Last
week, we started enunciating some of the themes that form the bedrock
foundation of the “Savage Cinema” as I’ve been calling the sub-genre. In short, what we found -- with several helpful and insightful reader
comments along the way -- is a thesis that suggests a meditation on violence itself stands at the crux of this form.
It
isn’t so much that violence is featured on-screen, but that the application of
said violence is the core issue of a savage film’s philosophical argument or debate.
When people descend to violence in these films, there’s often something lost or
re-considered in the fall, as we detected in Deliverance (1972).
In
other words, there’s usually some didactic
or pro-social purpose for the extreme, taboo-violating violence in the Savage
Cinema.
Today,
we continue our study of the Savage Cinema with Sam Peckinpah’s incendiary 1971
film Straw
Dogs, a brutal, edgy work of art that the late film critic Pauline Kael
once termed “fascist.” The film remains overtly
controversial today -- even more so than
the recent remake -- for its depiction of rape, traditional sex roles, the mob
mentality, and character components that stereotypically imply manhood.
The
last third of the film is a brutal, sustained, sharply-edited siege on a rural
cottage. In general, the siege (Night of the Living Dead [1968] Assault
on Precinct 13 [1976]) is one of my all-time favorite horror movie
scenarios, and here the siege pits a drunken mob of bullies and rapists against
an analytical, geeky mathematician.
Guess who wins: brute strength or relentless smarts?
That
central character dynamic and the final, unimpeachable action sequence represent
two reasons I cherish Straw Dogs. I also appreciate the film’s carefully
constructed but oft misunderstood stance on violence.
As
I see it, Straw Dogs concerns the idea that fighting for a belief is sometimes
necessary…but never pretty or easy.
Violence doesn’t make for “heroes,” but rather affirms the necessity of
civilization and laws in the first place.
I'll
have an answer, or I'll have blood!
American mathematician
David Sumner (Hoffman) and his wife Amy (George) rent a cottage in a remote English village where she was raised.
There, David works on a grant to study “possible structures” inside
stars.
When the greenhouse roof
needs fixing, David hires Charlie Venner (Del Henney), Amy’s old boyfriend, to
do the work…along with a rowdy group of locals.
While Charlie and his
boys work at a snail’s pace on the roof repairs, they also gawk at Amy, and try
to run David off a country road. Then,
the family cat turns up hanged in the master bedroom closet, and Amy begs David
to confront the men.
Possessing an
analytical and calculating mind, David is slow to point fingers or hurl
accusations. Instead, he continues to
collate data, and ingratiates himself with Charlie and the men. Amy thinks David is a coward pure and simple,
and comes to despise him.
When David goes out on
a hunting trip with Charlie’s boys, Charlie sneaks back to the cottage and
rapes Amy. She protests his sexual aggression, but her protests turn to terror
when the other men also show up, and want in on the action. David arrives home, but Amy doesn’t tell him
what’s happened.
Soon after the gang rape,
Henry Niles (David Warner) – a local simpleton
– accidentally murders a girl named Janice (Sally Thomsett). When David accidentally hits Henry with his
car, he brings the injured man back to the cottage and tends to his wounds.
But before long a lynch
mob led by Charlie Venner shows up at David’s door, demanding he hand Niles
over.
Realizing that they
intend to kill him, David decides to protect his home…over Amy’s objections.
“I don't know my way home.”
Writing
of Straw
Dogs, Pauline Kael wrote: “The
subject of Straw Dogs is
machismo. It has been the obsession
behind most of Peckinpah’s films; now it is out in the open…The setting, music,
and the people are deliberately disquieting…the goal of the movie is to
demonstrate that David enjoys the killing, and achieves his manhood in that
self-recognition.” (New Yorker,
January 29, 1972, pages 80–85).
I
suggest this is a faulty reading of the film. Late in Straw Dogs, there are two
instances wherein it is established visually -- and rather definitively -- that David is sickened by violence.
In
the first instance, he is out hunting, and shoots a bird. After he pulls the trigger, the bird falls
from the sky, and we see David’s saddened reaction as he approaches the animal. He’s clearly sickened by what he’s done.
In
the second scene, David battles the diabolical Ratman in his house. David beats
him with a fireplace poker, and when the act is done, he looks as though he
wants to vomit. Again, David doesn’t
enjoy killing.
Instead,
David’s manhood is actually asserted in another way, as I hope this review will
demonstrate.
Reviewing
the movie for Film Quarterly, William
Johnson suggested another interpretation of Straw Dogs: “On the one hand, he does not equate violence
with heroism…On the other hand Peckinpah does not equate violence with villainy
by implying that it could and should have been avoided. Peckinpah is not concerned with putting
labels of right or wrong on the violent actions and reactions in the film. Here, as in his earlier films, he is focusing
on the tension between the individual and the disintegrating forces of society.”
(Film Quarterly, 1972, pages 61–64).
