Bright Lights Film Journal
By Evert Jan van Leeuwen
April 30, 2008
On the manifest
destiny of Civil War tricksters and gun-slinging corpses
As the opening credits of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959)
appear on the screen, a caravan of cowboys on horseback and fully-laden coaches
come riding down the mountain into a green valley. With the sun and blue sky
behind them, the horses’ hooves and wagon wheels kick up orange dust from the
dry road that leads to the western settlement. The western world of Rio Bravo,
despite the outside threats its heroes need to overcome, is a predominantly
bright world, peopled with brave cowboys, in control of their horses, who face
the camera and the villains head-on to save the day, the settlement, and
civilization. This west is one of heroic sheriffs, defending beautiful young
maidens in flowing dresses from evil outsiders. In contrast, the viewer of
Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) is confronted during the opening credits with
the back of a solitary black-clad figure, walking away from the camera through
a sea of grey mud. He is not on horseback, but carries the saddle for
a horse he does not own. As the camera zooms out to reveal the stranger in full , no other cowboys or coaches appear that carry this traveler’s
belongings toward an ordered settlement. The dark stranger is revealed to be
pulling his own coffin on which what looks like a solitary black candle seems
to provide a fragile bright spot on the cinematic canvas.
The stylistic and atmospheric difference between a
classic American western like Rio Bravo and the opening sequences of Corbucci’s
Eurowestern is just one instance of how European directors utilized classic
gothic tropes and stylistic devices — in this case the trope of the darkly-clad
mysterious solitary wanderer in a bleak desolate landscape — to challenge the
dominant Hollywood myth of the American West. This essay will examine how the
makers of Eurowesterns employed a cinematic technique I call grotesque
perspective in order to subvert the often utopian and mostly nostalgic
ideological point view of the classic American westerns of, for instance, John
Ford or Howard Hawks.
Hawks’ Rio Bravo is a clear instance of an American
western that takes its subject seriously, heroically, and ideologically
affirmative. The film ends with two deputies having a private joke at the
hero’s (John Wayne’s) expense, as they wonder about becoming sheriff one day.
Their eyes are on the future, which, due to the intervention of the
all-American hero, is bright indeed. R. Philip Loy argues that the classic
Hollywood westerns “mirrored the American commitment to individual
responsibility, progress and manifest destiny,” an ideology that he defines as
“the belief that God gave the North American continent to whites of European
descent as a place in which to build a new democratic political order to serve
as an example for humankind.”1 From westerns, Loy argues, “children learned
that most folks were basically honest and brave but sometimes they needed a
good leader to stiffen public resistance to the few who were corrupt and
dishonest” (Loy 6). Westerns underscore the protestant work ethic that helped
build America, Loy argues, when he writes that “westerns also taught that very
little comes without hard work, but success is sure to follow if one works hard
and remains steadfastly committed to one’s goals” (Loy 6). Douglas Pye also
shows that the classic Hollywood western was ideologically affirmative. He
argues that the community dance sequence in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine
(1946) has an ideological function in pointing towards “the possibility of a
perfected society in the West that will reconcile opposing forces in an ideal
harmony.”2 J. A. Place also observes that the town of Tombstone, in the same
film, “goes through a ‘civilization’ process after Wyatt [Earp] takes over as
marshal.”3 Over the years several film critics have written about the poetic
and nostalgic nature of classic westerns such as My Darling Clementine, or the
glorification of heroic violence in cavalry films such as Fort Apache (1948).
