User:Rattyexaltations/ratty-acidwestern

My sandbox page for improving the Acid Western page.

- - - - - Defining the term and the origin of it:

The term "Acid Western" was coined by film critic Pauline Kael in 1971 to pejoratively describe a bohemian tangent operating in the mass cinema audience, employing elements of the Surrealists and the avant-garde, particular to the film El Topo ( http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/11/20/el-poto-head-comics-the-current-cinema ; http://www.notcoming.com/features/acidwesterns/ )

Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a review of Jim Jarmusch's 1996 film, Dead Man, revived the term to retroactively describe a particular revisionist western that he saw as a thread in American cinema up to and including Jarmusch's film.

In her review of Dead Man, film critic Katherine Follett noted that the traditional, formulaic Western used a moral focus and hero's journey to show that "Americans value individualism; they value personal morality over law; they see justice in violence; they presume that capitalism and industry will prevail", and that as the social values of America shifted over time "traditional Westerns began to seem outdated. Many filmmakers revisited them with the intention of recasting American myths in the light of new values. This is the larger context of the acid Western." ( http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/deadman )

- - - - - Cited examples explaining differences from 'traditional' Westerns.

Cullen Gallagher notes that Ride In The Whirlwind subverts the justice-driven narrative of many pursuit-oriented Westerns, the three fugitives being pursued by a posse over a case of mistaken identity, and, like Easy Rider, depicts the drifting protagonists as an anti-hero and the law as an agency of corruption and injustice. ( http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/rideinthewhirlwind )

Similarly, Gallagher argues The Shooting differs from the traditional Western that portrays the wide-open space of the American West as a freedom and limitless possibility, by composing the same landscape as too bare, barren and desolate to offer shelter, escape or future. ( http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/theshooting )

Taylor notes that the gunslinger's victory over his mystic opponents in El Topo does not end the the film but is rather a midpoint, and informs the protagonists' crisis of identity and leads him to a vulnerable humility, which leads to a narrative of spiritual redemption. ( http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/el-topo )

MacFarlane notes that Jeremiah Johnson's protagonist is not a lawman, war hero or criminal, but rather a deserter from the Mexican war, and that the film differs from the traditional Western by attempting to be "a proper Western without a sustained narrative arc" and that the protagonist's character changes in ways that ask more questions than it answers. ( http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/jeremiahjohnson )

Notes:

EXACT QUOTES FROM TAYLOR : "J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum elaborate on the phenomenon in their 1980 book Midnight Movies, in which an entire chapter is devoted to El Topo:   Although hip film buffs objected to El Topo’s graceless amalgam of Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Jean-Luc Godard, the movie bypassed cinematic sophistication to address the counterculture directly."" ( http://www.notcoming.com/features/acidwesterns/ )

These films generally posit an individualist journey that ends not in triumph but often in suffering and death—a narrative trajectory Dead Man summates in its very title. http://www.notcoming.com/features/acidwesterns/ )

"Rosenbaum elaborated thusly:   What I partly mean by ‘acid Westerns’ are revisionist Westerns in which American history is reinterpreted to make room for peyote visions and related hallucinogenic experiences, LSD trips in particular. […] Both ‘acid Westerns’ and ‘pot Westerns’ depend on reevaluations of white and nonwhite experience that view certain countercultural habits and styles in relation to models derived from Westerns, but where they differ most, perhaps, is in their generational biases, which lead them respectively to overturn or ironically revise the relevant generic norms."

"the acid Western caters more specifically to a bohemian audience befitted by the influence of a hallucinogenic substance of some sort, the same audience that would give birth to the ritual of the midnight movie in the 70s. It is in this regard that the acid Western is exemplified in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo."

"a true acid Western: a film that amalgamates the violent with the absurd in such a way that the result, to a specific audience, achieves a certain profundity."

"Westerns, with their formulas and archetypes, with their moral focus and hero’s journeys, are prime American myths. According to Westerns, Americans value individualism; they value personal morality over law; they see justice in violence; they presume that capitalism and industry will prevail. Or, at least, that’s what Americans valued when Westerns had their heyday in the middle of the 20th century. Toward the end of that century, as American values shifted, or at least came into question, traditional Westerns began to seem outdated. Many filmmakers revisited them with the intention of recasting American myths in the light of new values. This is the larger context of the acid Western" Katherine Follett, http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/deadman

Pseudononymous reviews - http://acidwestern.blogspot.com.au/

Rosenbaum's texts: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1996/04/a-gun-up-your-ass-an-interview-with-jim-jarmusch-tk/ http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/acid-western/Content?oid=890861