What if we inverse the cinematic denouement: the hero dies and the bad guy wins?

Well, that’s just tragedy, no?

Okay, but what if we turn it into a mass slaughter?

Cue: The Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci. The effect is oddly unsatisfying. Why oddly? After all, the audience is denied the typical gratification, the tasty dessert of Justice revenged after a cold, hard meal. What’s odd about that? Well, this is not the satisfaction, I mean. What I mean is this: there is no redemption, no arc to justify the purpose of the story as presented. Not character redemption, but a narrative one. There is only cruelty and oblivion. We are moving away from political pessimism and closer to political nihilism or quietism, defeatism, though I doubt that’s the impression the Director was attempting to convey. On an artistic level, what am I supposed to do with the hour and forty odd minutes preceding that point? I can’t flush the experience away, nor would I want to. It’s a great film! The setting is inspired. The snow bound western, the stuff of legend. It’s movement is anatomical and clunky in parts, but that give it a real charm. The acting is powerful. Kinski is unsettling in his calm sociopathy. When is Trintignant ever not incredible? Muted Hope in a brutal world. There are no fair fights. The man who is as good as his word is as good as dead. The ending makes sense as a rejection of cinematic troupes. But we are no longer in the realm of drama perhaps and have almost crossed over to…documentary?

The promise and lie of cinema is that it can reveal unbarred the living soul. In this, I detect a cautionary tale of the dangers of hyperrealism. We’ve become too sophisticated cinephiles. We know full and goddamn well that film is a projection of our desires. But as we lose a feeling of reality in our lives we seek a projection of our lost reality into film. Hyperrealism is the threshold, live at the max, dial up to 100, exaggerated authenticity, etc. The desire to be grafted onto the medium of film, to be absorbed and lost in its orgiastic possibilities.