According to Lindsay Anderson, Ford’s famous westerns neatly fit Loy’s
Hollywood western prototype. He wrote about Fort Apache that: “at the end Ford
leaves us in no doubt where our sympathies and our respect should lie”; the
movie ends by showing “a cavalry troop, riding out on another patrol.”4 The
following voice-over is imposed over this image: “they’ll fight over cards and
rot-gut whisky, but they’ll share the last drop in the canteen . . . the
regular army, now and fifty years from now . . .” (quoted in Anderson 125). For
Ford, the heroes of the movie are the rough and rugged soldiers of the cavalry,
who are fighting the battle over the West for the American people to cultivate
and civilize. Unsurprisingly, the voice-over at the end of Ford’s She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon (1949) presents the viewer with exactly such an American idyll:
So here they
are — the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty cent-a-day professionals,
riding the outposts of a nation. From Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan
to Stark, they were all the same, men in dirty shirt blue, and only a cold page
in the history books to mark their passage. But wherever they rode, and
whatever they fought for — the place became the United States. (quoted in
Anderson 125)
Violence in the classic Hollywood western, as Loy argued,
is “socially necessary,” a means toward a noble end, and when used in this
light it represented “manly virtue” (Loy 101). The violence pictured between
cowboys and Indians, the Cavalry and the Confederates, are all necessary
struggles in the larger process of civilization that will ultimately lead to
the realisation of a utopian community the settlers were destined to build in
this new-found land.
Christopher Frayling argues that across the Atlantic
Sergio Leone made westerns that reacted directly to the naive and idyllic
picture of the American West as presented by Hollywood. According to Frayling,
Leone believed that it was his personal interpretation of the history of the
American West, as a foreigner and outsider, which was the most important
difference between him and Ford.5 Leone tells in an interview how the Catholic
Irish American immigrant Ford imbued his movies with a traditional American
Christian vision of the West; as a result, his characters always present a
typically American optimistic future. Leone has described that, as an Italian
and a descendant of the Romans and therefore an outsider, he necessarily had to
develop a different perspective on the history of the American West: to him it
represented a world characterized by “the reign of violence by violence”
(quoted in Frayling 135). To materialise this alternative vision, Leone chose
to present his version of the American West from a grotesque perspective, an
example of which is his penchant for extreme close-ups on the eyes of two
dueling cowboys, an image that has gained iconic status in western popular
culture.
Philip Thomson writes that “the most consistently
distinguished characteristic of the grotesque has been the fundamental element
of disharmony,” which is present not only in the work of art but also in the
reaction of the observer or even in the temperament of the artist.6 According
to Thomson, the grotesque is characterised by ambivalence, a violent coming
together of binaries, especially the fluid merger of the comic and terrifying,
the mixture of which “may be disproportionate” (Thomson 21). Important to the
grotesque, Thomson emphasises, is that the grotesque is not concerned with the
creation of a fantasy world; it is not a purely aesthetic principle: “far from
possessing a necessary affinity with the fantastic, the grotesque derives at
least some of its effect from being presented within a realistic framework, in
a realistic way” (Thomson 8). All these elements of the grotesque are prevalent
in Leone’s work.
19 Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a
Hollywood Myth Part II
As an artist, Leone was clearly ambivalent about the
West. Frayling writes: “Leone may admire Hollywood westerns, but he does not
believe in the dreams they embody” (Frayling 135). One of the most obvious
grotesque techniques Leone uses to create his satirical vision of the West is
his choice to represent a hyper-realistic setting using surrealistic camera
angles. Leone’s camera lens is restless, shooting its subject from either too
high or too low a position, from too far away or too close up to the action;
focusing either too short or too long on the object in view or the scene;
moving too much or too little, and always placed in the most unusual of optical
positions. For example, while in the opening scene of Rio Bravo the cowboys are
presented as coming down the mountain, passing a fixed roadside camera, in the
opening sequence of For a Few Dollars More (1965), the camera is placed on
high, taking in a vast desert landscape surrounded by mountains through which a
tiny cowboy makes his way on horseback. While the convoy of cowboys in Rio
Bravo safely arrives at their destination, the tiny lone cowboy in Leone’s film
is suddenly shot and immediately falls off his horse, which subsequently runs
away in a gallop. This sequence reveals that the camera is also the sight of
the rifle that has just shot the tiny cowboy. The typically grotesque,
comically horrific atmosphere is created by the multiple aesthetic and
structural clashes: the hard reality of the western landscape photographed by
surrealist camerawork, which in turn surprises the viewer with a slapstick
rendering of a brutal killing that invokes laughter instead of terror. As in
Rio Bravo, the cinematic technique, setting, and representation of the cowboy
set the tone for the rest of the film.
