Name: Robin Alper Student number: 10565655 Supervisor: Erik Laeven
Second reader: Charles Forceville
Film Studies: Professional Specialisation Master’s thesis
Words: 22,770
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT 3
Keywords 3
INTRODUCTION 4
CHAPTER 1
THE POST-MIGRANT-WESTERN: A HYBRID OF TWO GENRES 9
1.1 A Post-Migrant Space in Cinema 10
1.2 The Western as an Adjective 15
1.3 The Wild West as the Suburbs’ Counterpart 18
CHAPTER 2
THE HERO’S JOURNEY: SEEKING STABILITY IN THE UNKNOWN 22
2.1 Stuck on the Edge 23
2.2 The Suburban Monomyth 25
2.3 Towards a New Myth 29
CHAPTER 3
WHAT MAKES THE BOY A MAN:
MASCULINITY IN THE POST-MIGRANT-WESTERN 33
3.1 A Fast, Fierce, and Felonious Façade 35
3.2 Following in Faded Footsteps 40
3.3 Men in the Middle 45
CHAPTER 4
BEING A LANDSCAPE:
CONVERGING POLARITIES IN THE SUBURBS 47
4.1 Confinement Versus Freedom 48
CONCLUSION 62 APPENDIX 68 Appendix A 68 Appendix B 72 Appendix C 73 Appendix D 73 Appendix E 74 BIBLIOGRAPHY 79 Filmography 83
ABSTRACT
This thesis revolves around the question why it might be purposeful to read Dutch post-migrant films that are set in the suburbs by means of generic elements commonly used within western films. By combining genre studies of the western genre and migrant cinema in a comparative research, I will argue that by reading the Dutch suburban migrant films through the perspective of the western genre these films add more positive connotations to the notorious stereotypes surrounding the second-generation Moroccans in the Netherlands.
Migrant cinema generally focusses on people with a migration background, stereotypically portrayed as living on the fringes of society. Central issues that come to the fore are the financial troubles and the absence of a clear sense of homeland, often resulting in a feeling of displacement and a heightening of crime rates. The characters are stuck in between two cultures, causing an unresolvable lack of harmony within their life. This thesis, however, posits an alternative way of reading these fairly negative patterns.
The main topics that will respectively be discussed are the lack of a homeland, a sense of being caught in between two cultures, the desire to engage in stereotypically hypermasculine behaviour, and the importance of the suburban landscape. For each topic, this thesis will interpret how the generally negative connotations surrounding these topics are transformed through the perspective of the western genre. Conclusively, in contrast to most migrant films, this allows for a sense harmony to occur as the
protagonists come to term with their place of being. A reading of these films along the lines of the western genre thereby sheds a new light on contemporary debates
surrounding diasporas in the Netherlands and contributes to filling up the academic void regarding the cinematic depictions of this group.
Keywords:
Post-migrant cinema, western genre, genre studies, suburban cinema, comparative research, in-betweenness, Moroccan diaspora, Dutch film, post-migrant-western
INTRODUCTION
“You know what my father always told me? He who leaves his home is worthless.” - Father to his son in Over Zonen (El-Hamus 2012)
“Go back to your own country” is a sentence that, for decades, has been bandied about at anyone whose skin colour, clothing, behaviour, religion or language does not align with those who consider themselves to be the epitome of Dutch culture. As the child of a migrant, this sentence often crosses my mind. Where are they commanding you to go to if you are, in fact, already in the country where you were born? The country that, supposedly, is ‘your own’?
Even though my father is Turkish, the Netherlands have always felt like my homeland – which I assume is the same for my father. It thus took a long time before the complexity of something that for me had always seemed so unquestionable started to dawn on me. It made me reconsider the meaning of a saying as “go back to your own country,” realizing that for many migrants and their here-born children the notion of a homeland is much more complicated than I ever deemed it to be.
This feeling strengthened as I moved out of the centre of Amsterdam and into Slotermeer, a peripheral area on the western edge of the city. Many of the children who grow up in this neighbourhood are born within families of migrants. In large part, this has to do with the fact that the historical centre is increasingly dominated by “the residential presence of the White middle class, while non-White and low-income residents are relegated to the urban periphery,” creating a socio-spatial polarization within the city (Van Gent and Jaffe 555). Although the children of migrants in neighbourhoods like these are born in the Netherlands, they grow up in a largely Muslim community, forcing them to be tightly bound to the homeland of their parents.
This polarization leads to ‘othering,’ whereby autochthonous Dutch people create an aversion based on stereotypes against those who live in the suburbs. I would like to emphasize that the dichotomy based on origin that results from this is not
realistic to me, yet it is a division that is regularly made in daily life as people often tend to stereotype others in order to get a clearer and stronger sense of their own identity (Eriksen 22-24).
While the presence of migrants in the Netherlands has become heavily criticized in the past decade, Dutch filmmakers seem to have discovered ‘multiculturalism’ as a popular topic (Saeys 351). They have started to engage in what is generally called ‘migrant cinema,’ which can be defined either as films made by non-European filmmakers or European films dealing with migrant themes, characters and issues (Ponzanesi 2011, 74). Migrant cinema is a topic that has hitherto received a lot of attention on French, German and Italian grounds, yet the film productions in smaller countries like the Netherlands have remained understudied (Saeys 349). An example of the considerable amount of research done within French migrant cinema is ‘banlieue cinema.’ Also known as cinéma de banlieue, this movement “emerged within French film criticism in the mid-1990s as a way of categorising a series of independently released films set in the rundown multi-ethnic working-class estates (the cités) on the periphery of France's major cities (the banlieues)” (Tarr 2).
The research that has been done so far regarding the cinematic representation of life in the areas outside Amsterdam’s centre generally looks at how the two extremes in the city’s socio-spatial polarization relate to each other. The focal point here is the unequal urban order known to Amsterdam, repeatedly illustrated in Dutch cinema by “contrasting Amsterdam’s city centre, which is depicted as White, middle-class and ‘civilized’, with the post-war urban periphery, which is cast as a mysterious place of racialized poverty, squalor and pathological behaviour” (Van Gent and Jaffe 555).
In this kind of Dutch migrant cinema, the identities of those with a migration background are shaped in contrast to the Dutch culture. Media discourses are
notoriously known for their pivotal role in the construction of the identity of ‘the other.’ They tend to “to articulate the fears and anxieties of the dominant culture” rather than signifying the actual experience and identity of those who are seen as the other. Simply put, “it is a story about us and not them.” This is why it is valuable to study films that do, on the other hand, give “a face and a form to those defined as strangers” (Ponzanesi 2011, 82-88). This is specifically important when looking at second-generation
migrants, as they exist not – stereotypically put – on one side of the contrast, but right in the middle of it. They are Dutch, while simultaneously bound to another land and culture.
For that reason, this thesis will focus on six Dutch films that solely revolve around the children of migrants, without comparing them to their white peers in the centre, thereby pursuing to fill up the academic void. The films that will be discussed are feature films Prins (De Jong 2015) and Wolf (Taihuttu 2013), and shorts Marc Jacobs (De Jong 2015), Over Zonen (El-Hamus 2012), 7 Marokkanen en Jos (Mawla 2018), and Jetski (Mawla 2019) (see Appendix A for summaries). All six have been produced in the past decade, aligning with the emerging trend of portraying
multiculturalism in Dutch cinema. Opposed to common Dutch migrant cinema, the films in my corpus are solely set in the peripheries of major Dutch cities.
