A LITTLE MUSIC IS GOOD FOR THE DIGESTION
Film buffs get all excited about the credits to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly , but to understand the film you have to fast forward past the galloping red horses and the music and begin with the face. This film is in one obvious sense the third film of a trilogy beginning with A Fistful of Dollars -- but for Zarathustra ends are always also beginnings. The film occupies a far larger intellectual and cultural space than the other two films. Further, despite its genre and setting, it's one of the most deeply European films ever made. If European intellectual life in the Twentieth Century can be called the "post-Nietzschean age," then this is the great film of that age.
Let's agree to call it Il Brutto , the ugly man, for that's the way it's presented to us once the theatrical prancing around of the credits has ended. If we're to deal with the film, we're like it or not, going to have to deal with Tuco Ramirez.
I'd run through the story to remind you of the film, but in this case that's not the point. Of course there is the gold, but despite appearances this isn't the story of three guys after a cache of gold -- even if they do find it. If someone asked you what your life was all about, and you said "The pursuit of wealth, whatever it takes," you wouldn't be telling the story of your life. For you'd just get the reply "So what's new? Nearly everybody's life is the pursuit of wealth. What's your life story.
If you're not really pathetic, your life story has a pattern (or pattern of patterns, if you're lucky), a cast of characters different from the characters in other people's stories in a way that matters, and so on. "I'm pursuing wealth." Is common, boring, and no news. In the heyday of fairy tales, the hero always went off to seek his fortune. That wasn't his story. The story was how he did it, where he went, and, especially, what befell him on his way. That is, to know the story of the hero's life is to know the classic quest he's on, and the adventures he has on the way.
So there's no "plot" to Il Brutto . The story of the good guy the bad guy and the ugly guy is just the way it should be: rambling, fragmentary, episodic, and full of coincidences: once upon a time there were these three guys. In fact, there's more "once upon a time" to this film than there is to Once upon a Time in the West . In that film, Harmonica's search for revenge couples with capitalist greed to provide the elements of a fairly normal "plot." In the classic oater myth dictates plot. In Il Brutto , myth totally obliterates plot. That's because the plot dictated by the classic myth of the Western is the good guy versus the bad guy. In Il Brutto we're beyond that. There's no moral to the story.
Beyond Good and Evil: More Feeling
"Moral?" Now, there's a good word. For most of their history, from pulp fiction through the silents, through the singing cowboys and the Saturday afternoon B Westerns to the "big" Westerns of Ford, Hawkes and John Wayne, the Westerns were the classic location for the battle between good and evil -- with good sure to triumph in the end. Nietzsche would have said that this casting of life into the perpetual struggle between good and evil was human -- all too human. In fact, according to him, it's by living life in the light of such moral stories that humans place themselves in a kind of self-slavery, squashing and inhibiting all kinds of human potential. In our culture, by tradition, the story of good and evil is most often derived from the story of the Fall, a consequence of our inhabiting a fundamentally Judeo-Christian world. However, says Nietzsche, the God of that world is dead, killed by the ugliest man. Far from regretting the demise, he says, we ought to consider it an opportunity to recapture our freedom. Without a God to sustain them, both good and evil are empty myths. They pretend to make our life worthy, and instead they make it meaningless. They're swindlers of our creativity and our power. But, of course, there are those among us who haven't gotten the point yet, and still thing in terms of the double entry bookkeeping of good and evil. They're dwarves, who ride our backs and weigh us down with the gravity of their petty moral penny pinching. Very many of them are lawyers. Very many of them are proud of their Puritanism, pilgrim.
So we're dealing with a movie that's all myth, the usual home of the battle between good and evil and its moral outcome. But we're beyond good and evil. Traditionally, the categories of good and evil are boundaries constraining us to the straight and narrow. We'll see that Tuco is outside those boundaries. They're irrelevant for him, and Blondie and Angel Eyes, as the designated representatives of them, simply make a mockery of them. This is easy to see when we contrast Il Brutto with all the Westerns entirely within the boundaries of good and evil, and, in fact, doing little more than playing out the battle of good and evil.
