Living in a World of Fear and Inexplicable Evil: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)1

This chapter focuses on the idea that we now live within a fear culture. Within this largely media-controlled space, we become obsessed with the idea of evil as inexplicable other than be recourse to concepts of religion and mysticism and see it as lurking everywhere within society. The chapter explores confused way in which Jesse James is seen in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) as on the one hand Christ-like and on the other as the embodiment of evil. It is argued that the spectator is confronted by a confused (and, for the viewer, confusing) text. This film is the product of a media and a society that is generally unwilling to accept the role social conditions play in the formation of individual character. The crucial implication of the representation of Jesse James we have in this film is that people should be seen as being born as they are, rather than as being created out of the circumstances of their experience of life.