Mia Power
Joint Winner
The Patricia Coughlan Award
Abstract
In her 2016 film Certain Women, Kelly Reichardt crafts a female-centric counternarrative to the traditional western genre. In her exploration of three women’s lives, she raises the question: what is the West now, and who does it belong to? This essay analyses Certain Women as a post-western by investigating Reichardt’s vision of the contemporary West. She depicts twenty-first-century Montana as a world defined by women’s desire, rather than that of men. This essay examines how Reichardt represents sapphic desire in the contemporary West, thereby constructing a counternarrative to the hypermasculinity of traditional depictions of the West’s past. It then discusses how Reichardt writes back to the western genre through her representation of female yearning for connection and recognition.
In Western Studies, scholars often debate the meaning of the word “post-western”. To start, Jesús Ángel González questions the meaning of the prefix “post” in “post-western”, which I interpret as referring to “post-frontier” – the period from the closing of the frontier in the late nineteenth-century up to present day (52). If the post-western genre concerns itself with the post-frontier period, then it must ask the question, “What is the West now?” What is the West in the twenty-first century, long after the closing of the frontier? What defines the West now that the frontier myth and the ideal of Manifest Destiny no longer define it? These questions drive my definition of the post-western. To ask and answer these questions, a post-western can take the form of a counternarrative to the traditional western genre, thereby demonstrating what the West is now by focusing on the people who were historically marginalised by the genre, including women and Native Americans. Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film Certain Women can be read as a post-western because it does exactly this: it provides a counternarrative to the western genre through its representation of women in the twenty-first century West. This essay will analyse how Reichardt rewrites the story of the West from one of hypermasculinity to one of sapphic desire. It will then examine how Reichardt creates a counternarrative to the western genre’s yearning for the frontier days through her representation of female yearning for connection and recognition, which she explores through the characters of Jamie and Gina.
Certain Women can be considered a post-western because of how it provides a counternarrative to the western genre through its central focus on female characters. This is in contrast to the classical western, the tropes of which include “an individualistic male hero” and “domesticating the feminine” (González 55; Campbell 11). We find no male heroes in this film; we find no clear-cut heroes or villains at all, but simply women living their daily lives. The film gives back the voice of the narrative to women. The protagonists of the three stories are all women, whom the western genre generally sidelines. Neil Campbell remarks that the post-western’s status as “period and approach “in motion,” pushing against boundaries…make it a platform from which to examine changes in forms of representation” (6-7). The post-western is “in motion” because it constantly looks back at and reimagines the West and the western. Reichardt looks at and looks back at the West and reimagines and rewrites it from a female perspective. By centring women’s voices and stories, she writes back to the “individualistic male hero[es]” and female characters without agency who populated the western genre (González 55). Jamie’s story – that of a queer woman in the twenty-first century West – showcases Reichardt’s interest in creating a counternarrative through new forms of representation.
