Dispossessing the Western: Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow

• In Event: Literature and Political Philosophy

Abstract

Kelly Reichardt is one of the U.S.’s leading independent filmmakers, known for her slow-paced, realistic character studies of fissures and failures in U.S. society. Reichardt has notably made two revisionist westerns— Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and First Cow (2019)— films that probe not only the cinematic inheritance associated with one of the most significant and enduring of American genres, but also the political stakes of the western for our times. Both stories take place “on the frontier,” specifically Oregon in the 1830s and 1840s, and address larger historical-political processes (settler colonialism and primitive accumulation respectively) to critique American ideas of progress and entrepreneurialism through stories focused on migrants and settlers. As frontier stories that complicate and frustrate many expectations traditionally associated with westerns, these two films of Reichardt’s speak to the politics of settler colonialism and primitive accumulation in ways that are significant not just for history and collective memory, but also for the current moment, enmeshed as it is in another era of migration amidst the legacies of settler colonialism. This paper will read Reichardt as a cinematic political theorist, putting these films into conversation with recent work on settler colonialism and dispossession such Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People and Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native as well as Greg Grandin’s popular and essential history The End of the Myth.

Author

• Robert E. Watkins, Columbia College Chicago