Monte Hell­man and the birth of the acid western

Acid west­erns are not eas­i­ly defined. They are said to have evolved out of the 1960’s counter-culture’s admi­ra­tion for spaghet­ti west­erns, which effec­tive­ly sub­vert­ed a clas­sic genre through the use of vio­lence. Those who took up this new sub­genre did away with (and some­times even invert­ed) the for­mu­la­ic struc­ture of clas­sic west­erns – where the good guy rides into town, kills the bad guy and gets the girl – and turned the desert into a place of hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry death and destruc­tion rather than redemp­tion. They kept the deserts, amped up the vio­lence and mixed in sur­re­al­ism and twists.

Each film in the genre is unique, although cer­tain themes can be seen in many of the films: anti-heroes, ele­vat­ed minori­ties, dan­ger­ous women, psy­cho­log­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, twist­ed reli­gious sym­bol­ism, polit­i­cal com­men­tary and open end­ings. They were made by the counter-cul­ture for the counter-cul­ture and as such rep­re­sent­ed the inse­cu­ri­ty the gen­er­a­tion was feel­ing, deal­ing with char­ac­ters in a solip­sis­tic fash­ion – telling sto­ries in which the expe­ri­ences of the char­ac­ters was the most impor­tant thing and truth could be done away with for the sake of indi­vid­ual real­i­ties. These films are not so much sto­ries as they are por­traits of dam­aged minds.

Both made and released in 1966, Monte Hellman’s The Shoot­ing and Ride in the Whirl­wind are wide­ly con­sid­ered the trail­blaz­ers of the genre. They are no less unique than any oth­er acid west­ern, and are just as con­cerned with the inter­nal real­i­ties of the char­ac­ters they fol­low. The Shoot­ing, which was writ­ten by Car­ole East­man and stars War­ren Oates, Will Hutchins, Mil­lie Perkins and Jack Nichol­son, is a bril­liant­ly para­noid hunt through the desert; all three men are hired by a young woman (Perkins) to help her hunt down a man.

From the start, the film blurs the lines between the hunter and the hunt­ed, begin­ning with Coley (Hutchins) explain­ing to Gashade (Oates) that one of their camp-mates was killed by an unseen enti­ty and that he thinks they are next. When the young woman shows up, Coley and Gashade become the hunters, before quick­ly becom­ing the hunt­ed again when they realise they are being fol­lowed by some­one. The hired-hand fol­low­ing them is revealed to be Bil­lie Spear (Nichol­son) who was hired by the woman. He appears to delight in vio­lence begins ter­ror­is­ing Gashade and Coley.

The Shoot­ing forces us into feel­ing the same para­noia as the lead char­ac­ters through some bril­liant and rather unortho­dox cin­e­matog­ra­phy – employ­ing numer­ous extend­ed shots of the emp­ty land­scape leads the view­er to sub­con­scious­ly won­der what they are not see­ing in the void, the same way the char­ac­ters spend the first part of the film look­ing over their shoul­ders to spot the man hunt­ing them down. Added to this, the land­scape is caged in by moun­tains, giv­ing the vague­ly seen Bil­lie Spear (Nichol­son) who is always at the top a ter­ri­fy­ing advan­tage, and the group on the ground no way to escape. Since it is always filmed from where the group on the ground is, the audi­ence is effec­tive­ly trapped with them. It is a daz­zling­ly effec­tive way of drag­ging the audi­ence into the Gashade’s expe­ri­ence of being stalked, and adds to the hor­ror of the final moments of the film because we have lived with him.

The sim­i­lar­ly min­i­mal­ist Ride in the Whirl­wind also deals with a man­hunt, but it is less about para­noia, more about a man in the process of los­ing him­self. It was writ­ten by and stars Nichol­son along with Cameron Mitchell and Tom Fil­er as cow­boys mis­tak­en for mem­bers of a gang who have sup­pos­ed­ly lynched a stage­coach dri­ver, led by Blind Dick (Har­ry Dean Stan­ton). The vig­i­lantes who sus­pect them pro­ceed to hunt them down to exe­cute them. They shoot Otis (Fil­er) but Wes (Nichol­son) and Vern (Mitchell) escape into the moun­tains and hide out on a farm with a fam­i­ly (played by George Mitchell, Mil­lie Perkins and Cather­ine Squire).

We then fol­low Wes as he strug­gles with the loss of his best friend, the pan­ic of being hunt­ed down simul­ta­ne­ous­ly forc­ing him to for­get his own morals, effec­tive­ly aban­don­ing his iden­ti­ty. It’s a slow-burn that cul­mi­nates in Wes leav­ing his friend to die in the desert, which seems even more shock­ing than him sim­ply killing some­one. In a film about loss and death, only the dead man keeps walking.

Though two remark­able films receive lit­tle expo­sure today, they still serve as a fit­ting intro­duc­tion to a chal­leng­ing and eso­teric genre which was found­ed by an eclec­tic mix of peo­ple from a wide range of places, all attempt­ing to make some­thing that had nev­er been seen before. And boy how they succeeded.