Blood, Money: The Twenty-First-Century Western and the Logic of Repayment

Abstract This article examines the twenty-first-century Western’s evolving treatment of economic debt, particularly in the context of the 2008 recession, payday lending, and the prevailing orthodoxy that one must pay one’s debts. The resurgence of the Western’s popularity connects with how recent Western films harness the genre’s aesthetic and ideological legacy to critique the contemporary logic of repayment. Taking No Country for Old Men (2007) and Hell or High Water (2016) as primary case studies, the author shows how these films rework the Western’s legacy to register the human toll of economic debt in the twenty-first century. Through a recalibration of genre tropes, particularly the centrality of violence, these films transform abstract economic obligations into tangible bodily experiences. Such representations reframe the obligation to repay economic debt, casting it not as a moral or ontological imperative but as a deeply antisocial force, one that stands as a direct threat to all noneconomic bonds and to the idea of the human as such.