Dislocation
The thing about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is no one has a home.
Not Blondie, not Tuco, not Angel Eyes, not the bounty hunters, not the whores as they live at work, not the troops, not the prisoners, not the missionaries because the battle is coming, not the bystanders because they will die, not the dead because they're unburied or with war atop their graves. The only home seen early is destined for abandonment.
Nights are spent in camps, outposts and trains. Daytime is in constant motion, on horseback, foot and coach, with sleeping, cleaning, bathing, drinking, eating, working, and killing all interrupted. Names are similarly transitive. Blondie, Angel Eyes? No names here, and Blondie, of course, is The Man with No Name. Tuco has a first name, last and four middles. But he's left his family behind, so they add up to nothing. Most-wanted man Bill Carson is a fake name, a couple times over. Last, Arch Stanton is a name that appears to mean something until it doesn't. We're left with Unknown and men whom, asked late for names, can say nothing.
And the war. Yes, the troops have no homes, but further they have no reason to exist. There are no slaves in the West. There are no states' rights. There are barely states. With Bull Run and Antietam, war makes sense. The battleground is the ground at stake. But in the West, land is tangential. Towns are sparse, as anonymous as the few inhabitants, and bridges mean nothing to the men who fight and die daily for them.
As Blondie tells no one, again late in the film, "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly." This suffering is impartial. Thank God for a DVD cut restoring Angel Eyes finding the survivors of the dying Confederate camp. The scene is as beautifully shot and moving as any in the movie.
In this world, as Tuco says over and over, there's two kinds of people… and now my part… those who love moving and those who are terrified of it. I'm the latter. Work is a different story with different impetus. It's personally where I'm the latter, terrified. No, I don't know why. When I move, I worry I'll disappear. When people whom I care about move, I worry they'll disappear. No, this fear isn't grounded, yet it exists. You pack your boxes, and the world shifts. Maybe I never see you again.
That's why I'm up later tonight. That's why I had Netflix send this DVD, why one in the morning was the right time to open this bottle and why the drinking is going slowly, soberly. I'm securing tomorrow, now here. Some people need people to live. I need people and tomorrow to run.
We try to sleep in our homes, in our beds, with our names, wanting.
September 19th, 2010 at 11:18 PM
[...] lately, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More to follow my spring's enraptured The Good, the Bad and the Ugly night. Color Westerns with true emotion-seeking and artistry tug the moon closer and add a couple [...]