ABSTRACT
What happens when the quintessentially American genre of the Western (which occupies an analogous phantasmatic space to the one taken up in Europe by the Oriental novel) is translated into the geographical and imaginary space of the Orient? The answer is, of course, that worlds collapse; the time-space continuum experiences a rift. Something similar happened when John Wayne starred as Genghis Khan in a famous 1956 RKO flop produced by Howard Hughes and directed by actor Dick Powell, The Conqueror. Lore about the film has it that “if half the cast died of cancer, the other half died of humiliation.” I submit that the translation of the conventions of the Western into the Orient precipitated an unbearable understanding of the facticity, and, at the same time, of the “disgusting” operations of the Western. This unbearable understanding of the failure of the Western as a cultural project is being experienced, in the case of The Conqueror (often described as one of the worst movies ever made), as camp: a relationship to the Real that is, at the same time, respectful and disrespectful, intimate and distant.
