The Good, the Bad, and the Culturally Inauthentic: The Strange Case of the “Asian Western

When The Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah talai jone 2000, dir. Wisit Sasanatieng) was reviewed in Sight and Sound, reviewer Edward Buscombe expressed surprise at the existence of a Thai Western and concluded that the film was “ultimately, about nothing at all.” Such debates had already been well rehearsed around Italian Westerns, the paradigmatic “inauthentic” adaptation of an “authentic” genre. Asian cinema’s connection to the Western can be traced back to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which was reworked across diverse genres, including the Western. Two further “Asian Westerns” have been distributed internationally more recently, Sukiyaki Western Django (Sukiyaki Uesutan Jango 2007, dir. Miike Takashi) and The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joheun nom nabbeun nom isanghan nom 2008, dir. Kim Ji-woon). While individual films have unmistakeable local resonances “lost” Thai cinema, South Korea’s Manchurian action films of the 1960s, the interplay between Japanese chanbara and the Western -- the common transcultural referent is not the American Western, but the Italian one. This paper examines the relationship between the “Asian” and Italian Western, and considers how the latter might inform the transnational ambitions of the former.