Beyond Good, Bad and Ugly: Sergio Leone and Cinema

The allotment of fate in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

What is Sergio Leone’s problem?, which is another way of asking: whence comes his vision?  What makes him engage with an old, foreign genre, most alien to his own experience, a genre which, incontestably, was already on the process of recognizing its own conventions (that is, it was no longer a genre…), failing like the industry which propelled it, on its way to unintended satire, bland and tired–––  what is this force which leads and directs, nevertheless, our Italian director? 

For let there be no mistake about the state of the Western by the mid-1960s. All that once was there allowing it to happen had been going, going and then was gone. It’s not the case of merely saying that Leone “revisited” the West, that he “complexified the moral landscape”, that he made its morals “grey” instead of black and white: gunfighters never had any morals in the first place, the Western was –– and that’s all that it was –– the story of their moralization, or: good and evil were but a culmination in the classic western, not a given. 

Also, in Leone’s masterpiece we have the good, the ugly and the bad, that is, not the evil. Therefore, Leone did not make the West amoral (for there was nothing statically moral to begin with), although he certainly gave up on the process, that is, Leone’s West is no longer a historical account, nor an ethical emergence, much less a Hegelian tale towards the State. In a sense, Leone’s West is time-less: the spatial element is now everything, the events are eternally trapped into its interstices, one after the other, though not chronologically, but metaphorically. 

The American westward expansion as an historical event is all but gone: the so-called Dollars Trilogy was shot in Spain, the score bears little resemblance to the Cavalry march or to country music (as in a John Ford western, for instance), and most of the actors are not Americans at all. This West has been, in fact, cleansed of almost everything necessarily American. It’s as if Leone had abstracted from the particular (historical) American West and reached its universal poetic structures. The story, then, does not have a proper beginning nor does it have a proper ending, say, the triumph of law over banditry, or, perhaps, the formation of the American nation-state. Au contraire, all that is certain in Leone’s West is that all will happen again, with different faces and guns, perhaps, but inevitably the same drama will play out. 

History and morality, thus, are not Leone’s business, he feels no need for them. (–– In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, especially. When Leone moves to his Once Upon a Time in the West he summons back the old motifs, combined with what he discovered in making his Dollars Trilogy: Once Upon a Time in the West, then, is but the historicization of the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is why it loses its edge somehow, taking us back to Jonh Ford’s territory.) 

So what is, then, the vision which forces Leone to the West, which makes him discover the West as the privileged ground of this idea? Leone’s envisioned problem is nothing but the allotment, that is, the essential moment in which the character’s fate is measured, weighed and defined, and soon afterwards discovered by him and enacted. The moment one receives and recognizes one’s lot: who one is and who one is destined to be, always. The portioning of fate. In traditional poetics, anagnorisis captures, though partially, the meaning of this notion: when Oedipus, for instance, finds out the truth about himself, he discovers his allotment, who he is, namely, the mother-loving parricide. 

However, anagnorisis is much too attained to plot and narrative: it’s a technical concept-device through which the narrative can unravel, constrained to the character’s biography and his epistemological state regarding it. The allotment surpasses this instrumental notion: it is, rather, that for the sake of which there is a narrative in the first place, that which essentializes, redefines a narrative after its own isolated significance, the story but being understood, then, as a mere preparation for that fatal moment. The allotment raises above the narrative and its immanent agonistic structures of meaning, focalizing these multiplicities under its unique instant of reckoning––– and therefore it is not framed temporally: both space and time being suspended, and suspended, also, the many categories with which a narrative makes itself understandable. The allotment operates in a certain level of pure significance, a mystical moment-in-itself, entirely self-sufficient. (It is, perhaps, somewhat akin to a theme). 

