Gettin' there.

College Checklist

1. Get accepted
2. Send in registration
3. Eat roommate

Maintaing the Status Q

I'm running out of
ways to keep this thing going
but a promise is
a fucking promise.

I guess I had to find her...

Heads You Die, Tails I Kill You
Spaghetti, Bullets and the American West
By: Jeffrey “They Call Him Cemetery” Filice

“Nothing is wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot.”
-Inspector Harry Callahan, Magnum Force (1973).

Of all film genres, the western is by far the most quintessentially American. They are tales of justice, equality, the individual and the frontier. So it usually comes as a surprise to people when they discover that some of the most beloved western movies of all time are actually Italian movies. Though the first of these “spaghetti westerns” (a Japanese invented term3) was a British movie called The Savage Guns (1961), the first one actually worth a damn was the sophomore picture of director Sergio Leone, Fistful of Dollars (1964) starring Clint Eastwood. Leone’s film would help to reenergize “a genre that had run out of steam not just in Italy but in America as well.7”

It was well known by the mid 1960s that the western was in its decline. “This was an audience that was laughing at John Wayne by now.7” So Leone and the filmmakers to follow set out to make movies that “chimed with mid 1960s youth.7”. What came out were movies that in a few words, were unsophisticated and unpretentious. They portrayed society where “law and order does exist... but is impotent in a system where legality is seconded to murder.9” Your standard spaghetti western, starting with Fistful uses a simple Yojimbo style structure; unknown stranger walks into a troubled town, untroubles the troubled down, then leaves to find a new troubled town. This basic plotline was tweaked and interpreted in many ways in decade or so that followed. Director Sergio Corbucci used it to paint hellish portraits of society forsaken by both order and common sense in his movies Django (1966) and especially in what many consider his opus The Great Silence (1968). The reverse is also true. After the runaway success of Enzo Barboni’s They Call me Trinity (1971), many directors used Fistful as a basis to create a long string of comedy films which started a “comedy western craze that swept Italy.10” While on paper most spaghetti westerns may seem identical, the varying levels of violence, cynicism and comedy has helped each one to stand out on its own.

The one contribution of the spaghetti western that is still ringing in the ears of today is its introduction of the action movie anti-hero. “...the Eastwood persona, which has lasted for the last 30, 40 years starts here.7” The days of “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” and “There’s some things a man can’t ride around” are over. Enter Clint Eastwood. “He’s cynical, he’s stylish... This is kind of a designer cowboy. All you need to know about him is he wears brown boots and everyone else wears black ones. It’s the hero you identify with not because of his beliefs, not because of his values, but because of his style, his personal style.7” While the rules of spaghetti western hero are not written in stone, some things mostly hold true across the board. They don’t have much of a name or a past. They don’t talk. And they could wipe the floor with you.

The names of these heroes are usually short and sweet, if they have one at all. Even though the American marketing campaign of the Leone/Eastwood movies described the hero as “The Man with Know Name”, his name is actually Joe (United Artists would even go so far as to edit out scenes from the movies where he’s referred to by name in order to keep up their ad campaign). Other famous characters of the genre include Ringo, Django, Sartana, Sabata, Silence (from The Great Silence), and Trinity (They Call me Trinity). All short. All easy to remember. All probably not their real names.

Keeping with the mystique, most of these characters rarely spoke or voiced an opinion, making it all the more impacting when they did. This idea was brought to its logical conclusion in The Great Silence where “the main hero is not only close-lipped, he is mute,4” never saying a word the entire movie. This was not a completely artistic decision. Jean-Louis Trintignant (Silence) only agreed to perform in the movie if he didn’t have to learn any lines. This rule of the tight-lipped hero was relaxed somewhat in the early 1970s in They Call me Trinity as a means of allowing the main character to be funny.

Despite the trend of contemporary Hollywood westerns “getting really interested in people’s psychology,7” in the Eastwood character “there’s no inner man.7” “The enigma, the magic, the enchantment of the character is that you don’t know much about him.7” Every so often we’ll get a flashback of the character’s usually tragic past, but only as a means to justify the quintuple homicide about to be committed such as in The Great Silence where we see a young Silence witnessing the murder of his parents by a bounty hunter he is about to perforate. A side effect of this non-psychological approach is it makes the hero seem so calm and distant from whatever’s happening. “He’s a little bit stepped back from the scurry of the action. And then at the ultimate moment he will step forward and resolve the action in a way that is morally satisfying to us.11” This makes our hero, despite how violent they are seem so uncompromised by this “immoral or even amoral universe of dog eat dog. Where all the characters are completely at home with violence.8”

