Peckinpah's Walden : The Violent Indictment of "Civilization" in The ...

Asbjørn Grønstad

Peckinpah’s Walden: The Violent Indictment of “Civilization” in The Wild Bunch This article argues that the rhetoric of Sam Peckinpah’s film The Wild Bunch is substantially indebted to the politics of American Transcendentalism as propagated in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Themes and preoccupations such as the notion of civil revolt, non-conformity, the appreciation of nature as a condition for individuality and the distrust of technological progress all resurface in Peckinpah’s film, where a perceived threat to these ideals is countered by apocalyptic violence. Furthermore, when contrasted with another notable aesthetics of violence - that of Futurism - it becomes clear that the consecration of nature in The Wild Bunch finds embodiment also on the purely stylistic level: whereas Futurism typically invokes the machine as an aesthetic model, poetic form in Peckinpah draws its main inspiration from the anarchically organic forces of nature.

As a technological universe, advanced industrial society is a political universe, the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical project - namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as the mere stuff of domination. (Herbert Marcuse)

Much ink has already been spilled over the significance of violence in the cinema of Sam Peckinpah, and in The Wild Bunch (1969) in particular. Critics have examined the film’s savage images from numerous different angles – biographical, cultural, historical, etc. 1 Taking its cue from 1

See for instance Bernard Dukore. Sam Peckinpah’s Feature Films. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Stephen Prince. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998; David Weddle. If They Move…Kill ’Em’. The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York: Grove Press, 1994; Michael Bliss. Justified Lives. Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993; Max Evans. Sam Peckinpah: Master of Violence. Vermillion, S.D.: Dakota Press, 1972; Marshall Fine. Bloody Sam. The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991; Doug McKinney. Sam Peckinpah. Boston: Twayne, 1979; William Parrill. Heroes’ Twilight: The Films of Sam Peckinpah. Hammond, La: Baywulf, 1980; Paul Seydor. Peckinpah. The Western Films: A

Asbjørn Grønstad

Marcuse’s statement above, the current discussion will explore the degree to which the repression of “nature” by the forces of modernity may be appreciated as a critical framework in which to explain this obsession with violence. My paper is thus of a synthetic, interpretive nature rather than of an aesthetic one, and aims at providing an additional context in which to grasp this still controversial film. Although some scholars have attempted to analyze the problem of violence in purely theoretical terms, 2 my premise here is that the phenomenon must be grasped contextually. Violence in fiction, I would argue, is always violence-in-relation-to some aspect of human life. I do not, however, thereby imply that the causes of brutal actions in the diegetic worlds of artistic texts can be traced mechanically or systematically, but rather that the filmic (or, for that matter, literary) inscription of violent structures may be investigated according to a myriad of influences which, if nothing else, at least contribute to a richer understanding of how this fictional violence might be appropriated hermeneutically. The argument with which I commence this inquiry should be relatively familiar. On more than one occasion it has been argued that one important “theme” in The Wild Bunch is that of the mourning of the vanishing of the old West. According to this view, the sensibility of the film represents a form of cultural pessimism and distrust of historical progress whose violent response metaphorically indicts the state of Reconsideration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997; Garner Simmons. Peckinpah. A Portrait in Montage. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982; Doing it Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Michael Bliss. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994; Terence Butler. Crucified Heroes. The Films of Sam Peckinpah. London: Gordon Fraser, 1979; Jim Kitses. Horizons West. Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship Within the Western. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, 7-27, 139-143, 160-170; Stephen Prince. Savage Cinema. Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998; Tony Thomas. “The Wild Bunch.” In: The West that never was. Hollywood’s Vision of the Cowboys and Gunfighters. New York: A Citadel Press Book, 1989, 231-5. 2

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See for instance Hannah Arendt. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969.

Peckinpah’s Walden: The Violent Indictment of “Civilization” in The Wild Bunch

civilization in 20th century America. 3 Violence becomes a radical expression of, and reaction to, a feeling of profound loss. For Peckinpah, it seems, this loss is one of individual freedom and moral choice. In the beginning of One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse writes that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances” (1).4 It is precisely this “democratic unfreedom” which forms a reactive parameter for the highly antisocial activities of Pike Bishop and his bunch in Peckinpah’s epic western. By distrusting the rewards of technological progress and the culture of modernity, the film becomes subversive of the values embodied in the rhetoric of technocratic society. Interestingly enough, The Wild Bunch can be read as a countercultural text which, on the one hand, is fiercely opposed to the conformist legacy of the 1950s, and which, on the other hand exhibits vital affinities with a philosophy of civil revolt that goes back at least to Thoreau and Emerson. Peckinpah’s dubious anarchism is as related to Transcendentalist thought - and even Bakuninian for that matter 5 - as it is to the anti-establishment program dominant at the time of the production of The Wild Bunch.

