from The Blood Poets, Vol 1, by Jake Horsley
If
they move—kill ’em!
—Pike
Bishop, The Wild Bunch
In
1969, a violent film about violent men exploded onto American screens and left
audiences divided. A meditation upon brutality and honor among brutal men who
are also thieves, The Wild Bunch is among the most savage and uncompromising visions
of America that the cinema has yet given us. It is not, strictly speaking, a
Western, at least not in the ordinary sense: it is a post-Western, a Western
for the wised up audiences of the “postmodern” counterculture.
The
film is held together above all by two things—the honesty and simplicity
of the performances (led by William Holden, as Pike), and the ability,
integrity, and poetic zeal of its director, Sam Peckinpah. The story is a
simple one. Pike, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) and the Bunch (Warren Oates, Ben
Johnson, Edmund O’Brien, Jaime Sanchez, Bo Hopkins) ride into the border
town of Starbuck, dressed up as U.S. soldiers. They have come to rob a railroad
office, but instead fall into a trap set by Pike’s former partner, Deke
Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is now working for the railroad.[1] Thornton is not the film’s villain,
however, though he is
the adversary of the protagonist, which is not the same thing, obviously.
Peckinpah is too sophisticated a director to deal with the heroes and villains
of children’s stories (though in Straw Dogs he did sink to such devices). In a flashback
later on in the film, we see that Thornton and Pike were not only partners but
friends, and that Pike ran out on Thornton in a crucial moment and left him to
be captured. So Thornton’s “betrayal” of Pike is really no
more than an honest response to Pike’s own “betrayal” of
Thornton.
In
any case, the ambush laid by Thornton is a failure, and far worse: it turns
into a massacre in which innocent bystanders (including women) go down along
with bounty hunters and bandits. (This was pretty much a first, a “new
low” in movie realism.) The Bunch escape, leaving one of their men, crazy
Lee (Hopkins) inside the office, while another, blinded in the shootout, is
finished off by Pike and left for the bounty hunters. The Bunch stop in a small
village to count their proceeds and discover that they have stolen several
sackloads of steel washers. What begins as an antagonistic scene of frayed
nerves and angry tension soon develops into one of weary resignation, and
finally mirth, until even Pike himself (who spent months “dreaming of
washers”) is laughing along with the rest of the men.
They
head for Mexico, where they stop off at Angel’s village (Angel, played by
Jaime Sanchez, is the one Mexican in the group). Further along the trail, they
run into a Mexican army run by a corrupt and lascivious general, Mapache
(Emilio Fernandez), and end up in his pay, highjacking a trainload of guns and
ammo. One caseload goes to Angel (who forsakes his share of the payment), who
wants the guns as a means for his village to resist the maurauding Mexican army
(the real villains of the film). The Bunch, in order to protect their
interests, rig the booty with dynamite and arrange with the Mexican army to
hand over one case at a time, in exchange for installments of the payment. The
last load is delivered by Angel and Dutch, whereupon Mapache accuses Angel of
stealing one of the cases. Angel makes a mad attempt to escape but is seized,
and Dutch has no choice but to leave Angel in their clutches. The Bunch accept
the loss and (somewhat sourly) celebrate their newfound wealth, hiding out from
Thornton in the army camp (where they get to watch Angel being tortured), then
retreating to a whorehouse (and no one does whorehouses better than Peckinpah).
Finally, Pike decides to go back and get Angel, on one last suicide mission,
without which all their victories (we are led to believe) would amount to
nothing.
“When
you side with a man you stick with him—otherwise you’re no better
than some animal,” Pike declares. When Dutch warns Pike that Thornton and
his men will be waiting for them, Pike replies: “I wouldn’t have it
any other way.” This more or less sums up the sentimental credo of both
the Bunch and Peckinpah himself. What he is giving us is the law of
outlaws—ritualized savagery. Without their code and without the awareness
of the “rules of the game,” he is saying, these men are nothing. So
Pike arms himself and goes to rouse his drunken men, saying simply:
“Let’s go.” Warren Oates stirs from his alcohol haze,
understanding at once, and growls, “Why not?”
