Hollywood Westerns and the Pacific: John Kneubuhl and The Wild Wild West

Abstract

In the mid to early twentieth century Pacific, Hollywood westerns and their signature trope, the cowboy, were extremely popular (Pearson 157-160). Paradoxically the western’s unwavering commitment to hegemonic white masculinity and U.S. colonial domination appealed to rather than alienated Polynesian audiences. In Samoa, Tonga and New Zealand, westerns were preferred above all other genres (Keesing and Keesing 166; Keesing 441). Avid transnational consumption of white masculinity on remote islands at the end of Hollywood’s distribution chain presents an interesting contradiction but it is not the only way in which Hollywood westerns and the Pacific inter-related. John A. Kneubuhl, a writer of Samoan and German-American descent wrote stories and scripts for almost forty American television series in the fifties and sixties. Kneubuhl’s Hollywood career was by any measure extremely successful, but he dismissed much it as mere ‘craft’ (Vought 193). Nevertheless, his mid-century television work, particularly for The Wild Wild West and one of its chief villains, the diminutive dastardly Miguelito Loveless, expresses deep ambivalence about the transcendent masculinity of the cowboy and the colonial consolidation that westerns symbolized more generally. Kneubuhl’s writing for The Wild Wild West, offers unique insight into the cultural entanglements of the postcolonial Pacific. In this case an ambivalent Polynesian voice writes back to Hollywood not from the experimental or independent margins but from inside the industry using the most significant genre of the century.