3

What we find in The Wild Bunch is that the regeneration through violence mythos discussed by Richard Slotkin is in the process of being overturned; the loss of faith in modern civilization also effects a loss of historical vision. According to Slotkin, the idea of progress in American society has since the 17th century been conceived of as requiring stages of violent upheavals. Thus, history regenerates itself through violence. It is the faith in this myth that is undermined in a text like The Wild Bunch.

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What Marcuse has in mind here are the processes of corporate growth, free competition and trade. See Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

5

In God and the State, Michael Bakunin postulates three aspects upon which human life and practice are premised: “three fundamental principles constitute the esssential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history: (1) human animality; (2) thought; and (3) rebellion. To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty” (12). It is by no means unlikely that Peckinpah would have approved of Bakunin’s thesis.

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Placed in the context of a rebellion against conformity, the bloodbaths dominating the beginning and the end of the movie can be seen as a violence directed against a future of intensified socio-cultural homogenization, and against the dehumanizing forces of a society which privileges the masses over the individual. In this respect, the temporal and spatial setting of the narrative has been crucial to the rhetorical project of the text. Of this Jim Kitses writes that “The Wild Bunch is set at a point in time when society is increasingly institutionalizing and rationalizing the function of the unsocialized group” (164). Hegemonic culture’s containment of the elements which in any way have a potential for deviation and differentiation can thus be grasped as a preventive measure which neutralizes opposition either by covert domestication or clinical isolation. In the American West of 1913, men like Pike Bishop have become the cultural “other,” the non-adoptable historical residue whose disposition toward violence can only be contained by a greater institutional violence. The Wild Bunch, of course, are misplaced anarchists in an environment of escalating conformism. Shortly before the outlaws convene for their final, suicidal shootout, a weathered Bishop mournfully contemplates his predicament as, to use Kenneth R Brown’s words, an “irrelevant anachronism, rendered obsolete and almost impotent by the armies of destruction with their machines” (20). Defeat comes in the form of modern technology. The bunch are overwhelmed by the force of the new items of destruction they clutch at during the Agua Verde massacre. The local havoc caused by the gunfire might even be interpreted as a local manifestation of a general philosophical stance entertained by the filmmaker, who, according to Terence Butler, conceived of American history as “the emergence of a civilization whose main feature is wanton destructiveness”(23). Such a dismal judgment on his own society seems to preclude anything but a violent response, but the somber constellation of irredeemable pessimism and jubilant, almost eroticized violence nonetheless produces a problematic contradiction. If one is to accept Butler’s premise, the destructiveness of modernity triggers correspondingly destructive narratives even when these are permeated by the rhetoric of a hard-core romanticist. Peckinpah’s violence, Butler suggests, is only depraved if taken literally. If one manages to view the 170


carnage metaphorically, (as Butler and so many others have), as the “vitality of eros,” as “atavistic frenzy” (22), the violence in The Wild Bunch transforms itself into something diametrically opposed to the “wanton destructiveness” of modern civilization. “In Peckinpah’s film,” Michael Sragow notes, “the accepted values of society are as culpable as individual moralities; each co-exists with, and contradicts, the other” (34). If Peckinpah’s opus is an “elegy for a life ground down,” it simultaneously laments the inflictions imposed upon contemporary existential conditions by a consensus-oriented but (or perhaps therefore) repressive society. The Wild Bunch was very much a result of the political climate of the era in which it was made and, according to Richard Schickel, it represented a culminating materialization of a latent trauma which had saturated American society for a long time: “the dirty western has been groping about in our violent past, unconsciously searching for some historical correlative that would help illuminate our present sense of desperate psychological dislocation. In The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah has brilliantly concluded this search” (151). A similar line of argument is suggested by Stephen Prince in his Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (1998), where he writes that “the violence of that film [The Wild Bunch] ... fed off of the climate of violence endemic to the era and was a conscious response to it...[The disintegration of U.S. society] shaped and stimulated Peckinpah’s own movement toward a cinema of violence, melancholy and cruelty” (27). Although the flavor of the late 1960s undeniably characterizes the discourse of the film, the text is more than a polemical derivative of its zeitgeist. At least equally important to a comprehension of The Wild Bunch, I would argue, is the film’s relation to a long tradition of political and artistic opposition to mechanisms of authority and control. However different in temperament and expression, Peckinpah’s conception of “nature” is one indebted to that of the New England Transcendentalists, in particular to the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In this tradition there is an intimate relation between nature and the conditions for the cultivation of individuality. A similar conceptual unity is evident in The Wild Bunch and possibly even to a greater extent in The Ballad of Cable Hogue. In his dissertation “The Old West and the Modern World: Western Attributes in the 171

