‘Man with No Name’ from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Two figures stand at the forefront of the Western novel: the cowboy and the pioneer. The frontier is a pervasive image in American culture, one that has captivated filmmakers, artists, writers, historians, and grade-schoolers since the advent of Westward Expansion. We marvel at the bravery of the pioneer, the rugged individualism of the cowboy; over and over again we consume stories where they grapple with a wild, free, lawless land and more often than not, come out on top.
The Western is, by design, about conquest; the allure of the stories we tell about the American frontier stems from the struggle between freedom and order. Often, this struggle is accompanied by extreme acts of violence. Italian director Sergio Leone pioneered the Spaghetti Western, where any cowboy story was incomplete without a gunfight, duel, or massacre; his over-the-top, exaggerated showdowns have become a staple of the Western genre. Anti-heroes, conflict, bloodshed: stories about the American West showcase a specific kind of stylized violence that is fun to consume.
The history at the foundation of the genre is much more brutal. The Western is defined by conquest, the cowboy and pioneer are its figureheads, and their victims are the original occupants of the frontier. Hundreds of years before Laura Ingalls Wilder or Billy the Kid, there were Indigenous populations and Spanish settlers living in communion with the land; the West was not nearly as wild or unoccupied as the average pioneer novel would have you believe. The blood spilled in a duel at high noon is the tail end of a long history of massacre and death that began in the name of bringing order to the Wild West. Every Western is set in a graveyard.
Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian engages with the history of American Expansion directly and, in true Western fashion, violently. Though it was written nearly forty years ago, it consistently ranks as one of the most disturbing and gruesome books ever written, a title usually reserved for splatterpunk or horror novels. But Blood Meridian doesn’t need to invent supernatural beings or convoluted torture plots to be disturbing; it only needed to be based in historical fact.
Very early on, the novel gives a warning to our protagonist: “Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.” This warning goes unheard, but not unrealized. Blood Meridian follows a teenage runaway dubbed “the kid” who joins a group of mercenaries called the Glanton Gang, a real group based on Samuel Chamberlain's memoir, My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue. Originally, the group is hired to protect Mexican locals from Apache attackers, but their intentions soon shift. The group begins to kill indiscriminately: soldiers, defenseless Mexican villages, nonthreatening Natives, their children, infants, and animals. McCarthy does not cloak this violence in metaphor or gratuitous description; though the acts described are repulsive, they are not stylized, only stated plainly.
Blood Meridian, in keeping with traditions of the Western genre, centers conquest in the narrative; unlike other Westerns, it does not try to justify, glorify, or condemn violence. Instead, brutality is accepted only as an inevitability. Judge Holden, a member of the fictional and real life Glanton Gang, is the manifestation of this inevitability. The kid is on the fringes of the group, the judge is at the center. He is a different kind of antagonist, not a mindless bandit or a cunning outlaw. Despite his monstrous appearance- seven feet tall, completely hairless, pure white skin- he is articulate, well-learned, a skilled musician, dancer, and marksman, fluent in several languages, extremely agile and strong. He is also the cruelest and most vicious of the group; living only to kill and destroy, especially the smallest and most vulnerable.
The judge takes great pleasure in finding rare and beautiful things, documenting and drawing them in his personal notebook, and then destroying the original, leaving himself the only witness. He says to the group that “whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” This is the ideal at the core of Westward Expansion, that land untouched and untamed by America is an insult to our power. The only way to reclaim this power and to hold dominion over that which is not us is through violence. Judge Holden says throughout the book that war is god. Early settlers believed it was God’s will for them to move west; to the judge, expanding westward is an act of war. The difference between the judge and the settlers is that while the judge understands and embraces the brutality of Manifest Destiny, the settlers refuse to see it as cruelty, only progress. Blood Meridian exposes the intentionality of the violence, suffering, and war that formed the American West. The traditional Western tries to spin violence as a tool that can be wielded for good or evil, McCarthy makes no such assertion.
American Progress by John Gast, 1872
Throughout the long, brutal passages of Blood Meridian there is little insight into the kid’s actions. It is unclear how big of a role he plays in the raids, if any. But we know he is always watching, bearing witness to the atrocities committed, doing nothing to stop it. Late in the novel, the kid's unwillingness to completely commit himself to the Glanton Gang leads to a confrontation with the judge, which the kid barely survives. Almost twenty years later, our protagonist, now called the man, stumbles upon Judge Holden in a tavern, completely unchanged. The man tries to leave after a brief conversation, but the judge corners him in the outhouse and murders him. The book- which previously graphically recounted infanticide, rape, mutilation, and murder- refuses to describe it. The man is no longer alive to bear witness to the judge and his actions. Without him, we can only try to fill in the gaps. The judge, the embodiment of Manifest Destiny, destroys the only remaining witness that refused to commit to his ideology of violence.
Without a witness, all we have left are the retellings, the Spaghetti Westerns, a version of events that are stylized and watered-down. The modern Western has no shortage of violence, but it doesn’t engage with the long, brutal history of Native genocide, buffalo massacres, and desecration of the land; these events are treated as unworthy of time and attention by the Western canon. Blood Meridian explains why: “only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.” A refusal to accept violence as inevitable is a refusal to commit to the rules of the Western genre, because violence is what built the West.
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