But that all said, the most important facet of the spaghetti western hero is his almost supernatural skill with a gun. In one of the later gunfights in Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood drops five suckers with his pistol before any of them can even draw their guns. The really interesting part of this is if you listen carefully, Eastwood only fires four bullets. “The heroes of these movies are brilliant at technique and technology. That part of their heroism comes from that they are better at shooting than anybody else and they know about weapons.8” Silence also uses a German made semi-automatic Mauser C96 pistol, which in stark contrast is space-age technology compared to the “primitive” single action revolvers of the time. Trinity even showcases some spectacular behind the back trick shooting in his movies. This supernatural feel is most exemplified in the Sartana movies, the first being If You Meet Sartana Pray For Your Death (1968) where the title character is literally the angel of death in the body of an old west James Bond. This idea would eventually make it to America by way of Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1973).

The spaghetti western hero is the archetype for what we call today the action hero. The transition would be also immediate when Clint Eastwood returned to the states and starred in Dirty Harry (1971). From there we get Han Solo, John McClane, and The Terminator to name a few. “And the modern action hero begins there... ...It all begins with that moment where the hero stops being a crusader and becomes a style statement. So I’d argue the entire action hero in action cinema begins in 1964 with Fistful of Dollars.7”

The spaghetti western is often accused of killing the myth of the Wild West; some people saying “It had nothing to do with the american west, neither the real or the mythological one.1” Not only do I find this unfair, I find it untrue. The truth is we, America, killed it. It started in the early 1960s with The Misfits (1961) and Hud (1963), two movies about people trying to find the Wild West in the 1960s only to find out it left a long time ago. Within the next decade movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) all feature the Wild West personified as the title characters being brutally murdered with extreme prejudice by a world that’s passed them by. In Pat Garrett, the Wild West personified as Kris Kristofferson is even killed by one of the western’s most enduring icons James Coburn. This is an obvious and profound contrast to Sergio Leone’s Wild West conclusion in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Here, the Wild West personified as Charles Bronson, realizing that it has said all it’s needed to say and done all that it needed to do, graciously takes its last bow and steps off stage.

Sergio Leone once said “In my childhood, America was like a religion…2” The Spaghetti western didn’t kill the myth, it just changed the way we saw it. American western movies were made to reflect way that we saw ourselves. The Italian ones were made to to reflect how the rest of the world saw us, for better or for worse. And from the view of the western purists, this was a heavy blow. “They were looked down askance because they so violated the long American tradition of how western stories were told... ...They were breaking all the rules.6”

“That fact that Leone knew jack shit about American geography (according to one of the characters, Chicago is somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix, Arizona) added to the [The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966)]’s sense of magnificent dislocation.5” Watching the movies, it’s clear that no one involved in them had ever been to America, and knew very little about the country. So the historical myth the Americans spent decades creating lost all it’s history, leaving just the myth. Characters use guns that aren’t invented until a decade after the year the film takes place in. Towns that are hundreds of miles away can be reached in a day’s ride. The result is this almost fantasy dreamlike feel where the world literally ends at the edge of the frame. So when somebody says “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” he means it.

The American western, and its American western hero are inherently tragic and this harks back to the tragic irony of the hero in general. Where they all strive to create a world in which them and their skills are no longer needed or wanted. Shane (1953) and The Searchers (1956) are prime examples of this. The thing is, this doesn’t seem to be an issue in the Italian movies. The Django and Sartana movies have a combined number of sequels that number well over sixty. In this Italian west, there’s always another town over the horizon, there’s always more money to be made and there’s always another bastard who needs a bullet or six in him. In Leone’s Italian west, there’s always a need for a quick gun. This combined with the fantasy feel makes the spaghetti western seem like a Valhalla warrior heaven for the traveling gunslinger. Fistful of Dollars doesn’t end with Clint riding into the hills to lick his wounds like a sucker. He walks out with a sack of cash like he owns the place. They Call me Trinity ends with the title character backing out of his own wedding just because he’s realized he’ll have to work on a farm for the rest of his life. In the spaghetti western no one has to settle down with a family or hang up their pistols or, thank God, find a real job.

