The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the Spaghetti Western
Abstract
The spaghetti western is notorious
for its memorable iconography of masculinity involved in
sadomasochistic violence taken to surreal excess and displayed in
close-up detail. Its homosocial and predominantly homoerotic base allows
little room, as a rule, for femininity and heterosexuality (Landy 2000,
p. 190). Films featuring central female characters are few, and even in
these cases femininity is usually represented exclusively through
sexuality, often directly through prostitution (for example, Leone’s C’era una volta il West, 1969, and Marcellini’s Lola Colt, 1967). A rare spaghetti western by a female director, Lina Wertmüller’s Il mio corpo per un poker
(1968), centres on a female outlaw (the real-life Belle Starr), but
even in her case emphasis is on her physical beauty, with sexual
attractiveness remaining the dominant focus. In other words, it is how
these women look, rather than what they do, that is crucial to their
role, namely as token affirmation of male heterosexuality in a
homosocial and homoerotic genre. Instead, given the paucity of central
female characters, the positions of femininity can be seen taken up by
the racial, rather than gendered, other of dominant white masculinity,
and on occasion by feminized adolescent or homosexual masculinity.
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