Wolf, Over Zonen, 7 Marokkanen en Jos, and Jetski are created by directors with a Moroccan background. Prins and Marc Jacobs are directed by Sam de Jong, who does not have a migrant background but did grow up in a multicultural suburb in Amsterdam Noord. One can nevertheless gather this entire corpus under the migrant genre, as they all revolve around the life of the sons of Moroccan migrants, growing up right in between the Dutch and Moroccan culture.
In his article on banlieue film, Higbee explains how this kind of cinema was “a ‘new’ category of film that, for the first time since the Western, was primarily defined by its geographical location” (38). The same goes for the six films that I will discuss.
However, whereas banlieue cinema oftentimes focusses on the socio-political problems that are created by the architecture of these neighbourhoods, the films of my corpus shed a new, more in-depth, and arguably more positive light on the urban landscape of these outskirts. In this thesis, I will argue that such a constructive interpretation of a setting that is mostly known for its negative connotations can be brought to the fore by a reading of these films in the vein of the western genre.
For long, cinematic portrayals of the peripheries have depicted them as an exotic space that merely exists in contrast to the polished streets of the centre. Yet in the past decade, the negative connotations started to change as the suburban aesthetics became a preferred style in the rap and fashion scene, thenceforth creating a new wave of setting choices within Dutch production companies. The suburban wilderness was then
transformed from a dangerous area marking the border of the city into a frontier to be explored. In that sense, these Dutch migrant films reveal great overlap with the
pioneering genre based on a geographical location, namely the western. Instead of pragmatically depicted life in this setting, the landscape is elevated into a more mythical element within the story. These suburban migrant films are placed between the building blocks that for long have been seen as icons of architectural and social failure.
Nevertheless, they do not blame the urban structure for the struggles of those who inhabit it. Instead, they use the western genre’s conventions to affix the city’s borders with the same significance that the western genre rendered for America’s last frontier.
As will be explicated in the following chapters, Prins, Marc Jacobs, Wolf, Over Zonen, 7 Marokkanen en Jos, and Jetski all make use of conventions seen in the western genre in order to convey the stories of the Moroccan protagonists. To decipher how this sets the films in my corpus apart from other types of migrant cinema, this thesis will analyze why it might be purposeful to read the discussed Dutch films by means of generic elements commonly used within western films. Since all six suburban films do make use of stereotypes surrounding Moroccan youth – such as engaging in criminal behaviour, having trouble with their parents, and desiring symbols of financial success – it is of interest to uncover what meaning the western genre adds to these cinematic stereotypes of immigrants, thus asking in which ways it changes the patterns that generally exist within migrant cinema.
So as to reach a comprehensive answer, the consecutive chapters will first set out the main concepts and theories, followed by three different chapters which will link three conventions inherent to the western genre to issues that regularly arise within migrant cinema in a comparative study. I will then look how these issues gain new meaning through a western genre-based analysis. Genre studies play a pivotal part in this analysis, for which I will combine theories on migrant cinema, focusing on the works of Naficy and Ponzanesi, with writings about the western genre. For the latter, I will predominantly rely on the older works of Cawelti and Williams from the sixties and seventies, combined with more modern theories by Verstraten.
The chapter structure is loosely based on a categorization within the western genre’s conventions which can be described as a division into outer and inner form. The outer form includes all visual aspects of the film, most notably the setting and the props. The inner form includes the stories and the moral assumptions behind both the narrative and the visual aspects (Saunders 10). The main elements within this division will then
be combined with recurring topics in migrant cinema, to decipher what meaning is added to the latter by use of the former.
After setting out the main theories and concepts in the subsequent first chapter, the second chapter will focus on the main storyline in the inner form of the western, namely the hero’s journey. Chapter two zooms in on the incentives of the protagonists, after which chapter three and four will move further away from the characters motives by focusing on the main outer elements, respectively being the props and the setting. The latter chapters will uncover the inner moral assumptions and connotations behind each element, thereby illustrating that the characters’ state of being is not just
represented in their choices, but also in the mise-en-scène. The migrant topics that will herein be discussed come in large part from the characteristics as mentioned by
Ponzanesi and Berger, being the “central issues of migration, displacement, mobility, space and place, as well as identity” (113-114). By putting the western genre’s
assumptions and connotations next to recurring topics within migrant cinema this thesis strives to reveal what new meaning is thereby added to the latter.
1
THE POST-MIGRANT-WESTERN: A HYBRID OF TWO GENRES “I became a chameleon. Everything was completely new. The
children in my class followed the path of their parents, who could help them with their homework. My parents couldn’t do that. As second-generation immigrants, we were pioneers; we had to invent everything by ourselves. I would compare it to sea turtles: the mothers lay eggs on the beach, and then leave. The babies are born and have to save themselves, which is why the mortality rates are so high among those animals.”
- Abdelali Bentohami, in De Volkskrant (Vuijsje 2019)
In the sixties and seventies of the last century, more than one hundred thousand Moroccan and Turkish migrant workers arrived in the Netherlands. Unlike today, the European Union didn’t set any boundaries against these strangers in search of a better life. Driven by the economical uprising after the Second World War, local industries received official support from the government to visit poorer countries to recruit workers. Hence it happened that thousands of energetic young men arrived on Dutch ground. They came from poor agricultural regions, were often low-skilled, sometimes illiterate, but mostly happy to follow the siren call that emerged from the Netherlands (Van der Toolen 2018). They were, as Trakilović calls it, going West; “yearning for a better life, peace, and freedom” (83). Bayraktar notes how “the social identities of migrant workers were circumscribed by the contested rhetorical figure of the
‘guestworker,’ a term that quite literally defined the hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers according to their economic utility and insisted on the temporary nature of their stay” (23). However, most of these guestworkers and their children born in the
homeland never returned home again. Instead, they stayed in the Netherlands, building up a new life while longing back to the place they had left behind (see Appendix B for further explanation).
“Foreigners from far and wide, working at the lowest level, will start to form a new industrial proletariat with their families without sufficient branches within Dutch
society. Because of their strong mutual ties and their own place in our economy, they will easily form a strange body within our population with all the consequences that that entails,” wrote Carel Polak, the Dutch Minister of Justice, in a letter to the Council of Ministers in 1969. This letter did not stand on its own, but was part of a lingering policy conflict about the admission of families of migrant workers (Bonjour 101-102). That relatively negative view on this new phenomenon stuck and increased in the years thereafter. The myth of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space enabling free movement, soon proved to be untrue, as “the European ideals of mobility and fluidity [became] deeply enmeshed with immobility, forced migration, illegalization, inequality, racism, and xenophobia” (Bayraktar 4).
