ABSTRACT
In the voiceover that accompanied the original Star Trek series, there was no doubt about the tradition to which the men and women of the starship Enterprise belonged. ‘Space, the final frontier,’ clearly situated the intergalactic travelers in a narrative of discovery and territorial expansion, which finds its most quintessential expression in the twentieth-century film genre known as the Western. If the shift from the Old World to the New, as we will see in Chapter 3, provides the Marx Brothers with material for commentary and satire, movement within the New World is another exhaustible source of material for film makers. Central to the promise of migration to the Americas was the promise of opportunities and land for all. As more migrants came, more land was needed to sustain the myth of a promised land of agricultural and mineral plenty for prospective settlers. The relentless push westwards was the precondition of the survival of the frontier myth. By moving ever further forwards, it was possible to make large tracts of land available for the Europeans who were arriving in their millions from a world perceived as restricted in both space and opportunity. The problem, of course, was that Europeans discovered that the New World was not as New as all that, and that for its native American inhabitants the New World was indeed a very Old World. The pioneers and settlers were not so much discovering virgin territory as a highly contested space. The frontier, then, became as much a zone of risk as a place of promise.
