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113 3. WELCOME TO WESTWORLD Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West The American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilisation. Gilles Deleuze The previous year, Baba had surprised Hassan with a leather cowboy hat just like the one Clint Eastwood wore in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—which had unseated The Magnificent Seven as our favourite Western. That whole winter, Hassan and I took turns wearing the hat, and belted out the film’s famous music as we climbed mounds of snow and shot each other dead. Khaled K. Hosseini Learning from Almería An expanded critical regionalism like that explored in the previous chapters demonstrates that no region can be static or inward-looking, for it needs to recognize forces beyond the nation, considering how the regional travels and dialogues with other cultures, circulating as it is consumed and re-produced in other forms. As the West is performed and practiced outside its geographical and ideological boundaries (or grids), as in Khaled Hosseini’s Afghanistan-set novel The Kite Runner (quoted above), it undergoes changes akin to the “wandering lines” described by Michel De Certeau—“‘indirect’ or ‘errant’ trajectories obeying their own logic . . . [creating] unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths”— and although they share a common “root” in the American West (“the vocabularies of established languages”), “the trajectories trace out ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop.” These trajectories (or routes) beyond the grid demonstrate the rhizomatic potential of “westness” exemplified, in this chapter, through the tactics adopted by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone as he “poached” the language of the Western in the 1960s, creating an alternative “outside” within the existing framework of the genre, with textual and ideological ruses that “circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain, a manoeuvre ‘within the enemy’s field of vision.’”1 From this he developed a “recycled,” hybrid welcome to westworld 114 genre known as Western all’italiana, or more colloquially as “spaghetti Westerns,” “more cynical, ironic [than any Hollywood Western], like the commedia all’italiana.”2 Indeed, the physical traces of these creations still exist, north of the city of Almería on the southern coast of Spain, inland near Tabernas, as the remains of the film sets used by Leone and other directors to produce hundreds of Italian (and Spanish) Westerns.3 They have become quasi–theme parks like “Mini Hollywood,” run-down, struggling sites like “Western Leone,” or more impressive, still-used film sets like “Texas Hollywood” with its adobe church, clapboard main street, and saloon. Here you can find the impressive log home of the McBain family from Once Upon a Time in the West (now a saloon), the (rebuilt) stone arch where Harmonica’s brother is killed by Frank, the bank of El Paso in For a Few Dollars More, and other locations that, even if not the originals, simulate the scenes from a hundred themselves-simulated Western films. This is the American West Leone created: a European version that looked authentic but, at the same time, had a particular quality of light, filmed in a unique manner to emphasize its stark, isolated beauty. The uncanny, disorienting experience of these places, even today, mirrors the effects of spaghetti Westerns—both familiar and unfamiliar, strangely unsettling , “more Western than Westerns themselves.” Of course, the fact that these sites remain preserved and visited by thousands every year adds further to the circulation of the West as a global concept, as iconography and experience, as myth and simulation. Tourism further recycles Leone’s vision, staging “live” shows on the streets of every site, imitating in (usually) stilted fashion the particular mannerist qualities of “spaghetti” acting styles: laconic, slow, packed with looks and glances, and explosively violent. In this, the “already-said” of Leone’s pastiche and homage, learned from a studious comprehension of American Western codes, is played out again—simulated like a faulty copy—on a twice-daily basis in the dusty, hot hills of Almería by local people dreaming of elsewhere. But the copied copy is a perfect reminder of the West’s existence as a complex, traveling concept, a rhizomatic formation crisscrossing continents, being constantly reconfigured and used in all manner of ways. Any sense of an original, authentic West has been displaced and disrupted by the effect of the hyperreal...

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