Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) has long been recognized as a quasi-adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), even if it relates much more closely to Hammett’s short story ‘Corkscrew’ (1925). Yojimbo was remade as the Italian Western Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone. The material finally ‘came home’ when Walter Hill adapted it as Last Man Standing (1996) that returns to the 1920s American desert town setting of the original story. This contribution seeks to examine the inflections of the individual incarnations that the material has undergone on its journey through various cultural contexts. The main argument is that the story of the outsider infiltrating a corrupt town and ‘cleansing’ it by playing off two gangs against each other has lent itself to commentary on transnational cultural exchange and mobility. ‘Corkscrew’ expresses anxiety over the integrity of cultural boundaries, Red Harvest expresses the inherent corruption of a ‘hermetic’ culture, Yojimbo uses the story to highlight the uneasy relation between tradition and Westernization in Japan while simultaneously drawing attention to Kurosawa’s status as ‘Western’ director and embraces a guarded cultural mobility, Fistful of Dollars empties the signs, icons, and narratives that make up the expressions of culture of any essentialist meanings and so stages cultural mobility as the shifting play of signifiers, endlessly transgressing acquired meanings and cultural boundaries, and Last Man Standing, finally, in reclaiming the Americanness of the story simultaneously forgoes any cultural specificity by reducing it to an excessive pastiche of prior elements.
The article explores the similarities of Westerns and war films and the ways in which the two genres have cross-fertilized each other since World War II. Central to their similarities are their efforts to render violence as a “regenerative” Slotkin means to establish or defend American civilization. Since the Vietnam War, however, the Western has taken a revisionist turn, and its subsequent evocations in war films expose the frontier ideology of justified violence in the name of the advancement of American civilization as a failed ideological project and highlight the imperialist aggression that connects America’s westward expansion with its military efforts. Using the example of Clint Eastwood’s film American Sniper 2014, the article argues that the use of Western elements in contemporary films about the Iraq War adds a sense of moral ambiguity to the portrayal of the hero, who exhibits a pathological obsession with a Western image of the righteous protector of civilization that is ultimately destructive to himself and the society he wants to protect.WESTERN A FILM WOJENNY — SNAJPER CLINTA EASTWOODA JAKO GATUNKOWA HYBRYDAArtykuł jest eksploracją podobieństw między westernem a filmem wojennym i sposobów, w jakie obydwa gatunki wzajemnie się przenikały od czasu II wojny światowej. Głównym ich podobieństwem jest próba prezentowania przemocy jako „odradzającego się” Slotkin środka służącego ustanowieniu bądź obronie amerykańskiej cywilizacji. Jednakże od wojny wietnamskiej western przeszedł rewizjonistyczny zwrot, a jego kolejne ewokacje w filmach wojennych eksponują ideologię Pogranicza będącą usprawiedliwieniem przemocy w imię zaawansowania amerykańskiej cywilizacji jako projektu ideologicznego upadłego i ukazują imperialistyczną agresję, która łączy amerykańską ekspansję na zachód z jej militarnymi wysiłkami. Na przykładzie Snajpera Clinta Eastwooda 2014 niniejszy esej przekonuje, że zastosowanie westernowych elementów we współczesnych filmach o irackiej wojnie przydaje moralnej dwuznaczności portretowi bohatera, przejawiającego patologiczną obsesję westernowym image’em prawego obrońcy cywilizacji, skrajnie destrukcyjnego wobec siebie oraz społeczeństwa, które chce osłaniać. Przeł. Kordian Bobowski
Edward Albee’s stage adaptation (1981) of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) is universally regarded as an unqualified failure. This contribution seeks to recover the play from critical neglect by arguing that it not just productively interprets and transforms the source text but also critically comments on its implications regarding the relationship between artist and creation, audience and art, and ethics and aesthetics. The play features an anthropomorphised equivalent to the novel’s implied author in the character of ‘A Certain Gentleman’ (ACG), a figure uniting features of (imagined) Nabokov and Albee, who introduces himself to the audience as the creator of Humbert and guides them through the plot while commenting on the action, alternatively trying to distance himself from his creation, trying to teach him moral values, or admonishing the audience to show empathy. In the interplay of Humbert, Lolita, and ACG, the play stages an emancipatory dialogue between artist and creation, using the presentational character of (epic) theatre to level diegetic hierarchies. Just as Lolita emancipates itself from Nabokov in the act of adaptation, so Humbert emancipates himself from ACG and Lolita from Humbert. In the same way, the play encourages an emancipation on the part of the audience from a position of passive spectatorship by cultivating a critical engagement with the discordant discourses of theatrical narration, presentation, and spectatorship in a dialogic of identification and distance.
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