A nice example hovering near the edge of the Western myths of good and evil is Peckinpah's Ride the High Country . Steve Judd, an old washed up lawman, rides into town to apply for the job of escorting gold from the miners in the hills to the local bank. (The miners have been having trouble hanging on to both money and life on the trip.) A traveling show is in town, featuring an equally washed up former partner of Steve's, Gil, running a shooting gallery. Gil's young buddy, Heck Longtree, fleeces the locals in races between their horses and his camel (at a distance guaranteeing a win for the camel). Judd gets the job, and recruits Gil and Heck for help. The two of them sign on with the full intention of stealing the gold, preferably with Judd, but against him if needs be.
On their way to the mine they stop over at the farm of the very pious Joshua Newsome and his daughter. The farmer's daughter is restless and, ready for a husband. One of the miners, Billy Hammond has already asked, but Dad, whose wife has strayed, is determined to keep the farmer's daughter at home. After a night of Hanky Panky interruptus, the three men leave for the mine. It's not long before the farmer's daughter comes trotting up after them, on her way to the mine to marry Billy Hammond. They decide they have to take her under their wings.
While Gil and Steve set up the bank at the mine, Heck delivers the farmer's daughter to Billy Hammond -- or rather, to the Hammond brothers, the scummiest clan of peckerwoods (by their own description) you ever did see. It's immediately obvious that the marriage of the farmer's daughter to Billy is designed to provide the entire clan with female amenities. The farmer's daughter is far from pleased at the prospect, but the wedding is performed with brisk efficiency in the local bordello, catered elegantly by the madam and her staff. The nuptual flight, however, is more than the farmer's daughter can bear, and she has to be extricated from her confrontation with a fate worse than death by Steve, Gil, and Heck. They balance force and strategem, and succeed in getting away from the mining camp with both damsel and gold.
The trip back is a complex one, with Gil and Heck working on Steve to steal the gold, and with the Hammonds in hot pursuit of their bride. Steve remains steadfastly committed to his duty; Heck waivers in his venality; Gil loses patience and makes his play.
Steve anticipates him, captures him and ties him up. Enter the Hammonds for their first skirmish. Two of them bite the dust, and the other three ride off. We know they'll show up again. Gil escapes the overburdened Steve, re-arms himself, grabs an available ex-Hammond horse, and slinks off after Steve, Heck, and the farmer's daughter as they head back to the farm to return the farmer's daughter home. They arrive only to fall into a trap. The Hammonds have gunned down Newsome at prayer, and are waiting in ambush.
Gil shows up at Steve's side for the ensuing showdown, where the remaining Hammonds are killed, and Steve mortally wounded. He extracts a promise from Gil and Heck to take care of the farmer's daughter and return the gold. Then he asks to die alone, and the other three ride off -- perhaps to deliver the gold to the bank, perhaps not: one never knows.
Now there a story for you: written on the stone tablets of morality, and solidly faithful to tradition. We even get the rescue of a damsel in distress thrown in to underline the chivalry of Steve Judd. In fact, dress the principles up in armor rather than chaps and buckskin, convert the farmer's daughter into the princess she obviously derives from, let the Hammonds be the evil knights, and you've got a rip-roaring knights-in armor flick right out of the 'thirties. Good and evil are fairly reliably represented by Joel McCrea's Steve Judd, whose heart is pure, and Randolph Scott's Gil, whose fall from chivalric oath is precariously in question. Even eviller evil is represented by the Hammond brothers. The temptations confronting a young squire vacillate in the sidekick, Heck Longtree. The puritanical dogmas of good and evil are the heart and soul of old Joshua. As Mariette Hartley, the farmer's daughter, says of him, "Daddy thinks that there's only pure good and pure evil." Joshua himself says "The Lord's bounty is not for sale." (though eggs end up being a dollar apiece). (And Gil mumbles "But the devil's is, if you're willing to pay the price.")
In obvious ways, this makes for as fine a mess of good and evil as there is in Il Brutto . The crucial difference is that you're riding the high country within the world of good and evil. The moral landmarks of Steve's chivalric honor and Joshua's puritanism are as important in getting from the bank to the mine and back as the natural landmarks of peak and stream are. In Il Brutto the moral landmarks show up; but you can't find your way by them. They're just leftovers from another world, and don't mean what they did when they were first cooked up.
