I watched my first spaghetti western with my dad and my brother on a little boxy TV in our shared bedroom the night after we’d returned from spending Christmas in Ireland. This wasn’t your typical return from Ireland, this was at the end of a little experiment where we decided to save money on plane tickets and drive from Slough to Fishguard in Wales, get the Ferry to and then drive all the way to Cork. During December. With a one-year-old baby in the back seat. And back again.
My younger brother projectile vomited in the cafeteria area of the ferry on the way there as the winter weather had made the crossing particularly rough, so we booked a private, windowless cabin on the way back and swallowed some travel sickness tablets. Knowing now that a window with a distant view was better for sickness than reading a copy of 2000AD in a windowless cabin, I realise that this booking was more about saving face than preventing sickness.
I’m not sure what kind of Westerns I’d watched before but I’d never seen anything like the moment when The Man With No Name pulled his revolver, brought down his palm onto the hammer and sent a whole room of men sprawling in every direction, flinging their arms skyward before dropping. There wasn’t a single bullet wound on any of the bodies, nor a tear of blood on their clothing. It was as if the Man With No Name’s gun was actually a kind of magic wand that issued a sudden-death curse to whoever was framed by the barrel’s sights.
We watched it until the part where the hero was captured and beaten to the point of having one of his eyes swell shut. I’d watched Rocky and Rocky 3 multiple times by then so I knew that was not a good thing. But then, possibly because my parents were knackered and my baby sister was kipping in the next room, we were told to turn off the TV and get to sleep. None of us knew this was on TV so nobody had set the VHS. We really had to leave it at that point, when the Man With No Name was down but not out. In the absence of a recording (or the advent of catch-up), I had to rely on the only service available – the exaggerated recollections of my classmates who were allowed to stay up and watch the ending. We could have rented it I guess but there seemed to be some unspoken taboo about spending money to watch a film after it had just been on telly.
My Dad first watched A Fistful of Dollars when it released in the cinema in Ireland, or possibly when the print found its way back round to the cinema. He also knew Yojimbo, the Kurosawa samurai movie that inspired it, from a foreign language film club that was held once a month. Looking back, this was for him what the ritual of making the kids watch Star Wars is for me – an attempt to draw a connecting thread between two childhoods; the little chime of pleasure that accompanies the children in our lives repeating our older, worn-out pleasures before us.
My Dad turns 80 this year, he still lives in a council flat in a very posh town that he’s been in for 25 years. His memory has deteriorated rapidly in the space of a few years and I’m not sure how long it will be before he stops remembering who me and my siblings are. It’s not just the short term stuff, but also bigger, biograpical stuff that makes me release that the forgetting is leaking from the current moment into other aspects of his awareness. I know that’s not how it works, but that’s how it seems.
On watching the other films in the Dollars Trilogy, I noticed early on that there was a kind of amnesia that governs all of them. How the Man With No Name’s moniker or nickname changes every time; how the same actors pop up to play different characters; how the timeline moves backwards from the first film to the last. It turned out that this was because the first two films were made by different studios and so the same characters couldn’t be used. Therefore the main character acted the same, wore the same clothes, spoke with the same voice and mannerisms and gunned down other men using the same bloodless gun-curse technique but seemed to go about with a different name and backstory.
Memory is famously fallible, it is as plastic and adaptive as the brain itself. I can’t pretend to have some special insight into what memory is, but its function seems to be to provide the grounding for who we are rather than act as a kind of storage system. Our selfhood consists of so many moving parts and the memories that ground is are as tectonic as the seemingly solid ground beneath our feet. When a memory vanishes, a little part of us also vanishes. And then there’s the stuff that the brain makes up too, perhaps to bolster that same shifting sense of self.
In the early 70s, an American TV station filmed a new prologue to A Fistful of Dollars, that implied that The Man With No Name was a carrying out work for the government in pitting two rival gangs against each other. The network station felt that the character was too amoral and needed some kind of foundation of duty in order to portray him as a more clear cut moral agent. A goody. I have a feeling that the brain also does this, reframing the contexts of previous actions as part of some greater moral context. But The Man With No Name obviously showed some sympathy to the people of the town, and I wonder if the network’s real motive was to avoid portraying the common folk as a moral authority rather than good old Uncle Sam?
It should be added that, at 95 years old, Clint Eastwood is still working and intends to do so for as long as he can. Despite his reactionary, right wing opinions, he comes across as a good sort, to me at least. A friend of mine once worked as an extra in a scene he was filming and has an amazing story about him that isn’t mine to tell in a work of prose. I can only say that it demonstrates that he really seems to be a kind and funny person when he’s dealing with other human beings and not talking to an empty chair. It’s tempting to say that this is a testament to the rejuvenative powers of keeping active but the money probably helps too.
When I started writing this, I had to stop and recall whether the movie I watched that night was A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. One unnerving thing I noticed was that my brain was ready with both versions of my history, like a Large Language Model reaching for a convincing sounding answer in the absence of available facts. The same thing with that copy of 2000AD that I read in the lower bunk of the ferry cabin. It might have been a Judge Dredd compilation instead. I might also have read it on the top bunk. No, my older brother would have taken it. I’m sure. I can picture it right now.