This is Leone’s problem, that which drives him to the West: he recognizes in the duel the privileged case of an allotment, hypostasizes it, freeing the duel from its conditioned position within the narrative logic, and turns it into a fatal handling of destiny. The duels in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are nothing like what is usually found in classic Westerns: this is not the Gunfight at O.K. Corral, the shooting of Liberty Valance nor sheriff Gary Cooper facing criminal Frank Miller at high noon. In classic westerns, duels are intrinsically linked to the West’s historical dimension: they symbolize the contradiction within the nation-building process, the contradiction within law itself (i.e., that violence is only overcome through violence). 

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly duels do not reveal any historical or social reality. Duels are, rather, the allotments, deadly attributions of fate to eternally wandering heroes. It’s a characterological necessity: these characters can only become who they are in a duel. This is why Leone’s characters face each other: it’s impossible for Hector not to face Achilles and fulfill his fate, just like it is impossible for Angel Eyes, Tuco and Blondie to resolve their treacherous journey without facing each other, receiving each his own lot. What will come out of the duel? In the classic western, a new society (with its original sins). In Leone’s West, but destiny comes out: all is cleansed in order for its scales to be weighed and death to fall upon the unlucky. (–– Again, Angel Eyes is not evil, but simply bad, the one who loses.) 

Angel Eyes meets his fate.

Now that Leone’s problem has been identified, we can move towards its significance beyond his own work, that is, the relation between this notion and cinema itself. The allotment can be safely summarized as the fatal moment. And what is a moment if not the very stuff of which films are made of? A neatly composed concatenation of signs (visual, musical, mobile, dramatic, etc), a symbolic dance, which can, or should, stand out as something in itself, aside from being a part in a whole, each of its elements gesturing towards some possible meaning accessible only to it in virtue of its particular arrangement, making it a new whole, while still remaining a part. It is not a scene–– many moments last longer than a scene, others are shorter, almost instantaneous: Dreyer’s Jeanne D’Arc is, perhaps, made of one single moment, while Hitchcock could have in one scene a repertoire of moments. 

A film moment is not, however, a mere perceptual quid pro quo through fabricated images. (That is why Eisenstein is but a cinematic behaviorist, notwithstanding his mastery of imagetic stimuli–– his films are pure mechanics, so to speak, they wrap up completely, impoverished and unambiguous, except for his technical virtuoso). A film moment could be anything: a look, a small gesture, a robbery, the handling of an object, a murder, a dance, a kiss, a toast, holding someone’s hand to prevent falling in the precipice, or, even, the testing of an atomic bomb in the desert. They are, as it were, the items composing the ontology of films. When we say, then, that Leone’s problem is that of the allotment, that is, the fatal moment where eternity and character are portioned, we are saying also that Leone’s problem is nothing but the question “What is cinema made of?”.

And he answers it epically–– Leone conceives cinema as a Homeric enterprise, which means to say that, for him, cinema is the anti-novel. There can be no room, in cinema, for the prosaic, for the lingering, developing subjectivity––  there is no room for formation (Bildung) in Leone’s cinema: everything is given, timelessly, there but remaining for the characters the discovery and recognition of their destinies, which cannot be changed, but only courageously endured. Leone believes that the only vehicle appropriate to define life is the moment. A moment, a lifetime for a moment, is his motto. (–– Perhaps, even, an eternity for a moment). 

This tragic understanding goes back to the Greeks: it goes back to the first Greek, Homer. What is Hector’s life if not but a preparation for his final combat with Achilles? When forced by divine treachery to face Achilles, Hector discovers his destiny. And when Zeus weighs the two heroes’ lot in his golden scale, then Hector finally becomes who he is: the great Trojan hero who fell to his better counterpart. The second best, but first esteemed, since the best of the Greeks, Achilles, praised him as a foe above all. This conception is truly radicalized with Christianity: the crucifixion –– the whole of Creation for a moment, one single moment, excruciatingly depicted, interpreted and suffered ever since, that for the sake of which everything is and must be subsequently resignified. In Dante’s Commedia, as well: each character in Hell gets his allotment recounted, sometimes in a single terzina. They are in Hell, which is the true, eternal reality, because of a fatal moment, only then recognized. It is, then, no wonder that only with Christianity could painting have emerged as an art form, for only then did the conception that lies behind painting, that which makes it possible – namely, the fanatical reduction of the world, space and time, to one moment – truly crystalized in subjectivity. 