By the mid 1970s. the western movie, regardless of national origin had run out of steam. It’s true that westerns are still being made today, but not with the frequency or success of times long ago. But don’t feel sorry for it. The western has accomplished everything it has set out to do. Even the spaghetti westerns that were so looked down upon are now taken “seriously as a form of artistic expression11” forty years later. It is one of the few genres that completely encompasses the mindset, or perceived mindset of an entire nation. Since FDR, only three US Presidents have cited non-western movies as their favorite movies. Two if you count Gone with the Wind (1939) as a western. “America is a nation that believes almost religiously in individualism and self-reliance, the two values that inform every western.1”

Though the western lay dormant, the values they stood for endure in cinema. Dirty Harry always fights for justice, even if the law gets in his way. Thelma & Louise would stop at nothing to find independence and the frontier, even if it killed them. So why after all these years since the western ruled the world do all these ideas still matter? The answer is simple. Because the story of the lone rider, the story of the frontier and the story of standing up for the little guy, no matter where they come from, these are the stories of America.

“You don't understand. People like that have something inside... something to do with death.”
-Cheyenne, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).


Works Cited
1. Cottam, Chris, dir. Rich Hall's How the West Was Lost. BBC 4. 14 June 2008.
2. Edwards, Daniel. "Sergio Leone." Senses of Cinema. Sept. 2002. May 2009 .
3. A Few Weeks in Spain. Dir. Michael M. Arick. Perf. Clint Eastwood. DVD. 2007.
4. "The Great Silience." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. May 2009 .
5. King, Stephen. The Gunslinger. New York: The Penguin Group, 2003.
6. Leone's West. Dir. Michael M. Arick. Perf. Richard Schickel. DVD. 2003.
7. A New Kind of Hero. Dir. Michael M. Arick. Perf. Sir Christopher Frayling. DVD. 2007.
8. A New Standard. Dir. Michael M. Arick. Perf. Sir Christopher Frayling. DVD. 2007.
9. Sutton, Mike. "The Great Silence." DVD Times. 15 Aug. 2004. May 2009 .
10. "They Call Me Trinity." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. May 2009 .
11. The Leone Style. Dir. Michael M. Arick. Perf. Richard Schickel. DVD. 2003.

T(r)opical

How many California supreme court justices does it take to screw in a lightbulb*?

6.

In this business, we like to call it a metaphor.

SAY! I LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM!
I DO! I LIKE THEM, SAM-I-AM!
AND I WOULD EAT THEM IN A BOAT.
AND I WOULD EAT THEM WITH A GOAT...
AND I WILL EAT THEM, IN THE RAIN.
AND IN THE DARK. AND ON A TRAIN.
AND IN A CAR. AND IN A TREE.
THEY ARE SO GOOD, SO GOOD, YOU SEE!
SO I WILL EAT THEM IN A BOX.
AND I WILL EAT THEM WITH A FOX.
AND I WILL EAT THEM IN A HOUSE.
AND I WILL EAT THEM WITH A MOUSE.
AND I WILL EAT THEM HERE AND THERE.
SAY! I WILL EAT THEM ANYWHERE!
I DO SO LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM!
THANK YOU! THANK YOU, SAM A EL!



psst.  It's about death.

Unfounded Criticism at 24 Frames a Second

Movies I didn't like, and things they could have done to make me like them:

-Iron Man (2008): Don't cut out the only fucking reason I went to see your movie in the first place.

-Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969): Less bike ridey, more shootey.

-Taxi Driver (1976): End the movie 5 minutes earlier; more child hookers.

-Almost Famous (2000): Instead of following the stupid Eagles, follow Iron Fucking Maiden

-Thelma and Louise (1991): Ride more horses; wear more cowboy hats.

-The Dark Knight (2008): Next time use Firefly or Hush.

-Corpse Bride (2005): One word: Polygamy

-Speed Racer (2008): PERFECT. AS. IS.

And then there were an indefinite amount.

Things I have hanging in my room:

1. A crowbar
2. One working clock

Fictional people I hate more than real people

1. Arsene Lupin

Authors I detest (in order of ascending obesity):

1. Ernest Hemingway
2. Ayn Rand
3. William Yeats
   
4. Sylvia Plath*

Good ideas that turned out to be not so good ideas:

1. Peanut butter and jelly in the same jar
2. Home offices

Things that don't remind of me of former President-elect Barack Obama

1. Wesley Willis
2. That episode of Rugrats where they held a trial to see who broke the clown lamp. It was a cool one except they didn't go into their imaginations enough where the courtroom was real so we had to look at Tommy Pickles wearing a blanket as a judge robe the whole time. What gives?
   
3. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles
4. Bonita Vista Junior High School