When adapting Maile Meloy’s short story “Travis, B.” as Jamie’s story in Certain Women, Reichardt decides to change the gender of the protagonist from male to female (“Spotlight”). This change is pivotal to the counternarrative Reichardt constructs through this story. It ensures that the focus of the film remains on women, but also facilitates an exploration of sapphic desire in this new West, a subject overlooked by traditional westerns. Due to the film’s minimal dialogue and exposition, as well as Jamie’s isolation – there are no conversations about her feelings nor grand declarations of love – the audience needs to pay close attention to understand that her queer desire drives this narrative. Reichardt subtly establishes Jamie’s attraction to and interest in Beth. She stays behind to speak to her after the first school law class, and offers to show her where the local diner is (Certain Women 1:01:46-1:01:53). In the first diner scene, Jamie does not eat, although the waitress and Beth both offer her food. This establishes that she is there solely to spend time with Beth. The following scene reinforces this, wherein she leaves the diner, buys food in a nearby shop, and eats it in the car on the way home. These two scenes together suggest Jamie’s burgeoning romantic interest in Beth, and thus, viewers begin to understand that Reichardt’s female counternarrative centres a queer woman in the twenty-first century West. Jamie does not have much dialogue, especially relative to Beth, so what she does say carries importance. In this first diner scene, she tells Beth, “I’d show you if you could stay longer. […] The ranch. The horses”, even though Beth seems disinterested; she is looking at her phone, and then merely replies that she needs to get back home because she has work in the morning, barely registering Jamie’s offer (1:04:35-1:04:50). Since Reichardt has spent time so far on showing Jamie caring for the horses, the audience understands that they are important to her, and therefore she must feel strongly for Beth if she offers to bring her into this meaningful, private world. Reichardt uses this audience understanding again later to further reinforce Jamie’s romantic interest in Beth. By the time Jamie offers to give Beth a ride to the diner on her horse, Reichardt has shown us more scenes of Jamie caring for her horses day after day, highlighting how much effort she puts into looking after them. Therefore, this is a deliberate act of intimacy on Jamie’s part. It can also be read as such because of how close Beth has to sit next to her on the horse so as not to fall off, which Reichardt conveys through her lingering shot on Jamie’s smile as they travel (1:16:18- 1:16:31). The week after this event, however, Beth quits her teaching job, framing her resignation as a rejection of Jamie, and leading to Jamie’s final gesture of her interest in Beth, which adds to Reichardt’s exploration of sapphic desire in the West.
In her final scene with Beth, Jamie’s desires are thwarted. She drives four hours to Livingston to see Beth one final time, and, unable to find her when she arrives, sleeps in her car overnight in the hopes of finding her in the morning. Again, the time Reichardt has given to showing Jamie’s daily routine pays off; Jamie puts her responsibilities on the ranch on hold in order to convey her feelings to Beth. When the two women meet again, Jamie tries to verbally confess her affection for Beth in case her act of driving the long distance to see her is not clear enough. She tells her “I was sorry you stopped teaching the class. I looked forward to it. […] I just knew that if I didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again. I didn’t want that” (1:30:00-1:30:40). By saying that she “looked forward to [the class]”, Jamie means that she looked forward to seeing and talking to Beth, since both we and Beth already know that Jamie has no knowledge of or interest in law. The closest Jamie comes to explicitly stating her romantic attraction to Beth is that she “didn’t want” to never see Beth again. The words left unsaid are the most important part of this speech. Viewers must ask themselves, if Jamie enjoys learning about law or Beth’s friendship, would she not have said as much? The fact that so much of what she means is subtextual implies that she intends to inform Beth of her attraction to her, but that she wants to be careful about it. Reichardt carefully constructs this scene to engage with an important aspect of queer desire, which I will now examine.
Jamie struggles to say exactly what she means and to ask for what she wants, partly because she is unsure of how it will be received. Thus, she says as much as she can about how she feels without making it explicit. If Beth reacts badly or is homophobic, Jamie can deny that it was intended as a confession of queer desire, thus protecting herself in an uncertain situation. This is Reichardt’s final reinforcement of the fact of Jamie’s queerness. Ironically, her omissions actually confirm her queer identity and desire. Ultimately, Beth does not respond at all; Jamie waits for her to speak, but leaves after a while when it becomes clear that Beth does not reciprocate her desires. It is left ambiguous as to whether or not Beth is queer, and Reichardt’s lack of engagement with this question suggests that it is irrelevant. Reichardt is interested in Jamie and her thwarted queer desire. Thus, through the character of Jamie, she creates a counternarrative to the western genre and its representations of an aggressive masculinity, with little space for women or queer men, and certainly not for queer women. Reichardt’s dedication to developing Jamie’s story and investigating her queer desire displays her interest in constructing a post-western through representations of marginalised people.