A more recent contrast is Eastwood's Unforgiven , highly praised by the critics, and wallowing in the sentimentality and violence of good and evil that the great Westerns often suggested, but almost always skirted. Whatever the merits of that film, it doesn't move outside the bounds of banal morality. Will Munny plays out the story of the Fall and Redemption, then segues right on to the martyrdom of the savior. From the initial carving up of the Magdelene in the first few seconds of the film we slog through the usual tale of revenge and redemption. We've seen The Searchers , one of Ford's darker moments, explore the same turf far more powerfully with racism at stake. For that matter, Leone himself raises those themes to epic myth in Once upon a Time in the West . I think the critics were so impressed by Unforgiven because Eastwood had the "courage" not to wash the pig shit off -- at least until he rode off to the Coast to sell drygoods. They must have forgotten Tuco, who's unredeemably covered in shit. That's the difference. Leone suggests that the shit won't wash off. It's not a sign of martyrdom to be cleansed, purified, atoned for, and forgiven.
Something to do with Death
"Being towards death" is the formula for one variety of existentialism. Leone's fascination with death, and near escapes from it, is notorious -- Frayling's subtitle, "Something to do with Death," is apt. Leone's fascination was one of the reasons why the Western was such a natural genre for him. The sixgun duet is above all else a confrontation with death, as is war -- and we can't forget that the War between the States is the constant presence framing everything that happens in Il Brutto .
So death is everywhere. In the final scene, at Sad Hill Cemetery, the dead fill their places (graves, not seats) in the amphitheater, and watch over the ritual sixgun duet. In earlier ages they watched over Greek tragedy in such a setting: the delivery room for the birth of tragedy. More recently they watch over the ritual slaughter of bulls. The music of the corrida evokes that for us. No setting could be more Nietzschean.
Yet despite the constant presence of death, a fascination with death really doesn't get very far. It's notoriously difficult to get messages through. More productive is a fascination with dying, which apparently develops at an early age. When we kids came back from the movies late Saturday afternoon, on of the chief things we did was have competitions to see who could die best: Aargh, cough cough, stagger, stumble, flop. Who did it best? Well, judging that's no tougher than judging gymnastics or figure skating.
So I think Leone wasn't really interested in death so much as the act of dying: the moment, as Tuco says, when you can feel the devil bite your ass. And this is as it should be in the post-Nietzschean framework. Death is nothing. Dying could mean something. That depends on how you do it. Take Shorty, for example. We don't get to see much of him: just the moment of his death. He's Tuco's successor in the saddle with the rope around his neck. Blondie is just about to cut the rope when Tuco catches up with him and sticks a gun in his face. Blondie asks permission to finish the job; Tuco signs "No;" Shorty swings; Blondie apologizes -- posthumously: "Sorry, Shorty."
Now that's a meaningless way to die -- for Shorty. But Tuco has been there and nearly done that himself. In fact, Blondie has been there in the noose as well, at the hands of Tuco, and been saved by a Union cannon ball blowing up the makeshift gallows. Tuco will be there again, teetering on the rickety cross with the gold lying on the ground at his feet. Tuco's arrival is the chance contingency that does in Shorty. The cannon ball is the chance contingency that saves Blondie. But Tuco's escapes from death by hanging aren't contingencies. He's always cut down by his guardian angel. Having a guardian angel: now that means something -- or other.
But don't get too complacent. Remember what happened to Shorty. Guardian angels are a risky business. As Blondie points out to Tuco, changing the financial arrangements could mess up his aim. It goes without saying that any arrangement with a guardian angel involves the same risk. The gods might snooze at the crucial time.
And in the end, we die anyway. Nothing is certain, the saying goes, except death and taxes. Even geriatric Americans, trying desperately to avoid both, crap out in the long run. And what's worse, they delay the day so long that when it comes it's absolutely meaningless. What's the use of that? But then, I suppose, where would all those people get jobs if they weren't nursing home attendants. We have to consider the economy.
Nietzsche, and Leone after him, want to put some significance in the "act" of dying. That's exactly what's wrong with the war. Blondie remarks that he's never seen so many people wasted so badly -- and, mind you, he's wasted a few in his time himself. The irony here is bitter, for patriotic sacrifice of self to country is often held up as the most significant of deaths. Leone, like Ford before him, thinks it's (possibly always, certainly sometimes) idiotic. They both use the resources of the Western to illustrate the point. A meaningless bridge in a meaningless place is, for both, the scene of the meaningless waste of life. The scene in Il Brutto recapitulates the one in The Horse Soldiers .
