“For fans of Hillcoat’s work, the timing of this release is more than a little serendipitous; this June marks the 10th anniversary of The Proposition, a revenge Western that launched the director to international acclaim and a career outside his native Australia. In the decade since The Proposition, Hillcoat has regularly returned to the mythic properties of his most successful feature; the subsequent release of The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012) formed a loose trilogy that focused on the permeability of historical eras and the “frontier myth” of the American Western.”
“What makes a Western? While film scholars have offered a number of answers to this question — drawing upon structuralist analyses and reception histories alike — we might start where Matthew Carter does, with the frontier myth. In his book Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative (2014), Carter describes the original frontier myth as a projection of American exceptionalism, of men and women who traveled west to bring order to the wilderness of America.”
“It is here, in the narrative mosaic — layering myths of the modern and the primitive, masculine and feminine, justice and revenge — that filmmaker John Hillcoat has explored the concept of mythology and how desperate men have tried to turn fiction into fact.”
“Hillcoat’s characters actively attempt to secure their own legacies through self-mythology, creatively interpreting their own past.”
“And then there’s The Road, which departs from many of the semantic traits of the Western — the film takes place in the near future following a nuclear attack on the United States — but still bears many of the hallmarks of the Western genre’s syntax.”
“Returning to Matthew Carter’s Myth of the Western for a moment, we can see the ways in which the frontier myth has “survived the so-called ‘demise’ of the Western through migration into other Hollywood genres” — incorporating the myth by reversing its tenets.”
“Instead of telling a story about the modernization of the wilderness, The Road features characters that bear witness to the collapse of all civilization.”
“How they navigate this transitional period depends on their ability to appropriate the values of the old world through the new myths that they write.”
“The Proposition, Lawless, and The Road establish clear dividing lines between two distinct eras in world history: the premodern and the modern, the antebellum and postbellum, the present and the future.”