The Ghost of Sam (20 years On)
Sam Peckinpah is an interesting case study. As a character, he is so
charismatic and multi-faceted that Dostoyevsky would be hard-pressed to invent
so rich and provocative a protagonist. The reason for this (partly) is that Sam
Peckinpah was his own invention. He was a dreamer who dreamed up a self, a
persona that eventually turned into a nightmare, a nightmare from which he was
unable to awaken.
It’s a popular misassumption about Peckinpah that his work was
realistic; understandably, because one of his most significant contributions to
the Western genre was a whole new aesthetic of blood, dirt, and authenticity.
Peckinpah had a fascination and affinity for the West and the men who helped to
“win” it, and he went to great lengths and pains to imbue that time with
accurate period detail and dialects and, even more importantly, the appropriate
mood and tone. Peckinpah looked at the West as a time like our
own but cruder, more brutal, simpler and more primitive, a time when people
were driven by basic needs, fears and desires, by survival and by the animal
requirements of comfort, security, and personal contentment. Because Peckinpah
was unusually conscientious about period detail, authentic dialogue, and such,
and because he was interested in writing about real people instead of
stereotypical heroes and villains, his “re-envisioning” of the Western genre
can easily be mistaken for demythologizing. Peckinpah was interested in
subverting the dominant myths about the West, and he did use realism (or
hyper-realism) to do it. But he was more than a mere demythologizer—destroying
old myths was the means Peckinpah used to clear the slate so that that he could
create his own personal mythos. Like all artists, Peckinpah was not a
realist but a romantic. He was a mythmaker who knew that the best way to
create new myths is by first of all delivering a strong dose of realism to blow
away the old ones.
In fact, The Wild Bunch is no less mythic a drama than Stagecoach
or Rio Bravo, it’s merely a much bloodier, darker, and more profound one
(as well as being less naïve and sentimental). Peckinpah had no illusions about
movies being, or aspiring to be, reality; what he aspired to was creating sensations
and impressions in his viewers that would be akin to—and even
surpass—those experienced in “real” life. Like the Surrealists, Peckinpah
attempted to use film as a means to heighten our sense of reality and take us
into a waking dream state. For someone whose entire life wound up as a
prolonged fever dream, Peckinpah must have found it darkly amusing when his
critics hailed him as a realist director. In fact, by bringing an unprecedented
level of reality to the myths he was portraying, Peckinpah’s intent was,
subtler and more obscure, to reveal the mythic nature of “reality.” This
was why, in agreement with John Ford and every other romantic who ever
lived—when given the choice between fact and legend—he always, even when
despite himself, chose to “print the legend.”
Sam Peckinpah was born in 1925, just before the Great Depression hit. He
died in the very last days of 1984, at the threshold of the cybernetic age, and
in those sixty years he witnessed the complete and total transformation of
Western society. Peckinpah grew up with stories of the Wild West, of cattle herding,
log farming, gold mining, and men doing what men had to do to survive. He
didn’t just hear the stories, he was raised by men who lived them, and glimpsed
for himself, however fleetingly, a simpler, purer world in which Nature ruled
and Man was, if not at harmony with it, at least obliged to get along. By the
time he died, that world had gone forever, replaced by a technological world of
satellites, computers and video recorders, jet planes and weapons of mass
destruction, in which Nature—and even Man himself—had taken second place.
During his life, Peckinpah witnessed the destruction of the environment which
had birthed him, in a process so slow and insidious that it was never fully
apparent until it was over.
Peckinpah was four when the Depression hit, and although he had all he
needed and more while growing up, he would have seen its effects on his less
fortunate schoolmates, sensed the fervent desperation that was leading
inexorably—during Peckinpah’s adolescence—to the Second World War. Hitler came
to power when Peckinpah was eight. The war broke out in 1939 while Peckinpah
was coming of age in the most traditional and bloody of fashions, hunting deer
in the mountains of California. In 1943, when Peckinpah was eighteen, the US
entered the war; by the time he was ready to join the fray and had enlisted in
the Marines, in 1945, it had reached an apocalyptic end. By the age of twenty,
Peckinpah had already been given a glimpse into the dark side of human nature,
with the revelations of the Nazi Holocaust and the mass incineration of
Japanese civilians by the US government in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The great
naiveté of the American people and their still forming Dream saw this as an
unequivocal victory. Peckinpah, on the other hand, a profoundly sensitive soul
blessed (or cursed) with an insider’s view, was unlikely to have harbored such
illusions. It was here that the rot began to set into the American dream, and
that Peckinpah, once eager to serve his great Nation, began to feel estranged
from his country, and from society as a whole.
’50s America was a time of national security and domestic complacency,
TV naiveté and anti-Communist paranoia. During this period, Peckinpah survived
McCarthyism unscathed (though he later suffered from a more specialized kind of
blacklisting in the sixties: anti-Peckinpah-ism) and found his fame and
(relative) fortune working on Western TV shows. He worked not to brainwash his
viewers, however, but to disturb and enlighten them. Peckinpah’s early interest
in theater and philosophy, and his adherence to the Aristotelian principle of
catharsis through the arts, would have given him a unique perspective on the
horrors steadily unfolding around him.[1]
Though personally appalled by much of what he saw, Peckinpah was also fascinated
and inspired by it. He had a profound love-hate relationship with violence and
with man’s seemingly inexhaustible inhumanity to man; at a more personal level,
however, he was fascinated and appalled by his own capacity for cruelty. The
1960s, Peckinpah’s prime as a filmmaker, can only have deepened this strange
and doomed relationship, cementing Peckinpah’s conviction that, somewhere along
the way, his country had taken a wrong turn and just “kept on going.”
