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Chapter 2 Deconstructing Genres, Revising Masculinities, 1961-1969
In Chapter 1 I discussed the transition from wartime to postwar societies in the U.S. and Japan and the impact this transition had on the masculinities of the cowboy and samurai archetypes. Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Martin Ritt’s remake The Outrage dismissed the samurai and cowboy as ineffective and impotent, whereas Shichinen no Samurai and John Sturges’ remake The Magnificent Seven witnessed the elegiac withdrawal of the samurai and cowboy as once dominant models of masculinity. Consistent in all of these films is a sense of time passing, be it through the arrival of a train or the passing of a storm, and so it is that the masculinities of the cowboy and samurai are situated as historical constructions subject to change. In response to the seemingly obvious impermanence of masculine formations Todd W. Reeser states that ‘thinking of masculinities in historical terms contributes to the larger goal of disbanding simplistic or essentialist notions of masculinity.’1 In this chapter I will build on the historicity of cowboy and samurai masculinities in order to identify the shifts in hegemonic ideals of masculinity that arose out of the bilateral exchange between the U.S. and Japan in the 1960s.
The 1960s witnessed the fragmentation of heroic masculine traits that coincided with an increase in onscreen violence and chaos – violence that reflected a tumultuous decade witness to global student protests and vicious state responses, and the exposure of the bloody consequences of U.S. globalization and Cold War foreign policies. Kjetil Rödje explains that Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which will close this chapter, ‘can be seen as a film about violent men in violent times, striving to find a sense of meaning and direction in their chaotic existence.’2 This sense of violent men attempting to find meaning and direction is well suited to the cowboys and samurai discussed in this chapter, who likewise struggle to make sense of their role in a decade of chaos. Shifts in hegemonic constructions of masculinity reflected the emergence of newly fashioned conservative majorities in the U.S. and Japan, which reacted to the sense of chaos by endorsing complacency, consumption and conservative morality. This conservative turn took the shape of Nixon’s silent majority and Japan’s slow return to militarism and exceptionalism under the guise of Cold War defence policies and economic stimulation. In Japan, the yakuza and salaryman would compete with the samurai as dominant models of masculinity deemed fit to embrace the competitive impetus of Japan’s economic miracle. In the U.S., the cowboy was uncomfortably positioned alongside the soldiers in Vietnam and it became all the more apparent that the western had overstayed its welcome as the nation’s defining myth.
The violence and chaos evident in the westerns and jidaigeki of the 1960s not only made apparent the failure of the cowboy and samurai to function as bastions of civilized, masculine stability in the postwar period, but it also became clear that men could be victims of patriarchal domination. R.W. Connell notes that ‘men’s dominant position in the gender order has a material payoff,’ which she calls the ‘patriarchal dividend.’3 These benefits made it unlikely for men to emphatically embrace feminism or a rejection of patriarchal norms that might diminish that payoff. However, Connell also clarifies that not all men benefit from the patriarchal dividend, and in response to the violence and chaos of the 1960s, patriarchies in the U.S. and Japan were targeted by feminists and men alike. That the patriarchy could work to victimize men contributed to the discourse of a crisis of masculinity and gave ascendancy to the image of ‘the white male as victim.’4 Rather than accept the abuses of patriarchal domination, with which they had once been complicit, the cowboys and samurai discussed in this chapter dismantle patriarchal institutions and the national mythologies that had normalized masculine hegemonies, not to rescue women from the abuses of masculine domination, but to save men from their own destruction.
To build on Todd Reeser’s insistence on the historicity of masculinities I will discuss the hybrid formations that became prominent in the 1960s. Demetrakis Demetriou suggests that hegemonic masculinity is not a formation that dismisses less desirable forms, but is rather a ‘hybrid bloc that unites practices from diverse masculinities in order to ensure the reproduction of patriarchy.’5 Demetriou contends that ‘it is its constant hybridization, its constant appropriation of diverse elements from various masculinities that makes the hegemonic bloc capable of reconfiguring itself and adapting to the specificities of new historical conjunctures.’6 In the 1960s it was clear that the cowboy and samurai no longer represented desired forms of masculinity and they could not be easily reconfigured or adapted to suit the chaotic conditions of the 1960s. Rather than hybridize the identity formations of the old archetypes, the films discussed in this chapter set the old masculine types in direct opposition to the emerging hegemonic blocs being established by a new generation of patriarchs. The 1960s witnessed the violent death throes of the cowboy and samurai as they presaged their departure as hegemonic archetypes of maleness. The stability of the cowboy and samurai, which may have once normalized and naturalized the domination of men over women and Othered, non-hegemonic men, gave way to gender multiplicities and hybrid formations at a historical juncture where the fragmentation of personal selves coincided with perceived ruptures in the homogeneity and hegemony of nation-states.
