GoodTrash Media

Welcome again to another edition of Eye Protein. Ordinarily we talk on a fairly academic level about the most nutritious sections of cinephilia to help you, the dear reader, to expand your palate. This week is a little different. We are talking about Django (1966) and Spaghetti Westerns on the main GoodTrash show this week and I am tasked with doing what I do more often than anything in this column and talking international film genres.

So it’s the Spaghetti Western…. I cannot speak objectively here. Here’s the Wikipedia-type stuff: It’s less a genre than a cycle of films made by Italian producers, shot in Spain, crewed by Spaniards and Italians, and featuring a cast from Italy, America, Germany, and/or Spain. These films lacked the romanticization of the myth of Westward expansion and tended to have morally ambiguous protagonists and sent up the shady dealings of America’s past. The style was visually ambitious, with crazed zooms, long landscape shots, fecund production design in the interiors, and the most frequent uses of closeups since Carl Theodore Dryer. The cycle lasted roughly from 1960 to the mid 1980s.

Oh and there are plenty of academic discussions. We could talk style. There’s a fascinating production history. Here’s a place where directorial auteurism smacks directly against star auteurism. I am fascinated by the definition of the Spaghetti Western in relation to Film Noir. Is it a genre, a style, or cycle? In what ways is it all three and none of the above?

Sorry gang, I just can’t do it.

From age seven till twelve Clint Eastwood westerns were on matinee television at my house growing up. My grandpa and I would curl up on the recliner, take turns sleeping, and watch the Dollars Trilogy, Josey Wales and Pale Rider.…this was nearly every Saturday for five years. And there were so many Spaghetti Westerns… Duck You Sucker, Once Upon a Time in the West, Death Rides a Horse, Compañeros, and A Bullet for the General. Strangely they were always my favorites.

Somewhere along the way I got too cool for school and we stopped the ritual. We’ve watched all of The Dollars Trilogy probably three times apiece since, but never again like those magic Saturdays.

My grandpa is dying of cancer and likely won’t see his next Christmas. I don’t know how to express how thankful I am for these movies as an instrument that brought us together and also kept us together in spite of my difficult teenaged years. I love these movies because I love my grandpa and the two very different loves strangely intermingle. Spaghetti Westerns are how I learned cinema is magic.

Not in a classroom, but but by being enchanted by its spell in a Lazy-Boy recliner.

And by sharing the enchantment with the most important man in my life.

I fell in love with movies through the Spaghetti Western. I learned the pleasures of cinephilia when I saw Biff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II amazed at Clint Eastwood’s bulletproof “vest”. I learned that American history is not quite so rosey and I should not pick out who the good guys and bad guys are based on white or black hats (or blue or gray uniforms, or cowboy hats versus sombreros). I learned that a losing battle for the right thing was worth it. I learned that the typical grammar of filmmaking was impoverished and there was a world out there where filmmakers broke all the “rules”. I discovered samurai films because of Spaghetti Westerns.

For me, the Spaghetti Western was my gateway drug. Is it my favorite genre now? Not really. However, hese movies are in large part why I do what I do. They are how I learned to love movies.

These movies were so much more than than a couple of hours, a nap, and sometimes a bucket of popcorn. They were foundational to one of the most important relationships in my life. We had some of the best and most meaningful conversations I’ll ever have during, after, and initiated by these films. Movies matter, gang, and my experience with the Spaghetti Western is why I know in my bones that it’s true.

My story is not your story, but I would love to hear yours below. When did you find that the imaginary worlds of cinema actually enrich the real world we live in? When did you fall in love with movies? Who introduced you? What movies/genres/places mattered the most? I love the academia of film studies, but it’s the personal that drives me.

And I don’t think I’m the only one…let me know below.