Acid Western
Encyclopedia
Acid Western is a sub-genre of the Western
film that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that combined the metaphorical ambitions of top-shelf Westerns, like Shane and The Searchers
, with the excesses of the Spaghetti Westerns and the outlook of the counter-culture. Acid Westerns subvert many of the conventions of earlier Westerns to "conjure up a crazed version of autodestructive white America at its most solipsistic
, hankering after its own lost origins."
in a review of Jim Jarmusch
's film, Dead Man
, published in the Chicago Reader in June 1996. Rosenbaum expanded upon the idea in a subsequent interview with Jarmusch for Cineaste and later in the book Dead Man from BFI Modern Classics.
In the book, Rosenbaum illuminates several aspects of this re-revisionist Western: from Neil Young
's haunting score to the role of tobacco, to Johnny Depp
's performance, to the film's place in the acid-Western genre. In the chapter "On the Acid Western," Rosenbaum addresses not only the hallucinogenic quality of the film's pace and its representation of "reality," but also argues that the film inherits an artistic and political sensibility derived from the 1960s counterculture which has sought to critique and replace capitalism with alternative models of exchange.
In the traditional Western
, the journey west is seen as a road to liberation and improvement, but in the Acid Western, it is the reverse, a journey towards death; society becomes nightmarish.
, Dennis Hopper
, Jim McBride
, and Rudy Wurlitzer
, as well as movies like Greaser's Palace
; Alex Cox
tapped into something similar in the Eighties with Walker
."
Monte Hellman's cult film
, The Shooting
(1966) could be considered the first Acid Western. The film stars Will Hutchins
, Warren Oates
and a young Jack Nicholson
, and was anonymously financed by Roger Corman
. The Shooting subverts the usual priorities of the Western to capture a sense of dread and uncertainty that characterized the counterculture of the late 1960s. Hellman quickly followed up with Ride in the Whirlwind
(1966). Rudolph Wurlitzer
is considered "the individual most responsible for exploring this genre, having practically invented it himself in the late 60s and then helped to nurture it in the scripts of others," such as McBride's Glen and Randa, Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Cox's Walker, and Sam Peckinpah's
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
. Wurlitzer worked on the script of Gone Beaver, which Rosenbaum describes as "a visionary script" for Jim McBride. It was an extremely ambitious big-budget Western about early American trappers and Indians, for which a virtually invented language of “trapper talk” was devised. The film was aborted one day before production. Wurlitzer's unproduced 70s screenplay Zebulon inspired Jarmusch's Dead Man. Wurlitzer later transformed his script into the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.
Early 1970s films such as Robert Downey Sr.'s
Greaser's Palace, George Englund's Zachariah
, and Alejandro Jodorowsky
's El Topo (The Mole) blend religious allegory
, John Ford
ian Americana, Thomas Pynchon
esque satire, and counter-cultural fantasy. Luc Moullet
directed A Girl is a Gun (Une Aventure de Billy le Kid) featuring French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud
as Billy the Kid. The film swings wildly between slapstick insanity and delirious experimentation set in a bizarre, elemental wilderness. The acid western reached its zenith in the 1970s, depicting the Old West as an imaginary, post-apocalyptic wilderness populated by degenerate hippies and loners. Grim Viet-era acid Westerns include Robert Aldrich's
Ulzana's Raid
, Robert Benton
's Bad Company
, James Frawley's Kid Blue (starring Dennis Hopper
), Stan Dragoti's Dirty Little Billy
, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand
, and Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson
.
Rosenbaum calls Dead Man
a "much-delayed fulfillment" of the Acid Western, "formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda."
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
film that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that combined the metaphorical ambitions of top-shelf Westerns, like Shane and The Searchers
The Searchers (film)
The Searchers is a 1956 American Western film directed by John Ford, based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May, and set during the Texas–Indian Wars...
, with the excesses of the Spaghetti Westerns and the outlook of the counter-culture. Acid Westerns subvert many of the conventions of earlier Westerns to "conjure up a crazed version of autodestructive white America at its most solipsistic
Solipsism
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
, hankering after its own lost origins."
Origin of the term
The term "Acid Western" was coined by Jonathan RosenbaumJonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
in a review of Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch
James R. "Jim" Jarmusch is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer. Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.-Early life:...
's film, Dead Man
Dead Man
Dead Man is a 1995 American Western film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. It stars Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Michael Wincott, Lance Henriksen, and Robert Mitchum . The film, dubbed an "Acid Western" by its director, includes twisted...