In the United States and Japan personal politics became entangled with discourses of national identity, even if many cultural forms refused to acknowledge the conflict. In the United States hegemonic masculinity could no longer be accepted as white, heterosexual and dominant when women’s liberation movements, civil rights protests, gay pride parades and anti-war rallies were gaining traction throughout the decade. In Japan, masculinity could no longer necessitate the virtues of loyalty and honour as student protests brought light to Japan’s increased militarism and the suppression of worker’s unions after the nation aligned itself with the United States and its Cold War diplomacy. And although feminism and the visibility of homosexuality in Japan were stifled by a broad acceptance of conservative norms based on economic growth, as well as the reluctance of many men to forgo the existing patriarchal order,7 gender and sexual discrimination was no longer considered to be acceptable to those who embraced democratic values beyond granting women the vote (first exercised in the election of April, 1946).8 The hybridized masculinity that emerged from the conflicts of the 1960s undermined the established male protagonists of both westerns and jidaigeki, whose dominant masculine qualities seemed ill-fitted to a world where the patriarchal social structure could no longer be accepted as benevolent. The directors discussed in this chapter created male anti-heroes who no longer served the existing patriarchy; they either chose to rise against it, or opted out of society entirely. In doing so, these characters also altered the performances of masculinity that had once rendered them heroic. Beginning in 1961, with Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, these anti-heroes culminated in some of the most memorable characters of both westerns and jidaigeki, but their arrival also beckoned the demise of both genres.
In the 1960s hybrid masculine identities coincided with hybrid explorations in film genres that began to deconstruct the national mythologies of the western and jidaigeki. Critiques of these national mythologies rendered the genres that relied on them untenable in their traditional forms. For Akira Kurosawa, his critique of Japan’s culpability and hypocritical stance in its Cold War relationship with the United States would contribute to the nameless drifter of Yojimbo who represented a violent departure from traditional samurai characteristics. It was a figure that would inspire Sergio Leone’s anarchic gunslinger in Per un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), a film that echoed a similar sentiment of dismay over Italy’s own postwar political and social developments and its relationship with the United States. Both Kurosawa and Leone saw in the American western an opportunity to critique and debunk the narrative of America’s manifest destiny during a period when the influence of the United States on both Italy and Japan (and the world) had become unpopular, particularly among those recovering from Japanese and Italian militarist institutions who witnessed similar fascist tendencies in America’s global policies. Both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars were immensely popular nationally and globally, and their animosity towards once sacred masculine archetypes resonated with a counter-cultural celebration of rebellion against narratives of conformity and national exceptionalism. In August 1969, just three months after the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch shocked viewers with a festival of violence largely inspired by the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, which effectively brought an end to the possibility of the traditional American western serving any purpose beyond naive nostalgia. The irrelevance of samurai virtues in Japan’s postwar focus on economic growth undermined the narratives of jidaigeki, while international perspectives on the American western rendered the myth of America’s manifest destiny culturally impotent. Through cultural and genre hybridity the worlds of the cowboy and samurai were brought closer together, at the same time as their respective mythologies were being torn apart.
