Popular Culture Review 30.1 • Winter 2019 Book Review
Split Screen Nation : Moving Images of the American West and South . By Susan Courtney . Oxford University Press , 2017 . 329 pp .
ISBN : 978-0190459970
Reviewed by James Altman University of Nevada , Las Vegas
Susan Courtney is a noted scholar of numerous aspects of American film culture . In Split Screen Nation : Moving Images of the American West and South , she examines the underlying ideologies , preconceptions , misconceptions , and mythos that combined , during the Cold War , to give “ The Screen South ,” and “ The Screen West ” enduring cinematic reputations . As Courtney reckons , “ The Screen South ,” is inexorably encumbered by its antebellum past , simultaneously ashamed of it , and nostalgic for it . “ The Screen West ,” by contrast , in having , essentially , no meaningful past , waits eternally empty , open , and pliable . Her scholarly goal is not to venerate , or to denigrate the screen depiction of either region . Rather , this thought-provoking study wishes to unravel why these “ screen regions ” are depicted as they are , how they influenced popular culture in their time , and how , and why , they continue to resonate in popular culture today .
The book contains four chapters . Each , ostensibly , focuses either on one of the “ screen regions ,” some aspect of interplay between them , like the function of Southern characters in westerns , and / or the role of local and national landmarks in mythmaking . Practically speaking , however , insights and
235 doi : 10.18278 / pcr . 30.1.12