Indefensible as the Vietnam War must have seemed to him, it could hardly have
come as any great surprise. The assassinations of the Kennedys, followed by
those of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, formed a bloody, conspiratorial
backdrop to the swinging ’60s. This helped shift social values and lift creative
taboos, paving the way for Peckinpah’s scabrous, misanthropic vision to come to
full bloom (in 1969), with The Wild Bunch. Soon after its release,
Charles Manson and his family took Hollywood by storm and the counterculture
came to a bloody and brutal end; as did, in retrospect at least, Sam’s creative
prime.
With The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah gave his testimony as fully and
completely as any artist working at that time; now he could bow out gracefully
or fade away slowly, along with the optimism of the times. He chose the latter
path, and by the time of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—his last Western,
released at roughly the time of Jonestown and Watergate—Peckinpah was washed up
on the shores of a new world order, along with countless other casualties of
the time.
Peckinpah lived another ten years and made several movies, each one more
enervated and lackluster than the last (his final work was an MTV video for
Julian Lennon: “Much Too Late for Goodbyes”); but really, Peckinpah died along
with America’s innocence, having helped kill it with The Wild Bunch.
(His follow-up movie, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, was his swan song.)
That was poetic justice—the only kind Peckinpah believed in—and he wouldn’t
have had it any other way.
Sam Peckinpah was a man born out of time. He was born at the end of an era, an era he could only ever see as it receded, forever, into non-existence. Peckinpah waxed nostalgic for a time of frontier-free America, a West still wild and unconquered, a natural world dominant and strong, where a man was still pure and unadulterated and constantly challenged by the rigors of nature. Peckinpah might have fantasized as a child about growing up as a cowboy, but his real dreams went further back, to a time before Columbus. (It was cowboys, after all, who began the inexorable process of taming the West.) Peckinpah dreamed of the pre-civilized world of the Indian Brave and, whether Peckinpah’s claims of Indian blood had any veracity or not, his affinity (remarkable for someone raised in a time that looked on half-breeds with contempt) clearly went deeper than mere boyhood fantasy. He was still making his claim publicly in later life.
If Peckinpah was part of a world that was already disappearing when he
was born—if that was the world he identified with and drew strength and meaning
from—is it any wonder that he lost his way? Peckinpah never believed in the
modern world, but he reinvented himself for it. He was determined not just to
fit into it but to become the master of it. It is hardly any great surprise if,
even at the heights of his worldly success, he felt a fake, a pretender, and a
misfit, when all he ever wanted was to ride the high country and enter his
house justified.
The old world had passed away, taking nature and the nature spirits and
the Indian warriors and shamans along with it. Some few souls were left behind,
unwittingly perhaps, and unprepared to find their own way back. Peckinpah was
one such ghost of the past. That’s why his vision is so dark, and that’s why
his whole life seems like a quest for death. Peckinpah made movies to impress
upon the world his unique and lonely vision of it. Since the world could not
see what he saw, he was forced to create images by which to convey his vision,
to infect the world with his perception of it. If we could not see how insane
and vile our world had become, then he would give us a vision even more
abhorrent, and force us to look.
After all, what else is a poor ghost to do, besides wander aimlessly
from room to room? Peckinpah rattled his chains and wailed for all he was
worth; and at night he whispered in the ears of the living as they slept and
snuck into their dreams. And for the longest time, his ghost, still clinging to
memories of a former time, was haunted by the living, and did all it could to
exorcise these unfriendly “spirits” from his world. It still hadn’t realized
the truth, that its world was made only of memories.
As Peckinpah’s friend Jim Silke once put it, “Sam’s whole concept of the
world as he portrayed it in his films was: it’s not the way you think it’s
going to be, it’s not the way you thought it was.”
At some level Peckinpah knew: it wasn’t the world that was “wrong”: it
was him. The knowledge tormented him and drove him to self-destruction. The
torment and despair, the artistry and the vision, all came from the same place:
his complete antagonism and antipathy with the world. Peckinpah sought release
any way he could: in hunting, in women, in movies, in drinking, in filmmaking,
in alcoholism and drug addiction, and finally—the only place he would ever find
it—in death.
Peckinpah’s drinking was a way to give up
without appearing to give up. It was a means for drowning out his conscience,
whatever it was in him that kept him from sinking or drifting from what really
mattered. He drank to forget that he was a no-good drunk who drank to forget.
The worse his condition got, the more he succumbed to self-hatred and
self-pity, the more he drank to escape that feeling. Peckinpah worked hard to
become exactly as loathsome and worthless as the devil inside him told him he
was. His whole life was a struggle to overcome that basic core of self-pity and
self-loathing, and though he struggled valiantly—and left a testament to that
struggle in his movies—in the end he succumbed, and the drink took over. At
which point, he couldn’t even make movies anymore. All that was left was to
finalize the defeat.
Sam Peckinpah’s life may have played like a
Sam Peckinpah movie, but it was a hell of a lot darker; it was closer to
Shakespeare. It was a lousy life, but it made a great story. It was the stuff myths
are made of.
In commemoration of Sam Peckinpah, died Dec
28th, 1984
Back to Jake’s
Page
[1] “Aristotle’s
Poetics gave him the foundation for dramatic writing, and he became a strong
believer in the philosopher’s theory that great drama provides an audience with
a catharsis through which they can purge their own pain, rage, and fear.” David
Weddle, If They Move, Kill ’Em, pg. 73