Biting the Hand that Feeds You –Yojimbo (1961)
Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo begins with an image of striking brutality that is as shocking as it is appropriate, for it signals the director’s intention to subvert the very genre that had made him an international icon while framing the anarchic nature of his anti-hero. Upon entering a deserted village the titular yojimbo (bodyguard), played by Toshiro Mifune, watches as a wild dog runs past with a severed hand in its mouth. The association is that, like the dog, Mifune’s character is a man without a master – a rōnin, or masterless samurai. The connection between the wild animal and Mifune’s character has already been established in the opening credits of the film, which have the yojimbo scratch at his neck like a flea-ridden dog. It is a mannerism shared with Mifune’s bandit in Rashomon and his character Kikuchiyo in Sichinin no Samurai. Kurosawa’s audience are being introduced to a man they think they know; a man untamed by civilization, flawed, but nevertheless governed by a code of honour even if it is a code that only he follows. But whereas the bestial nature of Mifune’s previous characters had been associated with sexual vigour and an energetic unpredictability, in Yojimbo the link to wild animals connotes mere savagery and a disconnection from the laws of man. An upbeat, anachronistic score ‘played by the wrong instruments’ accompanies the yojimbo’s indifference to the brutal sight.9 Within moments he will himself be severing the arm of one of the town’s many gangsters as he plays two rival factions against each other. In the narrative of the film the yojimbo is figuratively biting the hand that feeds him by allowing the two factions to annihilate each other. Kurosawa’s use of the anachronistic score and the graphic depiction of brutal violence bite at the traditional form of jidaigeki that he himself had revolutionized with Rashomon and Shichinin no Samurai.
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto describes the emergence and popularity of Toei jidaigeki in the 1950s as predictable narratives of good triumphing against evil based on kabuki formulas and popular Japanese tales (such as Chūshingura, known in the West as the tale of the forty-seven rōnin). Evil is represented by the villain who ‘thinks’ and good is represented by a swordsman who has no need to question an inherent sense of justice.10 In the tale of Chūshingura, which has numerous film adaptations, the forty-seven rōnin who seek revenge for their dead lord are faulted precisely for taking too long to ‘think’ of a course of action.11 Like the protagonists of the films, Toei jidaigeki affirmed the unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo shattered this formulaic approach to the genre, and the film’s immense popularity delivered a ‘fatal blow’ to Toei jidaigeki.12 Traditional narratives could no longer reflect the chaos of Japanese society, and traditional heroes could no longer be relied upon to serve as role models. In a deliberate inversion of Toei norms, Toshiro Mifune’s wandering samurai is repeatedly depicted stroking his beard in thought as he considers the next stage of his plan. He becomes a director of the action. He writes and reacts to the script as events unfold, and he refuses to commit his loyalty to either warring faction, for they are both equally evil in his eyes.13 The yojimbo represents the film director, Kurosawa himself, the auteur at odds with either faction of Japan, be it the left, the right, or the impassive majority. Whether he is sitting atop a watchtower gleefully observing a battle unfold, or impassively watching as a village inspector is bribed, the yojimbo participates in the action only insofar as doing so furthers his own interests.
Yojimbo is a hybrid construction that emerged from an original, intertextual screenplay which departed from the traditional narratives common to jidaigeki. James Goodwin explains that Macbeth is the primary intertext for Kurosawa’s 1957 feature, Throne of Blood, rather than the basis for a Shakespearean adaptation.14 In the intertextual narrative of Throne of Blood, Toshiro Mifune’s samurai lord becomes imbued with many of Macbeth’s crises of masculinity.15 In a similar fashion, Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929), featuring the character of the Continental Op, becomes the primary intertext of Yojimbo. Like the yojimbo of Kurosawa’s film, the Continental Op cleans out a town corrupted by two rival factions by playing one group against the other. Both characters remain nameless, defined by their function in society. Cyrus Patell writes that upon its release Red Harvest ‘reinvigorated heroic individualism within the domain of popular culture, even as the ideology was being discredited within the domain of political and economic theory.’16 Such a description is equally applicable to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which likewise celebrated individualism at a time when Japan was embracing the profitability of conformity combined with an efficient wartime model of ‘cartel’ production.17 Hammett’s hero was immediately poignant in a society forced to confront the failings of its economic system in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Reliant on a corrupt bubble of prosperity, Japan’s economy would suffer a similar crash when the bubble burst in 1991, but even in 1961 Yojimbo existed as a warning to those eagerly embracing Japan’s peacetime consensus. Like the Continental Op, Mifune’s yojimbo is an outsider hastening the demise of a town corrupted by greed. By default, both of these characters become moral agents, because ‘alternatives to corruption are nowhere to be seen.’18
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was an allegorical treatise on the corruptive consequences of greed in American society. Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo complicates the allegory by expanding the scope of the corruption beyond national borders. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Cold War had created a divisive rift between those on the ‘left’ and those on the ‘right,’ and by 1960 it was clear that America’s foreign policy with Japan had a village inspector is bribed, the yojimbo participates in the action only insofar as doing so furthers his own interests.
