As a kid, I almost never watched westerns. They were so LAME. I always found John Wayne to be an insufferable prig, and had about a five-minute tolerance for his presence on screen. The stories were so constrained and didactic. Basically, here’s this isolated boondock that has one focused source of anarchy, usually some dudes running around stealing cattle or starting gunfights or what not. So some other dude, who’s all about law and order, comes in and sorts things out. And it’s all done with 19th century technology. The end. There was something so inherently square about the western that I might as well been watching something educational. Like all those old-time towns needed was a competent police force, and some proto-industrial proto-suburb was the result. It was dreadful, and it was false, and made my bullshit alarm go off. I was convinced that the western, like romantic comedies, was a genre best avoided.
Then I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I cannot exaggerate what a sea change that movie made for me, not just in merely my perception of the western, but film structure and development in its entirety. Like many impressionable youth, I ran out and bought Ennio Morricone’s original score, which soon became a bong circle favorite.
It was all downhill from there. I knew precisely what I wanted out of westerns. Not some goddamn morality play about how the White Man civilized the Wild West, which any first year history student can tell you is horseshit anyway. After the Dollars trilogy, I discovered the wonderfully insane world of Spaghetti Westerns, and then the so-called Revisionist Westerns…and finally, the Acid Western. I had Drifted to the High Plains, and there was no turning back, amigo.
Just what is the acid western? Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum first coined the term in his lengthy 1996 deconstruction of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Eh, that movie is fine, but starting there is seriously putting the cart before the horse. And honestly, Jim Jarmusch is a lightweight director, and Dead Man is a lightweight film. I need a stronger shot of whiskey, if it’s all the same to you. (To be fair, Mr. Rosenbaum does mention the predecessors to Dead Man in the last paragraph).
Let’s go ahead and put the horse back in front of the cart, and say that Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns were the first acid westerns. To be sure, the subgenres of Spaghetti, Revisionist, and Acid westerns all blend together, and are arguably the same thing. But it was in the late 60s when the acid really started to kick in, so to speak. The floodgates that Sergio Leone unloosed led to darker and more nihilistic visions. The first truly acidic western is perhaps Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966), and the most literal “acid western” (in the tripped-out sense of the term) is Alejandro Jodorworsky’s El Topo (1970). Other prime examples include the genre-killer The Wild Bunch (1969), Bad Company (1972), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and the disturbing and magnificent Four of the Apocalypse (1975). And there were certainly predecessors to the acid western; these worthy forebearers include The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and The Big Country (1958). Though these proto-acid westerns might seem quaint compared to the excesses of acid westerns, they paved the way for the darker, more nuanced visions of the Old West.
Acid Westerns are generally bleak, gritty, and nihilistic. The story usually centers on a dubious hero or an outright anti-hero drifting across a wilderness of horror and anarchy, nature despoiled and raped by greed, hatred, and madness. These films all have an anxious, palpable sense of dread about them, and take the lawless west to its logical extreme.
But the strangest thing about the acid westerns, for all their often heavy-handed 60s-70s counterculture overtones, is that they just feel real to me. And herein lies the great irony of the Acid West. Judging by how harsh, violent, and insane the real Old West really was, it’s my speculation that the acid westerns could very well be the most accurate depiction of the time period. There were no legions of heroes spreading the American Dream across the untamed wilderness. These so-called pioneers were really just colonists and conquerors. The decentralized Native American culture was being annihilated by the war machine of paid professional soldiers and relentless breeding. There was no law out there, no court of appeals, no real moral standards to hang your hat on. John Wayne and the Lone Ranger, my ass. This is the time when human scalps…human scalps, for God’s sake…were viewed as trophies, and were bought and sold like some such curios. Given the history of horror that was Manifest Destiny, acid westerns are probably a lot more realistic than your standard western.
So, saddle up and come with us to explore the Acid West…if you’re drunk, desperate, or insane enough to do so. But fair warning, Blondie…you’ll never be able to return home. But then again, you never had a home to return to anyway, did you?
Welcome to Hell, Stranger. Population: You.
