Settler alienation: Jackson Mattocks, ‘Settler Alienation in the American West: Alienation, Loneliness And Colonial Masculinity Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Cairo Studies in English, 2, 2024, pp. 195-214 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler alienation: Jackson Mattocks, ‘Settler Alienation in the American West: Alienation, Loneliness And Colonial Masculinity Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Cairo Studies in English, 2, 2024, pp. 195-214

06Jan25

Excerpt: Cowboy characters in popular media have historically been portrayed as uber masculine, violent, and anarchic; and while the cowboy-like protagonists of Cormac McCarthy’s epic Blood Meridian (1985) and Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain (2005) certainly possess these themes, they also problematize traditional and sensationalist representations of the cowboy persona by showing it through a much starker lens, that of loneliness. Both McCarthy’s and Lee’s texts explore how ideas of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism that lie latent in the worldviews of the settlers in the American West prompt its male inhabitants to adopt masculine ideals of the laconic, impassive, and violent cowboy persona, and how those very expressions of masculinity serve to make these characters lonely. Blood Meridian promotes loneliness through the character of the kid, whose brusque and pithy nature, capacity for violence, along with his capacity for caring, make his identity incongruous with that of the stereotypical American cowboy, and precludes him from fitting in with the other hardnosed lone rangers of the Glanton gang. In Brokeback Mountain, the character of Ennis Del Mar similarly falls into many popular stereotypes of the lone and laconic cowboy, but in his case, his lonesomeness is also deeply tied to his identity as a closeted homosexual. Living in the deeply homophobic and conservative society of a rural town in the American West in the mid-twentieth century, Ennis can only express his true self when he is removed from society with his lover, Jack Twist, in the natural freedom that is provided by Brokeback Mountain. While Brokeback Mountain presents the Western wilderness as a site of reprieve from the lonely and repressed life Ennis leads in society, in Blood Meridian, the Western wilderness is seen as a site of loneliness, a place where almost nothing lives and where life itself becomes purposeless. In both Brokeback Mountain and Blood Meridian, the West is a social and political space that encourages its settlers to be lonely due to its history rooted in manifest destiny. In the former, this is done by contrasting the melancholic freedom of the West against the restraints of society, and in the latter, the West is itself represented as a harbinger of loneliness. For each cowboy character, the colonial language of violence supersedes verbal communication, and for each character, their propensity for violence directly serves to alienate them from others. In both texts, the protagonists’ masculine identities are intrinsically tied to popular representations of the Western cowboy, an identity that directly contributes to their loneliness. In this paper, I look at representations of the American cowboy, which are very different than the actual historical group of cowboys who were rarely deadeye gunslingers but instead merely tended cattle in America in the 1800s. I argue that representations of the Western cowboy are shown as lonely because the very masculine identities they seek to perform are rooted in individualist settler colonial ideologies which serve to alienate them from the respective societies and the land in which they live; it is this alienation, rooted in the cowboy’s settler colonial history, that serves to make the cowboy-like characters in each text condemned to lives of loneliness.

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