The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

My generation grew up with spaghetti westerns. Probably the most popular one was Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I watched this film for the first time in 70’s. 

The film reaches its climax in finale, an unforgettable duel scene among a trio; Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes. 

As I snuggled into my chair, eyes frozen without a twitch, I gazed at the barren landscape, I felt the heat, the tension as if it would last another lifetime before the music stopped and they drew their guns simultaneously. 

At the time every boy in our neighborhood walked and talked like Clint Eastwood,  sometimes with a piece of fake paper cigar between our innocent lips. It was the coolest thing.

Almost forty years later I found a DVD in our local supermarket, thrown into a big basket. I was eleven years old again. I bought it, rushed home and watched.

I was curious how much I would remember. I did not recall most scenes, the faces and plot did not fit exactly.  I could not remember war scenes at all. Perhaps I was drawn too much into Blondie, the aura of his personality hypnotised me.

“There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life.” from 2010 TED Talk by Daniel Kahneman “ The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.”

We are what we remember. The scenes picked by my remembering self survived and gave way to other thoughts, memes and ideas. Dead ends and dull became dead, truly, just like Angel Eyes.