Leone peoples this grotesque world with grotesque
individuals. The hero and focalising character of his movies is no longer the
famous western hero Wyatt Earp, or a heroic cavalry general, marked by his
integrity, moral steadiness, and engagement with the welfare of the community
and the nation. Frayling explains that in Spaghetti westerns, “the hero-figures
are usually identifiable by a collection of external gestures, mannerisms,
stylish articles of clothing, or even motifs on the soundtrack, rather than by
anything remotely to do with the inner man” (Frayling 61). The anti-hero of
Leone’s Spaghetti westerns is a man without a name, history, nationality, or
moral values. He is only recognisable from his multi-cultural external
identity, immortalized by Clint Eastwood in Leone’s Dollar Trilogy: a stylistic
combination of American cowboy and Mexican peasant with his ever-blazing cigar
and perpetual five o’clock shadow. The grotesque effect of such an identity is
created by fusing two character types that in the traditional westerns had
always stood diametrically opposed to each other: the heroic cowboy
(immortalised by John Wayne) and the Mexican or Indian outlaw (unsurprisingly
sometimes played but never immortalised on the silver screen by any Hollywood
actor). The grotesque effect of this mode of characterisation on the viewer is
that he or she is forced to conclude that not all people wearing a poncho and a
sombrero are slothful and dim-witted.
Significantly, Leone’s anti-hero fights for no national
goal or political authority but only from himself. He is always on his own, in
search of money. In Fistful of Dollars (1964), this figure manipulates two
feuding bands of robbers into killing each other; in The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly (1966), he opportunistically works together with other bandits, abuses the
American law, and uses the chaos brought about by the civil war, its weapons,
and union soldiers to realise his own selfish plans. Leone’s western world
parodies Hollywood’s western ideology of manifest destiny and heroic
masculinity by highlighting the complete disintegration of community, family,
and moral values under the rule of masculine violence and a selfish will to
power.
20 Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a
Hollywood Myth Part III
Revenge has been the grand motif of many westerns,
American and European. In Ford’s My Darling Clementine, a central theme was the
high price of revenge. Tag Gallagher commented on the fact that this film is
characterised with “musing over whether one can ever have the right or duty to
kill.”7 In Leone’s Spaghetti westerns, however, seeking revenge for wrongs
committed against the individual becomes a primary human necessity, on a level
with nourishment and shelter. Instead of functioning as melodramatically staged
moral lessons, the revenge plots in Leone’s westerns are represented through
comical tableaux. The never-ending twists in the plot, in which each anti-hero
tricks and gets his revenge on the other, endow Leone’s films at times with an
undercurrent of slapstick humour. At the end of The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly, the man with no name has tricked his adversary and hung him on a tree,
only to shoot down and free him from the noose at a distance, leaving the
bandit to swear revenge, pointing out that after the end credits the story will
start all over again in the imaginary world of the film.8 The circularity of
the plot stands in marked contrast to most of Hollywood’s Western plots, which
are founded on a model of linear progression.