The guestworkers turned out to be more than mere ‘guests,’ and in the years following their arrival more people from North African and Middle Eastern regions headed towards the Netherlands, often fleeing from war and poverty in their own countries. Like the migrants that came before them, many of them stayed and created a new life in which they kept on longing for the homeland they had left behind. Yet the yearning for a lost homeland isn’t felt by every immigrant living on foreign soil. As the guestworkers and refugees stayed in the Netherlands, they expanded their families with children who never crossed borders in the literal sense of their parents and grandparents. Instead, they were born on what was essentially a last frontier for their ancestors.
Growing up in the peripheries of cities, their worlds are literally defined by being a border zone: they are torn between the heritage of their family and the new land they are trying to make sense of, forced to choose which road they pick for themselves as they leave their boyhood behind. The spatiality and temporality of this specific place of being is where the following chapters and case studies will focus on.
1.1 A Post-Migrant Space in Cinema
Because of the migrants’ loss of familiar habitats “migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world (…),” Rushdie argues. And for the plural, hybrid, metropolitan result of such imaginings, the cinema, in which peculiar fusions have always been legitimate, (…) may well be the ideal location” (25). This creative
urge to tell their stories through the medium of film has been given many different names, such as accented cinema, intercultural cinema, transnational cinema, post-migrant cinema, and cinema of the borders. “Films that fall into these categories typically explore the exilic and diasporic spaces and subjects in Western metropolises. By documenting and detailing the many faces of the ‘other’ in Europe (…), such films investigate the psychological and sociological processes of assimilation, integration, and cultural syncretism as well as discrimination and racism against minorities and
migrants” (Bayraktar 8).
One well known category within these kinds of films is what is called ‘banlieue film’ or ‘cinéma de banlieue.’ This term first appeared in France in 1995, after the release of six feature films about the urban periphery as a site of social exclusion and ethnic difference, the most well-known being La Haine (Kassovitz 1995). This new genre was defined by its geographical setting, yet beyond their shared socio-cultural location, these films displayed considerable stylistic and ideological diversity.” It still is a very loaded term, as it stereotypically “evokes images of run-down cités (working-class housing projects) located on the peripheries of larger French cities dominated by violence, unemployment, criminality, social exclusion and populated by alienated male youth – particularly of (North-African) immigrant origin” (Higbee 38). Banlieue is thus not just known for its location, but also for the negative connotations that it brings forth.
The emphasis on location sets banlieue cinema apart from other types of migrant film that are primarily defined by a common theme. An example of this is Naficy’s notion of accented cinema, “defined as films made since the 1960s in Western countries by exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial directors” (Bayraktar 24). Bayraktar explains how, “according to Naficy, accented films share specific stylistic and thematic features such as narrative hybridity (the juxtaposition of multiple voices, spaces, and times) and a specific visual style of expressing nostalgia for the homeland. Evoking the
deterritorialized conditions of the filmmakers, these films are preoccupied with journeying and displacement” (25).
Although the latter part about the common theme is true for the case studies I will use, they are not, on the contrary, all created by postcolonial directors. Neither do they merely tell the stories of first-generation migrants, as is often the case within the previously mentioned categories. Therefore, I will from hereon use the term
post-migrant cinema, which emphasizes not just the first-generation post-migrants who physically crossed the border to another country, but also their successors (hence ‘post’). This term was first coined by Betts, who states that “in both France and the Netherlands, the film industry is involved in the representation of ethnic identities from the North African diaspora.” She describes post-migrant cinema as “films focusing on the lives of first- and second-generation North African immigrants in Europe. They are sometimes, but not always, written or directed by people of the corresponding heritage” (28). Since the six Dutch films I will examine are made by directors with and without a migration background, revolving around second-generation migrants from Morocco, I will from now on refer to them as post-migrant films.
Berger and Mohr note that “to re-become a man (husband, father, citizen, patriot) a migrant has to return home” (12). This can clearly be seen in films exploring the experience of exile and diaspora, as they often portray recurring topics such as home-seeking, homelessness, and homecoming journeys, which are manifested in a nostalgic and sometimes fetishistic quest for wholeness (Bayraktar 47). The experience of second-generation migrants differs from this, in the sense that their homeland is less clear due to the strong ties to both cultures.
Diasporas often have a strong nostalgic or mythical connection with their homeland, which can produce a tension between the two cultures, Rawle explains. This tension is particularly intense for those who are born in the new culture, as they are in between two cultures or a blending thereof (111-113). Therefore, the second-generation migrants are usually the ones who select more or less consciously what aspects of each cultural background are acceptable and preferable for them, thus transgressing cultural boundaries and demonstrating a cross-cultural and transnational hybridity (Rings 117).
Their hybridity is manifested, for instance, through what Naficy coins as ‘multiplexing’ and ‘multiplicity.’ Elements hereof can be found “in the film’s
multilingual dialogue, multicultural characters and multi-sited diegeses, and it is driven by the many languages of the film-makers and their crew and the stories they make films about” (Naficy 2010, 15). The multilingual dialogue can be observed in Over Zonen, Jetski, and Wolf, wherein the protagonists talk in Arabic with their family and in Dutch with others. Additionally, the characters in Prins and Marc Jacobs use slang
which originates from the migrant youth in the peripheries of major Dutch cities and the lyrics of Dutch hip hop, a popular subculture amidst youth with a migration
background.
In contrast to first-generation migrant films, where the ties to the homeland are more tangible, the notion of multi-sitedness is more complex in post-migrant cinema. Instead of shifting between the different countries that shape the identity of the diaspora, the periphery is the core setting. Naficy’s multiplicity of locations is here traded for a single location, namely the suburbs, and the crossing of spatial borders is replaced by the portrayal of life on the border and the crossing of psychological borders. Such can be seen in Marc Jacobs, in which the protagonist wants to go on holiday to the homeland of his Moroccan father. Unfortunately, the migrant-son is eventually forced to stay where he was born: on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Films like these don’t show the two sides of the border that the first generation has crossed. Instead, it depicts life in the place where those two meet – on the frontier that characterizes the experience of the generations that followed.
As Ponzanesi and Berger state, many of the what they call ‘postcolonial migrant films’ contain a specific mode of filming. Two of the foregrounded elements in this aesthetic language are the earlier mentioned multilingualism and something that they refer to as ‘places’ (112). To get a more intelligible concept of what these non-places entail, it is first necessary to take a closer look at the role of space within post-migrant cinema. “Spatiality occupies a central role in postcolonial cinema, because it foregrounds movement and dislocations, borders and crossings, spaces and non-places, mental journeys and fantasies, as well as different forms of heterotopias,” Ponzanesi and Berger explain (113). Peculiarly with regard to the suburban setting of these films, the notion of ‘the border’ is crucial to understand the role of space.
Traditionally, borders referred to a geopolitical line between different topographies. Nevertheless, they have obtained a broader meaning in contemporary society. Borders have gained a certain multiplicity, meaning that the term can be applied to a plurality of conditions. Yet, “their hypothetical and fictive nature, do not make them any less real” (Balibar 76). Such is true for the suburban setting in post-migrant cinema; they characterize the border of a city – often being the last residential area
before the landscape morphs into meadows and industrial sites – but they also entail a hypothetical or metaphorical border – being the border where a clash between two cultures takes place for the protagonist. In this sense, the periphery – with its high population of migrants and their children – can be seen as what Ponzanesi calls a holding or waiting area. She describes this, for instance, as the bureaucratic no man’s land in between two countries, where refugees and migrants have to wait before knowing if they can enter the new land (2012, 682). In case of the protagonists in my corpus, the suburbs form the setting in which they are ‘waiting’ to find their place between the Moroccan and the Dutch culture, still unsure of how to amalgamate both.