The
Bunch arm themselves and take their last, long walk into the army camp. They
demand Angel’s release, and the general obliges: “You want Angel? I
will give it to you”; and he slits Angel’s throat before their
eyes. Pike does not hesitate, and shoots the general dead. There is a pause, no
one moves or speaks. Dutch laughs crazily, then Pike’s eyes narrow to
slits as he sees Mapache’s German advisor (for some reason perhaps edited
from the final cut, he causes Pike to see red), and opens fire upon him. The
battle begins, then, at Pike’s own “signal.” The four members
of the Bunch decimate an entire regiment between them, and die, as they had
wanted, in a blaze of glory and agony—the two having become, through
Peckinpah’s artistry and passion, strangely synonymous.
Thornton
arrives with the bounty hunters in time to pick up the pieces, literally: the
bounty hunters (L. Q. Jones and Strother Martin) descend like vultures upon the
corpses and strip them of all items of interest. Thornton takes only
Pike’s pistol, as a sign of respect for the man he once rode with and
always admired. He then joins up with the one surviving member of the Bunch,
the old man (the grandfather of Crazy Lee) who was shot earlier by Thornton,
and then found by the Indians from Angel’s village. Thornton accepts the
old man’s offer out of contempt for the alternatives. “It
ain’t what it used to be,” says the old man, “but it’ll
do.” The film ends on his prolonged cackling, then cuts to a montage of
shots of the Bunch, in one of their lighter moments, laughing like children, or
perhaps better said, like dirty old men.
The
Wild Bunch is all of a
piece. For a movie that is almost exclusively made up of shootouts, massacres,
explosions, chases, and torture scenes, it has more heart and soul than just
about any other work of its kind. Though the ostensible theme of the film might
be summed up with the phrase “honor among thieves,” there is
something more remarkable going on in Peckinpah’s treatment of what is
essentially one of the oldest and most tired “genres” of them all
(the “hard men in a hard world” genre, which places the film closer
in spirit to the war film than the Western). The Wild Bunch is not simply violent in form and content; it
is a film about
violence, about the necessity of brutality to men who do not know better, and
about the poetry
of such brutality, for those of us, outside and looking in, who fancy that we
do.
More
than any other film yet discussed here, The Wild Bunch deserves the title of “a poem in blood.” It is an
ode to blood, to violence, and at a
surface level it says nothing more profound or insightful than “those who
live by the gun will die by the gun.” But, at a deeper level, it tells us
that those who live and die by the gun do so not out of some higher moral
“Law” at work in the universe, but wholly and simply because they must: that that is what they choose to do. The Wild Bunch are like wayward children
(not maladjusted, but refusing to adjust at all) who have taken their devilish
games far beyond their own power to control them. But there is an innocence,
even a sort of purity, to these “children” that somehow redeems
them, in Peckinpah’s eyes, certainly, and by extension (if we are sold on
his vision) in ours.[2]
For all their savagery and folly, the Bunch are never guilty of the kind of
sadism and cruelty, the moral rancidity, that we see in Mapache and his men,
and in the bounty hunters, or even in the children of the film’s opening
shot.[3]
If
children are not spared Peckinpah’s scathing cynicism, women hardly fare
much better: all the women in The Wild Bunch are whores.[4] Two of these whores are shot by members of
the Bunch, at different times: Angel, in a fit of jealous rage kills his former
love as she sticks her tongue in Mapache’s ear; then, in the final scene,
Pike is shot in the back by another of Mapache’s whores, whereupon he
turns, growls “Bitch,” and shoots her dead. (This set a precedent,
and was probably something of a departure point for the Western—until
then heroes simply didn’t shoot women, under any circumstances. In later years, however, it
would become more commonplace.) In a way, this was an improvement on the
accepted form, that of the suffering heroine who breathes “Be
careful” in the final scenes, and seems to serve no other purpose than to
lick the hero’s wounds. (This stock “heroine,” or expendable
floozie, which the conventional Western gave us, has since been relocated to
the police thriller, and lives on in plastic limbo to the present day.) The
women who were treachoros whores at least became part of the action, even if
only by getting shot by the hero or villain, or by shooting him.
The
fact that all the women are whores in Peckinpah’s film is more than
simply an indication of the director’s chauvinist tendencies however, for
whores are, after all,
the only kind of women who have any place in the world he is presenting to us.
But, at a profounder level, it is intrinsic to the unspoken (perhaps even
unsconcious) premise of the film—that of male “bonding”
through violence.[5]
The point is, the Bunch are
involved in a romance with death, and, by extension, with each other. Death (or
its means, brutality) is the only thing that does unite them, the only measure of respect they hold for
each other, and finally the only measure of manhood—and of
life—that the film allows them. Women, quite plainly, have no place in
such a fantasy world: a woman is either a mother to leave behind, or a wife to
be avoided, or else she is, as here, a whore to enjoy, briefly, in moments of
repose, between further bouts of killing.
