engleski

SUBVERTING WESTERN GENRE IN JANE CAMPION'S THE POWER OF THE DOG

The article attempts to interrogate the reconfiguration of the western genre and its representation of masculinity in Jane Campion’s movie “The Power of the Dog” (2021). Comparatively analyzing the movie within the recent film and masculinity theory, the author observes cinematic concatenation of narrative figures and iconographic images which provide an imaginative potential of the western iconography that goes beyond the framework of the classic genre design and questions the aspect of traditional gender dynamics within the western genre. Theoretical studies on masculinity developed mainly from the feminist film theory, are the basis of analysis through which we try to look at the visual imagery and the symbolic representation of the movie’s main male character. The dramatic transformation of the protagonist, established through surprising narrative economization and the use of the western setting, results in fracturing the masculine heterosexual order, thus changing the very matrix of the genre and its paradigm which relies on the archetypal masculinity constructed on violence and action. The masculine identity tormented by homosexuality has destabilizing effect not only on the main protagonist and the genre, but also on the majority of the genre viewers. The narrative where the cowboy becomes an object of homoerotic gaze and is looked at, positions its male viewers among the concepts of scopophilia and voyeurism. This dangerous situation threatens not only to emasculate its audience, whose expectations persist on a traditional return to the heteronormatively desired qualities of a typical western hero, but it also looms over the existence of the traditional western genre.

Western genre, masculinity, representation, gender.

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