Yojimbo is a hybrid construction that emerged from an original, intertextual screenplay which departed from the traditional narratives common to jidaigeki. James Goodwin explains that Macbeth is the primary intertext for Kurosawa’s 1957 feature, Throne of Blood, rather than the basis for a Shakespearean adaptation.14 In the intertextual narrative of Throne of Blood, Toshiro Mifune’s samurai lord becomes imbued with many of Macbeth’s crises of masculinity.15 In a similar fashion, Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929), featuring the character of the Continental Op, becomes the primary intertext of Yojimbo. Like the yojimbo of Kurosawa’s film, the Continental Op cleans out a town corrupted by two rival factions by playing one group against the other. Both characters remain nameless, defined by their function in society. Cyrus Patell writes that upon its release Red Harvest ‘reinvigorated heroic individualism within the domain of popular culture, even as the ideology was being discredited within the domain of political and economic theory.’16 Such a description is equally applicable to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which likewise celebrated individualism at a time when Japan was embracing the profitability of conformity combined with an efficient wartime model of ‘cartel’ production.17 Hammett’s hero was immediately poignant in a society forced to confront the failings of its economic system in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Reliant on a corrupt bubble of prosperity, Japan’s economy would suffer a similar crash when the bubble burst in 1991, but even in 1961 Yojimbo existed as a warning to those eagerly embracing Japan’s peacetime consensus. Like the Continental Op, Mifune’s yojimbo is an outsider hastening the demise of a town corrupted by greed. By default, both of these characters become moral agents, because ‘alternatives to corruption are nowhere to be seen.’18
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was an allegorical treatise on the corruptive consequences of greed in American society. Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo complicates the allegory by expanding the scope of the corruption beyond national borders. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Cold War had created a divisive rift between those on the ‘left’ and those on the ‘right,’ and by 1960 it was clear that America’s foreign policy with Japan had intensified Japan’s ‘susceptibility to the polarization of the Cold War.’19 On the left, Japan’s Communist Party (JCP) had immediately attempted to maintain communications with, and funding from, Stalin’s Soviet Russia, which ostensibly established the formation of two Japans pulled in opposite directions by two disparate superpowers.20 Having already participated in the split of Japan into two opposing sides, the JCP itself became fractured as radicals and student protestors felt the party had become ineffectual, while ‘average’ citizens feared the party had become a tool of the Soviet Union.21 The result of this factional rivalry was escalating violence that became ‘the hallmark of student radicalism in the 1960s.’22 Meanwhile, the United States became actively involved in re-militarizing Japan’s political right so as to undermine the perceived communist threat, which involved “purging” leftists and “de-purging” formerly disgraced militarists.23 Support from the United States in purging communists coincided with the involvement of the yakuza, who repressed (often violently) the leftist opposition of trade unions and political parties.24 Tensions between the two groups escalated with Japan’s “passive” involvement in the Korean War when its decommissioned war-time industries were rekindled to serve America’s war machine.
Marie Thorston Morimoto argues that the yojimbo represents Japan ‘carrying on with its economic plan – even playing one superpower off against the other – often as if it were entirely independent from the situation, a rōnin in the world of nation-states.’25 While this interpretation is certainly valid, it largely redeems Japan from its active complicity in the Cold War, as the corrupt village becomes a stand-in for global corruption, rather than a microcosm of Japan’s own schismatic society. Morimoto’s interpretation also overlooks the bitter and ineffectual rivalry between Japan’s political left and right, which had become so entrenched and radicalized in their positions that they were unable to be brought ‘into the same room, much less have a real discussion.’26 Democracy existed in Japan, but the cartelization of politics and industries muted any dialogue between opposing sides, and in the meantime the career-minded, soon to be hegemonic, figure of the salaryman ignored political activism altogether.