Under
such a standard, women aren’t “people” at all, at least until
they pick up a gun, and then can kill or be killed. But this is hardly a case
for regret. The world of the Wild Bunch and the wor
ld of women are separate
worlds that can never meet, nor indeed would they want to. They are mutually
deadly to each other, for, just as the Bunch can only bring mayhem and
destruction to the tranquility and bliss (and limitation) that women represent,
so woman, with her innate intimacy with nature, can never be a part of the
Bunch’s unreal world of machismo and pseudo-heroism (which has no
equivalent in nature, the image of the scorpion notwithstanding). Any woman
worth her “salt” would laugh this world into ruins in an
instant—she would see it at once for what it is, a game for children who
have never grown up (the game however having grown deadly). So it is for their
very power (or wisdom) that women
are excluded from this world, and not for their weakness. And though a whore
may arguably be seen as the most “free” of women, she is also,
accordingly, one who has sacrificed her natural power as a woman, and become
simply an object of male desire.
None
of this is even implied by the film, but I think it’s there, nonetheless,
because for all his scorn of females, Peckinpah clearly loved them deeply (in
his private life), and this comes through in his films. On the other hand, for
all his apparent admiration of the man of violence, the rugged independent who
fights for his right to stay that way, there is a subtle but still apparent
element of mockery to this admiration. Peckinpah mocks his characters, their
machismo, his own admiration, and finally even himself.[6] And everyone who knew Sam Peckinpah commented
that, for all his rugged and manly facade (and his success with women), he was
above all a gentle, sensitive and even a feminine man. The conflict and the violence of his
films, then, are undoubtedly an externalization of this private conflict that
raged within him. He was a drunken, ornery old he-goat with the soul of a poet.
Paul
Seydor writes, in his invaluable essay, “Men without Women” (Peckinpah:
The Western Films,
p. 113),
What Peckinpah shares with Homer, with the
anonymous poet of Beowulf, with the Shakespeare of Henry V and the Henry IV plays, and with the Kurosawa of The Seven
Samurai and Yojimbo is an ability at once to identify himself
with the warrior-hero’s sensibility and to stand apart from it. He is
thus free to explore the nuances of feeling—the attractions, the
excitement—of this kind of life and at the same time to leave us
undeceived as to what it really involves—its limitations, its psychotic
edge. As storytellers, none of these poets is a preacher; and while they function
as storytellers, they are neither for nor against violence, at least not in
such a way that their poems are reducible to a polemic that will please
simple-minded moralists. As poets, their point of view is not interested; it is
sublimely, and rightly, disinterested.
Peckinpah
glories in the maverick spirit of his Bunch—they are criminals and
killers, but they are men of honour, he suggests (while simultaneously seeming
toquestion his own suggestion), at least so far as they remain true to each
other, and separate from the world. This is plainly an artistic vision,
transposed onto an outlaw’s world, and the transposition of values is an
uneasy one, at best. It gives us death as the ultimate, the last remaining, way
of life.
There
are hints and intimations of other things, however, of deeper concerns, but
they are no more than hints. The lost innocence that is at the heart of the
film is symbolized by Angel’s village, which gives us the only greenery
in the film (the rest of which is set in dry, dusty and arid desert), and also
the only moments of serenity and joy (unless you count the whorehouse). When
the old Mexican tells Pike: “We all dream of being children again, even
the worst of us; perhaps the worst of us most of all,” he is summing up
the point of view of the film, expressing in a few words all the mystery, the
melancholy and the poignancy that it exudes, as it takes us further and further
into the savagery and slaughter. Such moments carry a great weight, they touch
us deeply, because Peckinpah has saved his resources: he has been so sparing
(in the film and also in his career) with tender moments that we feel these few
moments of tenderness almost with pain. They are wholly free of sentimentality,
or of regret; it is simply acknowledged, implicitly, that sadness is at the
core of all violent men. Or perhaps simply all men, seeing as Peckinpah makes a case here, and a
strong one, for the equation of maleness with violence.
