Wounded Knee Massacre
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Also known as neo-Westerns, these films have contemporary U.S. settings, and use Old West themes and motifs (a rebellious antihero, open plains and desert landscapes, and gunfights). These films have been on the rise since the release of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (2007). For the most part, they still take place in the American West and reveal the progression of the Old West mentality into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This subgenre often features Old West-type characters struggling with displacement in a "civilized" world that rejects their outdated brand of justice. Taylor Sheridan's filmography can be used as a template to identify what being a neo-Western film means, with three identifying themes. First is the lack of rules, with morals guided by the character's or audience's instincts of right and wrong rather than by governance. The second is characters searching for justice. The third theme, characters feeling remorse, connects the neo-Western film to the broader Western genre, reinforcing a universal theme that consequences come with actions.
Examples include Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952); John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955); Lonely Are the Brave, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo (1962), Hud, starring Paul Newman (1963); the Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy (1969) Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971); Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972); Junior Bonner (1972); Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974); Hearts of the West starring Jeff Bridges (1975); John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976); Alan J. Pakula's Comes a Horseman (1978); J. W. Coop (1972), directed/co-produced/co-written by and starring Cliff Robertson; Flashpoint (1984); Extreme Prejudice (1987); Robert Rodríguez's El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003); John Sayles's Lone Star (1996); The Way of the Gun (2000); Down in the Valley (2005); Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019); Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005); Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005); Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking (2005); Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (2007); Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2008); Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart (2009); Out of the Furnace (2013); The Rover (2014); Rambo: Last Blood (2019); El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019); Nomadland (2020); as well as George Miller's Mad Max franchise. The television shows Sons Of Anarchy (2008–2014); Justified (2010–2015), Longmire (2012–2017), Mystery Road (2018–present) and Yellowstone (2018–present) along with the Nicholas Winding Refn noir/satire mini series Too Old to Die Young (2019); Sicario (2015) and its sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018); Hell or High Water (2016); Wind River (2017) and Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021), all written by Taylor Sheridan; and the superhero film Logan (2017). Fallout: New Vegas (2010), Call of Juarez: The Cartel (2011) and Grand Theft Auto V (2013) are examples of Neo-Western video games. Likewise, the television series Breaking Bad and its spin off Better Call Saul, which both take place in modern times, feature many examples of Western archetypes. According to creator Vince Gilligan, "After the first Breaking Bad episode, it started to dawn on me that we could be making a contemporary Western. So you see scenes that are like gunfighters squaring off, like Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef—we have Walt and others like that."
The precursor to theseTemplate:Citation needed was the radio series Tales of the Texas Rangers (1950–1952), with Joel McCrea, a contemporary detective drama set in Texas, featuring many of the characteristics of traditional Westerns.