Within the popular mythos of Japan’s postwar gendered society the salaryman emerged as a dominant hybrid masculinity which fused samurai values of loyalty and self-sacrifice with the mercantile ambitions of the patriarchal head of the household.27 Aligned with international narratives where ‘business was war in bilateral economics,’ the Japanese businessman as samurai warrior was adopted by Japan as a hegemonic role model to be feared by men in the United States.28 However, Kurosawa does not accept the hybrid salaryman-samurai masculine figure. Toshiro Mifune’s beard-scratching rōnin might lack the traditional characteristics of the loyal samurai (namely, devoted service to a master), but he does at least adhere to a code of honour. Conversely, the symbolic salaryman in Yojimbo becomes hybridized with the world of gamblers, thugs and yakuza, and his participation within society merely hastens its moral corruption. Kurosawa does not differentiate between the Machiavellian world of Japan’s postwar economics and the yakuza underworld that thrived off of Japan’s postwar growth, and he identifies the breakdown of the family unit as a consequence of this moral decay.29
The film opens with a family dispute, in which a son tells his parents that he is moving into the village to become a gambler. The son is effectively leaving his home to become a salaryman so that he can earn a living and become the patriarch of the household. The son’s physical act of entering the village at the centre of the action in Yojimbo evokes the phrase ‘shakaijin no naru’ (becoming an adult), which ‘denotes entering society.’30 Although the phrase can apply to both men and women, its association with entering the workplace primarily links it to men; in effect, women are prevented from entering the ‘adult’ world just as the son’s mother remains at home in the film.31 One of the basic tenets of the salaryman doxa was the reinstatement of gendered distinctions between private and public. Women were expected to remain in the private sphere to care for the home, while men dominated the public sphere.32 Kurosawa rebukes the gendered differentiation of the sexes by depicting the young gambler’s mother working a loom. Throughout the action of the film she is the only character to produce anything; the men trade only in death. The mother’s involvement in the film is minimal, and to suggest that Kurosawa is engaging with women’s liberation might be an overstatement, but she certainly serves to emphasize the productive role of Japanese women within the domestic sphere of the household.33 Yojimbo begins with the family unit being dismantled by the son’s desire to enter the mature world. But, as we discover, the mature world is rife with corruption, violence, and greed. After the final battle of the film, after all of the gamblers and yakuza are dead, the son returns home. Only with the eradication of the salaryman’s village can the family prosper, held aloft by the productivity of a working mother.
Akira Kurosawa condemns the salaryman archetype for being composed of undesirable qualities of the yakuza, while contemporary popular representations of the yakuza attempted to imbue gangsters with samurai values. Toei’s jidaigeki were rendered redundant by Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but the genre was already in decline as yakuza-eiga (literally, yakuza films) emerged with their hard-edged narratives and gritty, hyper-masculine protagonists. Acknowledging the shifting trend, Toei began mass-producing yakuza films in the late 1950s and 1960s, including the films of Kihachi Otomoto, Masahiro Shinoda, and Seijun Suzuki. To legitimize yakuza as desirable, masculine heroes, popular yakuza-eiga focused on the exploits of “good,” that is to say, loyal, gangsters while the cinematic samurai became “bad” rōnin.
In Kurosawa’s film the difference between the yojimbo and the yakuza is established through action. The yakuza pose and scheme, but they do not act; the yojimbo schemes, but he punctuates his plans with violent action. Keiko Iwai McDonald attributes the growing popularity of the postwar yakuza film to ‘Japan’s status as a newly independent nation,’ which ‘called for virtues such as charismatic leadership, group loyalty, and social harmony.’34 Kurosawa consciously critiques the ‘rising cult of the yakuza’ by depicting his gangsters as cowards, drunkards, and inferior men who contribute to social disharmony.35 The gang bosses are ineffectual and impotent, easily coerced by manipulative wives. Prostitutes are seen early in the film as the yojimbo enters the town, but their presence is not referred to again, as if to suggest the impotence of the gangsters who are too busy drinking and gambling to be sexually active. Alluding to the classic western High Noon, a confrontation between the two opposing factions is scheduled for midday, the local guard acting as an unofficial time keeper to signal the combatants. But the battle is a farce, with gangsters from each side unwilling to confront each other. Akira Kurosawa makes it clear that the yakuza do not constitute a suitable form of hegemonic masculinity, for they do not fulfill