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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / Kevin Blake / Jeffrey S. Smith / Hollywood Westerns have informed popular images of the American West for well over a century. This study of cultural, cinematic, regional, and historical geography examines place imagery in the Western. Echoing Blake’s (1995) examination of the novels of Zane Grey, the research questions analyze one hundred major Westerns to identify (1) the spatial settings (where the plot of the Western transpires), (2) the temporal settings (what date[s] in history the Western takes place), and (3) the filming locations. The results of these three questions illuminate significant place images of the West and the geography of the Western. I selected a filmography of one hundred major Westerns based upon twenty different Western film credentials. My content analysis involved multiple viewings of each Western and cross-referencing film content like narrative titles, American Indian homelands, fort names, and tombstone dates with scholarly and popular publications. The Western spatially favors Apachería, the Borderlands and Mexico, and the High Plains rather than the Pacific Northwest. Also, California serves more as a destination than a spatial setting. Temporally, the heart of the Western beats during the 1870s and 1880s, but it also lives well into the twentieth century. The five major filming location clusters are the Los Angeles / Hollywood area and its studio backlots, Old Tucson Studios and southeastern Arizona, the Alabama Hills in California, Monument Valley in Utah and Arizona, and the Santa Fe region in New Mexico. The filming locations spotlight majestic mountain backgrounds, impressive rock formations, dangerous deserts, sweeping plains, and place-less urban backlots. The quintessential Western is spatially set in southeastern Arizona in the 1880s and is filmed in Monument Valley. Utilizing Meinig’s (1965) Core-Domain-Sphere concept, the genre’s place-image core resides in southeastern Arizona. The Western domain includes the Borderlands, High Plains, Sierra Nevada, Slickrock Country, and central New Mexico. The sphere of Western imagery extends outward to Los Angeles, Dodge City, Mexico, Canada, and Spain. Following Wright (2014), the Western’s typical boundaries are the Missouri Breaks (north), Indian Territory (east), the Borderlands (south) and gold mining in the Sierra Nevada (west).

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Firefly, a television series created, written, and directed by Joss Whedon, premiered on the Fox network in 2002 and aired only eleven episodes before it was cancelled halfway through its first season. While it gained some on-air popularity, it was not until fans convinced Fox via online chatrooms to release the series on DVD that it gained posthumous acclaim. Whedon credits westerns as the inspiration for Firefly because frontier characters tend to be natural, flawed, complex human beings who question universal truths through widely recognized motifs of classic westerns. In a February 17, 2011 Entertainment Weekly interview, Firefly actor Nathan Fillion stated that if he won the lottery, he would buy the rights to Firefly, inadvertently rallying fans to bring back the series that was cancelled almost a decade before, mirroring the cowboy culture that Firefly emulates of marginalized individuals fighting for a cause. Despite its science fiction and space motifs, Firefly is no different from classic westerns in blending legend and reality, reinforcing the mixture of myth and fact that constitutes frontier ideology. Firefly, like the cowboy culture it represents, has become a cultural icon, romanticized because of its brief and nostalgic nature. This paper will look at the enduring appeal of Firefly through western motifs of frontier, displacement, and mobility, considering why westerns lend themselves to continued nostalgia and reinvention in contemporary popular culture.

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