| Summary: | This dissertation examines the Hollywood western through large-scale developments in lived experience in America after World War II, particularly in regard to the rapidly expanding middle class and in relation to the concomitantly expanding range of leisure and recreational activities the middle class had to choose from. The genre is placed in dialogue with other forms of artistic expression and leisure activities in order better to understand its place within the cinematic landscape and its impact on and intersection with extracinematic aspects of American culture during the long 1950s. This dissertation uses a mixture of formal analysis, cultural historiography, and empirical research to find moments in films that open onto important issues and aspects of the practice of filmmaking, the reception of films and television shows, and the formulation of American identity during the Cold War. The first chapter discusses intersections and parallel moments in the history, experience, and business of both tourism and location filmmaking in the American West. Chapter Two examines landscape aesthetics as they were articulated with new widescreen film formats in juxtaposition with the increased popularity of camping and outdoor activities as well as the rise of "big canvas" action painting. Chapter Three follows the western into the domestic sphere, as it appeared and was received on television, specifically by child viewers who could play with toy version of their heroes' weapons and clothes. Here the psychoanalytic theory of D.W. Winnicott informs my analysis of the practice of spectatorship. Chapter Four deals with the recurrent theme of gambling in westerns and the popularity and legalization of gambling in American society. In the conclusion I show how the success of the western actually contributed to the creation of the material conditions for its own impossibility as a viable cinematic genre. Here I draw attention to the exigencies of cinematic contingency as articulated by anachronistic appearances of condensation trails made by jet aircraft in the skies over what were ostensibly a scene from the late nineteenth century.
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