The Master Film is a Western : The Mythology of the American West in the Cities of the Red Night Trilogy

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This essay traces the vestiges of Western literary and cinematic tropes in Cities of the Red Night, and discusses the development of the Master Film and the dominance of the Western genre in The Place of Dead Roads and some faint echoes of the mythology of the American West in the last book, The Western Lands. The dubious enchantment of cultural myth dominates the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, but particularly the second novel, The Place of Dead Roads, demonstrates that the myth of the American West serves both the powers of hegemony and resistance. In The Place of Dead Roads, the Master Film is unequivocally the Western, centered as it is on the shootist Kim Carsons as the “hero.” His tactic in his liberatory struggle is the warping, splicing and destruction of the narrative myth fabric, developed metaphorically as the “Master Film,” providing as it does a critique of the Western as reigning American cultural myth, as well as questioning the psychic or cognitive hegemony of any cultural myth.