John R. Clark points out that the grotesque as an
artistic mode has strong links with ideological critique. He argues that “the
‘serious grotesque,” as opposed to the comic grotesque, “is significantly
utilized in the eighteenth-century gothic novels,” where it functions as “an antidote
to Enlightenment optimism.”9 The serious nature of the grotesque in the gothic
is created by unbalancing the relationship between the comic and the terrific
in favour of terror in which the engagement with symbolism and the supernatural
is favoured over the satirical engagement with the real (as is the case in
Leone’s Spaghetti westerns). After the success of Leone’s Fistful of Dollars,
many European filmmakers followed his lead, and the exploitation film market
was flooded with Spaghetti Westerns. The most successful of these post-Leone
films was Django (1966). This film was also the first gothic Eurowestern, in
which the Leone-style man with no name is pulling his coffin through the mud
only to reveal a humungous machine gun with which he ends up maiming a fascist
gang. Sergio Corbucci was the first to alter the nature of the anti-hero from
Leone’s immoral, opportunistic trickster into the mysterious apparently
immortal wanderer so frequently found in gothic fictions, such as Godwin’s St
Leon (1799) or Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). This figure, as Manuel
Aguirre argues, symbolises the “abandonment of the journey” toward an
optimistic resolution, which typifies the linear plots of quest or epics, as
well as Hollywood westerns. The sense of Django’s immortality was heightened by
the many unofficial sequels to Corbucci’s film and by the fact that as late as
1987, Django, now a monk, digs up his coffin and with it his machine gun in
order to again try to bring about justice. Castelari would take up this trope
in Keoma, heightening the Hell-on-Earth gothic atmosphere by using symbolic
colour schemes.
Clark argues that “modern grotesques” following on from
the gothic “dramatize the corruption of entire communities” in which
“individualism and the noble protagonist are equally perverted and destroyed”
(Clark 14). The effect that the utilization of a gothic grotesque aesthetic has
on the development of the Spaghetti westerns is that these films turn from
satires on the naïvely optimistic Hollywood myth of the West into gothic
allegories about the Hollywood western genre’s self-deception regarding their
civilization’s innate sense of superiority over other cultures, its God-given
drive to dominate nature, as well as the androcentric heroism with its reliance
on militaristic violence that makes this project of domination possible.
Significantly, Frayling argued that Spaghetti westerns found a sympathetic
audience in the third world as its people could more easily identify with these
movies’ overt engagement with the evils of first-world economic and political
tyranny and peasant oppression (see Frayling Chapter 9). Several European
directors, in their attempts to distinguish themselves in the now flourishing
Eurowestern market, fused Leone’s grotesque perspective with gothic tropes
pioneered in the tradition of nineteenth-century gothic romance and further
developed and popularised by the horror-film industry since the 1930s. While
Leone’s westerns were characterized by their fine balance of the comic, the
horrific, and the political, these films heightened the terrifying over the
comic. As a consequence they move from the satiric to the monstrous in their
response to the classic Hollywood Western.
In Antony Dawson’s (Antonio Margheriti’s) Vengeance
(1968), the relationship between hero and villain is no longer characterised by
the moral struggle between good and evil, but takes on the hues of gothic
psychological doubling. The gothic double, Manuel Aguirre has explained, “is a
figure to flee from, or ignore, or destroy, not one to confront and embrace”
because “there is no longer a belief in the possibility of restoring the
harmony of human nature” (Aguirre 53). This gothic trope is exemplified in late
nineteenth-century gothic tales such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray, in which a young man becomes immortal while his youthful portrait grows
monstrous as it comes to represent his corrupt mind. Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the doctor loses control of his experiment and
ends up killing his degenerate double, is of course the most famous of gothic
doubling stories. The hero and villain of Vengeance increasingly come to embody
this relationship, where the monster is not an external force to be defeated
with masculine muscle or military might, but an aggressive inner demon of the
mind that must be confronted and exorcized.
In Vengeance, this doubling works to critique the
Hollywood western’s idealisation of masculine violence noted by Loy.10 Joko,
the hero cowboy, finds the dismembered body of his friend Richie and swears to
get revenge on the bandits who murdered him, making the film a standard revenge
western at the outset. However, as Joko gets closer to finding and confronting
the bandit Mendoza, the initially orthodox representation of the West
increasingly takes on a surreal character. By the finale, Joko, having become
as bloodthirsty for revenge as his adversary Mendoza, is lured into a
labyrinthine system of dark caves illuminated in lush shades of yellow and orange
through which he pursues his enemy.
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