¹ Jameson, Fredric, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2014), 91Google Scholar.

² Even though the “New Hollywood” is a contested periodization and some prefer the expression the “American New Wave,” it seems to retain some currency in the scholarly literature designating a certain mode of American filmmaking from approximately 1967 to 1980. See, for example, Kirshner, Jonathan and Lewis, Jon, eds., When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

³ Thomson, David, “The Decade When Movies Really Mattered,” in Elsaesser, Thomas, Horwath, Alexander and King, Noel, eds., The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 73–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Quoted in Biskind, Peter, Riders, Easy, Bulls, Raging: How Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 139Google Scholar.

⁵ It is important to note the debt the film's aesthetics owe to both Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague. Biskind notes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 338, that Bogdanovich successfully “melded American subjects with a European sensibility.”

⁶ Whilst the category of the “revisionist western” is a commonplace in western genre theory and broadly pertains to films that revise the colonial ideology of the genre, the other designations are less common. See, for example, Neil Campbell, Post-westerns: Cinema, Region, West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), at www-jstor-org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/j.ctt1ddr7x0, and McCracken, Janet, “The Non-western of the New West, 1973–1975,” Film & History, 44, 2 (2014), 82–97Google Scholar.

⁷ See, for example, Sueur, Marc Le, “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films: Heritage and Methods,” Journal of Popular Film, 6, 2 (1977), 187–97, 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Considine, David M., “The Cinema of Adolescence,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 9, 3 (1981), 123–36, 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 287Google Scholar.

⁹ For a recent discussion of this ideological orientation of 1980s Hollywood cinema see Needham, Gary, “Reaganite Cinema,” in Tzioumakis, Yannis and Molloy, Claire, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 312–22Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For a significant post-Freudian theorization of how narrative dynamics solicit a sense of desire in a literary context see Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brooks argues, “We can, then, conceive of the readings of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text. Narratives both tell of desire –  typically present some story of desire –  and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification. Desire is in this view like Freud's notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire but larger and more polymorphous, which (he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) seeks ‘to combine organic substances into ever greater unities.’ Desire as Eros, desire in its plastic and totalizing function, appears to me central to our experience of reading narrative, and if in what follows I evoke Freud – and, as a gloss on Freud, Jacques Lacan –  it is because I find in Freud's work the best model for a ‘textual erotics’.” Ibid., 37. For a discussion of the significance of a Freudian conception of desire in Jameson's narrative criticism see Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 2002), 50Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Wall, Geoffrey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)Google Scholar. Macherey argued that “the important thing [in cultural interpretation] is not a confused perception of the unity of the work, but a recognition of its transformations (its contradictions, as long as contradiction is not reduced to merely a new type of unity).” Ibid., 42. Jameson has repeatedly underscored the importance of this insight in his own work. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 41, 66.

¹² See Campbell, Post-westerns.

¹³ Holmes, Grayson, Zonn, Leo and Cravey, Altha J., “Placing Man in the New West: Masculinities of The Last Picture Show,” GeoJournal, 59, 4 (2004), 277–88, 278CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Whilst the categories of “civilization” and “wilderness” are today ideologically suspicious, the early pioneering genre theory of the western fundamentally articulated the conceptual terrain of the genre in these basic antinomic terms.

¹⁵ Quoted in Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 279.

¹⁶ See, for example, Kitses, Jim, “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western,” in Kitses, Jim and Rickman, Gregg, eds., The Western Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998), 57–68Google Scholar; Cawelti, John G., The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Wright, Will, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Quoted in McCracken, “The Non-western of the New West, 1973–1975,” 83.

¹⁹ Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, 174, that generic elements continue “to emit [their] ideological signals long after [their] original content has become historically obsolete.”

²⁰ Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 279.

²¹ Ibid., 278.

²² For discussions of the history of the sociological category of the “teenager” see Savage, Jon, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (London: Pimlico, 2008)Google Scholar; and Palladino, Grace, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996)Google Scholar.

²³ Giddings, Greg, “The Love Song of Larry J. McMurtry: The Last Picture Show,” Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas, 44 (2013), 57–64, 60Google Scholar.

²⁴ Crawford, Iain, “Intertextuality in Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show,” Journal of Popular Culture, 27, 1 (1993), 43–54, 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ McReynolds notes that, “like Ford, Bogdanovich uses the formal dance to establish social hierarchies and relationships. A great deal has already been written about Ford's development of social themes through the language of the ritual dance, in particular in My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), and The Searchers (1956).” See McReynolds, Douglas J., “Alive and Well: Western Myth in Western Movies,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 26, 1 (1998), 46–52, 48Google Scholar.

²⁶ Giddings, 63.

²⁷ Aitken, Ian, “The Redemption of Physical Reality” in Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 162–202, 185Google Scholar. This text offers a helpful historical survey of influential theories of cinematic realism.

²⁸ Ibid., 193.

²⁹ Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, 138, “Indeed, as any number of ‘definitions’ of realism assert, and as the totemic ancestor of the novel, Don Quixote, emblematically demonstrates, that processing operation variously called narrative mimesis or realistic representation has as its historic function the systematic undermining and demystification, the secular ‘decoding,’ of those preexisting inherited traditional or sacred narrative paradigms which are its initial givens. In this sense, the novel plays a significant role in what can be called a properly bourgeois cultural revolution – that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism. The ‘objective’ function of the novel is thereby also implied: to its subjective and critical, analytic, corrosive mission must now be added the task of producing as though for the first time that very life world, that very ‘referent’ – the newly quantifiable space of extension and market equivalence, the new rhythms of measurable time, the new secular and ‘disenchanted’ object world of the commodity system, with its post-traditional daily life and its bewilderingly empirical, ‘meaningless,’ and contingent Umwelt – of which this new narrative discourse will then claim to be the ‘realistic’ reflection.”

