Origin of The Term
The term "Acid Western" was coined by Jonathan Rosenbaum in a review of Jim Jarmusch's film, Dead Man, published in the Chicago Reader in June 1996. Rosenbaum expanded upon the idea in a subsequent interview with Jarmusch for Cineaste and later in the book Dead Man from BFI Modern Classics.
In the book, Rosenbaum illuminates several aspects of this re-revisionist Western: from Neil Young's haunting score to the role of tobacco, to Johnny Depp's performance, to the film's place in the acid-Western genre. In the chapter "On the Acid Western," Rosenbaum addresses not only the hallucinogenic quality of the film's pace and its representation of "reality," but also argues that the film inherits an artistic and political sensibility derived from the 1960s counterculture which has sought to critique and replace capitalism with alternative models of exchange.
In the traditional Western, the journey west is seen as a road to liberation and improvement, but in the Acid Western, it is the reverse, a journey towards death; society becomes nightmarish.
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In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
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