What is a neo-western?

What would we class 'High Plains Drifter' ?

Bush ranger westerns or meat pie westerns, but I also dislike the latter term. They are considered westerns, as much as it can be in Australia.
Ned Kelly, Mad Dog Morgan, Quigley Down Under, The Man from Snowy River and The Proposition all fall under this sub genre.

I'd call it a Twilight Zone Western (I mean that as a compliment to the film).

Oh! Meat Pie, that sounds all kinds of gross. I need to see Quigley Down Under again.

Yeah, I chose Australia as my country for Nightmare Mode in Jabs 2021 challenge. Watched The Dressmaker finally and enjoyed that. A few others. Mostly ozploitation films like Patrick and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. Mad Dog Morgan which has a decent Denise Hopper performance.
Quigley Down under is also on my radar for it.

Glad to hear there's another fan of The Dressmaker, that was my nom in an HoF.

Oh yeah! Weaving was great in it!

I am definitely not an authority on the western, but I personally consider "High Plains Drifter" to also be a revisionist western. It's not as successful in doing so as "Unforgiven," but I do think it also subverts genre expectations. At its heart, the Western mythology, most commonly popularized by John Wayne, centered around noble men who act righteously and who seek to promote the American way of life and safeguard the "good people" who many believe built this country from harm from outsiders. To many, this way of life was symbolized by men who carried in their hearts an abiding sense of justice and a duty, almost a compulsion, to set wrong things right.

At its heart, "High Plains Drifter" centers around the Eastwood character's efforts, who is called the Stranger, to expose the moral hypocrisy of the town. Rather than being noble men who seek to do what's right, they were responsible for murdering the town sherrif. They did so in order to cover up their own crimes in pursuit of their own craven, selfish interests. Unlike most western heroes, who work tirelessly to save good people in the town from evildoers, the evil in Lago comes largely from within, and the Stranger is instead sent there to punish the townspeople for their past wrongs.

Stories centering around either morally ambiguous, complicated characters, or which are filled with human frailties, who act in pursuit of their own interests or who are brought down by their own weaknesses, is a hall mark of Eastwood's work as both an actor and a director. By focusing on the bad rather than the good, Eastwood seeks to revise and call into question the traditional notions that many westerns at the time presented. This is another reason that "High Plains Drifter" is to me a revisionist western.

The anti-heroic character that the Stranger represents is also a far cry from the traditional Western hero. It is also not completely clear from the narrative whether the Stranger is the murdered sherrif reincarnated, an avenging angel, or a ghost-like apparition. This is also a revisionist concept because focusing on a potentially other-worldly protaganist is not traditional to the Western archetype, and adds an additional layer than many Westerns of the period do not depict.

Somewhere between Revisionist Western and Acid Western

I am enjoying this conversation and thanks for everyone's thoughts, but I still feel like I'd like to gain a greater understanding here, and I think it may be easier to do that by analyzing and applying a specific example.

This is a description of Clint Eastwood's upcoming film 2021 film, Cry Macho, which some articles refer to as a neo-western:

To you, does this plot description seem like it describes a western? If so, why? If not, why not? In particular, if you think that it does, what themes, tropes or common elements make it a neo-western on a deeper level rather than another type of film?

I have my own thoughts, but first, I'd love to hear yours, since you all are much more knowledgeable about film than I am.

Maybe this doesn't belong here, but it's worth watching.

Space Western

I'd like to keep this thread focused on neo-westerns rather than the video or the photo previously posted. Since no one has responded to this yet, I'm going to repost the plot description that I've asked about, which has been referred to as a neo-western, and add some of my own thoughts:

To me, this story does not fit the western genre. I would call this primarily a road movie, a family drama, potentially a survivalist story depending on what these "unexpected" challenges are, but not a western. There are surface level similarities. Clint Eastwood is iconically associated with the western, and based on production materials he does appear to wear a cowboy hat and western clothing, but the tone, themes, and overall plot do not fit the western genre to me. From all of you, I've learned that being set in a border area, such as Mexico/Texas is a western setting, so that does fit, but on a deeper level, this feels like it superficially shares vague elements of the western while primarily it falls mostly outside of it.

What does everyone else think? Does the plot description above describe a western to you? If it does, why? If it does not, why not? Are there common themes and characteristic of the western that you see here that I don't? This is only one example. I feel like I can do this with many films that are described as neo-westerns, and that's what makes a neo-western for me difficult to understand and define.

With any word or descriptive phrase, once it becomes common vernacular and enters into the accepted method of describing something...then that word or phrase has validity. So then it follows that if 'neo-western' is being used to describe a certain type of movie and that term is being used by movie sites, reviewers and movie fans, then it has become 'legit'. Though the popularity of a descriptive term doesn't automatically render it auspicious.

Take the description of Eastwood's new movie and replace Eastwood with Meryl Streep. Does it now still sound like a neo-western with Streep in the lead role?

What if we keep Eastwood in the movie but move it's location to the country side of upstate New York. How about that would it still be a western?

See that's the rub: Eastwood, horses and the rural southwest doesn't automatically make a movie a western or neo-western...and yet because of Eastwood, horses and the southwest many will call it a neo-western.

Absolutely, and to add onto MKS's points here, what differentiates Noir, Westerns, and their Neo/Revisionist spin-offs from each other is the way they were first defined; the Classical Western, by its nature of primarily dealing with the struggle between lawlesness and order in the American West during its frontier years, means that it's a genre that's "stuck in the past", so to speak, and why even a film as old as Stagecoach still qualified as a "period piece" in its time, since, like so many other Westerns, it's set in the 19th century, while a Noir counterpart in something like The Maltese Falcon was completely contemporary to its time. So, if you take a Classical Western, keep all the elements as similar as possible, but update the period, then it's not a Classical Western anymore. That's also why, despite having been released in 2003, long after the genre's golden age, the subject, setting, and (especially) the tone of Open Range still qualifies it as a Traditional Western, while Chinatown is still considered Neo-Noir just the same as something with a contemporary 21st century setting like Brick, since both of them were produced after the 1950's, even though Chinatown has almost exactly the same kind of story, tone, and period setting as any Classical Noir. To sum up:

Classical Noir = anything in the genre released before the 60's
Neo-Noir = anything released afterward
Traditional Western = one set during the frontier period of the American West
Revisionist Western = one that uses the same era, but attempts to "revise" our vision of the old West into something more morally ambiguous, ala Unforgiven
Neo-Western = a film that uses similar setting/narrative elements to a Western, but updates up it to a more modern setting, like No Country (with the tones being less relevant, although Neo-Westerns certainly tend to be darker)

Citizen Rules, thanks for your post. These are some great points, and to me, kind of reinforce the difficulty I have understanding the neo-western concept. If we can take the "Cry Macho" description, and replace the main actor with Meryl Streep, or someone who is not iconically associated with the western, or we can change the location where the story is set, and most people would question whether it was still a western, than to me, it's not a western. Nobody would question whether if we replaced Clint Eastwood in "The Outlaw Josey Wales" or "Unforgiven," with someone else, or John Wayne in 'The Shootist," or if we set the story in a different state, the film would still be a western.

Stu Smalls, what are the similar narrative elements that neo-westerns have in common that are similar to a western? I understand that part of the definition is that the story is set outside of the historical period when most traditional westerns take place, but the common narrative elements/themes is what I've been trying to learn with this thread, but so far, beyond centering around stories that are set in border towns, no one has really articulated these common narrative elements within the neo-western genre.