Staging the “Wild Wild East”: Decoding the Western in East Asian Films

Abstract

As the oldest film genre in American cinema that is “intimately… woven into the imaginative fabric of American life” (Langford 75), the Western has been adapted, revised and transplanted along its multiple historical and geocultural trajectories. From cinematic projections of the American frontier and Spaghetti Westerns to more self-reflective revisionist renditions and postmodern parody within and outside Hollywood, the Western’s global appeal bespeaks the genre’s inherent mobility and continued transmutations despite the apparent decline in production output and popular reception. Critical interest, on the other hand, seems to be waxing just as the Western as a mainstream genre is on the wane (Nachbar 179). While the box-office failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980) might have sealed the fate of the genre, film scholars have observed signs of its revival, albeit in augmented and hybridized forms in the global mediascape, noting in particular the intertwined processes of generic crossbreeding in postmodern film cultures and cross-cultural critical reception.¹ If post-centennial Westerns are struggling for a place in popular cinema in the twenty-first century, the question why the genre continues to inspire the cinematic imaginations of filmmakers working in, and across, different cultural contexts through adaptation and subversion is more complex than a desire to imitate or mimic a long-standing Hollywood paradigm.