Ford's criticism of the Civil War was, as we've seen, very deep. In forcing a patriotic significance to death, it inevitably led to a hardening of the regional patriotisms of the two sides, but especially the losing side. Wounds would not heal, a consequence that sometimes, at least, seemed to Ford to overshadow any possible benefit gained in the war.
Leone's criticism seems, on the surface, to be much shallower than that of Ford's -- an aesthetic judgment in the mouth of a killer. But in fact it's no less deep a critique, because it shows the fragility of the possibility of meaning in a radical way. In its own way, demigogic warmongering rhetoric shows the same thing. Of course this isn't a point in the abstract. The rhetoric we're talking about in Il Brutto is the rhetoric of the Cold War, but it could just as well be the rhetoric of the crusade against "terrorism."
We've already seen in the Taco Bells how one of the classic issues gets worked out, the man of the people. It starts with Robert Jordan and ends up with Taylor and his gold bullet for the general as the image of a CIA operative. But Leone himself had reflected on the position of "small" countries like Italy as they threaded their way through a perpetual confrontation (and arms race -- remember the dynamite) between two super-powers. In A Fistful of Dollars , Joe finds himself in an interesting, and potentially lucrative, position between the American Baxters and the Rojos (Reds -- as if we needed it) in their perpetual armed confrontation for hegemony in their little world of San Miguel. We're in Mexico again, the locus classicus of experimental displacement. By accepting, then rejecting, the allegiance of the Americans and the Rojos, Joe succeeds in getting them to destroy each other to his profit.
The irony of Italians seeing themselves in this light is, shall we say, chronic. During an economic crisis in the mid-seventies, the joke going around was whether Italy ought to become a colony of the USA or of Germany. That is, should they seek a bailout from NATO or from the EEC. Further, at that time the Italian Communist Party was still a live issue, but as "communismo in doppiopetto," the double breasted communism of Berlinguer et alii , so the left had its own little set of potentially profitable maneuvers to work out.
Thus the Cold War put death in everyone's face, so it's not surprising that the senselessness and meaninglessness of war should be so strongly underlined in Il Brutto . What looks like a shallow aesthetic judgment on a silly battle for a bridge the War Between the States ends up a trenchant judgment about the mime war between the super-giants of international politics.
The Priest and the Dying Man: "Preach me a Sermon, Pablo"
Nietzsche was only one of the historical fathers of existentialism. As you could expect from a child with many fathers, existentialism has a very complex face. Generally, just to get the conversation started, I say that existentialism is the family of views you get when you ask the question "What does it all mean?" and get the answer "Nothing." Of course, given the nature of the tradition(s) you have to think of yourself as free to define it along with everybody else. This doesn't make life comfortable for the taxonomic by temperament. Some existentialists would then say of those taxonomists "to hell with them". Others would remember just in time that there is no hell.
One of the great early classics of the tradition we now know as existentialism was the Marquis de Sade's "Dialogue between the Priest and the Dying Man." Apparently never "published" through the Nineteenth Century, it led an underground existence, read by nearly everyone, apparently, and surfacing frequently: for example in Stendahl's The Red and the Black , and in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov . In our century, the set piece appears over and over again, most famously (twice) in Camus' The Stranger . In his The Fall , the dialogue is between Jean Baptiste Clemence and you, the reader. It shows up all the time in films as well, with wicked twists. For instance we can see it in the confrontation of Holly Martins and Harry Lime in the Ferris Wheel car in The Third Man , and in the confessional confrontation between Antonius Bloch and Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal . At the grass roots the dialogue takes place between Tuco and his brother Father Ramirez. De Sade's dialogue was the fountainhead.
Almost everybody has at least heard about the Marquis de Sade. Wouldn't we love to be as flattered by history as he was by having our name given to a characteristic pattern of behavior! He wrote most of his works while imprisoned in the Bastille, put there largely as a way of relieving his relatives of the embarrassment of his presence in the world at large. Among all the ranting and raving he produced, the dialogue stands out for brevity and incisiveness. Nature is god, says the dying man, and every opportunity for natural fulfillment missed is a sin against nature. The priest disagrees. His is the traditional god.
