Category: Cultural Studies

V Samuel R. Delany understands more of the myth in his novel The Einsten Intersection (1968), where Billy the Kid appears as a redheaded boy with gold lashes and transparent skin whose eyes ‘had no whites, only glittering gold and brown … dog’s eyes in a human face: “My mother called me Bonny William,” the […]

IV The reality and fantasy of Billy the Kid contain the social issues. Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) needed Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson to attract a public, and in 1974 Dirty Little Billy, starring the radically unheroic Michael J. Pollard, was advertized at the Hiram College, Ohio, cinema Under the […]

III Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains described the development of the cattle kingdoms of the American West and of the cowboy who worked the ranches and ranges. The Homestead Law of 1862, the invention of barbed wire in 1874, and the advent of the windmill, the railway, artificial irrigation systems, and the automobile combined […]

II The technological morality of gangster and police movies provides a full iconography from the Thirties onwards. The obvious symbolism of black and white shirts is there in cowboy films, of course, together with other ancient characterizations: blonde and brunette, fair and darker skins. But clothing and other ‘extensions of man’ furnish gangster films with […]