This exploration of Jamie’s thwarted queer desire also invites an understanding of the loneliness of queer desire, and of being a young queer woman in Montana. She has no one she can talk to about her feelings for Beth, no one to give her advice on how to proceed. She briefly mentions her family, but Reichardt decides not to show them, in order to reinforce Jamie’s isolation and loneliness. The shot of her watching the cars drive in for the law class also serves to inform us of this (58:10-58:45). She watches them from a distance, on the outside looking in, alone while they are all near one another. Thus, the film places her in an outsider status, which it highlights in the subsequent scene. Jamie sits at the back of the class, separated from the other students. Her isolation is implied again when one of the other students explains, “We all know each other”, while they are in focus in the foreground of the shot, and Jamie is out of focus in the background (59:36-59:38). Since she is out of focus, the film implies that Jamie is not important in this shot; she is not important because the other students are at the centre of this moment of the scene and they do not know or care about her. Reichardt underlines this point later, when Jamie admits, “I don’t know anyone at all” (1:11:00-1:11:02). She does not know anyone, except for Beth, and that relationship is severed by the end of the film, leaving her isolated once again, as we watch her performing her tasks with only her dog and the radio for company (1:41:50-1:43:23). Jamie’s loneliness and desire for connection factors into another aspect of Reichardt’s counternarrative – these female characters’ yearning for something more.
Campbell writes that a “curious mix of hope, yearning, and loss is intimately bound to the West and the Western as a type of haunting presence” (13). This “haunting presence” is what lives on in the West now, through Certain Women’s characters. William R. Handley identifies “the yearning implicit in the myth of the frontier for a lost and ever-receding Eden”, thus associating a type of yearning with the frontier period, a time which the western genre often engages with (54). However, these women are not yearning for “Eden”, or for the lost ideals of Manifest Destiny. In its counternarrative to the western genre, Certain Women depicts the yearning of these female characters for something much less grand – for love, or respect, or connection to something greater than oneself. The film engages with this idea through its portrayal of Jamie’s loneliness, as analysed above. It suggests that the people of the West now are searching for something smaller than they were in the days of the frontier, but it is still beyond their grasp. The film explicitly engages with this idea through Ryan’s reference to “pioneer days” (38:32). This line suggests that the “pioneer days” are long gone, even though it is intended to draw parallels between those times and Gina’s own situation. Gina strikes out on her own, trying to get what she wants through her own hard work. The film also engages more ironically with the past trappings of the West. Jamie watches a TV programme that describes space as “[a] new frontier, just waiting to be explored”, implying that there is nothing left to be explored in the West anymore (56:58-57:02). What is left except this ghost of a yearning for something more, which lives on in these women?
The film’s counternarrative of female yearning in contrast to traditional male yearning in the western genre is most explicit in Gina’s story. Firstly, she yearns for a connection with the past; specifically, the West’s past, which Reichardt explores through her association with the Western landscape. The first time we see Gina, she walks through the woods by herself in the early morning, immediately connecting her to the landscape and her surroundings. We quickly learn that she is camping with her husband and daughter, in another visual connection to the landscape. Living outside, almost directly on the ground, is as close as Gina can get to the Montanan landscape. However, in the first few seconds of her story, we see her stamp out her cigarette and bury it in the ground (32:20-32:30). This suggests adding something new to the land, bringing part of herself to it, but destructively, which calls into question her housebuilding mission later in the film.
Gina’s desire to build a house using native Montanan sandstone drives her story forward. Guy Lodge proposes that this goal satirises “the opportunistic exploitation of tradition in the American heartland” (125). In one way, this is accurate. Gina tenuously convinces an elderly man, Albert, to give her his sandstone, and ultimately for free. Reichardt leaves this interaction open for interpretation. Did Gina take advantage of Albert and his fragile mental state and essentially steal his possession? Or did she negotiate with him fairly and happen to get what she wanted out of it – after all, she does offer to pay him for the materials, and he refuses (47:26-47:36; 48:54-48:58). I interpret Gina’s longing for the native sandstone with which to build her house as a longing for a connection to the past, a way of bringing the West’s past into its present. By building onto the land, she adds part of herself to it, and by using native sandstone, she connects herself to the landscape both past and present. Kate Stables describes “Gina’s townie hunger for the original sandstone blocks that were once the frontier schoolhouse” as one of “the film’s discreet echoes of north-western history”, hinting at the way in which Certain Women engages with the past and present of the West through Gina’s yearning to be connected to the past (74). In Gina’s story, Reichardt constructs a counternarrative to the Western genre, one which centres female yearning. It tells the story of what the West is now through a female character’s relationship to what it once was.
