Towards the end of last year, I finished watching 150 westerns in preparation for a future project. But, as I did when I watched 150 film noirs, I saved a few choice bits for last because I knew that my pace of watching so many movies would leave me exhausted. I was too tired to watch the last three after I was done, so I just got around to watching them this week. And what do you know, one of them is one of my 5 favorite films I have ever seen. It’s called Duck, You Sucker.
That’s a nasty title and is probably why they changed the title to A Fistful of Dynamite in this promo.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=THn36Mwmv7U
Now the reason this is among the last three films I saved was that it’s by my favorite director of westerns, Sergio Leone, who directed my favorite western of all time, Once Upon a Time in the West, as well as my second favorite, For A Few Dollars More (the second in his Man with No Name trilogy).
The original title reflects a comedic tendency born of the 1960s exuberance at having broken free of the shackles of tradition. With a title like Duck, You Sucker, I did not hold much hope for its ability to hold up over time. What’s more, it stars James Coburn, who also starred in such mod hits as In Like Flint, so I didn’t think I was going to like it. Granted, I had seen him and loved him in Sam Peckinpah‘s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (and elsewhere), but I’ve never been a huge fan of his work and I didn’t hold out much hope for this effort.
I Was Wrong
I am not afraid to admit that I was wrong. Yes, Coburn is playing his usual brash and callous character—the one that Mike Myers has such a good time flaying in his Austin Powers character. And what is even more preposterous, he’s supposed to be playing an intellectual opposite Rod Steiger, who plays a poor Mexican peasant who’s only interested in money (and little else). But what I love about this movie is the sense I got from the first explosion that Leone has been paying attention to Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch (another of my top 5 favorite Westerns). Coburn is loaded up with explosives, and he’s not afraid to use them.
Leone’s European Perspective
Leone brings a European perspective to the Sam Peckinpah universe. Peckinpah’s universe itself is a bleak and nihilistic one. He was an alcoholic who felt he had missed out on the great adventures of the West and was living in a time when the old myths had been sundered and new men were coming to transform the landscape forever (the cowboys versus sodbusters myth of Shane). He, and his main characters, were living past their expiration date, and they decide to go out in a blaze of glory (and an orgy of blood).
Leone doesn’t have such a view of the past or such a nihilistic view of the future. Instead, the director had sat in Rome during the 30s and 40s watching American Westerns dubbed into Italian (by order of Mussolini) and he dreamt of freedom in America which was denied him in Italy. His future is not a European, but an American future. See my post on France Gall or the Ye-Ye Girls to understand just how prevalent such a view of the future was in the 1960s.
Duck, You Sucker appears to me to be part of Leone’s project of assembling his European perspective by co-opting the fresh perspective of the Sam Peckinpah Western.
I have always had a fond spot in my heart for the European perspective on American culture. It’s why I pursued an academic career. In Europe, the educated man is supposed to have some perspective on life derived from having lived in a country that had survived for more than one or two hundred years. America was a young country, but France, France had been around since before Gaul was conquered by Caesar (that’s a long time for those who don’t know).
It’s also why I got out of academia. Academics tend to build Ivory Towers that present barriers to entry for individuals of lesser talents. But those same barriers tended to exclude too many of the people with different ideas (like mine which I’ve been laying out in my explication of my Poker Tales). I found these barriers were being built with a mind to keep my perspective out.
Back to Leone
The film starts off with a quotation from Chairman Mao which sets the tone for the main theme of the film:
The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or embroidery; it cannot be done with… elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.
This sets the stage for such directors as Quentin Tarentino, who say (and apparently believes) that violence is the purest form of cinema. I have my doubts (but then who am I?).
In any case, Leone takes a more subtle approach in his explosion-filled fantasy. In the film’s best scene, Juan comes into the tent of his brother John (nice pairing of different names whose underlying meaning is the same) and lays his head on a map.
‘That’s your country you’re lyin’ all over there,’ says the helpful John.
‘It’s not my country,’ says Juan. ‘My country is me and my family.’
John reminds him of the other words that country covers, including ‘the governor, the landlords, and this revolution.’
