This article examines the function of violence in the western and science-fiction genres of classical Hollywood cinema through the lens of institutional representation. While the western imagines the founding of the community and institutions that regulate the public order through legitimated violence, science-fiction stages the threat of destruction of that same order and the activation of exceptional mechanisms designed to preserve it. Through the analysis of both genres, this work argues that violence constitutes a structuring and complementary principle of the Hollywood institutional imagination: it is creative in the western and destructive in science-fiction, both participating in the same dynamic that allows us to think through the processes of founding, consolidation, and crisis of the modern community.
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