It's important to notice, as many have, that the issue of monotheism isn't at stake in the dialogue. What's in question is the nature of the godhead: is it the traditional deity or Nature. Furthermore, in the terms de Sade sets in the dialogue, the traditional godhead and the Nature that's to replace it are incompatible, not complementary. This actually gets us into conflict with the classic picture of the Wild West. For one of the strong threads in the traditional Western is that the West, in all its natural wildness and beauty, is God's Country. The Westerns are played out in Nature, in the sight of the traditional god. This is especially true of the John Ford westerns, but think also of High Noon .
So there are loads of subsequent dialogues between priests and dying men in the literature of the last couple centuries. After all, we're all dying, and it's not all that hard to find a priest. Beyond that, you wouldn't think it was a problem, but when you find a potential dialogue between the priest and the dying man, you always have to be careful about who's supposed to be the priest, and who is dying. For instance in the Bros K, the dialogue is between the Grand Inquisitor and Christ, imprisoned after his second coming. The Grand Inquisitor is definitely the priest, and Christ is quintessentially the dying man, destined to do it yet again. The Inquisitor's message is that Christ really has no business coming again, and no right to add to the words he has already said. The church has taken those words and built them into an institution that has organized the lives of a vast horde of faithful for centuries. The faithful rely on those words and the institution embodying them, and the church cannot let its sacred trust be threatened -- even, ironically, by the original founder. So what you're dealing with in Dostoyevsky's version of the dialogue is anti-clericalism. Dostoyevsky yearned for the rebirth of Christianity deeply rooted in the soil of Mother Russia and the hearts of the good peasants.
There's a wide variety of anticlericalisms to be found. De Sade's original dialogue is a kind of anticlericalism, in its own way. As long as you're denying one god only to affirm another, you're likely to get involved in anticlericalism. For instance, Sade's dying man denies the traditional god in order to enthrone Nature. There are lots of other "styles," as it were, of anticlericalism: some of them loads of fun. Some of the styles are regional, and since we're dealing here with Leone et alia we can look at an Italian (actually Sicilian) one.
When we were living in Rome we had a Sicilian friend, whose (well known and learned) name we'll obscure by calling him Tuco. Tuco had an ulcer. He'd had it for years, and it seriously cut into his eating, drinking, and cigar smoking pleasure. One day I said to him "Tuco, you're crazy not to have an operation to cure your ulcer. In this day and age it's really quick and simple." He said, "I can't do that." "Why not?" "Because I'm an atheist, and God is just waiting for his chance to get me. When I'm on the operating table under anesthetic, that's just the chance he's waiting for." It's hard to know what's more fascinating, the psychology or the theology. That's the same sort of fascination you get when you're watching the Tuco of the film cross himself fervently but with obvious hypocrisy.
Americans puzzled by the anticlericalism of the film have to realize that it's just a matter of style. The relationship between church and state in Italy is a lot different than it is in the US. More importantly, the history of the role of the church in Italian politics is something we don't have. Here, church and state are separated. -- Well, if you believe that, you'll probably be interested in a great deal on aluminum siding I can get for you. But, credulity aside, church and state are somehow supposed to be separated here. In Italy, in contrast, being anticlerical quite naturally is expected to have something to do with the way you vote. You'll hear someone called "cattolico" (catholic) and that just means he votes for the Christian Democratic party. In the sense in which we use the word "catholic," virtually everyone in Italy is a Catholic: even, most of the time, the Pope.
So one of the chief differences between the intellectual climate where Il Brutto was made, and the climate here where Americans saw it was the way the religious turf was laid out: the differential distribution of Tuco's blasphemies, you might say. The US is basically a Protestant country. Of course Protestantism, is anticlerical at its roots, and remains so in a lot of its branches, the Society of Friends, for example, where all, hence none, are clerics. Anticlericalism rebels against the priest without rebelling against the priest's message.