³⁰ This is of vital importance as in Jameson's discussion of “dialectical criticism” he notes the onus upon the critic to draw out the imagined but subconscious wish-fulfillment desires that are specific to the work's historically determinate situation that become the pretext for the conscious staging of the given narrative. See Jameson, Marxism and Form, 404–7.

³¹ Jameson parses the distinction between a negative and positive hermeneutics in these terms in Marxism and Form, 119: “We must … distinguish between what Paul Ricoeur has called negative and positive hermeneutics, between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of a restoration of some original, forgotten meaning, between hermeneutic as demystification, as the destruction of illusions, and a hermeneutic which offers renewed access to some essential source of life. For Ricoeur, of course, the latter cannot be imagined as anything other than the sacred, so that the only form of positive hermeneutic of which he is able to conceive remains an essentially religious one.”

³² Tompkins, Jane P., West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10Google Scholar.

³³ For a discussion of the relationship between “escapism,” wish fulfillment and the utopian impulses of classical Hollywood cinema see Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edn (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 33–40Google Scholar.

³⁴ Tompkins, West of Everything, 4.

³⁵ Ibid., 14, emphasis added.

³⁶ Cawelti offers an early statement of this connection in The Six-Gun Mystique, 68, suggesting that the western “is a fine example of what Frye calls the mythos of romance, a narrative and dramatic structure which he characterizes as one of the four central myths or story forms in literature, the other three being the comedy, tragedy and irony. As Frye defines it, ‘the essential element of plot in romance is adventure,’ and the major adventure which gives form to the romance is the quest. Thus, ‘the complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.’”

³⁷ This is a commonplace in the genre theory of the western but is perhaps most forcefully underscored as a generative contradiction by György Lukács in his analysis of the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, which can be regarded as the literary urtext of the western genre. Discussing the hero, Natty Bumppo, Lukács argues, “In this simple, popular figure who can only experience his tragedy emotionally, but not understand it, Cooper portrays the enormous historical tragedy of those early colonizers who emigrated from England in order to preserve their freedom, but who themselves destroy this freedom by their own deeds in America. Maxim Gorky expressed this tragedy very well: ‘As an explorer of the forests and prairies of the “New World” he blazes trails in them for people who later condemn him as a criminal because he has infringed their mercenary and, to his sense of freedom, unintelligible laws. All his life he has unconsciously served the great cause of the geographical expansion of material culture in a country of uncivilized people and found himself incapable of living in the conditions of this culture for which he had struck the first paths.’ Gorky shows here very finely how a great historical, indeed world-historical tragedy could be portrayed through the destiny of a mediocre man of the people.” See György Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 65.

³⁸ For discussions of the emergence of the road movie and narratives of political automobility see Mills, Katie, The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Film, Fiction and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Archer, Neil, The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Laderman, David, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, “Placing Man in the New West,” 285.

⁴⁰ See, for example, Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1950)Google Scholar. Discussing representations of “wilderness life,” Smith notes that “life in the mountains is especially attractive because of its unrestricted love and licensed polygamy. All the trappers have ‘an instinctive fondness for the reckless savage life, alternately indolent and laborious, full and fasting, occupied in hunting, fighting, feasting, intriguing, and amours, interdicted by no laws, or difficult morals, or any restraints, but the invisible ones of Indian habit and opinion’.” Ibid., 88.

⁴¹ Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 279.

⁴² Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 121.

⁴³ Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 285.

⁴⁴ The sense of sadness, loss and nostalgia that is fundamentally inscribed in the historical passing of the frontier in the western is described by many genre theorists. For a classical example see Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique. Cawelti notes that while the westerner hero “undertakes to protect and save the pioneers, this type of hero also senses that his own feelings and his special quality as a hero are bound up in the wilderness life. The outcome of Westerns which present this version of the hero are invariably more ambiguous and tragic.” Ibid., 54.

⁴⁵ Le Sueur, “Theory Number Five,” 187, 188, 189.

⁴⁶ For a recent example of this line of critical thought see Tom Symmons, “American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978): The Fifties as Myth and Comment,” in Symmons, The New Hollywood Historical Film 1967–78 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 159–94.

⁴⁷ Jameson, Postmodernism, xvii.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 19.

⁴⁹ See Jameson, Postmodernism, 19: “The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remains the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana but also the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs.”

⁵⁰ See Jameson, Postmodernism. He argues, “Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.” Ibid., 21.

⁵¹ These broad theoretical propositions, famously associated with the models of history advocated by Hegel and Marx, underpin Jameson's entire oeuvre. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism (1979),” in Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, Volume II, Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 148–77. Jameson argues that “Marxism also proposes a master code, but it is not, as is commonly thought, either that of economics or production in the narrow sense, but rather that very different category which is the ‘mode of production’ itself.” Ibid., 149. For an extended discussion of the classical Lukácsean critique of bourgeois thought as unable to grasp the historicity of capitalism as a mode of production characterized by immanent contradictions see Jameson, Marxism and Form, 182–90.

⁵² See note 49 above.

⁵³ Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Jameson, Marxism and Form, 82.

⁵⁵ Quoted in Redding, Arthur, “Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 35, 4 (2007), 313–22, 321Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 170. It is also worth quoting a similar and equally powerful passage: “Conceived in this sense, History is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.” Ibid., 87.

⁵⁷ Campbell, Post-westerns, 13.