A Man Called Horse: Western Melodrama and Southern Gothic

According to a longstanding theory, genre narratives foster social cohesion by imaginatively resolving intractable contradictions within dominant ideologies (Cawelti, Adventure 35-36). Let us suppose that the classical Western concerns the establishment of an orderly social arrangement, a prelude to the nation's annexation of a previously chaotic and nebulous geographical space. The peculiar layout of the film's one-sheet poster, which reveals key elements of the narrative in chronological order, graphically illustrates the relative importance of the Sun Vow scene by making its depiction massively larger than the other six plot points (see Figure 1). [...]as the vertical sequences on each side reveal more of the plot than typical film posters of the period, the central image hides from view the most gruesome aspect of the Sun Vow, Morgan's wounds, prompting a desire to see more.4 I argue that the addition of this scene, like its placement in the poster, amounts to a gothic irruption into a melodramatic frame.