The young protagonists are, as Sieg puts it, “located in a twilight zone of ‘in betweenness” (260). Their going-on are shaped around the specific spatiality and temporality of in-betweenness. They are in the midst of two cultures, two languages, and two sets of moral codes. At the same time, they find themselves on a temporal border space as well: growing up from boy into man, and possibly being the last one in their genealogy to be called a person with a migration background. According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics, a person with a migration background is someone of whom at least one parent was born abroad (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek). If the protagonists in my corpus would have children with a non-migrant, their children would thus loose this title. As such, the in-betweenness seeps through in almost all aspects of the protagonists’ portrayed life.
The concept of non-places was first formulated by Augé, who refers in particular to places of late capitalism without an identity, history or relation to the outside world (79). Examples of such places are shopping malls, motels, airports and motorway stops, in which individuals function mostly as passengers. Yet Augé additionally includes peripheral locations in his definition, such as the geographical places of transit and waiting in which migrants and refugees find themselves when trying to get into a new society (idem, 103). Here, he builds on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, also known as ‘other spaces’ or des espaces autres. “In general, a heterotopia is a space that organises otherness and difference, and is also a means of escape from authoritarianism and repression. These are spaces of otherness, neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental” (Ponzanesi 2012, 677). The organisation of ‘others’ can be applied
to the social housing in peripheral areas as well, as this is where the guestworkers of the past century were put en masse to live a cloistered life.
Ponzanesi and Berger therefore argue that the colonial suburban space “can also be defined as a heterotopia, a place where regimes of otherness are organised and enforced, (…) far away from the centre but imprinted with its model of inclusion and exclusion.” The inhabitants of these areas are marked as ‘other’ and physically displaced to the outskirts of society. These liminal spaces are, as mentioned earlier, zones of in-betweenness. Although they are spaces of in-betweenness “these zones of marginalisation and exclusion,” can, according to Ponzanesi and Berger, eventually “become places of semi-belonging and transformation” (678).
In order to arrive at this belonging and transformation – thereby reaching a sense of homeland – its inhabitants have to create an alternative space. This is a ‘Third Space’ which can be seen as a location of transformation established by the different
generations of migrants who live there. This can be done “by transforming the outsider/insider relations and making of those non-places locations for alternative belonging and trespassing” (idem, 689-690). The cinematic and generic elements that are deployed to portray this development in the discussed post-migrant films will be discussed in the following subchapter.
1.2 The Western as an Adjective
As aforementioned, the post-migrant youth demonstrates a cross-cultural and
transnational hybridity, since they find themselves both internally and externally on the edge of two cultures. This multiplicity often causes post-migrant cinema to, from an aesthetic point of view, combine a complex and eclectic variety of different styles, genres and forms (Ponzanesi 2011, 74). The stories of its marginalized subjects are therefore oftentimes conveyed through rather unconventional and atmospheric visual registers that defy containment in any traditional genre (Ponzanesi and Berger 2016, 114). Consequently, films within post-migrant cinema generally consist of a
combination of elements found originally in other genres.
The fact that there’s not yet one specific list of generic elements that defines post-migrant cinema can be explained by delving a bit deeper into the emergence of
new genres. Altman suggests that “all genre formation (…) begins with a process of cycle-making creolization, combining gypsy adjectives with established, land-owning generic substantives” (199). Altman poses the question of what genres can teach us about nations, before he goes on to explain how genres commonly take on new shapes through hyphenation. “With national concerns as with genres, hyphenation is the vehicle of change,” Altman states.
In the twenties of the previous century, the western could not yet be seen as a genre itself. The word ‘western’ was then generally used as an adjective, describing the style of another genre, such as ‘western romance,’ ‘western comedy,’ western
biographical drama,’ and ‘western melodrama’ (Leutrat 157-163). Yet “by 1930, a pattern of generic miscegenation – drama, comedy, musical-melodrama – had produced an offspring regarded, surprisingly, as pure,” Altman continues. He then relates this to changes within the nation from which these subgenres emerged: “During the same period, melting-pot America was born out of a population of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and Chinese-Americans, who (after many tribulations) eventually came to be known simply as Americans. Today the situation apparently repeats itself (…)” (204).
Like so, the road-western eventually turned into the road movie. “What was first a theme becomes a recognized genre in its own right,” Roberts writes about this
transition. Here, “the focus changed from a hero travelling across the frontier to the searcher hitting the road” (50). At the same time, the reason for the protagonist’s
journey, the props, and the setting changed. “In the transference from the Western to the road film, the frontier becomes the road, the horse becomes the car, and the hero
becomes a desire (…) for heroism,” Roberts adds (66). As will be shown in chapter two through four, the transference from the western genre to post-migrant cinema changes these elements in a similar manner. The hero’s reason for journeying becomes a quest for wholeness, the horse is substituted with stereotypical masculine tools (such as jet skis, cars, and branded accessories), and the frontier changes into the suburbs. When discussing transnational cinema, Rawle follows up on Altman’s theory. “With genre, as with nations, hyphens become a question of politics,” Rawle argues. “Hyphenated identities eventually become submerged into the masses, while new
hyphenates are acknowledged on the margins” (218). The same can be seen in post-migrant cinema which – like its subjects – is still a combination of different cultural (or in this case, generic) elements. “Only when those previously marginalized adjectives plant their flag in the centre of the world are they transmuted into substantival genres, thus putting them on the map, as it were (…),” writes Altman. In the same means as its second-generation migrant subjects, post-migrant cinema is still in the process of shaping its own specific identity – trying to find its individual path within the different elements that created its initial form. “Alone, no single point on the periphery can possibly stand up to the powerful centre,” Altman continues, “but through lateral
communication the margins can eventually muster the strength necessary for a takeover, only eventually to be displaced by a new set of laterally connected margins” (199). Although the characters in post-migrant cinema are not pursuing a takeover, they are similarly attempting to merge the two parts of themselves together as a whole.
The idea that one cannot infiltrate the mainstream on its own essentially
demonstrates how specific hyphenations need to become more ubiquitous in order to be seen as a proper genre. In the following paragraphs I will argue that there’s one specific genre of which certain conventions are commonly used in my post-migrant corpus, namely the western genre. As noted previously, the western was the first major genre to be primarily defined by its geographical location. Yet while its location and place in history originally played such a fundamental role within the genre, the western was later on adapted by other countries and set in more contemporary times. Evidently, the western genre encompasses a sense of universality, which led to the emergence of multifarious subgenres worldwide.
