Trenker's "The Emperor of California"

Trenker's "The Emperor of California" can be viewed from the perspective of several genres, but is most typical of the category of German adaptations of the American Western. It has some themes in common with American Westerns, such as that of men going out into the wilderness and creating their own space within it, "ensur[ing] the final victory of civilization" (Koepnick, 10). The story also takes place, at least during the middle of the narrative, at the intersection of civilization and nature (10). However, the victory of civilization is not portrayed positively, and the film ends on a note of resignation, with the idea that progress cannot be stopped (no matter how much one may want to stop it, implying that it isn't great) and that Sutter should accept this. He is, in the end, defeated by the greed and chaos that comes with capitalism/gold and modernization. Thus, while it embodies some typical characteristics of an American Western, "The Emperor of California" is also at odds with that genre and/or goes beyond it. Seen as a German Western, however, it is more typical. It definitely has "antimodern, anticapitalist rhetoric" (Koepnick, 11), and also raises issues of the "struggle between materialism and spirituality, greed and self-sacrifice" (11)- materialism and greed being represented by the gold-diggers who ruin Sutter's happiness, and spirituality and self-sacrifice being represented by Sutter himself. Yet, ironically, Sutter, the hero, is still a "capitalist entrepreneur" (11), although his goals are to create a space and life for himself and his family and effectively run the land he has been granted, rather than getting rich. Also fitting in with the German Western is the fact that Sutter and his men are actually the "harbringer[s] of institutionalization" (12), whereas in an American Western the hero would typically be resistant to or on the outskirts of any such development. Institutionalization itself, then, is not seen as negative, although extreme modernization is. It is also disturbing that the hero is in the end told to give up and stop fighting the inevitable, even though in the film's beginning he fought to the point of death; in an American Western, a more likely ending would have been the the hero/outlaw continuing to be defiant against all odds (ex: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which the two protagonists take on a ridiculous number of police-type characters in the last scene and may or may not have lived to tell the tale).