I
think the single most powerful image in the film is not that of the children
torturing the scorpion, but that of the children riding on Angel’s back
as he is dragged in the dirt behind the automobile. It’s an agonizing
moment to see these “innocent” children who don’t know any
better, making a game out of a man’s being tortured. Of course,
that’s what Mapache and his army are doing, too: they are sadistic
children all. It’s in this context, which is the primary backdrop of the
movie (i.e., “Hell”) that the Bunch really are heroes (noble men). Of course, the other,
secondary backdrop of the film is the paradisiacal refuge, Angel’s
village, the very “cause” for which he is “martyred”
(hence for which the Bunch themselves also die, albeit indirectly). And here,
in this context, the Bunch are seen somewhat differently: they are simply
corrupt—too corrupt, in fact, to remain in this idyll, of which they can
do no more than dream. (It’s Peckinpah’s beautiful irony in the
film that children are spoken of as symbolizing innocence, but are actually pictured as
representing “original sin,” or primal, sadistic impulses.)
There
is a depth to this movie that few critics ever acknowledge, but that Peckinpah
most certainly was aware of, and that’s why he chose to reproduce the
Bunch’s ride out of the village as the film’s final image (over
which the credits roll). This is the condemned men’s ride out of
Paradise, and it’s the film’s most heartfelt, psyche-wrenching
moment. As the Mexican mamas give Dutch a red rose, and return Lyle’s
(Oates) hat to him, they seem truly mournful to see these degenerate killers
go. They don’t care that these men are wild, that they are “the
worst of men,” because of course, in paradise, all sins are forgiven. But
the Bunch can’t stay here, because their “sins,” their wild,
violent nature, will not let them rest. And so they must ride on, out of
paradise, and back into hell.
This
is Peckinpah’s story: his sins gave him no peace, he couldn’t abide
happiness. The Wild Bunch leaves no doubt he felt this at the profoundest of levels, and all
his poetry and artistry here comes not from the head, but from the heart, from
the gut. The Wild Bunch is
his story, through and through, and all his other movies were simply further
attempts to wrestle down his demons, in public; and they all fail, because he
did it already, so perfectly, with this one film.[7]
The
Wild Bunch has the
texture and the grandeur (and the ache) of a tragic love story, and achieves an almost
perfect juxtaposition of form with content; it creates a contrast between the
sweeping, lyric romanticism of the images and music (and the performances), and
the gritty, almost sordid realism of the action. This contrast—one might
almost say conflict—is at the very heart of the film, both aesthetically
and thematically: it is what makes it great.
It
may just be that, though a poet generally makes the poorest kind of warrior (he
doesn’t have the coarseness for field combat), the warrior, if so
inclined, may make the very best of poets.
*
The woods are full of killers, all sizes, all
colors. . . A director has to deal
with a whole world absolutely teaming with mediocrities, jackals, hangers-on,
and just plain killers.
—Sam Peckinpah, When the Lights Go
Down
Sam
Peckinpah is a man who even to this day invokes strong reactions in otherwise
mild-mannered folk. He is in many ways the epitome of the film auteur (Pauline
Kael, in her review of Straw Dogs in Deeper into Movies, called him “the youngest legendary
American director”), and if there is irony in his story (as there is
irony in that of Welles), it is, like that of his own films, a melancholic
irony. For one of the greatest American directors in cinema history, Peckinpah,
like Welles, was almost criminally frustrated in his attempts at personal
filmmaking. Of his thirteen movies, perhaps only three or four of them can be
considered representative of his actual intentions and of his talents. The rest
were either projects that he was compromised into making, in order to work at
all (such as The Getaway,
for example, and all his later films, from The Killer Elite onward), or else they were personal projects
that were then disfigured by the studios (most notably Peckinpah’s third
film, Major Dundee,
set a pattern of studio interference that was to be repeated throughout his
career). Like Welles, we can say that Peckinpah only ever managed to complete
and release a single film worthy of his talents and intentions.
Unlike
Welles, however, Peckinpah had an almost perverse desire to squander his own
talents, as if at heart he was ambivalent about their true worth (as many
people claimed). It is possible that for all his passion, he considered
moviemaking something of an “unmanly” occupation. The fact remains
that he was a drunk, at constant odds with the studio heads, his own producers,
and anyone whom he considered as part of “the system” (as opposed
to a part of the artistic process—he was equally ruthless with his own
crew and actors, but there was a method to this madness, as the films
themselves testify). Peckinpah’s battles with the studios and the
businessmen he so openly despised, was just his way of retaining his integrity,
apparently, or at least his dignity, in what he persisted in seeing as “a
dirty business.” He
repeatedly referred to himself as “a good whore—I go where
I’m kicked,” and of course filmmaking, unlike any other art form, is a business, first and foremost, a business in
which the artist is forced into an alliance (at best uneasy, at worst diabolic)
with essentially uncreative entrepreneurs indifferent, and even antagonistic,
to the passion and the plight of the artist. The result is that a work by
definition individual, uncompromising, becomes compromised in the worst
possible way, by being subjugated to the will and the authority of others (and
filmmaking depends on a veritable council of others). And in the process, the
artist becomes a hired hand—a whore.
