A while ago I was reading about the decline of the western as a film genre: “In recent years, the cowboy has been replaced by the superhero as the most common expression of American values in blockbuster filmmaking.” (From “What the Western Means Now” by Noah Gittell, the Atlantic) Today, movies that tap into the landscapes of the American frontier get folded into other more dominant genres. See: MINARI (drama), PEARL (horror), BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (romance), KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (crime), and LOGAN (superhero).

And here I found my end, with a video essay about a mutant with claws and the limits of genre as a set of laws that govern our expectations. It starts with this quote from film critic Leo Braudy: “Change in genre occurs when the audience says ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.’”

The end / the beginning.