In this article we examine the idea of the Frontier as American self-imagination from the 1940s to the 2010s, using a selection of influential classical Western films (Red River, 1948, The Gunfighter, 1950, High Noon, 1952, Shane, 1953, Rio Bravo, 1959) and a group of contemporary TV-series (Jericho, 2006–2008, Falling Skies, 2011–, Terra Nova, 2011) in which the Frontier ‘comes back’ as organized society becomes absent for one reason or another. As in these Westerns, the Frontier, a liminal phase that falls between modern civilized society and nature (Burchell & Gray 1989, 130–131), works as an etiological apparatus that explains how America was made, in the post-apocalyptic TV-series The Frontier is re-introduced following a break with the old social order. It becomes thus purification of American-ness and a chance of a new beginning.

Thus, Frontier myth is not used as eschatology, dealing with the end of times, but instead as an etiology, because it occurs after the end of times and is thus a break with the past. We discuss the small community that is based on free enterprise and voluntary co-operation, the focal point of the Frontier located between the nature to be appropriated, and an organized society that is ambivalent in its relationship with the small community. We examine how the Frontier, as an often recurring narrative structure, is used to make claims about ideal, authentic, clean, good American-ness and also its opposites. In this article we first look at the historical formation of this frontier myth, then its well established, prototypical forms in classical Westerns, and finally its recent uses in contemporary post-apocalyptic TV-series.