The
sad irony of “Bloody Sam” is that, the more aware he was of this,
the angrier and the more bitter he grew, the truer did it become for him.
Naturally enough, his resentment only fed the resentment of the studios, and he
was increasingly treated like an unruly child (a prodigy or wunderkind, but
still a child), one who had to be disciplined and restrained, if he was ever to
produce at all. His drunkenness, though it was presumably in part a reaction to
(or a retreat from) this intolerable situation, once again only served to
consolidate it: in later years, Peckinpah was like a child, unable to see his own movies through,
unable to meet the responsibilities he had taken on for himself. Pauline Kael
(who knew Peckinpah) said that, “His whole way of making movies has
become a revenge fantasy: he screws the bosses, he screws the picture, he
screws himself.”[8]
Peckinpah
was a victim of the Hollywood system. For all his bravado, his machismo, his
brilliance, and his dedication, he was unable to hold his own against a machine
that finally chewed him up and spit him out (incapable of actually devouring
him). His story, more than any of his movies, is a modern tragedy of everyday
proportions—the lone fighter, the man’s man, who is unable to
resist or escape the encroaching, insidious influence of
“progress,” who can only stand his ground and endeavor, at least,
to hold on to his beliefs, and to die, as he lived, fighting for them. (He died
in 1984.) In this sense, Peckinpah was no victim, for he did fight on to the end; but in another, perhaps
deeper sense, he was the worst kind of victim, for while he was busy parrying
blows with ordinary foes, the enemy within devoured him whole.
Welles
was both greater and wiser; he followed Oscar Wilde’s advice, and saved
his genius for living. Welles died neither beaten nor embittered, and, most of
all, he died at the right time. The fact that he never, after Citizen Kane, made a film the way he wanted to make it,
that is our loss (a loss
which we will forever have cause to regret, and to despise the film industry
for); but it was not his
loss, not really. Peckinpah on the
other hand was unable to live without his
work, and he was unable to separate himself from the glamor and the excitement
of Hollywood, to go off and make small, personal films outside the industry (in
Mexico, for example), and so retain his integrity that way. (Or else simply to
retire and become a ranchero, or a poet, or whatever.) His pride and his
passion compelled him to fight to the bitter end, just like his own heroes had,
in the one perfect expression of his artistry that he gave us.
The
Wild Bunch is a perfect
film, so far as any work of art can be called such. But this is largely because
its aspirations are fairly low, at least for a work of art. For a Hollywood
Western it aspires to greatness, and achieves it, but for a meditation upon
manhood it satisfies itself with mere poignancy, and with an eerie, almost
mysterious kind of melancholy that, nevertheless, is unique to the genre. The
film’s perfection is in its lack of flaws, and its integrity within its
own frame of reference: This frame of reference, however, is a very tight one
indeed, for it is the frame of reference of a man clinging desperately to what
little integrity he could find in a crazy, fucked up world. Accordingly, the
film (or Peckinpah) attempts to expand this limited point of view until it
assumes almost mythic proportions, in order to find refuge therein. Peckinpah
never quite manages this, he never quite convinces himself (or us) of the
integrity or the authenticity of his primitive vision of violence as
man’s only possible freedom of expression. The expression (all-too brief)
is through violence, but
the violence in turn expresses something else, something mysterious, out of
reach, with intimations of a beauty and a depth quite plainly beyond the men
who had unleashed it (I refer to Peckinpah, as much as to the Bunch). Peckinpah
was one with his Wild Bunch, certainly (he couldn’t have made them so
real to us otherwise), but he was also beyond them, looking back, or perhaps
even above them, looking down. (His ambivalence is evident throughout the film,
which simultaneously asks us to admire the Bunch and to regard them as
romantic, suicidal fools.) But the violence of the Bunch is only beautiful to
us in the audience—obviously the Bunch themselves do not get to enjoy (or
even appreciate) the glory of their own annihilation, even if Peckinpah would
have us believe
they do (and this is his foremost conceit).[9]
For
a work of art, The Wild Bunch is morally all at sea—it’s not that it’s unsound,
it’s that it’s hokum. It’s the work of a man with the
sensibilities, the vision, of a major artist, but the romantic follies, and the
conceits, of a twelve-year-old child. The Wild Bunch is the ultimate, the inevitable, conversion of
the bad man into the hero—because the world it presents is so filthy,
rotten, stinking, and irredeemable that the only thing to do with it is to smash oneself against it, and die
“gloriously” in one last hopeless paroxysm of hatred and disgust,
in rage and ecstasy for this world. The film is a reactionary fable for men who
believe that war is the only true expression of the warrior’s spirit; and
yet (and it’s a big “and yet”’), this
warrior—Peckinpah—is also an artist, and so he knows (and proves to us with every perfected image
and quick cut and musical note of the film) that art and war are not at odds,
but overlap and intermingle.
