There Will Be No Country For Jesse James
An examination of America’s decline through the Neo-Western film genre.
2007 was a period of burgeoning insecurity for the USA — it had been six years since the towers fell (unofficially terminating the American Century), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were looking more and more disastrous by the day, and though the Global Financial Crisis had not fully taken root, the housing market was starting to quiver suspiciously. That supposedly shatterproof American confidence was in the process of a sober reevaluation.
In light of this, it seems ostensibly intuitive that 2007 would also see a revival of the thoroughly American film genre, the Western. While the world was growing increasingly complex and unparsable, Westerns were a theoretically potent form of escapism: a reversion to simplistic storylines of good and evil archetypes set in a time before things got so weird. Instead, audiences were treated to the subversive Neo-Westerns There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) and No Country For Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen).
I recently re-watched these films as an eight-hour triple feature and was struck by how well they harmonised. Aside from a mutual genre and release year, these films also have common…
