The authenticity paradox and the western

This chapter explores the question of how authenticity can be claimed for the Western genre when in Baudrillardian (1994) terms it is its own simulacrum. Despite this authenticity paradox the Western genre continues to be a draw for film and television/streaming services’ storytellers and directors. When American wants to tell stories about itself the Western’s allegorical power is harnessed. Close analysis of Hostiles (Cooper, 2017) and The Lone Ranger (Verbinski, 2013) focuses on how the Western’s “negative capability” is chanelled through the cinematographic representation of the natural landscape drawing upon the discourse of the American sublime (Arensberg, 1986, Wilson, 1991). The chapter argues that once we begin to embrace the genre’s incapacity for authenticity exemplified by the two films under consideration; with contrasting narrative intentions, box office results and critical acclaim, but both drawing from the genre’s bank of iconographic images, we can move beyond the rhetoric of authenticity.