The
art of war is an old, old tradition—what Peckinpah gives us is the war of
art. As Kael noted, “Peckinpah, by getting into something bigger than the
story he was telling, raised crucial issues for future artists working on
action films.”[10]
Art is a form of warfare, maybe
even of terrorism (as the Surrealists had it), and, for all his marked lack of
insight about his own failings, Peckinpah’s passion (we might even say
his genius), transcended his failings; as if despite himself, he turned hokum
into tragedy.
This
tragedy is at the heart of The Wild Bunch, as it was at the heart of Peckinpah, and as it is
at the heart of all violent men driven by their own demons to destroy
themselves, out of self-disgust and weakness (and through their own ignorance
in projecting this disgust on to the world). That’s a thesis sentence,
right there, and I should probably be prepared to back it up with 10,000 words
of exposition, but I think that essentially this is what The Wild Bunch is about, and that this is precisely what has
caused it to resonate with so many people for so long a time. The fact that it
can be enjoyed as one of the most exciting and bloody films ever made in no way
detracts from such a “thesis”—on the contrary, it only
deepens it. It shows us that the artist, if he is sufficiently inspired and
uninhibited (by himself or by others) to get his vision out (onto the page or the canvas or the screen),
will disclose things about himself that even he may not be aware of. And so the
true value, the actual content, of a work of art i
s occulted, or
hidden—it exists almost despite the work itself, which serves not only to
house this meaning,
but often to conceal it as well. But that’s a whole other thesis.
The
enduring power of The Wild Bunch is due to both its content (hidden or otherwise)
and its form. This latter is very nearly immaculate. Few films from any period
or country demonstrate such grace, economy, assurance, and energy, such an
intricately balanced and finely rhythmed control of image and sound, of
performance and of dialogue. The plot of the film, like that of A Fistful of
Dollars, is secondary, almost
irrelevant—it’s the engine, certainly, that drives the film onward,
but any other engine might have served, so long as it was equally well-built.
It has a mythic simplicity, so that no time is wasted expositing it, and the
audience’s attention is more or less spared for the subtler nuances that
the director and the actors provide; and then, for the magnificent set-pieces
that punctuate the film.
The
Wild Bunch begins with
such a set-piece—and it may be the most wrenchingly beautiful opening
shootout ever filmed for an action movie.[11]
The film was innovative in far
more than its brutality, however, and it was the manner in which it depicted violence that both
shocked (and later inspired) so many people (especially filmmakers). From the
beginning, by the rapid juxtaposition of images, by combining extremely fast
cuts with balletic slow-motion shots, Peckinpah created an unprecedented sense
of vertigo in the audience. Here they were watching a bloodbath such as had
never before been seen on the screen (Bonnie and Clyde prepared us, but only barely), and it was closer to
being at the opera than at a bullfight. This was Peckinpah’s aria. The
images had a peculiar, almost surreal intensity to them. On the one hand, the
action itself was realistic beyond anything ever attempted in Hollywood before
(dirt, dust, blood, screams of innocent bystanders as they go down and are
trampled by horses); on the other hand, there was an undeniable, unnerving beauty to the way in which these appalling events
were presented. The filmgoer, in what was to become over the decades an
experience familiar to the point of contempt, felt (here for perhaps the first
time) a bewildering (and bewilderingly intense) confusion of responses—horror
and disgust at the brutality, and at the random senselessness of it, and yet
awe and admiration—even perhaps delight—at the sheer virtuosity of
film artistry displayed, which rendered the brutality like a dance. Somehow
Peckinpah had taken blood, and made it poetry.