Genres tend to uphold their freshness and vitality by combining familiarity with difference (Roberts 48). Since the western encompasses a certain elasticity which allows for such combinations, it has become one of the most appealing and durable genres (Verstraten 23). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the western has yet again risen up in a new form. Lee writes that “film scholars have observed signs of its revival, albeit in augmented and hybridized forms in the global mediascape.” Moreover, they particularly noted “the intertwined processes of generic crossbreeding in postmodern film cultures and cross-cultural critical reception.” Filmmakers from numerous countries have re-invented the immemorial Hollywood genre as a way to engage in
complex “intergeneric and intertextual dialogues between the Western” and their own regional cinematic cultures (147). The western genre is exceptionally suitable for these kinds of intergeneric and intertextual dialogues, which in large part has to do with the hyphen-theory as explained above.
When discussing transnational cinema, asking how the hyphenated identity of the western genre relates to transnational flows (219). After the western grew into a proper genre, other countries started to take it over, using new time periods and different settings. Due to its elasticity as a genre, the western film might gain new meaning when it is placed in a different context. The western genre could originally “be understood as a popular form that becomes part of the cultural language by which America understands itself” (Lusted 22). Thus, when the genre is adapted by other cultures in other times, it may become a way to make sense of themselves too.
The versatility and possibility of intergeneric dialogues is something that the western and post-migrant cinema have in common. Post-migrant cinema combines “genre, authorship, and transnational positioning,” Naficy explains. Thence it “allows films to be read and reread not only as individual texts produced by authorial vision and generic conventions, but also as sites for intertextual, cross-cultural, and translational struggles over meanings and identities” (2003, 205). When creating the hyphenated combination of western and post-migrant cinema, the western adjective consequently offers a new perspective on the meanings and identities of the migrant subjects
portrayed within this hyphenated genre. For this reason, I will now use the hyphenated term post-migrant-western to refer to the films of my corpus.
1.3 The Wild West as the Suburbs’ Counterpart
The manners in which generic elements of the western offer a new reading of migration issues, will be explicated in the following chapters by analysing the post-migrant films along the lines of conventions inherent to the western genre. However, before the relation between the two can be construed, it is pivotal to first elaborate a bit further on the western genre itself. “We recognize a western because of its familiar characters and settings: cowboys with ten-gallon hats in saloons or lone buckskin-clad horsemen in
open, sunlit spaces,” Verstraten writes. “Apart from this imagery, we tend to recognize recurring plot lines,” particularly that of the good cowboy stranger saving civilization after a climactic showdown with the bad guys in the wilderness. Logically, it owes its name to its geographical setting, the American West, and is set mostly in the period of the Great Settlement (1860-1890), when pioneers crossed the wide, open plains to settle their towns (Verstraten 21-23).
Notwithstanding these characteristics, storylines have been adjusted and the setting has sometimes been unrecognizably changed over the years. Given this
mutability it is best to understand a genre like the western as a process that is known for repetition, yet fundamentally marked by variation. For this reason, critics following the 1970s – the heyday of scholarship on the western – have noted that elements and conventions of the western genre are not simply replayed but always in play (Neale 170). Verstraten follows up on this, by explaining how “one western relates to another western in a constant interplay of repetition and variation.” The first step is then “to note resonances and differences. The subsequent step, and the crux of genre study, resides in making differences meaningful” (21). This thesis will therefore examine what new meanings are added to the resonances of the western by putting them in the new context of post-migrant cinema set in Dutch suburbs.
One of the constant elements characterizing the western genre is the framework of binary axes, such as inside/outside society, good/bad, law/outlaw, and
civilization/wilderness. The good cowboy fights the bad outlaws, the men are out in the wild while “the women either need to be rescued or remain at home, and in the end some sort of justice is served” (Roberts 49). These binary axes are closely related to the dichotomies as seen in post-migrant cinema in the form of a tension between two cultures. Rawle sees this, for example, in the binaries and hierarchies of centre/margins and self/other. In Bayraktar’s book on migration in film, these binaries take on the shape of home/travel, mobilities/moorings and inside/outside, as migrant experiences are structured around binarism and duality (47). Although the use of dichotomies is inherent to both the western genre as well as post-migrant cinema, they do not have the same negative connotations in western films as they do in post-migrant films. As the following chapters will explicate, the polarizing effect of the binary axes gains a new
and more positive meaning when reading it through the lens of the western genre. The western conventions prove themselves to be a tool in finding a middle way between the web of opposites, thereby relating to current affairs surrounding the image of migrant youth in the Netherlands.
Understanding the frontierness in post-migrant cinema by means of the western genre’s conventions entails a similar significance. The western has originally been described as “a story which takes place on or near a frontier” (Cawelti 35). The pioneers of the Great Settlements crossed the open plains of American to settle their towns. Their travels eventually ended as they came to rest in the Wild West, America’s last frontier, in the hope of starting a new life there. Although it should be noted that first-generation migrants did not come here to take over the land and extrude the native population, they too crossed borders in search of a better life, establishing themselves in a new frontier zone.
Since “the western should not be regarded as the recreation of a verifiable topography but rather as the production of an imaginary setting” any kind of frontier can be the backdrop of a western (Verstraten 23). The borders of Amsterdam can therefore, even in “their hypothetical and fictive nature,” be seen as a last frontier in the eyes of the people who live near or on these outskirts (Balibar 76). As aforementioned, the people who live here are “located in a twilight zone of ‘in betweenness’” (Sieg 260). This closely resembles what Verstraten describes as the setting where the clash between the binary axes of a western takes place: it is a “’frontier space,’ an ‘in-between’ area” (23).
This frontierness is in large part caused by what will be the main focus of the chapter hereafter, namely the hero’s journey. By cause of the laminated homeland, many post-migrant films are preoccupied with journeying and displacement, causing the hero (or protagonist) to set forth on his own journey (Bayraktar 25). Within the western, the hero also goes on a journey to solve the conflict around the frontier. The hero can intervene in variable ways and choose his own path to find order within the chaos caused by the clash of those earlier mentioned binary axes (Verstraten 24). Like cowboys, the subjects in post-migrant cinema can thus set off on their own journey in order to solve the internal and external conflict on both the physical and mental border of two cultures.
In the mind of surgeon Abdelali Bentohami, a second-generation Moroccan living in Amsterdam, the second-generation youth can be seen as pioneers (Vuijsje 2019). They are the ones living on Amsterdam’s last frontier – turning what once was seen as a non-place into their own non-place. When reading contemporary post-migrant films from Amsterdam as westerns, one can thus gain new insights into how we perceive its second-generation migrant subjects. Compared to their first-generation predecessors who set up a life at this last frontier but are longing back home, the youth inhabiting the periphery of Amsterdam at this moment does not have such clear sense of a homeland.
The following chapters will explicate how they, like the heroes in westerns, can solve the conflict of being struck between two cultures on both a spatial and an internal border. Contemporary post-migrant cinema intertwines “the stories of subjects with different ethnicities, affiliations, and cultural backgrounds by drawing from various film genres and styles that are not immediately associated with migrant and diasporic
cinema, enabling us to draw connections across seemingly unrelated notions” (Bayraktar 24). These unpredicted connections can create a new perspective, as the suburbs are represented with an almost “poetic abstraction,” allowing us “the possibility of viewing the cité through different eyes” (Higbee 43). The western turns out to be a suitable adjective for such interaction, as “a western does not just originate from its context, but (…), in turn, can also speak back to and affect contemporary debates” (Verstraten 28). The creative use of western elements in the post-migrant films which will anon be analysed, helps the viewer to see the meaning and identity of Amsterdam’s edges through the eyes of those who inhabit them.
