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Johnny Guitar

Nicholas Ray's western Johnny Guitar is a film with character of heightened sensibilities and character traits. This is not a film of realism but of hyper-realism, with confrontations with life-or-death outcomes based on Western icons and images but carried to an extreme by the director. The structure of the film is such that it is difficult to ascertain who might be considered the hero, whether it would be Johnny or Vienna. The fact that the film is entitled Johnny Guitar does not settle the matter. Indeed, the film has a deliberately queer undertone that is demonstrated in a gender role reversal between the two main characters, with a particularly strong undertone of lesbianism in the conflict between Vienna and her primary enemy, Emma. Johnny is similarly paired with the gender-ambiguously named The Dancing Kid. An examination of the views of several critics will lead to an analysis of the issues to show that Vienna is the hero of the film while Johnny is a catalyst for much of the action, both deriving their positions from gender-role reversals and inviting a homosexual analysis of the film.

Jennifer Peterson discusses the film in terms of its allegorical use of politics and gender, noting that this use is highly contradictory. Peterson sees the film as misogynist. When the film was released, critics were taken aback by the way the film twisted generic conventions, for it featured not only male gunfighters but female gunfighters. The film also had a strong political subtext critical of the McCarthyism then in vogue in much of the country. Peterson accepts the idea that Ray set out to create a revisionist Western and that he did so by making the woman the hero. Peterson rightly points out that the film is difficult to pin down because of the richness of the various strands that make it up:

To a greater degree than many films it supports multiple and contradictory discourses, and analysis of it has usually focused o...

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Johnny Guitar. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:21, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682759.html