"Reconnoitering the Rim":

The American Western genre in film has spanned the better part of a century, and its attributes have evolved from the classic in the early 1900¿s, to the contemporary-revisionist in the late 20th century. Traditionally, the American Western, through its revisionist subgenre born in the 1950¿s, has retained the same linear narrative structure of the classic Western as a means to deconstruct the romanticized myth of the American frontier. The revisionist Western subgenre transformed the American Western hero into the anti-hero through revealing his flaws, and the post-revisionist Western of the 1990¿s accentuated the anti-herös sense of moral ambiguity. The major aim of this study was to use the theme of emergent order in David Milch¿s Deadwood as a tool to discuss the deconstruction of the romanticized myth of the American frontier, and the reconstruction of the Western genre through the contemporary-revisionist Western.