« Adapting, but still settlers: Katie Kane, ‘”A Huge Mass in a Single Hand”: Yellowstone and the Selling of Montana’, in Pamela Demory (ed.), Ecoadaptation: Mediating Nature and the Environment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 153-170

Unfitting and therefore settlers: Susan Kollin, ‘Settler Ecologies and Western Adaptation: Unfitting Characters in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’, in Pamela Demory (ed.), Ecoadaptation: Mediating Nature and the Environment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 203-218

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter explores how the Coen brothers reconfigure the Western in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, laying bare its white settler fantasies to reveal how toxic beliefs often shape foundational myths of regional and national identity. Many of the sequences refuse to deliver action in ways we expect in the genre. Plots, for instance, often appear unreal and cartoonish, highlighting a refusal on the part of the filmmakers to conform and adapt themselves to expectations of the Western. Satire and humor likewise redirect the narratives to reveal the underside of generic myths. Foregrounding various “unfitting” and “maladaptive” western characters whose misguided relationships with the more-than-human world and each other often end in tragedy and death, the Coens’ film illustrates how stories persist or perish, leading to the conclusion—from the point of view of ecoadaptation—that perhaps some stories need to go extinct.


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