Ask Greil: June 6, 2025

Revising the Western and other incidents in the history of the moving image

Hey Greil! I just got back from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where among other things I enjoyed the surprisingly good local music tourism, including the Woody Guthrie Center and the Church Studio. Of course the highlight is the Bob Dylan Center. I told my 27-year-old daughter, also a Dylan fan, that we might spend 2–6 hours in there, depending. As it turned out, 2 was plenty. I won’t say it was disappointing but I expected rabbit holes and deep exploration and there wasn’t too much of that. There was a sizable area devoted to A Complete Unknown—props and scripts and pictures—which I imagine they had to put up quickly. At one point, during one of the filmed pieces, a commenter said “Dylan, as an artist, refused to be put in a box” and my daughter turned to me and said “Feels like we’re standing in that box right now . . .”

Have you been and what did you think? —KEVIN WALSH

I think your daughter’s comment is . . . in the box. When I was there there were of course any number of artifacts whether objects or photos that were unknown, suggestive, that carried an aura, or all three. There was, especially, what I think of as a Shaker mural, though I may be misdescribing it, that vastly expanded the musical and spiritual world from which Dylan’s music derived and where it lives. But the revelatory moments you can sometimes find in museums, the encounters with captured, lived history, weren’t there. That may be because it’s a center, not a museum, and the real place may exist far more in its archives, which I haven’t visited, than in its public spaces. It was the purchase of Dylan’s own archives that provided the impetus for the center in the first place. You can get some idea of what it contains from the Dylan Center anthology Mixing Up the Medicine, where many different people were asked to write about something in the collection, a song manuscript, a tape of forgotten or unknown performance, a memo or notebook page.

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Do you have a favorite movie western of all time? I think I already know the answer is The Searchers. Not for me, however. For me, since its expanded version was released years ago, it’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Yes, it’s a cartoon, but so are all movie westerns, give or take. Director Sergio Leone turns the Hollywood Western on its head and gives us a sprawling, iconic, and funny take on the Western Myth. It’s Eastwood’s break-out moment, but Eli Wallach chews the scenery and steals the movie, making it so much better than the previous “Dollar” Leone movies. (And how did Wallach and Dustin Hoffman not get cast as family members in a movie? Sean Connery as Hoffman’s father in Family Business? WTF?) Wallach is so good I almost forget he was in Godfather III. I said almost. Good, Bad, Ugly has the finest western movie score (or just plain movie score) of all time (I’d say High Noon has the best song), it’s epic, sprawling, has something to say about heroism, war, and death without being preachy. It’s ’60s the way the pop music of the ’60s was: taking an established form and making a great pastiche out of it, making it better. That final shootout scene in the graveyard between the three, is there anything more iconic or imitated since? Not only does Clint shoot Lee Van Cleef dead, he shoots him into an open grave. Then he shoots his hat into the grave! Kills me every time. —JAMES R STACHO

This isn’t a question asking for a response, but for a book.

For me, now, The Searchers comes down to the two framing shots, at the start and the end, of John Wayne first at the door of the house, then in the sun in front of the the door, and the house in shadow. Manny Farber talked about Wayne’s “hipster” way of standing—constellations of attitude and philosophy in the way he moved into position and held it—and these two shots remain deep and inexhaustible.

But I don’t know if today I could get past the anti-Indian racism in the film—the scene of the jabbering women rescued from Indian captivity even more than the portrait of Scar. I like the story of how Buddy Holly wrote “That’ll Be the Day” off the way Wayne keeps repeating the phrase throughout the movie, though Holly was all vehemence and Wayne was over-the-shoulder cynical about the futility of hopes and dreams. But for Ford westerns, I’ll go with My Darling Clementine and Henry Fonda sitting in that chair.

Where to even begin? In some ways my favorite western is the collage film Graeme Buckley scored to Bob Dylan’s “Ain’t Talkin”—subtitled “Tribute to the Western”—though since the song inspired the collage, you could say the film scores the song—where dozens of faces moving in fragments of scenes or just caught in stasis from modern Westerns travel through Western time. It’s moving and intriguing—all the actors you don’t associate with Westerns, like Robert Duvall, appearing like figments of the imagination of the form itself—and makes you want to identify every film used and watch them all right away.

