This week we looked at Westerns in our screening class, I was thrilled.
There’s something wonderful about a Western, about the hard-earned wisdom of the west, about the harshness of the people in a harsh world. And yet it’s all about honour, not necessarily law-abiding heroes, but men deemed good or bad by deed and morals.
I’ve been watching Deadwood lately, and I adore it. HBO tends to make me very happy, and they haven’t failed with this one. Despite the constant and, at first, jarring swearing (I’ve never heard ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’ and ‘cocksucker’ used so freely before) one is swiftly absorbed in this world of struggle and survival. With no ‘law’ to speak of justness is metered out by the good against the bad, but the bad so often succeed. Death is a constant, and where you may hate one character for an episode, you find him as the protagonist in the next and you hope for his victory. I adore the way HBO television shows can turn a villain to a hero and back again without ever losing character.
I would like to write a Western one day, or at the very least film one. They have wonderful poetry of landscape and an enormous amount of philosophy among seemingly simply living characters.
