“Osama bin Laden Ain’t Here: Justified as a Post-9/11 Western.'

摘要

Justified, a postmodern televised Western narrative that unfolds in the contemporary South, utilizes character tropes defined by America’s response to the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. While the classic Western focuses on Anglo-American conflicts with the savage “Other” on the frontier, Raylan Givens, the protagonist of Justified, fights localized enemies with which he (and the viewer) can identify. As a US Marshal, Givens’ role as a Federal officer makes him an official of the American government, and his actions and the show’s representative criminals can be read as allegorical responses to America’s foreign and domestic policies since the 9-11 attacks. The proposed paper will give a close-reading of the two seasons of the FX series Justified, contextualizing the show’s character and narrative development as part of a new wave of Westerns released after 9-11 which engage morally ambivalent space.