I find myself drawn most deeply to recent films, not ’40s and ’50s classics but pictures from the late sixties on, which is to say from the beginnings of the anti–Vietnam War movement, when all sorts of social issues that were buried or suppressed in earlier films began to surface and reshape the greater story all Westerns told. And because most of those movies were fun, full of humor, poking fun at themselves, but never quitting the genre itself, even if you could say they dissolved it. So I’m thinking of Bonnie and Clyde, which opened the door to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which I watched again recently and loved every minute, except for Katherine Ross saying “I’ll miss that scene”—the line was far too modern, and stuck out, robbing the movie of its credibility for a moment. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where both Warren Beatty’s Clyde, who’s impotent, and Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, who’s never shot anyone, combine into Beatty’s McCabe, and a tough guy’s dismissal—“That guy never killed anyone”—until he’s forced to and he does. And the star of the movie—no, not Leonard Cohen, God, no—is the town. The way it goes up. What’s left at the end. Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, but The Wild Bunch far more than that.

My favorite Western? There are two. First, from 1968, is Sergio Leone’s American work Once Upon a Time in the West, with Fonda as the killer Charles Bronson has to bring down—that’s not just casting against type, it’s casting against the whole history of American film. Attempts to understand the gravity Fonda brought to the role—the way he dredged up a monster in himself—often focus on the 1919 lynching in Omaha of a black man accused of assaulting a white woman, one of the most gruesome incidents in the epidemic of lynching of black people that followed the end of the First World War, and which Fonda, at 14, witnessed.

Bronson is as good. A lot less time has been spent on why that’s so. But the pacing of the very long movie—the full version is almost three hours—may be what makes it so powerful, so disturbing. You can’t believe the quest will ever end, and in some ways, you don’t want it to. The film is so rich you don’t want it to end.

Second is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, for every element, from script to shots, almost all the actors (the movie could have survived without Billy Bob Thornton and Iggy Pop hamming it up), Neil Young’s soundtrack, Robert Mitchum’s last role—and maybe best of all, the train ride from Cleveland to Washington, with the country changing as it passes west, especially when everyone rushes out of their seats to shoot buffaloes.

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Hi again Greil. Thanks for all you do.

No doubt I’m especially vulnerable at this Trumpian moment, but something just broke in me when I heard about the allegations agains Smokey Robinson. As in “Oh fuck no. Not Smokey Robinson. Fuck no. NOT HIM! I CAN’T STAND THIS!”

The great soul artists always seemed to me to make for the sweetest, most open-hearted songs about mutual joy and tenderness in the whole popular song canon, even more so than the Great American Songbook writers I love when Sinatra takes them up. But what the fuck? Sam Cooke. James Brown. David Ruffin. Marvin Gaye. Michael Jackson. Now Smokey “I Second That Emotion” Fucking Robinson? Soul music means more to me than just about any other genre, but just at the moment I feel a little bit like what I imagine you must have after Altamont, not wanting to hear rock & roll for a year. That’s when you got into country blues and Robert Johnson, and that might be the only music that moves me even MORE than classic soul and there’s a lot of sexual cruelty in THAT music that’s more overt.

What am I gonna do, just play nothing but ambient music for a year? —EDWARD HUTCHINSON

When people have the money, reputation, and attractiveness to be masters of their own domain, far too often they will act on it. And many people will go along, out of fear, out of doubts about their own complicity, about a belief that the perpetrator does love them, that life will change, even that she will someday rule with him. It is at bottom Mansonoid.

Is it true? The proof may be there if a settlement is offered and people take it, or if they really want a reckoning.

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Do you ever wonder if John Lennon may eventually have had a similar album in idea and scope to Time Out of Mind if he had lived? —BEN MERLISS

That’s a fascinating question. I started thinking, rather dumbly, in terms of parallels. Two people about the same age, world figures, who countless people in some way believe belong to them, but now it’s decades past the time when they first appeared, they’re nearing sixty and they both make albums about death . . . And then I realized John Lennon had already done it. In a far more confessional way than Bob Dylan would ever allow himself, perhaps no less allegorical but with a different feel for allegory, Plastic Ono Band is John’s Time Out of Mind. The title would have fit—even, as that title will do for anything, illuminated it.

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Hi! Long-time listener, first-time caller.

