Slightly Psychedelic: On Kevin Maloney’s “The Red-Headed Pilgrim”
The Red-Headed Pilgrim | Kevin Maloney | Two Dollar Radio | January 2023 | 223 Pages
In 1971 Pauline Kael coined the term “Acid Western,” an expression intended as a pejorative commentary on the stoner crowd that gathered for the midnight showings of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo. Kael critiqued the film as “exploitation filmmaking joined to sentimentality—the sentimentality of the counter-culture.” This sentimentality comes in the form of Jodorowsky’s combination of violence and surreal, psychedelic imagery that Kael says appeals to drug users because “extremes of feeling and lack of control are what one takes drugs for.” Kael was admittedly not a drug user herself, and her attempt to invalidate the film failed to perceive the growing influence of the Acid Western genre and its counter-culture audience. Flourishing in the 1960s and ’70s, the Acid Western bloomed with films such as George Englund’s Zachariah (1971), a coming-of-age tale about a young gunslinger who joins a gang called The Crackers (played by psych rock band Country Joe and the Fish) to seek fame as a sharpshooter. Themes of drug use, psychedelic music, and surreal imagery define the Acid Western, and the genre persists in contemporary media with Colin Winnette’s 2015 novel Haints Stay or Jan Kounen’s film Blueberry (2004). Dismissing the Acid Western as a phenomenon of films “valued only for their intensity,” Kael failed to grasp the importance of this new step in the evolution of the Western genre and its ability to deconstruct the Wild West’s harmful myths.
Jonathan Rosenbaum redefined Acid Westerns as “revisionist Westerns in which American history is reinterpreted to make room for peyote visions and related hallucinogenic experience.” While traditional Westerns propagate myths of individual moral rectitude, strong-armed justice, and rugged individualism, the Acid Western genre brings these myths into question with a turn toward the spiritual. In George Stevens’ Western, Shane (1958), the eponymous protagonist, a gun-toting stoic loner, is driven to violence by his moral code to protect the homesteaders of the Wyoming territory against a ruthless cattle baron. In contrast, in George Englund’s Acid Western Zachariah (1971), the eponymous protagonist is the ruthless one, robbing and killing for fame and fortune. While Shane goes to war to save a community, Zachariah wages a battle against his own violent bent and eventually learns to relish in the spiritual beauty and stillness of the desert. In this sense, the Acid Western is an Anti-Western. They share the open desert and saloons that pit civilization against lawlessness, but in the Acid Western the message becomes one of solipsism and expanded spiritual consciousness often through the use of psychedelic substances. In his essay, “On the Anti-Western Genre Set in America’s Surreal Borderlands,” poet Mike Soto says that “all the mythmaking America has to offer can be found in Westerns.” The Wild West is the perfect backdrop for art to revise those outdated myths of Manifest Destiny and rugged individualism.
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Though Kevin Maloney’s The Red-Headed Pilgrim doesn’t feature a traditional Western setting, its revisionist treatment of Western themes and imagery place it in the Acid Western genre: slightly psychedelic, geared towards a counter-culture audience, invested in revisiting American norms and forms. Maloney removes the Western mythos from its regional origins, proving The West as more Idea than Place. The West becomes a persona the character Kevin Maloney tries on when he saunters around Burlington, Vermont. Wearing a cowboy hat and smoking a corncob pipe, he refers to himself as a “semi-retired large animal veterinarian from Montana,” a caricature of solemn masculinity used to compensate for the emasculation he feels from being rejected just weeks ago by a woman he loves. Maloney buys into the myth of his new get-up, the stoic myth of the West; living that myth, he gains confidence. But for the reader, the falsehood of his get-up is laughably obvious when they picture a tall redhead with a cigarette ambling through Vermont giving passersby his howdy. When Maloney tries to impress a woman, he recognizes the frailty of this myth, that the machismo of a “ranch doctor who’d plundered his share of bull scrotums” is less alluring in the modern day than it once was. “I was a nervous pilgrim on a spiritual quest to lose my virginity,” he admits.
With similar humor, Maloney recounts the weeks he spent in a Montana “Frontier Village” with his unrequited love, Angela. The village is run by a German couple who insert unchecked violence and toxic masculinity into their cheap replica of the “‘Viiuld Viiuld Vest!’” Maloney (the-author) beautifully parodies the perversion of the Western myth when the owner greets guests with squirt gun AK-47s and a World War II bomber jacket. For the owner, the myth of the West, his ersatz-Western town, is synonymous with the myths of veteran heroism, and the reckless power that comes with the possession of automatic weapons. When the Frontier Village is finally mismanaged to death, Maloney and Angela leave: Angela to pursue a life off-the-grid in preparation for the apocalypse (an end of the world she envisioned while on LSD), and Maloney to New England. Carrying his cowboy hat and corncob pipe, Maloney brings the West with him, using it to make his mark on the East.
While the Wild West of Western film extols the virtues of Manifest Destiny, Maloney openly rejects the concept of private property. Rather than claim a place for himself, he admonishes the way the American landscape is parceled out to others, preferring land to be un-owned, free for everyone. He gives up farming in Oregon to pursue a relationship in Vermont, repudiating land ownership through hard work in favor of personal growth. Rather than toil in the fields to stake his claim, he prefers a bohemian life with few possessions where he works only sixteen hours a week, leaving him with “an inordinate amount of free time.” When Maloney does finally give in to office work and insurance plans, buying into these traditions leads to the breakdown that precipitates the recounting of his former life.
Maloney counters the macho cowboy stereotype with tenderness. While Westerns are filled with white hats battling black hats, with long grudges ending in shoot-outs, Maloney proffers forgiveness each time he feels wronged. When Angela ditches him to pursue her delusional brand of end-times survivalism, Maloney forgives her, knowing that he is not the type of person who can gut a boar. Similarly, he continues to profess his love for his wife, even after she has an affair and hides it from him. Though the chauvinistic cowboys of myth would justify violent responses to such lies and rejection, Maloney works through his hurt and eventually finds solace in his role as a divorced father. He does not seek violent justice. He refutes rugged individualism, becoming, in a sense, an anti-cowboy. As he states upon first meeting his wife: “A real cowboy would have invited her to come with him, but I wasn’t a real cowboy.” Like Stevens’ Shane, Maloney wants only a moment of peace—but his peace is unconventional, bohemian, far from that of the Western hero’s American Dream.
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A young Maloney’s exploration of psychedelic substances and Eastern philosophies clashes with Western mores. Just as Kael said of El Topo, Maloney’s book has a counter-cultural appeal. The “extremes of feeling” that Kael critiqued in El Topo exist here, not in violence, but in such tender moments as when Maloney holds his child in his hands and asks, “Can you really move on from a moment like that? Or can you stay there for the rest of your life, holding your baby girl, kissing the top of her skull over and over?”Maloney finds that a gunslinger has lost his value, that a cowboy has no space to roam, and that a pilgrim in search of losing his virginity is actually looking for much more. He finds the modern Western landscape only reachable by an expansion of the mind. And the Wild West of the mind is reached through “zigzagging back and forth across the country,” or the use of psychotropics, or through the mindblowing revelation of bringing new life into the world. While it’s difficult to argue that a true “Western”—whether it be prefixed by “Acid” or “Anti”—can be limned outside of the setting of the Wild West, Maloney’s revisionist treatment of Western themes make The Red-Headed Pilgrim at least the offspring (dare I say red-headed step-child?) of the Acid Western genre. And I don’t believe it’s overly generous to say that The Red-Headed Pilgrim is the next iteration of the Western, one with enough music and heart to propel the genre into the twenty-first century and beyond.