Juan explodes in anger, as you can see here.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMwTbb8NHQ
As Wikipedia notes, in the film, the intellectual John (Coburn) learns a lesson taught by to him by the peasant Juan (Steiger) and not the other way around. They quote Leone himself:
I chose to oppose an intellectual, who has experienced a revolution in Ireland, with a naïve Mexican… you have two men: one naïve and one intellectual (self-centered as intellectuals too often are in the face of the naïve). From there, the film becomes the story of Pygmalion reversed. The simple one teaches the intellectual a lesson. Nature gains an upper hand and finally the intellectual throws away his book of Bakunin’s writings. You suspect damn well that this gesture is a symbolic reference to everything my generation has been told in the way of promises. We have waited, but we still are waiting! I have the film say, in effect “Revolution means confusion”.
My Kind of Message
That’s my kind of message. It is the message that I take from the experience of Louise Brooks’ encounter with the director G. W. Pabst. It’s the difference between living your life at a distance and living your life in the immediate present. The intellectual distance can protect Pabst from contact with the creature he is anatomizing. He can make art about Lulu and can be protected from the natural fallout of action by putting a window on that world and allowing viewers to access that world without actually experiencing it for themselves. That is the role of art; it is an “artificial” recreation of that which we dare not touch ourselves. When Louise Brooks appears in his artifice as Lulu, Pabst is ecstatic; when it turns out that she was a Lulu in actuality, he revolted. “He didn’t like it,” says the actress.
Bakunin’s Thought
When John (Coburn) throws away the work of Bakunin, he is throwing away work based in the principles of nature. Bakunin had written:
The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.
By revolution, Bakunin had meant the effort to tear down the artificial barriers of entry put up by the bourgeois classes and to put in their place more “natural” boundaries in line with Nature herself. He doesn’t see any problem with this.
Another Justly Famous Scene
In another justly famous scene, the two once opposed Johns (points of view if you’re a stickler for propriety) come into alignment:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW0wO-Vds_8
Juan is complaining about the traveler John who’s showed up in the country and has decided to stay.
‘He says there is no danger. All you have to do is watch the bridge from a long way,’ mumbles Juan to himself. He has turned his binoculars to make the bridge look even farther away than it actually is. ‘No matter how I look with them, I’m still too close to the bridge.’
The bridge is a metaphor in the film. Its subsequent destruction brings the two opposite poles (of intellectual and uneducated men) together in a new synthesis of cooperation against the man with ‘power’ to take what he wants by force and to enforce poverty on the poor in an inequitable distribution of resources. This is what both the family man and the Irish intellectual are after. After all flee under the bridge, they are all killed by John’s bomb, leaving a new synthesis and antithesis in which John and Juan are on one side of the cavern, and the brave captain who was wise (or foolish) enough to stand his ground is on the other.
My Reaction to Leone’s Film
I applaud Sergio Leone’s film for its awareness of perspective of the other. Like Louise Brooks, and unlike G. W. Pabst, he has an awareness of the non-intellectual’s value in the equation. He wants to coax him in. This appeals to me as a person who feels he was wronged in graduate school, as the Starkadders feel they must atone for the ‘great wrong’ they visited upon Robert Poste in my favorite comic novel of the 20th century 
It is in the ‘getting there’ that I have my problems with Leone’s film. First, I don’t believe that things are so cut and dried as Leone, from his (if not intellectual, still distant) distance from America, sees America as those of us who live in America see it (how long will it take you to understand that sentence? it means that I, American, see the world differently up close than Sergio, European sees it).
He takes a Hegelian/Marxist/Baukuninian view of the matter. All we needed to do, Leone was (and hoards of others were) telling us back in the 60s was to stick to a posture of revolt and all would be well. Leone, and most (not all) of my intellectual colleagues in academia wanted me to pursue a posture of ‘pure revolt.’ I thought the idea revolting and I backed away.
I want to be clear here. I do not begrudge my academic colleagues their voice. I do not resent them for their contributions to the gradually improving climate of human knowledge. I do sort of still resent their refusal to allow me ‘and my sort’ into their private club; but in the end it’s their tree house, and they can invite who they want to include and who they want to exclude in their club. Academia is not the only place to think about the problems that affect humanity.
But I always thought that my academic colleagues only meant revolution as a metaphor for critical thought (which was fine with me) but not as a call for actual revolution with the chopping off of heads and the exploding bridges which kill hundreds of fathers, leaving widows and orphans in their wake. But they were telling me that, no, they were for actual revolution, which I was and remain firmly against.