the patriarchal expectations of leadership and empowerment. With his anachronistic score and deliberate departure from jidaigeki conventions through the allusions to Red Harvest, Kurosawa was able to further enrich the intertextuality of Yojimbo by embracing the ‘grammar’ of the American western, which he had been well versed in ever since watching the westerns of William S. Hart as a child.36 D.P. Martinez argues that Yojimbo is clearly structured as a western, with a visual grammar that recalls High Noon and Shane.37 However, Kurosawa subverts this visual grammar, and the conventions of the western, so as to debunk the myth of American exceptionalism and critique the manipulative relationship the U.S. was developing with Japan. In effect, Akira Kurosawa bites at the hand of the American western. Audiences well versed in the western were comfortable with the lone gunman riding off into the sunset at the close of the film after the triumph of good over evil (in its simplest form). Thus, Gary Cooper’s marshal is able to ride out of the town in High Noon without turning his back, because civilisation has been saved. And although the occupants of the town had cowered in fear, they nevertheless represented a ‘good,’ redeemable society dependant on righteous men to act on their behalf.38 In a sardonic twist of this narrative convention the lone yojimbo leaves only three survivors in the town when he is finished; he has not so much preserved civilisation as participated in its destruction, because no one in the town is worth saving. Kurosawa subverts the moral justification of violence in American westerns by deliberately complicating the convenient dualism between good and evil, rendering the actions of the hero morally ambiguous.39 The moral ambiguity of the “hero” and the immorality of the town he ironically “saves” can be read as a critique of America’s Cold War policy, ‘which took a simplistic, binary view of the world as being divided between the Soviet Union with its desire to conquer the world and the non-Communist bloc.’40 While many American Cold War westerns justified foreign intervention as a necessary battle between good and evil (John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven being one such example), in Yojimbo Kurosawa suggests that the Cold War was a battle of two equally pernicious powers, with the only conceivable result of their rivalry being mutually assured destruction.
By borrowing, and undermining, the conventions of the western, Akira Kurosawa is able to simultaneously critique both the Japanese and American male archetypes that had articulated masculine virtue. If the yojimbo represents an embittered, amoral samurai, the rival gunfighter, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, exists as his cowboy doppelganger.
Contents
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Note on Japanese Names and Translations
Glossary of Japanese Terms
Introduction Where have all the good guys gone?
Bilateral History of Cowboys and Samurai
Midnight for the Cowboy, Twilight of the Samurai
The Good, The Bad, The Crisis
The U.S. and Japan in the Postwar
Bi/Trans-national Crisis
Framing the Crisis of Cowboys and Samurai
Chapter 1: Remaking Men in Rashomon, Shichinin no Samurai, The Magnificent Seven and The Outrage
Masculinity at War’s End
Masculinity, War Memory, Rape and Rashomon
“Just when everything seems tranquil…” – Kanbei, Shichinin no Samurai
The Magnificent Seven and America’s Cold Frontiers
The Outrage at the Cowboy’s Demise
Men at Postwar’s End
Chapter 2: Deconstructing Genres, Revising Masculinities, 1961-1969
Biting the Hand that Feeds You –Yojimbo (1961)
Masculinity with No Name – Clint Eastwood’s Cowboy in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Last Stop is Vietnam: The Wild Bunch (1969)
Closing the New Frontier
Chapter 3: Cowboys and Indians and Samurai: Negotiating Masculinities through Racial Difference
The Red Sun Rises in the West
All Signs Point East/West
No Country for Old Samurai
Beyond Negotiation at the Forefront of Frontiers
Chapter 4: Cowboys, Samurai and the Uncanny in Westworld, RoboCop and Sengoku Jieitai
The Uncanny Antagonist in Westworld (1973)
Do RoboCops Dream of Electric Frontiers?
The Uncanny Space-Time of Japan’s SDF in Sengoku Jieitai
We Were Samurai
They’ll Be Back
Chapter 5: Becoming Cowboys, Samurai, Transnational in The Last Samurai, Wanderer of the Great Plains and Kill Bill vol.1 and 2
The Last Cowboy Becomes a Samurai
Becomings Cowboy, Ainu, Japanese
Becomings Bride, Woman, Masculine in Kill Bill vol.1 and 2
Can Cowboys and Samurai Just Be?
Chapter 6: Sampling Masculinities in Afro-Samurai, Ghost Dog: Way of the Warrior, Wild Wild West and Django Unchained
Afro Samurai and Sampling Blackness in Techno-colour
Sampling Chocolate and Vanilla Ice-cream in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai
Wicky Wild Will Smith
Unchained Melodies in Django Unchained
Keeping it Real
Conclusion: Learning to Live with Multiplicity in Sukiyaki Western Django
Multiplying Hegemonies
“Which Side Are You On?”
Learning to Live with Multiplicity
Bibliography
Filmography
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