Leone inherits this tradition full-heartedly: with a tinge of Morricone, of course. Morricone’s score serves the function of subjectivizing (or: temporalizing…) , the series of moments dispersed throughout the film. We follow his films through the score, which is the true subject of Leone’s West: that which provides substance to every moment, that which makes a moment truly grand, which makes us accept it as grand. Each song is the musical representation of an eternal moment: “The Desert”, “The Ecstasy of Gold”, “The Death of a Soldier”, “Escape on Horse” –– Sergio Leone’s inventory: a series of thematic grand moments, each an isolated eternity, sewn together by the Main Theme’s movement towards the moment of fate itself, the allotment of the final standoff. 

Tuco’s constant encounter with the rope.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, indeed, works not at the particular level, but it’s construed as a recurrent chain of universal images, of ghostly images. When Tuco is torturing Blondie, as a revenge for his betrayal, by making him walk to death in the desert, suddenly, and rather briefly, we have the emergence of one of these universal images, these grand moments of Leone’s world. A driverless carriage comes at a distance, announced by Morricone’s funereal trumpets as an otherworldly portent; a phantom carriage it is, indeed, eerie, reeking of death, riding alone in the desert, carrying in the whispers of its sole living spirit the secret to a life-redeeming lost treasure. This bears no relation to the American West; this is not the West of legends turned facts, or vice versa, but of dateless myth, archetypes and universal metaphors merely wearing the outfit of cowboys and outlaws. 

Leone’s West is, then, but a privileged and accidental configuration of “eternal metaphors”, to put it like Borges. Blondie and Tuco play a cat-and-mouse game across the stony rubbish and nothing will ever rid them of this: they are condemned to this routine, much like the soldiers, blue and grey, are condemned to fight over a bridge which will never be conquered. There is no redemption, solution, for there is no future: the particular characters, as fated forms, are themselves merely specters on a waste land, and the only reality is the recurrence of their drama. They have no real names for they are universals bound to reenact their destinies in the changeless landscape. There will always be a ransom for Tuco, a rope and a noose somewhere around his neck, a “golden-haired angel” looking out for him; there will always be betrayal, pursuit and torture, prison and the war; the journey to the cemetery, the tomb of the Unknown, the lost treasure promising redemption, then the standoff and the riding away. 

Schopenhauer in his Parerga and Paralipomena sketches, tentatively, the concept of “transcendent fatalism”. This is nothing but the impression we sometimes have that our lives contain some kind of destiny, that somehow it was meant to be just like this or just like that, a fatalism which is not mere chance, nor retroactively understood as necessary by us, but was always somehow “written in the stars” as a plan or intention. A feeling of “walking with destiny”, of absolute necessity and meaning in our individual life. 

“In fact, when he reflects on the details of his life, this may sometimes be presented to him as if everything therein had been mapped out and the human beings appearing on the scene seem to him to be mere performers in a play.”

Or: mere performers in a film. Leone’s cinema of the allotment is also a cinema of cinema. When he makes explicit his procedure (cuts, close-ups, image-sound synchronicity), stretching the fatal moment beyond the constrains of reality, of veracity, dilating time (–– fate has no hurry), in expectation of what the scale of destiny will weigh out for these characters–– he is also bringing out this “transcendent fatalism”, one’s life as a scripted life. Leone’s characters all have their lot, their role is previously written, everything they did was but another step towards this inescapable moment, now fully recognized so that they can willfully participate in this great enactment of destiny and find out, finally, who they are: he who kills or he who gets killed, “those with loaded guns and those who dig”, or –– the good, the bad or the ugly. The character’s destiny, his lot, is like a role in a film: Leone’s westerns are, ultimately, metafilms.