THE FRONTIER ANTITHESIS: THE QUENTIN TARANTINO’S WESTERN AND THE SECTIONALISM

Abstract

The western frontier of the United States became a defining element of its identity and national narrative since the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, and in the twentieth century, cinema through the western genre, crystallized essential elements that transformed the frontier into myth, and collaborated to strengthen the grandiose assumptions that the Americans attribute to themselves. Such a genre goes into crisis (of production and representation) in the late 1960s, but has been constantly taken up by some filmmakers, with Quentin Tarantino being one of the main responsible for revisiting the canons. This text proposes to analyze how Tarantino’s last two films, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, can be read as a reinterpretation and questioning of the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, repositioning the role of sectionalisms in the elaboration of the national narrative.