A bewildering comic crystal of a Western that doubles as a narrative void, My Name is Nobody is certainly one of the stranger desert dispatches you’re liable to see. If Sergio Leone’s 1968 Once Upon a Time in the West was a gorgeous bed-time story for the genre, and if the early ‘70s were filled with nightmares, My Name is Nobody is more like wetting the bed. And I’m not only referring to the truly grueling bathroom scene late in the film, an absurdist mockery of a debased high-noon standoff where one character uses a thousand-yard stare to intimidate a person while peeing. Little of this scans as uproarious, but it is certainly bracing. This is a stone-faced, brittle comedy, as cold-blooded and ironic as Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles from the same year was wily and hot-tempered. A bit like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye from the same year, it’s a playfully curdled travesty of its genre.

It certainly doesn’t take long for My Name is Nobody to announce what it is doing. It opens with an acerbic repetition of the famous waiting game from Once Upon a Time in the West, with Henry Fonda now in the hero position as Jack Beauregard. Yet even in showing all its cards in the first scene, My Name is Nobody still manages a poker face. There’s no way around recognizing this as Leone’s sillier variation on his earlier, more famous film’s sober, somber opening, but what, precisely, the joke is, and even if it really is a joke, remains fuzzy throughout the scene. All the more so when Beauregard immediately stumbles past Nobody (Terence Hill), posing and posturing with silent ruffian sangfroid in a river trying to bludgeon a tiny insect with a big stick, a screwball Teddy Roosevelt and a peculiar mixture of understatement and overkill that arguably summarizes the film as well. 

Nobody, we will slowly and only elliptically learn, worships Beauregard. He is an outsider to the world depicted but also a master, a bit like one of those old Warner Bros. cartoons where Bugs Bunny makes the wrong turn at Albuquerque or Walla Walla and ends up in a Western but still finds himself inimitably adept at screwing with the characters regardless. Rather than fashioning himself as Beauregard’s underling, his replacement, his enemy, or his fateful accomplice in a duel handed down through the ages, he could best be described as a slippery stage director for Beauregard’s reputation, a crafty and aloof fanboy who taunts and teases his hero into fulfilling his role as a totemic idol in the Western of Nobody’s dreams.

The nitwit philosophy Nobody foists onto Beauregard, who clearly wishes to move on to greener pastures, feels a bit like a metaphor for the relationship between this film’s two directors: the uncredited Sergio Leone, a stalwart who simply wanted to ride off from the genre to direct his crime masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America (still a decade away from release), and his protégé Tonino Valerri, a looser hooligan of a filmmaker who worships the master in the very act of lightly mocking his grandeur. Specifically, Nobody wants Beauregard to face-off with the roving Wild Bunch, a gang of 150-odd hooligans who remain an implacable, depersonalized force throughout the film. If Sam Peckinpah – who gets a cruel shout-out here for reasons I can’t quite comprehend – gave that gang a romantic send-off in his great 1969 film, where the Wild Bunch serve as titular, tortured memories of an era on its way to that big round up in the sky, Leone simply throws the gang to the dogs. Peckinpah’s film positions the gang as a nasty but authentically realistic emanation of humanity’s capacity for violence being overwritten by a cleaner, more modern, more institutionalized form of cruelty. In Leone’s and Valerii’s text, they’re nothing more than a myth. Peckinpah’s critical romanticism, which invests in the very sense of authenticity it interrupts, has no place in this cosmic carnival of a Western, where all one has is the fiction one cultivates, or the fabrication that cultivates oneself.

When the gang first rides into the film, Ennio Morricone skewers them with a truly devious version of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” played on what sounds like an elementary school worth of recorders. Why we would want to romanticize these galoots – why sculpt one’s identity around a final confrontation with them – is, of course, the film’s central joke, and it’s a good one. By the time the gang returns, in the final stand-off we’ve been waiting for, it is their desire to be seen, to seek and be sought after, that proves their undoing. Riding amidst the desert mist, they seem conjurations of cinema itself, eminently present and yet vaguely artificial, trying too hard to be worshipped with their gold, glistening, Hollywood saddles. My Name is Nobody mobilizes this tension to blow them to smithereens. Cinema’s capacity to lionize, to anoint them as a monumental force visible from miles away, turns them into an easy target for a man who simply wants to fade into the background. What else is the West, the film finally posits, but a canvas for the stories we tell about ourselves, and the narratives that are foisted upon us at our peril?

On its way to that stand-off, My Name is Nobody never really acquires a story. It plays more like a picture-book of travelling moments, or a campfire celebration of a comic hero. Each time you tell the story, it plays slightly differently, a tall tale that’s been cut off at the knees. As the tale progresses, the two protagonists develop a budding, antagonistic friendship that mostly consists of Nobody pestering Beauregard into various confrontations, each more carnivalesque than the last. None of them logically arrive at the next, but they constellate a set of concerns and a cheeky, impudent personality that is hard to fully dismiss, even if you aren’t quite sure what you are condoning, and what this Western funhouse wants us to take seriously.

I wrote that “tall tale cut off at the knees” line without remembering that one of the film’s best sequences literally begins with Nobody shooting off the wooden stilt legs of a carnival barker threatening him. Soon enough, the two heroes who turn a shootout into a Chaplin-esque theme park as they manipulate the space and infrastructure of the ramshackle town in a series of slippery set-pieces. The two men exercise nearly supernatural control over their abilities in a Wild West carnival that seems to exist for them to engage in rounds of target practice that finally amount to nothing, to fulfill a destiny the film is in the process of massacring.

Score: 7.5/10