, published in the Chicago Reader in June 1996. Rosenbaum expanded upon the idea in a subsequent interview with Jarmusch for Cineaste and later in the book Dead Man from BFI Modern Classics.
In the book, Rosenbaum illuminates several aspects of this re-revisionist Western: from Neil Young
Neil Young
Neil Percival Young, OC, OM is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation...
's haunting score to the role of tobacco, to Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp
John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor, producer and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol...
's performance, to the film's place in the acid-Western genre. In the chapter "On the Acid Western," Rosenbaum addresses not only the hallucinogenic quality of the film's pace and its representation of "reality," but also argues that the film inherits an artistic and political sensibility derived from the 1960s counterculture which has sought to critique and replace capitalism with alternative models of exchange.
In the traditional Western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
, the journey west is seen as a road to liberation and improvement, but in the Acid Western, it is the reverse, a journey towards death; society becomes nightmarish.
History of the genre
Rosenbaum used the term Acid Western to describe a "cherished counterculture dream" from the Sixties and Seventies "associated with people like Monte HellmanMonte Hellman
Monte Hellman is an American film director, producer, and film editor.Hellman is among a group of directing talent mentored by Roger Corman, who produced several of the director's early films...
, Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...
, Jim McBride
Jim McBride
Jim McBride is an American television and film director, film producer and screenwriter.-Filmography:* David Holzman's Diary * My Girlfriend's Wedding...
, and Rudy Wurlitzer
Rudy Wurlitzer
Rudolph "Rudy" Wurlitzer is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is known for his experimental style and has a large cult following for both his novels and screenplays. His fiction includes Nog, Flats, Quake, Slow Fade, and Drop Edge of Yonder...
, as well as movies like Greaser's Palace
Greaser's Palace
Greaser's Palace is a 1972 American cult film directed by underground filmmaker Robert Downey, Sr. A parable based on the life of Christ, it is full of references about the destruction of the world.-Plot:...
; Alex Cox
Alex Cox
Alexander Cox is a British film director, screenwriter, nonfiction author and sometime actor, notable for his idiosyncratic style and approach to scripts...
tapped into something similar in the Eighties with Walker
Walker (film)
Walker is a 1987 Acid Western film directed by Alex Cox. The film based on the life story of William Walker , the American filibuster who invaded Mexico in the 1850s and made himself President of Nicaragua shortly thereafter. It was written by Rudy Wurlitzer and scored by Joe Strummer, who also...
."
Monte Hellman's cult film
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
, The Shooting
The Shooting
The Shooting is a 1966 western film directed by Monte Hellman, with a screenplay by Carole Eastman . It stars Warren Oates, Millie Perkins, Will Hutchins, and Jack Nicholson, and was produced by Nicholson and Hellman. The story is about two men who are hired by a mysterious woman to accompany her...
(1966) could be considered the first Acid Western. The film stars Will Hutchins
Will Hutchins
Will Hutchins is an American actor most noted for playing the lead role of the young lawyer Tom Brewster in the Warner Brothers Western television series Sugarfoot on ABC from 1957-1961.-Biography:...
, Warren Oates
Warren Oates
Warren Mercer Oates was an American actor best known for his performances in several films directed by Sam Peckinpah including The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia...
and a young Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...
, and was anonymously financed by Roger Corman
Roger Corman
Roger William Corman is an American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Some of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2009 he won an Honorary Academy Award for...
. The Shooting subverts the usual priorities of the Western to capture a sense of dread and uncertainty that characterized the counterculture of the late 1960s. Hellman quickly followed up with Ride in the Whirlwind
Ride in the Whirlwind
Ride in the Whirlwind is a 1965 western directed by Monte Hellman, starring Jack Nicholson, Millie Perkins, and Harry Dean Stanton. Nicholson also wrote and produced the film.- Plot :...
(1966). Rudolph Wurlitzer
Rudy Wurlitzer
Rudolph "Rudy" Wurlitzer is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is known for his experimental style and has a large cult following for both his novels and screenplays. His fiction includes Nog, Flats, Quake, Slow Fade, and Drop Edge of Yonder...
is considered "the individual most responsible for exploring this genre, having practically invented it himself in the late 60s and then helped to nurture it in the scripts of others," such as McBride's Glen and Randa, Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Cox's Walker, and Sam Peckinpah's
Sam Peckinpah
David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah was an American filmmaker and screenwriter who achieved prominence following the release of the Western epic The Wild Bunch...
