ABSTRACT
“[T]he western[‘s] conventions … function precisely to privilege, examine, and celebrate the body of the male,” wrote Steve Neale in 1980 in Genre. 1 Three years later, in an oft-quoted and reprinted essay entitled “Masculinity as Spectacle,” Neale took young, 1960s, western star Clint Eastwood as a prime example of how male heroes engage spectators’ “narcissistic phantasies … of the ‘more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego’.” 2