“The disintegrating forces of society” is
one elegant way of describing the failure of law enforcement, organized
religion, parents, and other societal elements to raise men of decency and
compassion, and to protect the common good. In the film, the constable, the bartender, the
local reverend and other forces continually fail to “check” the mob as it grows
ever more unruly. As a consequence, many
of the locals live in a constant state of fear and anxiety.
David
finally acts violently because an angry mob comes to his door and will not leave
unless he accepts the mob’s dominance. Mob rule is little better than the law of the
jungle, and David has the intellect to understand that fact. So he does something
about it.
Straw
Dogs is a
film I’ve watched several times, and each time I come away from a viewing with
the sense that two distinct brands of violence are practiced in the film.
One
kind of violence is invasive and selfish.
It involves burglary, rape, home invasion, and attempted murder. These crimes are broached out of aggression,
anger and the desire to take something, to steal something of value.
Wrapped
up in this violence are feelings such as fear, jealousy, rage, inferiority and
the need for control. The men in the village
fear “the other,” and that’s how they see David. He is merely “the American” and they “take
care of their own,” as they say.
Charlie and the mob thus believe David has “no business” interfering in their brand of justice, and no business
marrying Amy, either.
The
second brand of violence featured in the film is quite different. It is the violence that a desperate man
resorts to not out of self-defense, but out of the recognition that if he is to
remain civilized – that is, to live in a
civilized society – it is up to him to defend the weak from an angry mob.
Encoded
in David’s use of violence is the all-important quality of empathy. He realizes that since he hurt Henry (in a car
accident), he has a responsibility and duty to take care of him until he can
get him to a hospital.
So
in a very real way, Straw Dogs isn’t about a man’s breaking point as the tag-line
for the remake suggests; but rather about a man’s personal rallying point: that individual place where he realizes he’s not
immune or separate from a world of violence, but will certainly be complicit in
it if he doesn’t stand up to defend himself, his home, and his ward.
I
should probably add, lest I be said to incite violence myself, that Straw
Dogs doesn’t concern abstract concepts such as ideological tyranny or
freedom in the face of a Supreme Court decision you happen to disagree
with. It’s not about standing your
ground when you think, maybe, perhaps, you could possibly be in danger. The film isn’t a justification of violence in
those senses.
Rather,
it’s about the idea that if a mob shows up at your door to kill someone, you
have the right and responsibility as a civilized person to prevent that act.
And
where Ed in Deliverance could not live with the violence he saw on the
river, David Sumner in Straw Dogs reaches a new summit of
understanding about himself. He learns
he has the capacity to commit to
something. This is important self-knowledge. He left America during the Civil Rights
Movement and the Vietnam War because he did not want to commit to a fight. Here, he a fight comes to him, and he commits
to it.
Amy’s
self-discovery is less self-affirming.
She finds that her family/town-of-origin issues are deeper than she
imagined, and that though she has adopted the forms and symbols of the
counter-culture (going bra-less, for instance), she has not been able to
actually change her parochial mind-set or belief system.
When
push comes to shove, she falls back in
with the herd she once sought to escape.
When she feels endangered, Amy turns to a physically-strong man, Charlie,
rather than intellectually-strong man, her own husband, for protection. She stills buy into the myth that to be a man
is to be a bully, a physically-aggressive, violent bully. Amy can’t escape the
beliefs she grew up with, even though she fancies herself “liberated” and “modern.”
Ultimately, Straw
Dogs makes a case that David – despite
all of his character flaws – is superior to Amy because, for all his flaws,
he finally demonstrates the aforementioned quality of empathy. When David takes
care of Niles, the village idiot, he notes that the locals must be worried
about the missing Janice. “I know how I’d feel if I had a daughter
missing,” he says with a sense of mercy and fairness. But it is also important to him that Niles –
a simpleton – is not murdered in a fit of drunken mob violence.
David tells Amy that the mob
will “beat” Niles to death, and her response is “I don’t care,” which reveals that Amy is the real coward here, not
David. His response is that he “does care” and that he is not going to
hand over someone to be killed. .
“This is where I live,” he tells Amy. “This is
me. I will not allow violence against
this house.” Here, the conscientious
objector to the Vietnam War finds a cause for personal courage, a cause that
matters to him.
The question in terms of Straw
Dogs and violence is: does the film advocate murder? Does it advocate revenge and violence? My answer is that it does not. At the
end of the film, David declares – with a crooked grin – that he doesn’t know
his “way home.”
This is the case not because
he has been violent; but because he’s achieved self-knowledge that has changed
everything. Until he committed to a
cause, he lived by the precept that he couldn’t commit to a cause. His new self-awareness changes that.
If one can look past the
violence in the film, Straw Dogs can be seen as a battle
in which civilization beats back brutality, and in which intelligence beats
back animal behavior. Finally, for David Sumner, “there’s nowhere else to hide,” and so he
must reckon with himself. His
self-discovery comes through committing to a cause, however, not through
violence.
From the
1990s:
