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Our laboratory has a vested interest in measuring the location and expression of the 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT, serotonin) 7 (5-HT7) receptor in the rat. Determining tissue-specific receptor expression would aid in validating understood and potentially new tissues that support the 5-HT7 receptor-mediated fall in blood pressure, an event we are committed to understand. We contracted with 7TM Antibodies to develop deliberately and rigorously a rat 5-HT7 (r5-HT7) receptor specific antibody. Three antigens, two targeting the third internal loop and one the C terminus, were used in three rabbits to generate antibodies. As a positive control, HEK293(T or AD) cells were transfected with a plasmid for the r5-HT7 receptor also expressing a C terminus 3xFLAG tag. Naïve rat tissues were also used in Western and immunohistochemical analyses. Nine antibodies (3 from three different rabbits) detected a ~ 75 kDa protein absent in homogenates of vector control HEK293T cells. Only antibodies that recognized the C terminus of the 5-HT7 receptor [ERPERSEFVLQNSDH(Abu)GKKGHDT; antibodies 3, 6, and 9] positively and concentration-dependently identified the r5-HT7 receptor expressed in Westerns of transfected HEK293T cells. These same C terminus antibodies also successfully detected the r5-HT7 receptor in immunocytochemical test of the transfected HEK293AD cells, colocalizing with the detected FLAG sequence. In naive tissue, antibody 6 performed the best, identifying specific bands in the brain cortex in Western analysis. These same antibodies produced a more diverse band profile in the vena cava, identifying 6 major proteins. In immunohistochemical experiments, the same C-terminus antibodies, with antibody 3 performing the best, detected the 5-HT7 receptor in rat veins. This deliberate work has given rise to at least three antibodies that can be used with good confidence in r5-HT7 transfected cells, two antibodies that can be used in immunohistochemical analyses of rat tissues and in Westerns of rat brain; we are less confident of the use of these same antibodies in rat veins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the video game Western and its relationship with ideas of temporality surrounding the American West. The fledgling video game industry first put 'Cowboys and Indians' on arcade screens in the 1970s, creating a playable digital West for gamers. Content and aesthetics proved decidedly simple, with game worlds reliant on prior filmic presentations. By the 2000s, thanks largely to technological advances, video game Westerns began to offer quantifiable depth and complexity, with Rockstar Games's Red Dead Redemption series (2004–18) being a leading example. Video game Westerns represent the next technological as well as cultural representation of the 'Wild West' in all its complexities. In this article, I explore how both old and new video game Westerns have toyed with notions of 'time' and how we experience 'the frontier' a century on from the lived historic period. I argue that games not only invite players to (re)visit a distinctive 'frontier time', but also, by their coding and mechanics, actively encourage players to subvert the temporal flow of Western history on-screen and even disrupt the West's larger cultural meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western has been seen as a key genre for understanding both the American national character and the particulars of Hollywood, but there are now very few contemporary studies of this once foundational genre. The articles in this Special Issue, coming out of the Lonely Are the Brave conference of 2021, aim to revisit the Western, and the post-war Western specifically, in order to revive scholarship surrounding these texts, to interrogate existing models of understanding the history of the genre, and to examine how the genre treats ideas connected to time and its passing as attached to the American west and its depictions on-screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the lead of Richard Dyer and Devon Carbado in naming whiteness as a racial identity and uses intersectional analysis to explore Jacques Audiard’s depiction of race and gender in Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers. Both movies depart from the gender norms of earlier Audiard films by doing away with female saviors, so making male protagonists responsible for controlling their own violence. Both films also reflect Audiard’s determination to foreground Black and Brown characters in ways that better reflect the racial and cultural heterogeneity of France and the world. And yet, unorthodox casting choices and visual framing distance these same characters of color from responsibility for violence. Such an approach might be interpreted as a challenge to film makers’ historical tendency to cast Black and Brown men as especially violent. However, Audiard’s films commonly elicit sympathy for white men who exercise violence. Accordingly, Audiard’s denial of authority for violence to Black and Brown characters intimates than they can only be sympathetic if seen to be more upright than his white protagonists.

The term Post-Western has been used since the 1970s to refer to books and films that are not Westerns but use conventions of the Western genre to analyse contemporary conflicts and issues. The most important contribution to the establishment of this subgenre has been Neil Campbell's monograph Post-Westerns (2013), in which they are described as films coming after and going beyond the traditional Western genre while at the same time engaging with its deeply haunting assumptions and values. This article seeks to adapt the concept of post-Westerns to Comics Studies and focuses on a recent graphic work that can be considered post-Western, Scalped, a 60-issue comic-book series written by Jason Aaron and illustrated by R. M. Guéra, published by Vertigo between 2007 and 2012. It tells a contemporary story of crime, violence and corruption in an Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where the Lakotas live in an environment of utter poverty, drug abuse and hopelessness. Making use of constant flashbacks and different points of view, Scalped makes references to the Western myth and establishes a dialogue with American history and the Western genre to show the contrast with post-Western contemporary nightmares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay examines three films that Hollywood director Delmer Daves made in the mid-1950s—Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboy—all of which starred Glenn Ford. The pairing of Ford and Daves, the essay argues, allowed Daves to re-think the Hollywood Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, especially regarding questions around gender identity and representation of genders, that of the Western man. In doing so, these three films present an anti-nostalgic view of the traditional mode of American Western masculinity as violent, non-verbal and threatening and instead embrace a version of American masculinity that is verbal, compassionate and considerate. Through a close analysis of the films, reviews of them and marketing, the essay demonstrates how Daves used his own family background to construct Westerns that featured more adult themes and addressing the larger societal concerns about the notion of American masculinity and manhood in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American television, as a mass medium of storytelling, often gets scrutiny over its content, facing industry standards, censorship, and audience pushback. While sex and obscenity have been intensely studied, TV violence has had most scholarship aimed at the effects of viewing violence. This study is focused in a different direction, seeking to analyze the evolving presentation of violence on American airwaves. TV violence is composed of two parts: The first is the graphic portrayal of violence through fights, gunshots, and death. The second is the role violence serves within TV narratives, which has morphed from acts of justice and self-defense to plotlines intertwining moral indifference with pointless killing and righteous vengeance. Three case studies utilizing close reading and image analysis of various shows are used to analyze both aspects of TV violence. The first case study centers on Bonanza, a TV western that presents violence within strict moral boundaries. The second looks at The Day After, a TV movie that employed special effects, dialogue, and set design to portray the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon. The third case study analyzes The Walking Dead, a culmination of the changing TV landscape of the 2000s that led to a hyperreal level of graphic violence and storylines that emphasized moral ambiguity, villains that escaped punishment, and endless death. The portrayal of violence on American television has changed drastically in the last 80 years, and this study hopes to reflect the reciprocal relationship between a changing TV industry and a shifting American society.

Since the mythic space of the Western helped shape how Americans view themselves, as well as how the world has viewed them, the characterization of Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo interaction warrants closer scrutiny. For a corpus with substantial diachrony, every Western in the National Registry of Films produced between the end of the Second World War and the American Bicentennial (1945-1976), i.e. the cultural apex of the genre, was assessed for the presence of foreign language and interpretation, the relationship between English and social power, and change over time. The analysis showed that although English was universally the language of power, and that the social status of characters could be measured by their fluency, there was a significant presence of foreign language, principally Spanish (63% of the films), with some form of interpretation occurring in half the films. Questions of cultural identity were associated with multilingualism and, although no diachronic pattern could be found in the distribution of foreign language, protagonism for Hispanics and Native Americans did grow over time. A spectrum of narrative/cinematic approaches to foreign language was determined that could be useful for further research on the presentation of foreigners and their language in the dramatic arts.

Interview with Richard Slotkin held through email exchanges from January 15th and March 25th, 2022.

The article discusses the James Bond Films, the Orphan Myth and the Western. It says that the presence of the orphan myth is central to the James Bond cycle of films and novels as well as to the mythic history of the American West. Both sets of narratives, the Bond cycle and the extensive catalogue of American westerns, rest on a myth of loss, abandonment and solitude set against an expansive geographical space to be dominated or guarded as a possession.

Since its release in October 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 has generated considerable controversy. Redemption 2, Rockstar Games' highly popular video game set in a sprawling open world that resembles America's southern and western states at the turn of the twentieth century, has attracted criticism from players who have disliked the perceived political messages the game presents. With numerous interactions with people of color, Native Americans, and feminist (suffragette) characters, the game prompts players to engage with the ongoing effects of colonialism, sexism, and racism, as well as the rising problems of an industrial and financial capitalist society. As such, the game's depiction of Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics has resulted in a large amount of online criticism from a group of traditionally white, male, right-wing players. This article argues that Redemption 2 utilizes the Progressive Era as a vehicle to capture and speak to the current political climate, and that it is the game's dual relationship with the past and the present that has aroused animosity from part of the game's audience. Ultimately, it demonstrates how contemporary mainstream progressive politics can be interpreted within and projected upon the politics of the Progressive Era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interrelated subjects of law, violence, progress, and civilization in three westerns from the American film director John Ford. Taken as a whole these three films, Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, equate civilization with the rule of law. Law is necessary to end the cycles of revenge and wanton violence depicted in the first two films. The final film is a meditation on the deliberate and violent elements of law, which must be combined in order to sustain a political community and provide the conditions for material, moral, and intellectual improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s 2011 feature film On the Ice, about Iñupiaq youth in Barrow, Alaska, in the context of Arctic and Indigenous cinemas and the American western. Reading the film through Inuit and Iñupiaq concepts and engaging with the film’s depictions of cultural syncretism, Indigenous hip hop, Iñupiaq hunting culture, and film genres, the essay argues that Iñupiaq sovereignty of the camera, as an adaptive aesthetic practice, strengthens the work and the value of traditional knowledge in a connected world.