2
THE HERO’S JOURNEY: SEEKING STABILITY IN THE UNKNOWN The West: “(…) a virgin land that stretched to what might be
infinity – with the possibilities seemingly infinite as well. It was a place to become what one could not be in one’s present state. It offered the outcast escape from the oppressive strictures of the law; it provided the explorer uncharted regions to challenge; it gave the settler the chance of a fresh start; it promised the entrepreneur unclaimed goods to gain the opportunity to turn a handy profit or to establish a personal empire.”
- Rita Parks, in The Western Hero in Film and Television (7)
The quote above refers to the American settlers moving westward in the nineteenth century, but could just as well be associated with the hopes and dreams that many Moroccan emigrants had when moving to the Netherlands. They arrived here in search of a better life, expectantly providing them more social and financial freedom. Just as it happened in the early days of America, the trickle of Moroccan emigrants in the
Netherlands widened into a flood (Parks 8). In both cases, it was the men of capital and enterprise who came first, soon to be followed by their families and children who too were brought in from their homeland (McDermott 2). They stayed as well, enchanted by the myth of all that Western Europe had to offer, and in their turn started their own families in this new land. Be that as it may, the longing to where they came from lingered on.
As Parks states about the American settlers, they “went west with the desire to better their lot in some way.” Nevertheless, many of them were “bitterly disappointed, [and] some were physically or mentally crushed, (…) they were, in turn, possessed by a restlessness that rarely permitted them to sink their roots very deeply into any given plot of land or place of work” (10). Again, there is a close resemblance to the Moroccan diaspora. After the hopeful arrival of the guestworkers, the Dutch economy slowly ended up in a long-lasting recession, while migration from Turkey and Morocco increased sharply as a result of family reunification, resulting in mass immigration at a
very unfortunate moment. From the nineties onwards, the rules for both the indigenous population and the migrants have therefore been changed. The requirements to be entitled to unemployment benefits have become stricter and migrants who end up in social assistance can since then be deported (Lucassen). These unsure social and
financial situations burden them with a feeling of restlessness, homelessness and lack of roots, which is often the subject matter in migrant cinema.
Despite promises from employers to provide them with better housing, the migrants often ended up in peripheral areas, increasing the problems in these already troublesome neighbourhoods (Versteegh). Localities with a greater diversity of origin amongst its inhabitants tend to have a less strong social cohesion compared to
homogenous areas, often resulting in higher rates of criminality and feelings of unsafety. A possible explanation is that, unlike the higher-income population, they do not always have the resources to choose in which neighbourhoods they would prefer to live. Besides that, the bottom of society would have “nothing to lose” anyway (Boon). This feeling of having nothing to lose yet wanting to step up might be a reason behind the stereotypical portrayals of their children, who are lured into the criminal circuit.
Withal, it is of importance to note that migrants differ from the American settlers, in the sense that the migrants have always felt a pressure to integrate into the new country’s culture – something that the oppressive settlers did not experience. Nevertheless, the parallels between the historical myths shaping the western genre and the background stories of Moroccan immigrants reveal valuable insights in order to gain a new understanding of the post-migrant-westerns’ plots and their characters’ diegetic decisions. This chapter will demonstrate how one can be provided with a more in-depth and well-grounded explanation of the protagonists’ actions by reading these films’ structure along the lines of the western genre.
2.1 Stuck on the Edge
The characters’ diegetic decisions to engage in this wild behaviour can in part be explained by the earlier mentioned sense of in-betweenness. On the one hand, their parents’ cultural integration appears to be in regression, as “for migrant and exilic
characters there can be no place like home, for they belong elsewhere and cannot be fully at home where they reside” (Bayraktar 47). In the analysed post-migrant-westerns, the conservative ideals of the parents thus stereotypically pull on the second-generation youth from one side, while on the other side there is the desire to move forward and create an identity of their own. The eagerness to progress or step up in post-migrant cinema often takes on the shape of trying to gain the financial resources that their ancestors were hoping for, but did not achieve. This can clearly be seen in the films of my case study. In for instance Prins, Wolf, and 7 Marokkanen en Jos, the protagonists’ introduction into the criminal world is motivated by a need or desire for money, which stems from the lack thereof in their household.
The migrant youth that was born in the new country thus finds itself in a twilight zone. They are still torn between the home culture of their parents and the host culture in which they live, creating a tension between the two which is at the basis of the post-migrant-westerns I will here focus on (Rawle 113). This in-between identity strongly resembles that of the hero in the western genre, who, according to Parks, is a loner that “can never become ‘domesticated’ or ‘civilized’ in full sense of the word.” He is “a man in the middle,” torn between civilization and the wilderness (Parks 56).
If one would apply this dichotomy of civilization and wilderness to the post-migrant-westerns set in the Dutch suburbs, the civilization could refer to the Moroccan parents, as they are the ones who established a society in a new land. Moreover, the town in the western genre signifies the feminine, domestication, and class stratification, which is comparable to the stereotypical portrayal of the households in my corpus. By contrast, the world outside is equated with the masculine – “nature, open spaces, heroism, vitality, and justice.” This wilderness would then parallel life on the streets in the post-migrant-westerns, with endless rows of apartment blocks shaping its nature and the criminal enterprises being the danger in the wild. Actors and filmmakers John Ford and John Wayne go even further in their films, by contrasting the new Western world with “the East and the old, defeated South, which together connote regressive values, decay (…), [and] effeminacy” (Roberts 48). The suburbs, wherein both sides of the contrast exist, thus resemble the frontier space inherent to the western genre. As Verstraten states: “Over and over again, the western stages the clash between the
‘lawless’ forces of the wilderness and the ‘civilized’ people (…). The setting where this clash takes place can be called ‘frontier space,’ an ‘in-between’ area” (23).
In line with the split identity of the migrant youth, the classical Westerner (or cowboy), also “seems uneasy in society – and eager to return to the more congenial elements of nature and solitude,” Parks explains. “He is almost always a man with one foot in the wilderness and the other in civilization, moving through life belonging to neither world” (57-8). Coincidentally, when faced with the lack of a homeland, “many exiles [too] seem to turn to the structural authority and certainty that only nature seems capable of providing,” notes Naficy when discussing accented cinema. “Nature,
however, also connotes a place of adventure and danger” (2001, 156). According to Wachhorst, the classic western hero mediates these opposites, both having a physical allegiance to the wilderness as well as a moral commitment to civilization. In regard to the migrant hero, this means having a moral commitment to his family while at the same time being drawn to an outside life full of opportunities and danger. One can recognize this tension in the protagonists of Prins, Jetski, and Wolf. In order to honour or provide for their families, they engage in criminal behaviour that their family does not approve of. Like the western hero, they are “caught between the townspeople's need for his savage skills and their rejection of his way of life” (Wachhorst 15).