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a 1973 Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. Co-star Bob Dylan composed multiple songs for the movie's score and the album Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was released the same year.The film was noted for...
. Wurlitzer worked on the script of Gone Beaver, which Rosenbaum describes as "a visionary script" for Jim McBride. It was an extremely ambitious big-budget Western about early American trappers and Indians, for which a virtually invented language of “trapper talk” was devised. The film was aborted one day before production. Wurlitzer's unproduced 70s screenplay Zebulon inspired Jarmusch's Dead Man. Wurlitzer later transformed his script into the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.
Early 1970s films such as Robert Downey Sr.'s
Robert Downey Sr.
Robert John Downey, Sr. is an American actor, writer, and film director, and the father of actor Robert Downey, Jr...
Greaser's Palace, George Englund's Zachariah
Zachariah (1971 film)
Zachariah is a film starring John Rubinstein as Zachariah and Don Johnson as his best friend Matthew. The film is loosely based on Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha, surrealistically adapted as a musical Western by Joe Massot and two members of the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe...
, and Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky, known as Alejandro Jodorowsky, is a Chilean filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, comic book writer and spiritual guru...
's El Topo (The Mole) blend religious allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
, John Ford
John Ford
John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...
ian Americana, Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
esque satire, and counter-cultural fantasy. Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.Though such influential...
directed A Girl is a Gun (Une Aventure de Billy le Kid) featuring French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
as Billy the Kid. The film swings wildly between slapstick insanity and delirious experimentation set in a bizarre, elemental wilderness. The acid western reached its zenith in the 1970s, depicting the Old West as an imaginary, post-apocalyptic wilderness populated by degenerate hippies and loners. Grim Viet-era acid Westerns include Robert Aldrich's
Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich was an American film director, writer and producer, notable for such films as Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .-Biography:Robert...
Ulzana's Raid
Ulzana's Raid
Ulzana's Raid is a 1972 revisionist Western starring Burt Lancaster, Richard Jaeckel and Bruce Davison. The film, which was filmed on location in Arizona, was directed by Robert Aldrich based on a script by Alan Sharp....
, Robert Benton
Robert Benton
Robert Douglas Benton is an American screenwriter and film director.Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, the son of Dorothy and Ellery Douglass Benton, a telephone company employee. He attended the University of Texas and Columbia University. Benton has won numerous awards for both writing and...
's Bad Company
Bad Company (1972 film)
Bad Company is a 1972 American Western film directed by Robert Benton, who also co-wrote the film with David Newman. It stars Barry Brown and Jeff Bridges as two of a group of young men that flee the draft during the American Civil War to seek their fortune and freedom on the unforgiving American...
, James Frawley's Kid Blue (starring Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...
), Stan Dragoti's Dirty Little Billy
Dirty Little Billy
Dirty Little Billy is a western film released in 1972 and was the directorial debut of Stan Dragoti. It stars Michael J. Pollard as Billy the Kid....
, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand
The Hired Hand
The Hired Hand is a 1971 American western film directed by Peter Fonda, with a screenplay by Alan Sharp. The film stars Fonda, Warren Oates, and Verna Bloom. The cinematography was by Vilmos Zsigmond, and Bruce Langhorne provided the moody film score. The story is about a man who returns to his...
, and Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson
Jeremiah Johnson
Jeremiah Johnson is a 1972 western film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford as the title character and Will Geer as "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp...
.
Rosenbaum calls Dead Man
Dead Man
Dead Man is a 1995 American Western film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. It stars Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Michael Wincott, Lance Henriksen, and Robert Mitchum . The film, dubbed an "Acid Western" by its director, includes twisted...
a "much-delayed fulfillment" of the Acid Western, "formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda."
See also
- Revisionist WesternRevisionist WesternThe Revisionist Western, Modern Western or Anti-Western traces to the mid 1960s and early 1970s as a sub-genre of the Western movie....
- Weird WestWeird WestWeird West is used to describe a combination of the Western with another literary genre, usually horror, occult, or fantasy.DC's Weird Western Tales appeared in the early 1970s and the weird Western was further popularized by Joe R...
- BlueberryBlueberry (film)Blueberry is a 2004 French film directed by Jan Kounen. It is an adaptation of the Franco-Belgian comic book series Blueberry, illustrated by Jean Giraud and scripted by Jean-Michel Charlier. The film starred Vincent Cassel as the title character along with Michael Madsen and Juliette Lewis...
, a 2004 French film focused around the influence of shamanism and the peyote religion.