The article focuses on American Sniper and the global frontiers of the western genre. Topics inlcude the background of this financial and critical success lies the problem of American Sniper's political agenda, the newspapers and film magazines has decried the movie as being little more than jingoist propaganda, and the controversy came to a boiling point following the film's release a twitter storm of Islamophobic death threats has prompted the American–Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Existing scholarship contends that James Cruze's landmark The Covered Wagon (1923) and John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) were notable for their American appeal, in particular their exploitation of contemporary nationalistic sentiment. Also noteworthy, however, is their centrality to contemporary discourse on cinema's potential function as a universal language. Rather than endorsing this type of procinema rhetoric, this article focuses on the adaptive strategies whereby these utopianist pretensions were constructed: context-specific reediting, elaborate promotional campaigns, and staged educational prologues. Reworking and reframing within globalized historical trajectories transformed these national epics into transnational histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

French Western films land in a blind field in accounts of both film genre and national film industries. Genre studies often place a strong focus on Hollywood, while there remains a tendency to favour auteur and art cinema in studies of French film. French Westerns are all but invisible, dismissed as clumsy parodies of what André Bazin dubbed the 'cinéma américain par excellence'. The convergence of the Western and France's most visible post-war star therefore strikes a dissonant note. Brigitte Bardot's global celebrity has been hailed as an emblem of transnational exchange. However, accounts of her star image dwell on the youthful sexuality exhibited in her early films or her consecration as a nouvelle vague icon. When not overlooked entirely, her Western pictures are cast as curiosities of a film career's undistinguished end. Bringing critical pressure to the discordance between these films and the relays that shape ideas of both 'Western' and 'Bardot' yields a more differentiated understanding of her star image, of the Western genre and, when a singularly visible emblem of French cinema is cast in a genre closely associated with America and Hollywood, of the volatile conjunction of 'French' and 'Western'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breaking Bad's creator and producer, Vince Gilligan, depicts how the past shapes the present in ways to which the show's characters often seem blind, specifically regarding interracial violence, white occupation of the West, how conquest negatively impacted women's lives, and the retention and appropriation of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

this journal explains customs in doing business with Japanese. Japanese has several unique etiquettes which is unknown by westerns. Those customs are important to explain, to avoid missed perception between Japanese and western businessman. This journal also gives some tips for those who don’t really understand Japanese, so that they can adapt with them. This journal explains some Japanese way of life that are applied in their way of doing business. Japanese way of life explanations are highly expected understood so that one understands Japanese behave in doing bussines. For instance: TQM, kaizen, and kaisan are just some of Japanese way of life that is explained simply in this journal.

Drawing on Michael Cronin’s analysis of Stagecoach, and on narrative theory and image studies, this paper aims to examine the role of language and translation in two classical Hollywood westerns, namely They Died with Their Boots On and Fort Apache. It will consider whether these films provide only negative representations of Native Americans and whether the linguistic and paralinguistic elements present in the films undermine those narratives. It will also compare the English originals and the Spanish dubbed movies in order to probe whether the narratives presented in the original films are maintained in the target versions. For this purpose, I will study the various textual layers present in the films, including the use of Injun English, the discourse of Anglo and Native Americans, the use of Spanish, and the translation of all these into Spanish. The study shows that the original films question old stereotypes of Native Americans, while the Spanish versions rely on more conventional narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clint Eastwood’s war film American Sniper (2014), based on the autobiography of (in)famous Navy Seals sniper Chris Kyle, was met on release with considerable commercial success and political controversy. This article investigates how through adopting generic structures and binary oppositions of the classic Western film American Sniper succeeds in evoking a sense of “frontier mythology.” By generically restructuring historical events, American Sniper analogizes the Iraq War with the mythic struggle of civilization/wilderness and portrays Kyle as a trailblazing frontiersman leading the way to Western expansion. Such a mythical conception of the Western genre operates as a political frame through which a jingoist discourse on the Iraq war is reaffirmed and within which audiences can interpret the conflict—and the undertaken military measures—as necessary and just.