2.2 The Suburban Monomyth
The civilization/wilderness dichotomy inherent to the western genre gave shape to what is now called ‘the American monomyth,’ which is the structural model laying at the roots of most storylines in the western genre (idem). This term, as coined by Jawett and Lawrence in 1977, was based on Campbell’s classical monomyth structure (Knight 14). In short, the classical monomyth can be described as follows:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (23).
This monomyth “involves a clear spatial duality that relates to inside/outside, self/other, home/away juxtapositions” as it is precisely the trip to the opposing end of the spectrum that makes the hero’s return so meaningful. Without experiencing the wild, the hero will not be able to solve the problems in the domestic world. This civilized space is where he starts and ends his quest. These are the ‘common lands,’ “the known home-world which signifies normality. His quest leads through a mysterious other-world where he
encounters the magical, the demonic or the divine.” Eventually he returns, with newly acquired insights that can be used to invigorate the home-world (Gent and Jaffe 557).
The reason for the hero to embark on a journey is of great importance in my corpus, though it is no structural part of the classical monomyth model. However, neither does the American monomyth fully suit the structure of the analysed post-migrant-westerns, as therein the hero leaves society again after his return.
Figure 1: A comparison of the classical and American monomyth (Knight 18).
The above figure compares the two monomyths to depict which steps are included or omitted. As shown, the hero’s incentive – which does present itself in my corpus – is no part of the classical monomyth. The American monomyth, on the other hand, leaves out the terminal integration of the hero into society, which does appear in most films I discuss. In my analysis, I will therefore use a combination of both
monomyths wherein the focus shifts from the needs of the townspeople to the subconscious needs and desires of the protagonist.
The protagonists’ reasons to set forth into the wild is in large part motivated by a concern for identity and honour, which relates closely to the western hero, who also has its roots in this same Mediterranean cultural notion (Parks 56). In Prins and Wolf the protagonist enters the criminal circuit with the main goal of making money. On the one hand, they need this money for their family. In Prins, protagonist Ayoub needs the money for his heroin addicted Moroccan dad. In Wolf, protagonist Majid needs the money for his parents, who are thinking of selling their house in Morocco as they can no longer afford it. Besides that, their quest for financial resources origins from an issue of identity. In both films, the characters try to gain money and status as a way to
upgrade their position of power within their community and become the masters of their place. 7 Marokkanen en Jos focusses solely on the desire to climb up the financial ladder, as all seven characters are portrayed merely by means of the (sometimes clandestine) professions that they created for themselves.
The protagonists in Marc Jacobs, Jetski, and Over Zonen are on the other hand driven by a motivation that has much more to do with honour, identity, and family relations. In Marc Jacobs, the protagonist is supposed to go on holiday to Morocco with his Moroccan father. Yet when his father bails on him, he traverses into the wilderness – a typical Dutch landscape that differs massively from his common suburban land. After walking through a construction lot, struggling to see due to the sand blowing in his eyes, he wanders into a meadow. Angry of being stuck in the Netherlands, he tries to scare the cows away. After a slow pan accompanied by the sound of church bells, the sun sets and the quietness returns, almost as if the young hero comes to terms with the Dutch side of his identity.
Mounir, the 23-year-old protagonist in Over Zonen, is similarly stuck between two cultures. He recently moved away from the periphery, into the centre of
Amsterdam. In the film we see him return to the suburbs for his depressed fathers 50th
birthday, like a hero emerging from the horizon. His father, who feels homesick and longs to be back in Morocco, confronts Mounir with the fact that he became too Dutch and lost touch with his Moroccan roots. As a form of escapism, Mounir traverses into his own personal wilderness – a hedonistic club in Amsterdam, which goes against all the ideals that his conservative father expects him to live up to.
Lastly, Jetski puts the focus on honour in relation to family bonds. Following Mido in the suburbs of Amsterdam, we see him working in a matrass store in order to be able to pay for his terminally ill father’s medicines. Yet this job is no part of his journey. The seed for his motivation to enter the wilderness is planted when Mido’s ill father tells him that he used to be the jet ski champion of the Red Sea. To honour him, Mido decides to buy a jet ski for himself. Unfortunately, the jet ski is too expensive. Once his father passes away, Mido no longer lets himself be held back by financial boundaries and decides to steal the jet ski, taking it to the vast waters of the Sloterplas. Without saying another word, he “finally ride[s] into the sunset, just as the Lone Ranger cannot wait for thanks” (Wachhorst 15).
What starts as a journey motivated by a need to protect, honor or make sense of ‘civilization,’ ends up to be a journey towards a kind of ‘wholeness.’ According to Campbell’s monomyth, the hero’s goal is to be born again after his journey (91). This relates to the motivation behind the journeying in post-migrant cinema since, as stated before, a migrant has to return home in order to fully become a man (Berger and Mohr 58). Stories surrounding “home-seeking, homelessness, and homecoming journeys are manifested in a nostalgic and sometimes fetishistic quest for wholeness” (Bayraktar 47). In contrast to most post-migrant films, the desire to return to a homeland is not the incentive for the protagonists in my corpus. Instead, their incentive relates to the domestic sphere in the same way that it does for the western hero. The importance of a homeland ultimately presents itself in the subconscious insight with which they return from their journey, underscoring the significance of using the western’s monomyth structure.
“In good Western fashion,” this can then be seen “as an epic journey between two imaginary (but also real) places” (Cawelti 58). One place is the civilization, or the conservative households that pull on the characters from one side. The other place is the wilderness, the landscape where the hero traverses to in order to reach his goals, while latently making sense of who he is. After moving in and out of the opposites that form his in-between position, the protagonist comes to terms with both sides of his identity. He pushes his limits, both physically and psychologically, and returns home with renewed strength and purpose (Barnes 80-81).
This development can, for instance, be seen in Prins. Ayoub’s initial goal was to make money for his father. When his father passes away, his journey starts to focus more on gaining status in the form of money, power and girls. After a classical shoot-out in a conflict with the bad guys, the hero returns to the common lands – also known as the playground between their flats. He leaves the criminal circuit behind, reconnects with his friends and family, and finally finds his own place. As Ayoub and his friends walk happily across the playground at the end of the film, the bad guys pass by in the background. After his journey, it is clear that Ayoub has claimed the space that was once an in-between waiting area in which he and his friends had nothing to say. After his encounter with criminal life, Ayoub has returned with newly acquired insights that strengthen his sense of identity in the home-world.
The struggle surrounding in-betweenness seemingly comes to an end as well in Wolf. Even though his father rejects his way of life (the boxing, the stealing, and dealing drugs) he does show up at Majid’s biggest boxing match, as he finally appears to
understand that they (the townspeople) need Majid’s savage skills. In the final shot of the film, Majid sits in the locker room after his grand boxing match, or his physical equivalent of a shoot-out against the bad guy. There is the sound of a door opening and Majid looks up, hinting to the idea that his father might come in to congratulate and reconnect with him. A similar event takes place in Over Zonen. After Mounir loses himself in a hedonistic club, he still chooses to return to his parental home. In the final shot, Mounir and his father sit next to each other in the living room. They exchange a glance, providing a sense of mutual understanding between the two. They realize that they both find themselves in an identical position, torn in half between two cultures. This shared identity lessens the burden that weighs on both characters at the beginning of the film, thus providing a sense of peace.
