Cowboys And Aliens Gender Roles

Gender and Class in the 1870s as Portrayed by the Film Industry

The film industry can create an image for genders, race, class, sexuality, nationalities, and even eras through the roles and story lines of characters in a film. More recently, the film industry has begun to combine two different eras of films and even combine two different genres of film. In the film Cowboys and Aliens, the writers and directors are able to depict the different roles of genders and classes that existed in the West back in the 1870s, as well as incorporating modern day ideologies into the Western film. This is done using a diverse group of individuals coming from a vast range of classes, all meeting up and recognizing that they are all different, but need
The common conception for the Western life and Western film is for it to be dominated by the male figure; as Lynn Weber puts it, “Whites, men, and heterosexuals are deemed superior” (Weber). In the film Cowboys and Aliens, men were more than the dominant gender in the film as there was really only one female, Ella Swenson, that made up the main cast for all of the film. However, Ella played a very important role in the film and was extremely beneficial to cause that all the men of Absolution were going for. According to Lynn Weber, it has been shown historically that things such as gender “hierarchies are never static and fixed, but constantly undergo change as part of new economic, political, and ideological processes” (Weber). Weber’s quote applies to this film because at the beginning of the film the men of the town, even Jake, thought of her as useless and burdensome to their efforts to capture the people taken from
The Western film consists of the films representing the 19th century in the American West and often represent that of the Wild West shows (Belton). With a name that includes both aliens and cowboys, there is obviously a cross between two very different generations or eras in the film. The most obvious would be the aliens in the film, which were much less common in films back in the beginning of all Western films. In addition to the aliens, the characters are also to look at as often times “Easterners tended to view the frontier as a rough and uncivilized region in habited by rude, semiliterate, semibarbaric backwoodsmen” (Belton). However, this was not the case with the people in Absolution; the citizens here were much more modernized, and were able to come together to defeat aliens with powerful weapons with the very under advanced weapons they possessed. Instead of just weapons, they used tactics formulated by the Colonel and the leader of the American Indian tribe, which shows their advanced state of mind and ability to think on their own. One last point to be made is the fact that most Western films were made based on conflicts over land, cattle, or range wars; but in this film it was different because the directors incorporated the aliens and gold into the film, which created a modern effect