On the other side, of course, there's the rebellion against the message without rebellion against the priest. This is in fact the attitude of the Grand Inquisitor, who claims that the institutions built on the original gospel have a self-standing legitimacy that shouldn't be messed with by a new visit from the Messiah. So, now and again you'll run into someone who at least claims to be both a Catholic and an atheist. The idea is that the existence of the church is a benefit to the world even though there's no God for it to be a church of . There seems to be a sort of paternalistic cynicism in that.
Finally there's the American anarchist's special: the rebellion against both the priest and his message, though not necessarily the message of the Gospels. It's my favorite. The easiest way to see it is the following:
Several years ago I reviewed for The Philadelphia Inquirer one of those collections of articles from Natural History Magazine that Stephen J. Gould used to issue periodically. This particular one was called Bully for Brontosaurus . It came out just at the time when Gould was enjoying what might have been the end of his bout with peritoneal cancer, but which proved, alas, to be only a period of remission. He was understandably a bit euphoric, and though he was an articulately confirmed atheist, he went off into the speculative creation of a deity who could be thanked for his good fortune. I said in the review how glad I was that he seemed cured, but how sad I was to see him inventing a deity to thank. The reason for my saying this wasn't that he offended my own deity. I have none; not even one of my own invention. The point is that inventing private deities ad hoc is the cheapest trick in the bag, and a major part of its cheapness is that it prevents us from appreciating some of the most important and abiding institutions in our history. Now, you're free to disagree with this. It's a free country. But you at least have to think about the role that religion has had in human history, including the role of providing the basis for communal bonds. Actually, you ought to think of that even if you think, as I do, that the bottom line is that we'd have been better off without it.
Well, when you write reviews for something like the Inquirer , those cards and letters can sometimes roll in. The people at the newspaper bundle them up and send them to you. So I got this big manila envelope full of outraged dissent. It turns out that do-it-yourself religions are all over the place. This is one of the ways in which freedom of religion is understood in the USA. It also turns out, I learned from reading the letters, that the people who have a private do-it-yourself religion consider themselves to be significantly better than those who subscribe to "organized religion." This stands to reason, I suppose, since making a religion up as you go along is a consummately egocentric project if there ever was one.
Of course interpretive freedom goes along with the freedom of creation, so that any authoritative text gets to mean whatever it needs to for the do-it-yourself religion to achieve a smooth consistency. Thus many do-it-yourself-ers think of themselves as Christians. Who am I to complain? But the upshot is the final color in the anti-clerical spectrum.
Now, what a dialogue between a priest and a dying man would be in these religions is another story. Something between consenting adult in private, no doubt.
Be that as it may, Leone, who knows the tradition, has another use for the dialogue. The dialogue between Tuco and his brother has roots as existential as they can get. There's nothing whatsoever religious about them on either side. The two brothers struggling against abject and persistent poverty had choices to make. As Tuco reminds his brother, if you were going to get out of the deadly circle of poverty you could become either a priest or a bandit. The older brother became Father Ramirez. Tuco became the Tuco whose miscreant life is read to him as he sits at the end of a rope. As he says to his brother, that way was harder. Father Ramirez concedes a guilty agreement. "Please forgive me, brother," says Pablo. The tone of superiority and righteousness he's been taking to Tuco has disappeared.
When you Have to Shoot, Shoot. Don't Talk.
How ducky. Is all this fancy deep thought what the American public for Il Brutto was looking at? Well, this time I can't give you a first hand account. I was busy with a lot of other things when the Leone westerns came around, and didn't catch up with them until much later. When they first came out I was a young untenured academic with a young family, trying to get my teaching, publishing, and fathering acts together. We also bought an old house that needed (perpetually) loads of work. We didn't go to a lot of movies, and, if we did, they were the dreadfully profound ones showing up at the artsy TLAsy houses. Although most Americans were watching a lot of network television, we didn't watch all that much. Of course we were also preoccupied with the Vietnamese War and civil rights at the time: marching, protesting, sitting in, smoking.
So we missed Leone's spaghetti westerns the first time around. Almost everybody did. It took them a while to catch on, and, when they did, they were thought of as big screen Rawhide : Clint Eastwood flicks. Of course in an important way they were, or Leone wouldn't have gotten the money to make them or American distribution. Rawhide itself was at the end of the trail, but Bonanza and Gunsmoke were rolling along at about the halfway point of their TV lives. By that time the TV westerns were well along the way to falling into the sit-com and soap rituals that have dominated network TV ever since. That's what the bulk of the viewing public expected from a western, whatever John Ford had been trying to tell them.
