Meek’s Cutoff, Hobbes and the Ambiguities of Political Foundation: An Alternative Political Philosophy of the Western

Theorists interested in the potential of film to express various conditions and possibilities of political experience are often particularly drawn to the Western genre. Typically, the cinematic Western is interpreted as narratively representing the logic of classical contractarian political philosophy, through its depiction of the effort to impose legal order on what is seen as a previously unregulated and chaotic natural state. In this article I provide a reading of Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 revisionist Western Meek’s Cutoff, in an effort to demonstrate not only how the Western may greatly exceed this political articulation, but also how close attention to a film’s insights are capable of intervening in a philosophical tradition in such a way as to problematise the dominant interpretation of it. Reading the film in juxtaposition with Hobbes, I argue that its depiction of the limits of sovereign legitimacy, the conditions of democratic foundation, and the instability of the nature–politics binary reveal a dimension of meaning within Hobbes’s civil science that has become obscured within the established political imaginary. Appreciation of this content that the cinematic work aids in uncovering ultimately facilitates a re-politicisation of the Hobbesian paradigm.