Films That in Some Way Teach Their Audience About Westerns
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Falconer, P. (2016). Spaghetti Westerns and the 'Afterlife' of a Hollywood Genre. In A. Fisher (Ed.), Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation (pp. 262-278). Edinburgh University Press. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-spaghetti-westerns-at-the- crossroads.html Peer reviewed version Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the author accepted manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via Edinburgh University Press at [insert hyperlink] . Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. University of Bristol - Explore Bristol Research General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ 1 Pete Falconer Spaghetti Westerns and the “afterlife” of a Hollywood genre The Western is no longer a major genre in contemporary Hollywood cinema. How long this has been the case is the subject of some debate; there is no definitive moment at which the Western “fell” out of the mainstream. Michael Walker argues that “The Western as a genre all but disappeared around 1977,” (1996: 284), while J. Hoberman (1998: 91) proposes 1973 as the first year in which the diminished profile and more marginal popular status of Westerns could be clearly felt. Other potential candidates for such a moment might include the critical and subsequent commercial failure of Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino) after its release in 1980. It is clear that the popular decline of the Hollywood Western has been registered in different ways at different times. It is equally clear, though, that there has been no significant or sustained return to the regular production of Westerns in Hollywood since the 1970s. This is not to claim that the genre has disappeared entirely. Westerns are still occasionally made, and characteristic images and motifs from the genre survive elsewhere, too – for example, Jim Kitses (1998:17) notes the continuing prevalence of Western iconography in the road movie. Nonetheless, in the past few decades the Western genre seems to have entered what we might call its “afterlife”: a more marginal, residual mode of generic existence in which older meanings and resonances face very different conditions of popular interest and understanding. 2 The Western is no longer assumed to be familiar to either Hollywood filmmakers or their audiences. There are undoubtedly exceptions in both cases, but this seems to be the prevailing view. John Anderson’s remarks in an article for Variety about the recent version of The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013) express some aspects of this contemporary perspective: As Verbinski puts it, making Westerns in general is ‘really hard.’ But so is the task of making them relevant to generations whose frame of reference doesn’t include masked men, horses, shootouts at the local saloon… (Anderson 2013: 60) The Western has come to be associated with a sense of uncertainty – uncertainty about the commercial viability of Western productions, and about contemporary audiences’ capacity to understand and appreciate the Westerns that do get made. This chapter forms part of my ongoing efforts to reflect on the implications of this situation – to think about how Western movies (and their attendant themes and tropes) have functioned since the genre ceased to be a major part of mainstream American cinema and how these changed generic conditions have affected the ways in which Westerns are produced and understood. In this chapter, I will compare the contemporary situation outlined above with another historical moment in which the conventions of the Western genre found themselves transformed by a different set of surrounding contexts: the Italian adoption of the Western in the 1960s. Both the Spaghetti Western and the afterlife of the Western can be thought of as moments of transposition, in which aspects of the Western genre have been subject to a fundamental shift 3 in context. In the case of Spaghetti Westerns, this shift occurred across national cinemas and film cultures, from the United States to Italy. For the various films and other works that I take to be examples of the afterlife of the Western, the transposition is across time, from a period in which the genre was a current and familiar popular form to one in which the place of Westerns in popular culture is much less prominent. I will consider the extent to which these two transpositions are comparable to each other and the ways in which works from each context reflect and respond to similar conditions. The cultural shift constituted by the Spaghetti Western can perhaps be said to anticipate aspects of the later situation, but there are also important differences, particularly in the level of assumed familiarity with the genre and its tropes. I am conscious that framing these two contexts as moments of transposition involves implicitly positing an earlier version of the Hollywood Western as the norm or template for the genre. It is certainly important to acknowledge that there is no original or definitive version of the Western genre, no single object or feature that is being transposed in all cases. The Westerns made during the Hollywood studio era, for example, are themselves made up of an array of transposed elements, from popular literature, theatre and painting, as well as from other movie genres. Although I would argue that the proliferation of feature Westerns in Hollywood between the late 1930s and the early 1960s was a time of great richness within the genre, I have no interest in promoting any particular example from that period as the model for how Westerns should be. Indeed, the quantity of Hollywood Westerns produced in these 4 decades resulted in an extraordinary variety within the genre – from the subversive comedy of Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) to the grim futility of The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943), from the vivid social renderings of John Ford to the isolated ensembles of Budd Boetticher. As Tag Gallagher (2003: 264) has pointed out, the notion of the “classic” Western as a coherent and identifiable form against which deviations can be measured is highly problematic. However, it is still legitimate to consider the ways in which movies relate to and make use of their influences and predecessors within a generic tradition. The presence of elements from earlier incarnations of the genre in very different surrounding conditions makes the Spaghetti Western and the afterlife of the Western particularly interesting contexts in which to reflect on such relationships. It is also important to acknowledge that there are differences in each case in the generic forms and conventions that are being transposed. Crucially, the loose composite definition of the Western genre that we find at work in its afterlife has come to include the Spaghetti Western (or at least a particular view of it) quite prominently. I will return to the place of the Spaghetti Western within the afterlife of the genre at the end of this chapter. Thinking about the Spaghetti Western and the afterlife of the Western as moments of transposition allows us to identify and examine some of the parallel ways in which the genre is treated in the two contexts. Perhaps the most significant similarity between many Italian Westerns and a range of examples from the afterlife of the genre is the sense of the West as a foreign 5 or alien environment, a place that is understood to be distant or different from an implied norm. In both cases, the generic world of the Western is treated as belonging to another culture – the culture of another country, or of another time. The distinctive locations seen in many Spaghetti Westerns are often described in terms that emphasise their geographical (and implicitly cultural) remoteness. Hoberman makes reference to “landscapes of Martian desolation” (2012: 38) in the films of Sergio Leone and likens some of the settings used in Da uomo a uomo / Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967) to “the middle of the Gobi Desert.” (41) In this way, the American West as portrayed in Italian movies is figuratively framed as a different world. Christopher Frayling’s remark, made when applying Umberto Eco’s structural model of the Superman comics to Spaghetti Westerns, that “The superman of the Italian Western does not come from a different planet (rather, from a different culture)…” (2006: 78) seems to imply that the perceived distances involved are comparable, if not strictly equivalent. The representation of the West as an alien world is most apparent in movies from the early years of the Spaghetti Western boom, after the commercial success of Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964). At this point, the Western had established itself as a currently popular filone (generic cycle or strand) within Italian popular cinema. As Austin Fisher notes, “filoni relied on rapid repetition and imitation of successful formulae” (2011: 36). The perspective on the world of the Western taken in Leone’s film seems to have been one of the characteristics that was repeated in the movies that initially followed it. Past a certain point – certainly by 1967, “the 6 peak production year of the Spaghetti Western,” (Frayling 2006: 78) when it was “a firmly established and flourishing filone” (Fisher 2011: 45) – it seems as if enough Italian Westerns had been made to have collectively established a familiar generic world of their own. Prior to this point, however, the outsider perspective of Per un pugno di dollari was prevalent. The sense of foreignness and distance attached to the Western milieu in many of the earlier Spaghetti Westerns can be seen in the films’ characteristic approaches to narration and point of view.