There was also the violence, of course, and it was the violence buffs who "discovered" the thrills of pasta on the prairie, largely through the Trinity and Django films. Leone provided plenty of that, and with Eastwood up front the "trilogy" got its meaning and reputation largely in terms of the violence Leone was so good at staging. Nothing I've been saying about them was even remotely in view. I can't honestly say it would have been in view for me either. A lot of what it took to get it in view I learned while I was living in Rome in the mid '70's.
In any case, "the death of God" doesn't play real well in middle America. If you're going to make a movie about the death of God for distribution here you have to agonize over it, like Bergman, not rollick in it, like Leone. If you want to play with that theme, as the trattoria roundtable who wrote Il Brutto did, you have to bury it deep enough so that those who don't want to see it won't see it. So you get Clint Eastwood set up; you put together what looks like a western; you challenge a little with a severe look at the war between the states; and you make lots of bucks.
What this seems to mean is that there are loads of themes and intellectual issues that the American movie-going public will never encounter. But this isn't really what it means at all. As we've seen with the Ford westerns, if you're clever you can weave in all sorts of vexing issues. In fact, doing so is one of the traditional ploys of good writers and directors. The slogan "If you want to send a message, call Western Union." Really means two things. First, it means that the messages that Capra, De Mille, etc. are peddling all the time are well circumscribed and so habitual as to be invisible. They can be sent over and over again. Second, it means that any other message must be disguised or hidden.
But what's the point? Who would you think you were hiding messages for? Leone, and his fellow Italian movie makers have a tradition they're playing in, so there's an answer in their case. There's an intellectual conversation going on in both literature and film, and they're finding clever things to say in it. They're also in a sort of contest with the French, Germans, and Scandinavians, and later movie makers from eastern Europe. It's a contest in which intellectual sophistication counts for something. So it's not a great surprise to find a post-Nietzschean western.
The movie tradition on the American side of the water is another kettle of fish. It's almost purely an entertainment tradition. Better said, of course, it's an entertainment industry, organized in a way and at a scale very different from the movie-making business in Europe. Obviously this changes as time goes on, but the traditions and expectations still remain different. The American tradition is and always has been dedicated to providing a good night out: a chill, a thrill, or a kiss to cuddle to. True, it has always had a sort of semi-high-cultural edge. At one time its name was Orson Welles. More consistently, John Huston's career is full of brilliant translations of literature to the screen. His first directorial gig was The Maltese Falcon , literally transcribed from the Dashiell Hammett text, and his last was James Joyce's The Dead . The list is long in between. But in general the art involved in filming books was always required to be at the service of the entertainment. Gone with the Wind is, I suppose, the paradigm.
However, the difference in opportunities for political engagement between the US and Europe are the main ones. I think it's important to see that a real politics, especially a real democratic politics, requires that there be several stories going around. That is, there have to be alternative points of view generating alternative accounts of what's going on and why -- let alone what should be going on in order for political debate to have a point. In Europe there are such alternative stories, all rooted in a long history. The result is a live debate about lots of things. For example, in Italy and France the newspapers are each associated with a particular story or particular version of events that's in turn associated with one of the many parties along a very plural political spectrum. Only rarely does America get anywhere near that situation (in public), and then only by fits and starts.
Or, to take another example (that we've looked at through John Ford's eyes), we're a nation of immigrants and imports. That could always have been looked at in either of two ways. The first way is that these newcomers were to be included democratically in the project of creating a diverse and dynamic America. The second way is to think that when the newcomers came, the job was to make Americans out of them. While neither of the two ways has ever in fact been exclusively carried out in its own terms, in the classic narrative of the movie western the second way was dominant. We looked at Ford's gentle judicious treatment of this domestic situation.
