CONTENT WARNING: video contains a hanging scene, not explicit
Cowboys and Men Why Once Upon a Time in the West is actually about the queer male experience
Daniel Pollock
T
wo factors made me decide to
young. That’s how I met Ennio. When I
watch Once Upon a Time in the
first heard his music, I could only hear
West. The first, of course, was
the absurdity, and I didn’t understand.
Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack. I’d heard
And so I laughed as I listened; the way I
it before: Music so beautiful you’re forced
would anxiously laugh when I was being
to remember there’s an element of being
disciplined by my parents, or the way I
beyond our perceptions, music speaking
now crack jokes and laugh in the scariest
to us in a language we don’t completely
moments of horror movies.
understand, or maybe a language we understand better than words. Ennio Morricone died a few weeks before I watched Once Upon a Time in the West. But his music still lives. Cinema Paradiso. The Good the Bad and the Ugly. The Mission. Each soundtrack
“Not that I was already going through enough with a possible case of Covid, a possible STI, and existential, identity-based dread, Co-Star decided to tell me in their daily text alerts that ‘sexuality, as you know it, doesn’t exist.’”
My
brother
was
obsessed with cowboys then. He subscribed to ranching
magazines,
owned a pair of cowboy boots, and laid out his plans to move to Montana (we lived in suburban Washington).
He
held
onto that dream for a long time; he studied
distinct from the other. Each perfectly
agricultural science in college. Now he
capturing symbiotic relationship between
works in a bank.
love and absurdity. It was partly my memories of that CD, My older brother often played a CD of
its incessant playing, that drew me to
western film soundtracks when we were
watch the film. But that was only one
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