The Lone and Level Sands
I am not making the case for generational irrelevance, or trying to align with those memes that go on about how kids nowadays will never know the joys of drinking from a garden hose or watching Yo! MTV Raps or whatever, but I do want to say something about the fading of the 20th Century as a dominant force in pop culture. Macca and Ringo are still hanging on, yes, but there’s an inevitability to their end. It’s in sight, just a wistful Merseybeat or two away. Their music might live on, but not as a breathing entity. Bugs Bunny is more or less extinct as well, despite corporate media conglomerates attempting a few revivals, and then half-assedly pulling the plug on them. Visiting a Six Flags theme park and seeing Looney Tunes branded rides is like a dead echo: Porky and Tweety Bird as Shelley’s Ozymandias, “look on my Tilt-a-Whirl and despair.” But ninety or so years is a pretty good run for a cartoon bunny. Ol’ Bugs coasted for decades on creative output from the 1940s and ‘50s, and then lived on for generations, selling breakfast cereal for at least four generations of children, all the way to the end of the American Century.
As those signifiers fade and die; another obit for a great writer, a political villain buried at last, yet one more cinema icon dropped into Hollywood Forever, the meaning of the things that are left behind starts to change. The medium might be the message, but the reader of that message now has to either parse historical context or ignore it and be either perplexed or disinterested or both. Case in point, I have a ten year-old son. When I was ten or thereabouts, I saw my first spaghetti western on Saturday afternoon television. It was probably either A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Saturday afternoon TV in those days was great. First, you had your morning cartoons, then you’d go out and play, and then come back inside at some point, turn on the TV, and The Guns of Navarone would be on. Or Billy the Kid vs Dracula, or The Eiger Sanction. Maybe if you were lucky, it’d be a Godzilla movie or Jason and the Argonauts. I fell in love with the Leone westerns instantly, and as I grew up, I’d continually seek them out. But even though those movies were already twenty years old when I first saw them, the conversation they were a part of was still going on. Maybe not so much as children who grew up in the fifties and sixties, but we of the following two decades understood the vernacular of westerns almost intuitively. We knew who the Lone Ranger and John Wayne were, Destry and Tonto, Earp and the Hole in the Wall Gang were known entities. We probably owned cap guns and cowboy hats at some point.
The Spaghetti Westerns were part of that conversation. Part schlock film cash grab, part auteur flamboyance–just as Nouvelle Vague had co-opted the classic film noirs of the thirties and forties, creating stylized responses to them, Leone and company crafted stylish, violent answers to that most American art form. I might not have understood all that on my first watch, but I understood their inherent radicalness. They were westerns, with all the stuff we always see in them, the saloons, the can-can girls, the gunslingers and the covered wagons, but they were a few beats off from the expected narrative trail. The landscape looked vaguely like the American Southwest (no rolling Platte prairieland in a Spaghetti Western), but was foreign in some way I couldn’t yet process. The violence was cartoonish but brutal, the morality, if any, hard to pinpoint. Watching them now, I’m always surprised at how Catholic the Leone/Eastwood trio of films are, all those monasteries and graveyards, and Eli Wallach’s Tuco incessantly crossing himself—the white Protestant imagery of traditional USA westerns replaced with an Italian’s innate understanding of a dominant Catholic monoculture. Of course Tuco’s brother would be a priest.
The dubbed voices, the dark humor, the sudden violence, those rich technicolor landscapes, the parched Spanish desert juxtaposed with the traditional western set pieces, the almost supernatural excellence of the Man with No Name’s gunfighting (which I now understand to be an heir to Kurosawa’s forlorn but preternaturally talented samurai loners) paint a picture that I still find hard to look away from. And I was thinking the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to share these films with my son?
Except, no, probably not. Leone’s films are now some six decades old. It would be like showing my son a pile of antiques laid out on oil cloth. Please assess the worth of these dusty objects. It would be a sterile experience. The western as a form of popular entertainment is not ascendent, no matter what Tyler Sheridan will tell you. It is true that contemporary westerns remain a genre that is in constant discourse with itself and with the actual history of our blighted country (as the T.K. Whipple quote that opens McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove notes, “What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”). But here in our troubled year of 2026, the conversation that Leone was having with the American Western is long over. If anything, Leone’s version of the west is the dominant modern depiction, just look no further than Red Dead Redemption–Gary Cooper in High Noon would be the anomaly now. So, aside from perhaps being intrigued by the quality of the filmmaking, what would a ten-year old who’s never seen a western and has probably never even thought about wanting to watch a western, think of For a Few Dollars More?
Do they still make high school kids read The Bell Jar? Consider the cultural references in there that needed some minor explaining thirty-five years ago when I read it-–the importance of the execution of the Rosenbergs, for instance. We were children of the Cold War, so while that event may have been remote in the 1990s, you could at the very least connect the dots to the world in which we lived. The Soviet Union still loomed as a force in the news, teetering through the SALT talks, keeping that wall up until they didn’t, all those bloated leaders in heavy coats with wild eyebrows and frog faced neck fat, Modernity has moved on from them. What’s the difference now between reading The Bell Jar and The Canterbury Tales? Both require foot notes. So too our ancient, poncho’d Eastwood. I may as well try to get my son to watch Bonanza.