Leone is showing us a perspective at a greater distance. We have to keep remembering that the Leone westerns were made at the height of the Cold War. The two super powers had a monopoly of the weapons of mass destruction. (One of them still does.) Everybody else was sitting around waiting and hoping for the threat of this weaponry to ease. The Soviet Union was at least verbally committed to the world-wide expansion of communism, whatever in the world that was supposed to be by that time. The US looked to be sanctimoniously and self-righteously sure of its moral purity and rectitude. A thermonuclear sixgun duet looked like a real possibility. In its single ideological tale of the West, the western seemed very much connected to an attitude that the rest of the world was beginning to find dangerous. It seemed too easy for the self-proclaimed Wyat Earp of the ICBM's to justify riding into town -- any town in the world -- to save the citizenry from the Clantons. John Wayne himself, after all, found it easy and natural to swap the Stetson for the green beret. (He'd had a lot of practice at Guadacanal, and Tarawa, and Iwo Jima, and ….)
Now, it would be silly to say that this is what Leone's westerns, or spaghetti westerns in general "were all about." They were about lots of things, including entertaining people, making money, exploring cinematic technique, and having fun. But they did offer that opportunity to slip in the alternative readings of the west that might compete with the single sacred reading they saw prevailing in the US. There was no harm in putting them in, they thought. The American public was far too oblivious to notice, or far too bent on escape to care.
So, all the trappings of the myth are in place: the horses, the guns, the whiskey, the loot, the good guy, and the bad guy. But as we've seen, the plumbing ain't American Standard.
"Hey Blondie! You know what you are? …"
There are some really enjoyable books on Leone. My favorite is Sergio Leone , by Oreste De Fornari, Rome 1997, Gremese International s.r.l. It's both beautiful and intelligent, and the one book on Leone if you want only one. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death , by Christopher Frayling(London and New York, Faber& Faber, 2000) is a more definitive "sourcebook." Trouble is, it's the source of many things, including facts and (appropriately) bullshit: everybody associated with Leone films has a different story to tell about every aspect of the making of them. For an English speaker interested in Leone, Frayling is clearly essential. Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone (Lanham MD & London, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987) contains some interesting perceptions but never connects the dots. A terrific quick read is The Pocket Essential Sergio Leone by Michael Carlson (in USA North Pomfret VT Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2001).
Il piu brutto di tutto, in the language of Leone.
Monty Python fans will remember the identification criteria for royalty in The Holy Grail : "How do you know he's a King?" "Because he hasn't got shit all over him."
It's also quoted from Once upon a Time in the West : Cheyenne's assessment of Harmonica at the very end.
Naturally the issue of suicide comes up here, especially, of course, in Camus. Is suicide always an option? Well, yes; but no need to rush into it. If you never get around to it you'll eventually die anyway; and that's the real issue.
This is another good place to reflect again on the meaninglessness of the religious images even as they're flaunted. Will Tuco die on the cross? Hell no.
For those who are interested in working these things out in a scholarly way, not just trying to understand a couple of movies, two things might be considered. First, "Fistful" is notoriously the blatant retelling of Kurasawa's Yojimbo , so one might ask if the original were a Cold War parable itself. I don't know enough about Japan or its film traditions even to guess. Second, one would also have to plow through the (vast) journalistic conversation on film going on in Italy in the 'sixties. Alll the greats participated, so it could be tremendous fun.
In re lineage, Tuco says to Blondie, "You're a bastard with a thousand fathers, and every one of them was a bastard." The same might be said of existentialism.
Students always notice that in this respect the dialogue encapsulates the whole "Enlightenment Project," if the project is to dethrone religion as the primary source of truth and knowledge, and replace it with Reason or Science as the sanctified source. This way of looking at things comes up over and over again in, say, accusations that molecular geneticists are "playing God, or in the context of discussions of the Big Bang as "the moment of creation."
That's actually the way Harry Lime looks at things, and explains them to Holly Martins in the cab of the Ferris wheel in The Third Man .
And I'd really appreciate it if you didn't forget that.
We did watch the Avengers, avidly and (one of us) pregnantly. Emma Peel was the coolest thing we'd ever seen.
Part of what I learned was that when I wore jeans and a broad-brimmed hat a lot of women would stare at me in interesting ways on the bus.
That's "circumscribed," not "circumsized." We're not talking about Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire here.
Woody Allen is a key indicator of the difference. His public lament that he's better appreciated in Europe than in the US always has a ring of pride to it. Further, he has always organized his movie-making on European lines -- not as an "independent," but as, say, a Fellini.
The likely exception to this, as we saw, is A Bullet for the General .