My Creative Destruction
I took a different message from the works of Bakunin, a message made popular in Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
This has at its base the accumulation of property which Marx made the basis of his Communist Manifesto. It also has at its base Bakunin’s exemplary apothegm “the passion for destruction is a creative passion.”
Only in Schumpeter’s case, it comes with a responsibility to create something out of the phoenix fire of destruction, rather being comntent to destroy what others have built or the academic who is content to climb above money to a ‘higher’ plane. This academic idealism is the subject of a recent book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
As the review of Miller’s work in Publisher’s Weekly says,
Miller remains neutral, preferring to juxtapose the behavior of his subjects side by side with their words, even if, as in the cases of Socrates and Diogenes, so much still remains unknown about their lives. Nonetheless, this compelling book elegantly lays bare the distance between the abstract formulation of right action and its achievement in the real world, indicating that the lives of the great philosophers can be exemplary but not always in the ways we might have hoped.
I don’t believe that it is enough to turn away from thought altogether just because some philosophers have failed to live up to their ideals. But I also don’t feel that it’s enough to remain neutral as a creature involved in a competitive universe. Some ideas are better than others, and taking the wrong side in an argument can mean the loss of resources in a universe of limited resources. As I noted in my post on the Introduction to Poker Tales, as well as in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing
In the academic environment, where many students sit waiting for life to begin, my students’ first choice is often to try to get away without having to make a choice. This allows them to keep their options open until an ‘important’ choice comes their way. Socrates? Didn’t he die a long time ago? That’s right, I say. The choice you’re asking me to make is difficult, AND it doesn’t matter if I decide not answer, so what’s the point?” they say (well, I’m paraphrasing; no one actually ever said exactly that).
I have to agree with their reasoning here. It doesn’t matter if they decide not to answer. But I remind my students that the problems of life don’t go away simply because you chose to ignore them.
Burying your head in the ground is how non-intellectuals manage to keep being roped into the games that intellectuals are playing. Sure, we intellectuals (and I include myself in this category) are idiots who are searching after ends that never come. And sure, we are often wrong, as was Rousseau who abandoned his children or Shelley, who abandoned his marital obligation in search of ‘free love.’ As ends go, we still have a lot to learn. But as far as the science of life goes, a Western scientist has a far greater appreciation of what is going on when the earth rumbles. They check their scientific instruments, rather reaching for a passel of virgins and tossing them into a volcano one-by-one until the rumbling stops. You could do it, but it would be a waste of a perfectly good virgin.
The fact is, I tell my students, is that the choices you make matter, and if you choose not to choose, you still have made a choice. My students love this, because at least some of them have heard the song. They are usually shocked that an old guy like me knows the song, ‘Freewill.’ I very seldom tell them that it has been my experience that choosing freewill is not always (or even usually) the best choice. I’ll leave them to discover that fact (if in fact it is a fact) for themselves.
My Last Words on My Last Leone
So I like Sergio Leone’s work a lot. He’s produced 6 of my favorite 5 westerns of all time—the others are the Man With No Name Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, and My Name is Nobody—but as far as his having captured the essence of my reaction to America (being that I am actually an American living in America) he’s not quite captured that essence yet.
Bakunin’s followers include Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Herbert Marcuse, and Saul Alisnsky. This is why I am so hard on Bakunin’s followers. They represent the folly of academia’s reliance on ‘nature’ in their configuration of thought. In my experience, nature has little to do with human being’s engagement with it.
The solution to academic folly is not to fly from the battle and to watch from a safe distance as Kaiser Wilhelm drops his King Belly bombs balls into the beleaguered city. The same thing happens in Dr. Zhivago and The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, where people ‘sit back and play their guitars today just like yesterday’ and greet the new boss, ‘same as the old boss.’
My response is to stand up and fight the good fight head on. It is not enough to back away into a land of fantasy in which ‘us’ stand for true things as opposed to ‘them,’ who stand for ‘not-true things,’ but back away as soon ‘us’ are challenged, as having settled on a metaphor of revolution and not revolution itself. In such an environment, I have always been more comfortable being one of ‘them.’
That’s why I write my own books (but then again, who am I?).