Revision as Nostalgic Practice: The Imagined Adaptation of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Abstract

This article investigates the role of nostalgia vis-à-vis practices of adaptation and revision in the genre of the American Western and specifically in Joel and Ethan Coen’s episodic film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). It proposes a view of the Western as a genre that originates in the revisionist adaptation of American national mythology. As an inherently nostalgic genre, the Western has grappled with its ambivalent relationship with the past throughout the twentieth century. Recent Western productions demonstrate their awareness of the genre’s sentimental falsifications of the past and integrate nostalgic tensions into their aesthetic repertoire. Buster Scruggs taps into both the current success of nostalgic formats on screen and the specific affordances of the Western genre. The close readings in this article explore the visual, structural, and narrative strategies the film employs to, on the one hand, permit and, in fact, encourage nostalgic indulgence while, on the other, engaging in the revision of both the postmodern aversion against affective involvement and its wholesale acceptance in the Western’s early incarnations.