinsic to the genre’s frontier legacy, as well as a critical semiosis specific to its production era. By centralizing the postwar era’s domestic concerns over and against the genre’s typical emphasis on the frontier mythos associated with Theodore Roosevelt, these Westerns subvert the stereotypical frontier/civilization dyad. By reconceiving the genre in a way that privileges “civilization” over “frontier,” this dissertation shows that the crucible of “savage” Nature, which formerly determined the exceptionality of the Westerner’s masculine character (as a synecdoche for an exceptional national one), is a cultural production that turns against civilization itself. Denuded of their naturalizing origin, and depicted as social productions within the dramatic action, the gunmen protagonists of each of these four Westerns additionally appear as complex gender constructions. By juxtaposing allusions from each Western to the ideological and aesthetic history of the genre and the socio-political context of the postwar era, the dissertation approaches the Cold War era as similarly mythological, constructed, and contradictory. I demonstrate that the conventions of the genre correspond with the conventions of domestication and nuclearization specific to the postwar era. In the process, this dissertation locates and defines a semiotic function for, and of, each Western that highlights the distinct narrative modalities respective of their mediums. In this sense, Coming Home: The Western, Media, and Masculinity continues a scholarly tradition suited for American studies and gender studies, while approaching the genre via the modalities of comparative media studies and television studies.