Some left in horror at their
own responses (and in their ignorance blamed these responses on the film
itself); others stayed to see the ordeal through to the end. And those who
stayed found themselves witness to the emergence of a new cinematic vision, as
it exploded onto the screen in fire and blood. Following which, when the dust
settled and the lights came up, American movies (and audiences) would never be
quite the same again.
[1]. In Once
Upon a Time in the West the previous year, Sergio Leone also used the
development of railways to symbolize the encroaching corruption of the West.
The villain of the film, played by Henry Fonda, like Thornton, worked for the
crippled railroad boss who, for all his extending kingdom, was himself
pitifully immobile.
[2]. Peckinpah has been quoted as saying, “I
believe in the innocence of children. They have no idea of good and evil.
It’s an acquired taste.” (See Peckinpah: The Western Films, by Paul
Seydor, p. 124-25.) This comment suggests not a wooly-minded naiveté about
what children are capable of but rather an acceptance of the absence of malice,
or forethought, in their actions, however cruel. What distinguishes adults from
children, then, may be said to also distinguish the Bunch from the likes of
Mapache. As Dutch puts it: “We don’t hang nobody!”
[3]. A group of
boys and girls between the ages of five and ten gather gleefully around a
scorpion and watch it devoured by ants, then build a fire over it and set it
alight. This image became the key to the whole film for Peckinpah. Obviously
the scorpion represented the Bunch—a predator, while the ants represented
“the rest of the world” against which the Bunch opposed itself
(specifically the Mexican army). In this symbolic arrangement, only the children
are unaccounted for, and the children, logically, become we ourselves in the
audience, taking a twisted and
all-too-human relish in the spectacle before us.
[4].
There’s a marked exception
in the child-women of Angel’s village who teach two of the Bunch how to
play “cat’s cradle,” but seeing as how this entire sequence stands apart from
the rest of the film, we can reiterate the statement with relative impunity:
all the women in The Wild Bunch are whores.
[5]. This is a
hidden “theme” of
every modern action movie, the difference here being that it’s the main
premise of the film, and so, by being exposed for what it is, it becomes more a
ambiguous, and less dubious, premise.
[6]. Perhaps the only characters that
Peckinpah seemed to spare this ambiguity and show unreserved affection for are
the gentler, more chivalrous (though still independent) heroes of Junior
Bonner and, most especially, The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
16. If Sam
Peckinpah had died after The Wild Bunch, he would probably be acknowledged as the greatest
American filmmaker since Welles. As it is, how can anyone say that with a
straight face about a man who made The Killer Elite and Convoy? Best just to call him, the greatest American failure since Orson Welles.
[8]. “Notes
on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah,” from When the Lights Go Down, p. 116. Kael
goes on to say that “a lot of the time he wasn’t fighting to
protect his vision, he was fighting for torturous reasons. He doesn’t
start a picture with a vision; he starts a picture as a job and then
perversely—in spite of his deal to sell out—he turns into an
artist” (p. 118).
18. Seydor is instructive on this point:
“In the largest possible terms, then, what Peckinpah does is alternate
between a moral and an aesthetic view of violence, which tends to divorce the
moral from the aesthetic response . . . and which gives rise to one of his
abiding themes: it is only
by divorcing the physical sensations, the pain and suffering, from our
apprehension of the violence that we can feel the violence as beautiful.”
Pckinpah: The Western Films,
p. 117.
[10]. From her
review of The Adventurers, in Deeper into Movies, p. 134. Kael
called the film “a beautiful self-destroying machine . . . it got so
intricately involved in the problems of violence that it tore itself apart. A
brilliantly directed and photographed study in confusion, it played to
audiences who apparently didn’t take it as an attack on violence but
simply enjoyed it as a violent Western.”
[11]. At least at
the time. Since then, the precredit action sequence has become standard form,
with the Bond films and suchlike, but almost invariably the sequence serves a
cynical function—that of keeping punters glued to seats from the word go.
The Wild Bunch on the other hand uses this opening sequence to
tell us all we need to know about the film that is to come—it sets the
mood, the pace, and the intensity, of the action, and carries us onward from
there. Many people, far from being glued to their seats, left the theaters in
the first ten minutes of the film, at least on its opening run (audiences have
been plenty desensitized since 1969).