2.3 Towards a New Myth
The journeys in these post-migrant-westerns are not merely physical, but particularly psychological journeys. The fact that the hero’s initial reason to set forth does not always line up with the end result can be explained by the notion that, in post-migrant
cinema, “journeys are rarely simple or homogeneous. (…) Once initiated, journeys often change character.” What started as an escape, can for instance become a journey of exploration or return. Just as in the monomyths of the western, where the cowboy returns to the common lands to reflect on his travels, every journey in post-migrant cinema also “entails a return, or the thought of return” taking on the shape of a homecoming (Naficy 2001, 229). Combined with elements of the western genre, this homecoming does not merely mean returning to civilization, but returning with the insights that have been yielded during the journey through the wilderness and can be used to invigorate the home-world (Gent and Jaffe 557).
In contrast to the monomyths of the western genre, the migrant protagonist is more than merely a facilitator. He not only honours or provides for his family in the domestic world, but moreover undergoes a grand personal transformation. The significance of the protagonist’s character development thus asks for a more modern interpretation of the western genre’s structure. This in part has to do with the earlier mentioned difference between the American settlers and Moroccan migrants in the Netherlands. Whereas the western hero confides in his own ideals, the Moroccan diaspora finds itself in a constant process of negotiation. Because of this discrepancy between the two, I would like to state that the post-migrant-westerns should be perceived as a more modern interpretation of the monomyth.
A more latter-day interpretation of the western genre’s hero’s journey could be the earlier mentioned road movie. In contrast to the western, the road movie emphasizes “a dual journey, physical and spiritual. It is not the case that the external journey
replaces the internal quest, but rather that the two are instead interdependent.” The yearnings and personal motives of the protagonists play a more important role in their decision to hit the road than it does for the western heroes embarking on their journey. “The characters’ desire to get on the road indicates a longing for a self-transformation, as well as a revitalized belief in (…) the American Dream.” As such, they can be seen as ‘dream chasers,’ on the hunt for a better situation than they were in before (Roberts 54-6). If one would relate this to the protagonists of the post-migrant-westerns, they are initially driven by a belief in their local version of what the American Dream connotes, namely the hope that they can achieve their goals and become the person they dreamt of. This subconscious longing for self-transformation soon becomes the most important
aspect of their journey, as a new sense of self and wholeness is the insight with which they return.
In the words of Naficy, describing the many types of journeying in exilic
cinema, this can thus be seen as a “journey of identity,” in which the characters undergo a personal transformation (2001, 237). They thereby resemble the American
frontiersman – “a man moving into the unknown, into potentiality, and by that move profoundly changing his own nature” (Williams 405). An escape into the wilderness is necessary to do so, as only when being “distanced from familiar and familiar structures, the [migrant youth is] in an enviable position of being able to remake themselves. If it can be constructed, identity can also be reconstructed, deconstructed – even performed” (idem 269).
The characters in the post-migrant-westerns that have here been discussed come to terms with their cultural in-betweenness by journeying between the two opposites that shape the dichotomy inherent to their life. After travelling between these two extremes, they return to the common lands in which they bring the elements of the two antipodes together. They no longer seem to feel as if they are pulled to two sides, being torn apart by the pressure of both, but manage to create a space for themselves in which they can merge the two together – thus making sense of their own being. The association with the western hero is essential here, as it shows that one can be ‘a man in the middle,’ while still retaining a strong sense of identity. The fact that the cowboy moves through life belonging to neither world does not lessen the fact that he is simultaneously one of the most emblematic characters portraying the historical American identity. By
combining post-migrant cinema with generic elements of the western, these suburban post-migrant-westerns seek to do the same for the Moroccan youth living in the peripheries of major Dutch cities.
As time went by, their ancestors might have lost the hopes and dreams that brought them here, longing back to the place they left behind when migrating. Yet the post-migrant westerns that are here discussed indicate that, if the second-generation in the Netherlands wants to break with their ancestors’ nostalgic lack of a homeland, they have to move forward in order to be able to return ‘home.’ By making them follow the footsteps of the cowboys and looking at it from a western perspective, they are no
longer the stereotypical criminals living in the suburbs. Instead, they are the migrant heroes embarking on journeys into the urban wilderness in order to come to deal with their inner struggles.
The western genre is thus capable of depicting old stories in new ways, adding another social context to the originally American myth (Parks 29-30). By looking at the discussed films through the eyes of the western genre, its mythical idealism is
transferred onto the suburban settings and its inhabitants. The tightly settled peripheral landscape acquires the seemingly limitlessness of America’s prairies, mountains, and deserts. The society of this urban frontier for once appears free and fluid. Once more, it seems “to offer a land full of opportunity, where people might build an independent life for themselves” (Buscombe 22). Yet at the same time, “as portrayed in the Western and alluded to in the road movie, frontier symbolism is propelled by masculinity and a particular conception of American national identity that resolves around (…)
aggression” (Roberts 45). To discern what this American myth adds to the stereotypical portrayal of the Moroccan youth in Dutch suburbs, the following two chapters will interpret the post-migrant-westerns along the lines of respectively the masculine aspect of the American identity and the meanings of the landscapes inherent to the western genre.
3
WHAT MAKES THE BOY A MAN:
MASCULINITY IN THE POST-MIGRANT-WESTERN Ik leer mijn zusje zelfrespect
En nooit huilen om een flikker Was mijn vader parra Moest ik duiken voor zijn slipper
- Boef ft. Lijpe, Terug naar toen (2018) (See Appendix C for elucidation)
Since the emergence of the western genre, many have noted its masculinist character (Roberts 47). Verstraten even goes as far to say that it is the fundamental anchor of the genre. According to him, “masculine heroism is a central issue in the western, because masculinity is closely implicated in the conflict between wilderness and civilization” (37). It is the earlier-mentioned clash between these two antipodes from which the notion of masculinity opposed to domestic femininity derives. Spatiality – in both the physical and symbolical sense of the word – thus becomes a mechanism for sexual differentiation within the western genre, as “the specific interaction between heroism and landscape marks the hero’s masculinity as natural.” He is an in-between man, occupying a frontier space that only he appears to be capable of being in. It is precisely this “ability to occupy frontier space which fortifies the belief in his natural manliness” (Verstraten 55). As this chapter will demonstrate, it is the notion of ‘natural’ manliness that makes a reading on the model of the western genre so worthwhile for the discussed post-migrant films.
In all six Dutch post-migrant-westerns, the protagonists traverse into the wild in order to deal with the situation in their homes. They want to make their fathers proud, provide for their family, or honour the ones they love. In many ways, their journey is a way to escape the pressure coming from within the domestic sphere, while at the same time being a means to live up to the expectations that arise from it. Those conflicting feelings might differentiate them from the classical western hero, as cowboys seem to be sure of their identity. Nonetheless, it is exactly this inner struggle that is needed in
