Revising the Western: Connecting Genre Rituals and American Western Revisionism in TV’s Sons of Anarchy

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the TV show Sons of Anarchy (SOA) and how the cable drama revisits and revises the American Western film genre. I survey ideological contexts and tropes that span Western mythologies like landscape and mise-en-scene to struggles for family, community, and the continuation of Native American plight. I trace connections between the show’s fictitious town setting and how the narrative inverts traditional community archetypes to reinsert a new outlaw status quo. I inspect the role of border reversal, from open expansion in Westerns to the closed-door post-globalist world of SAMCRO. I quickdraw from a number of film theory scholars as I trick shoot their critiques of Western cinema against the updated target of SOA’s fictitious Charming, CA. I reckon that this revised update of outlaw culture, gunslinger violence, and the drama’s subsequent popularity communicates a post-9/11 trauma playing out on television. Through the sage wisdom of autoethnography, I recall personal memories as an ideological travelogue for navigating the rhetoric power this drama ignites. As with postwar movements of biker history that follow World War II and Vietnam, SOA races against Western form while staying distinctly faithful. Ultimately, I argue the show’s Western evocation updates audience concerns amidst the ideological war on terror.