Acid Western: An Explanation

The term ‘Acid Western’ was coined after Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp, was reviewed by journalist Jonathan Rosenbaum. He called the movie ‘the much-delayed fulfilment of a cherished counter-cultural dream which I’d like to call the acid Western’. A muddled mash of Pythonesque anarchy, violent madness and ‘60s counter culture is thrown into one of film’s best loved genres. It is this overlooked and undervalued cinematic sub-category that I will attempt to explain.

The Acid Western is a genre that is inherently hard to define. It never really began, just sort of slithered into existence, stalking the fringes of the ‘revisionist’ category. There are no formal constraints, and many internal variations. The films inhabit the physical space of the traditional Western, and generally contain Western characters going about traditional Western activities (mostly shooting). And yet they seek to undermine the conventional genre, sometimes openly opposing it. They came out of ‘60s counter culture, with a twisted view of reality and an anti-establishment undercurrent combined with an interest in warped spiritualism. It is as if someone reorganised the genre in a haze of narcotics and muddled politics.

The Shooting, starring a then-unknown Jack Nicholson, kicked it off in 1966, following a gang of hired guns journeying into the abyss. Mexican filmmaker Alexandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) brought the genre into full maturation, about a gunslinger on a spiritual quest to defeat his nemeses. One or two of the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah can be included, like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch, with their excessive blood and flippant attitude to violence. Other definite example include the Biblical parable Greaser’s Palace (1972), pacifist vehicle Zachariah (1971), and historical epic Walker (1987). These were usually B-productions, independently made by maverick filmmakers like Jarmusch, Jodorowsky, Peckinpah, Robert Downey Sr. and Alex Cox. Often commercial failures, Acid Westerns garnered cult followings through midnight showings. Now, thanks to noble benefactors like Amazon, we can see them for the first time.

Seeking Aquatic Enlightenment

Style

It is the style of the Acid Western which is perhaps most remarkable, most bizarre, most like a psychedelic nightmare. Viewers finish the film like intergalactic voyagers returning from a separate area of space, dizzy from alternate reality. Terrifying characters inhabit the landscape: cannibals, juvenile bounty hunters, magical healers, lunatics, transvestites, chamber musicians, blues bands, blues singers, highwaymen, midget outcasts, cults, women with male voices... people who don’t fit into the old West or modern America. They drift about, crashing into enemies, misshapen forms of deity and everything that conservative society cannot offer. The landscapes are beautifully bleak: empty deserts and vast woodlands, in which lurk anything. A lot doesn’t actually make sense, filmed in an intentionally bizarre and unrealistic fashion to disfigure reality, much like an acid trip (I would imagine). So, when Walker claims that it is ‘a real story’, it is quite happy to feature helicopters, sports cars, Time magazine and Zippo lighters. Surrealist is certainly one way of describing El Topo or Greaser’s Palace: like Woodstock with weaponry.

'This one's mine, you had the last philistine!'

                          

Sometimes, it can actually be a more realistic landscape, for example a greater use of accurate clothing to the stylised Hollywood cowboy uniforms. The creators of Dead Man took great care in presenting the Natives’ clothes and habits accurately (John Ford knowingly and happily used Indians from one tribe to play members of other tribes in his traditional Westerns). The characters aren’t tough, brave heroes, rather they are singers, nervous clerks, immature boys and reluctant killers. Desperate men are lionised as saints, like the historical reality of Billy the Kid or other folk heroes.

The soundtrack of this genre is modern popular music, often in the form counter-cultural acts from the 1960s and ‘70s. Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Joe Strummer all composed scores for Acid Westerns, their haunting guitars stinging the nostalgic sepia of history with postwar attitude (Bob Dylan actually launched his single Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door from Pat Garrett). The latter two had roles as gunslingers, as did Country Joe, Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton. Don’t tell me that seeing a ‘60s blues-rock singer or Woodstock folk veteran stumbling around in 19^th century Texas doesn’t make you wonder if you are seeing things. Their placement is evidence that the counter-culture of those tempestuous later decades has appropriated a once-traditional narrative setting. Even historically accurate music has a warped place in proceedings: mariachi players imprisoned in a cage next to their master’s toiletry facilities in Ceaser’s Palace, or the protagonist playing piano and singing boldly in Walker while a ferocious battle smashes through the windows.

Acoustics must be terrible

Themes

The thematic content is far more complex that the customary tale of good defeating bad. It is complicated, dark and compromised. Religion and spiritualism feature heavily, especially Biblical references. Greaser’s Palace is essentially the story of Christianity, with the Holy Trinity, Martin Luther and Catholic Church all wearing ten gallon hats. Dead Man is full of Indian ideals of spiritualism, spurted by the wise Native, Nobody, as he tries to reach the next world. But the most notable example is El Topo. It blends several religions as the hero ingests lessons from all of them, Eastern and Western symbolism slotting together like a theological jigsaw. What recognisable religion there is is confused and perverse: Iggy Pop plays a cross-dressing maniac who adheres solidly to the teaching of the Lord. One can even find God shooting innocent people for no apparent reason. Ironically, it is frequently through holiness that the ethics of the old West are overturned: prestige and masculinity through established social codes are relinquished for ultimate spiritual happiness.

Church as Cult

The Holy Trinity, apparently

Surprisingly, pacifism is a facet of a genre so attuned to killing. For many, nothing comes of violence, only destruction. The black-clad protagonist of El Topo, a harbinger of death, is wracked with guilt over his exploits. The whole message of Zachariah is that pacifism (along with vegetarianism... why isn't this film bigger in North London?) saves your soul. Ultimately, karma's a bitch, and violent tendencies lead to one's downfall

Nihilism is also present. Whereas in the traditional film killing is either righteous or terrible, here it is constant, simple and bloody: an unavoidable part of life. Dead Man’s slayings are deliberately awkward and bumbling. Greaser’s Palace has a character revived half a dozen times after brutal extermination. And of course, there is the extreme violence of Peckinpah’s masterpieces, the Tarantino of his day. I’m fairly sure that he is the only one who shot the slaughtering of hundreds of Mexican soldiers in one scene.

So the journey west does not equal enlightenment and positivity, but death and hell. Whereas traditional Westerns acted as parables of good and evil, and the former’s triumph over the latter, the Acid Western seeks to reverse this. Death lurks in the desert, ready to indiscriminately claim anyone, even if it is dramatically unorthodox.

                                                                             

                                              A particularly bad day at work for the Mexican military

Conclusion

The Acid Western is an utter reversal of the traditional Western, a kick in the stomach for John Wayne’s rose-tinted representation of America’s early history. The genre as a whole is only a vessel in which to tell a tale, in this case done so through a hallucinogenic peyote trip and the desire to prove something big and clever. It's up to you to decide what is an Acid Western: basically is it like going to a cinema owned by Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and George Lennon? These films showcase the best and worst of independent cinema: pretentious malarkey or sublime vision. Either way, it is a unique cinematic bundling which deserves to be explored.