Gina’s yearning also manifests itself as a yearning for respect and recognition. Reichardt uses dramatic irony to emphasise this yearning: the audience knows from the first section of the film that Gina’s husband Ryan is having an affair with Laura, but Reichardt leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not Gina has any knowledge of this or even suspects it. Therefore, we have a greater understanding from the start of her story of how her search for respect is being frustrated, even by her husband. On their way to meet with Albert, Gina asks Ryan to speak to him because he “trusts” Ryan, implying that Albert will listen to a man more readily than a woman (40:18-40:30). This later comes true. Ryan lacks the courage to ask Albert for what they want, forcing Gina to explicitly offer to buy the sandstone. Albert does not reply, but instead asks Ryan questions directly, looking only at him and not Gina. This establishes that Albert is not interested in responding to Gina, a woman, but will speak to her husband instead, who has been reading magazines rather than participating in the conversation. Albert disrespects Gina, and merely a few minutes later, so does Ryan. When he finally steps in to speak to Albert about the sandstone, he tells him, “You don’t have to sell it if you don’t want to. It’s just that Gina wants this new house to be authentic”, undermining her and her authority (49:00-49:07; original emphasis). By specifically stating that Gina wants the house to be “authentic”, Ryan implies that he does not share her feelings about it, and his emphasis on the word “authentic” suggests a belief that she is going too far in her quest for “authenticity”. Gina later directly questions Ryan about this betrayal, asserting that “you really weren’t helping me at all”, thus standing up for herself and implying that he is not giving her the respect she deserves (51:50-51:53). By the end of the section, Gina has made strides in her search for connection to the past and the landscape, but her search and yearning for respect and recognition within and without her family have been left unfulfilled, much like Jamie’s yearning. The fact that both women’s desires are left unfulfilled suggests a greater point that Reichardt is making – in this film and in the new West, the yearning of the western genre carries on, but in women rather than men.
In his book Post-Westerns, Campbell asks “How does cinema evoke the modern Westonce it has dispensed…with the mythic trappings and the historical locations that we associate with its most conventional representations?” (10). Reichardt engages with this question in her post-western film Certain Women. She “evoke[s] the modern West” by providing a counternarrative to the traditional western narrative. The film is set in the “modern West”, twenty-first century Montana, long after the closing of the frontier. It engages with this idea of the “modern West” – which is crucial to the post-western – by centring a rancher, an archetype familiar to the western genre, but using this character to craft a female counternarrative. Reichardt’s rancher character is a queer woman, and she is the vessel for her exploration of queer (and specifically sapphic) desire in the contemporary West, writing back to the typical hypermasculine tales of the region. This counternarrative, through which Reichardt examines and evokes the “modern West”, also takes the form of an exploration of female yearning in the West. Typically, this idea of yearning in the West was associated with a longing for the lost frontier and ideal of Manifest Destiny; Certain Women instead associates it with the female longing for love and recognition. Ultimately, through the film’s engagement with the post-western genre, it concludes that one way of evoking the “modern West” is through a reclamation of it by women and queer women. The “modern West” belongs to them as much as the traditional West belonged to men.
Works Cited
Campbell, Neil. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Certain Women. Directed by Kelly Reichardt. IFC Films, 2016.
González, Jesús Ángel. “New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter's Bone.” Western American Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 51-76.
Handley, William R. Marriage, Violence and Nation in the American Literary West. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Lodge, Guy. “Certain Women.” Variety, vol. 330, no. 17, 2016, pp. 125.
Reichardt, Kelly. “Spotlight: Kelly Reichardt on Certain Women.” Interview by Mia Bays. Birds Eye View, 1 Mar. 2017, https://www.birds-eye-view.co.uk/certain-women kelly-reichardt-interview/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2022.
Stables, Kate. “Certain Women.” Sight and Sound, vol. 27, no. 3, 2017, pp. 74-75.
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