As I understand it, you and Robert Christgau had a falling-out over Public Enemy’s antisemitism back in the day, and didn't speak for some time—how did the two of you mend fences afterward? A quick deliberate band-aid rip, longer negotiation/argument with or without resentment, backing into professional contact—? (Friendship-maintenance over such a long period is a challenge for me, as matters of fore- and hindbrain get tangled and stay that way; I figure you know something about it.) —WALLY HOLLAND

This I hope is no one’s business. Though it’s canny to wrap digging for gossip in a question of philosophy.

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I think you mentioned that you were a fan of The Twilight Zone. Is the Trump administration Peaksville, Ohio, from “It’s a Good Life”? I watched that disgusting cabinet meeting and had to look up the episode’s opening narration: “They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque walking horror.” Aunt Amy as the Supreme Court—“who probably had more control over the monster in the beginning than almost anyone” until he turned her into “this smiling, vacant thing you’re looking at now.”

I guess the big difference is that everyone in Peaksville understood that the monster-child was the bad guy; Stephen Miller would have been too out-there for The Twilight Zone.

That episode scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. —STEVE O’NEILL

That is one of the most unpleasant things ever on TV. The face on that kid—the entitlement, the power, the sadism—

I wonder what became of him. Or maybe we know. It was 1961; let’s say he was 12, 13. Trump would have been 14 or 15 when he saw it. Saying, “Cool.”

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Someone told me you might have some Mort Sahl archives and even Mort Sahl stories. I was a pal of his late in life.

Anything would be appreciated. Thanks! —ANONYMOUS

Mort Sahl was a little too far ahead of me or I was a bit far behind. All I really remember of him is him on TV saying, “Is there anyone I haven’t offended yet?” which even as a ten-year-old or so felt off too me, wrong somehow, what now I translate as cheap, crowd-pleasing, slick. The great satirists who came across for me were Jonathan Winters, who was, I can say now, a hipster disguised as a suburban square—a scary hipster, because I was living in suburbia, in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and he made the street lights flicker—and Tom Lehrer. My father had all his records. He passed them on to me as if they were contraband. So I learned about dope before I was a teenager. AND HE IS STILL AROUND—he turned 97 last month. As he was a math professor throughout his professional life, I’ll bet he can still solve the social equations that still baffle most of us. I hope so.

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Dear Greil, You recently mentioned your love for Richard Price’s unforgettable The Wanderers. I thought the three novels that followed it were really good (especially Ladies’ Man). But starting with Clockers (also very good) when he switched his focus exclusively to cops and crime his work has often been less compelling. His last book Lazarus Man wandered all over the place and just fizzled out. The best thing Price has done since Clockers was The Night Of, the outstanding HBO miniseries he did with Steve Zaillian. Did you ever see it and what do you think of Price’s more recent fiction? —CRAIG ZELLER

The only thing I have to add I can’t find—my Rolling Stone review of Ladies’ Man, which I too thought was his best work—paradoxical, unpredictable, opening the doors to places the characters can’t even think about, even as they go through them. I liked Bloodbrothers—but I liked the movie even more, thanks to Richard Gere. But like you, with Clockers I felt it was all going wrong. I struggled through Freedomland. The books became completely cop-centered, and read as if Price had immersed himself with a unit or partnership and in exchange for access and the straight dope made his sources into heroic characters. Yet for all that the books read like math.

John Irving once described screenwriting as “not writing—it’s math.” But maybe for Price that was where characters were believable to him, where he could shape personalities that the movie would have to fit itself around. Certainly that happened in The Night Of—or maybe he needed to have John Turturro to work with. Certainly there’s more there than The Deuce, which never found its footing. But on The Night Of he was dealing with losers, people who aren’t quite good enough, but who somehow recognize their flaws and turn them, maybe for just a moment, into strengths.

There was one episode of The Night Of with a song playing in the deep background, two characters in a bar, trying to get a fix on the case, and it was just so uncanny—I had no idea who or what it was, but the scene didn’t quit, and it was as if, just by his tone, or the orchestration around him, the singer was both comforting the characters and giving them a clue. It had nothing to do with lyrics. I wrote Price to ask what it was—a great record I’d never heard, Benny Lattimore, “I’m Just an Ordinary Man,” 1969. That’s the kind of detail a novelist builds a city around.