Sam Peckinpah’s movie The Wild Bunch is a multilevel drama about an aging group of outlaws, trying to exist in a rapidly changing world. This paper analysis the movie from different sociological perspectives on three levels. First, it is argued that the movie provides an interesting example and an elaboration of Durkheim’s macrolevel theory of anomie. Second, at the micro level the movie describes the face to face interaction between gangmembers in terms of a symbolic interactionism in the tradition of Mead and Goffman. Third, at the individual level the gangmembers behave in many ways as existential heroes. These different levels of social science analysis come together to form a single coherent story line in Peckinpah’s complex portrayal of the Wild Bunch.

Since its initial popularization in Africa during the 1970s, Hong Kong martial arts cinema has enjoyed remarkably consistent popularity. This paper analyses some of the causes for this phenomenon by focusing on the consumption of Hong Kong martial arts cinema in South Africa during apartheid. It argues that film-watching under apartheid was jointly structured by state censorship and state-aligned monopolies controlling film distribution and exhibition. These factors facilitated the flow of Hollywood film into South Africa yet at the same time constrained black audiences. Due to a confluence of historical factors, Hong Kong martial arts film arrived in the country just as this dual system of state control via censorship and exhibition was weakening. In addition, the spectacular action and anti-hegemonic narrative in these films, can explain their popularity among black audiences who were familiar with the targeted censorship regimes, and versed in subverting the white supremacist narrative of Hollywood westerns. The paper uses a combination of political economy and film theory to historicize this moment and to understand the position of black audiences under apartheid vis-à-vis Hong Kong martial arts cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jack Reacher, created by British-born Lee Child, rejects the myth of the American dream in all its guises and straddles two emblematic American genres--cowboy and hard-boiled detective fiction--in his quest for absolute, utopian freedom. Paradoxically, this turns him into a quintessentially American character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood's promulgation of the "mythical Indian," I argue that a focus on settlement-rather than on bodies-is significant in the context of the ongoing, unfinished processes of colonialism, which continue to structure life in white settler states. Cultural representations that reconfigure colonial-occupied life as settled life naturalize settler colonialism while erasing and displacing Indigenous claims to land. I illuminate this method by analyzing how the 1974 "blaxploitation Western" Thomasine and Bushrod imagines settlement. The film features a pair of lovers who are on the run from the law in America's Southwest from 1911 to 1915. Because it is a film that speaks back to historical constructions of Blackness and Indigeneity, Thomasine and Bushrod productively illuminates how representations of Indigenous erasure work in often ambiguous and contradictory ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Ritt remade Kurosawa Akira's iconic Rashōmon (1950) as The Outrage (1964), a western set in the post-Civil War southwest. Although both films strive to silence the figure of the wife, privileging the death of her husband and rendering the crime of rape against her little more than a device to propel the plot, they differ markedly in the degree to which they succeed. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement nearing its apogee and the nascent second-wave feminism in the United States, the adaptation into the western genre provided a more robust opportunity for the wife to speak her rape precisely because of a genre mismatch between the source and the remake. Consequently, although The Outrage cannot be said to have significantly furthered the cause of gender equality, it does offer greater hope than its more famous originary film in this regard and adumbrates a greater voice for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the role of ambiguous character types in the national narratives of biblical Israel and modern America, two nations that ground their identities in myths of conquest. The types embody the tensions and ambivalence conquest myths generate by combining the invader/indigenous binary in complementary ways. The Indigenous Helper assists the invaders and signifies the land's acquiescence to conquest. The Renegade Invader identifies with the indigenous peoples and manifests anxiety about the threat of indigenous difference. A discussion of these types in the book of Joshua, through the stories of Rahab and Achan, establishes a point of reference by which to view the use of corresponding characters in three films that attempt to invert the American conquest narrative: Little Big Man, Dances with Wolves, and Avatar. The three films overturn the conquest plot but also evoke motifs that affirm national identity. This comparison of literary and cinematic narrations reveals the contested and fluid character of national narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Native Americans in films. Topics discussed include film "Ridiculous Six" and mentions incident where actor Loren Anthony along, with other actors in the film, walked off from the film sets due to derogatory remarks in the script to elders, women and sacred things, Red Indians and racism.

The article examines the possibilities of looking at "Django Unchained," a movie by Quentin Tarantino as a "Southern" film instead of a Spaghetti Western. Topics covered include the Southern generic tropes employed by Tarantino in the film, regeneration through violence in Western mythology and in early African American slave narratives, and representations of slavery in the cinema.