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Western and Non-Western Films of Sam Peckinpah,” Rory Palmieri argues that Peckinpah’s “view of the struggle between the opposing values represented by civilization and the wilderness becomes increasingly pessimistic in each succeeding film.”6 His protagonists in these films, characteristically, want to get away from the throes of an increasingly clinical civilization. When in The Wild Bunch Pike Bishop and his gang flee to Mexico, their escape, figuratively, is from the “civilized” United States to the more “primitive” neighbor to the south. For an “unsocialized group” like the bunch, Mexican territory provides a haven from the pressures of conformity incumbent upon the individual in the north. As Paul Schrader puts it: Sam Peckinpah’s Mexico is a spiritual country similar to Ernest Hemingway’s Spain, Jack London’s Alaska, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas. It is a place where you go ‘to get yourself straightened out.’ (17)

As a metaphor for “nature,” the space of Mexico in the movie offers a temporary sanctuary for the members of the bunch. Peckinpah’s Walden, however, is one in which tranquil contemplation is transformed into a scenario in which apocalyptic violence has become the premium virtue in the conflict with a modern society that threatens to mortify man and eradicate “nature” altogether. In the image of one of the Gorch brothers screaming maniacally as he operates the gatling gun toward the end of the battle at Agua Verde, it is almost as if the primordial forces of nature are personified and striking back at technology. As has become blatantly manifest by that point in the narrative, the filmmaker’s attitude toward the inventions of modern culture appears to be a pathologically bleak one. There are quite a few violent confrontations between man and machine in the course of the film: the bunch’s derailment of the train, Mapache’s spectacle in which his automobile is central, and the savage and uncontrolled maneuvering of the gatling gun by Mapache and, later, Tector. Commenting on the scene in which Angel is abused by Mapache, Butler remarks that “Angel’s tortured figure being dragged around 6

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The films Palmieri has in mind here are the director’s post-classic westerns, Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).


behind Mapache’s car links Mapache’s cruelty with the notion of the inhumanness of modern technology” (59). Also, there is a suggestion of imminent disaster implicit in the presence of Mapache’s German advisor, a dark foreboding of the near future in which European civilization withdraws to the trenches. The juxtaposition of this association with the carnage of the shoot-out makes Peckinpah’s condemnation of social progress all the more eerie. If one had to simplify the filmmaker’s rhetoric in The Wild Bunch, it would be something along the lines of the maxim that civilization corrupts while nature liberates. The statements of The Wild Bunch, therefore, are not wholly incompatible with the views of nature - and its inherent potential for, in keeping with Bakunin’s terminology, human animality, thought and rebellion - found in the ruminations of Thoreau and Emerson.7 Particularly Thoreau’s Walden, first published in 1854, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,8 and Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Self-Reliance (1841), seem to contain ideas concerning the relationship between nature and social progress, individuality and community, that resurface aggressively in Peckinpah’s fiction. Whether the director was familiar with these texts or not is not known, but what one indeed has ascertained is that during his student days at Fresno State College and the University of Southern California, he became thoroughly acquainted with the 7

The Transcendentalists formulated a whole range of ideas, all of which do not necessarily harmonize with the sensibility of Peckinpah’s cinema. Whereas a film like The Wild Bunch does seem to encompass elements of the main influences of Transcendentalism - romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy - other aspects characteristic of the movement might not be considered equally relevant to Peckinpah’s film. Some critics of Peckinpah would certainly deny that his films share the same progressive view on issues such as feminism, for example. Without engaging in this endless debate on the alleged misogyny of Peckinpah, I would just emphasize that the ideational integration of Transcendentalist thought into The Wild Bunch does not presuppose a full embrace of all the facets of the movement.

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This text, or parts of it, derives from a paper entitled The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government, which Thoreau delivered before the Concord Lyceum as a lecture in January 1848. It appeared in print the following year in Aesthetic Papers (Boston: Elizabeth P. Peabody, 1849), now under the title Resistance to Civil Government. In 1866 the text was reprinted in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers under its most familiar title, Civil Disobedience.

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existentialism of Sartre and Camus. According to Bernard F. Dukore, Peckinpah is reputed to have said that The Ballad of Cable Hogue was “a new version of Sartre’s The Flies with a touch of Keystone Cops” (quoted in Dukore, 12). Arguably, some of the themes found in French 20th century existential thought consort well with the philosophical speculations of the Transcendentalists. In an introduction to Walden, Brooks Atkinson writes that “Walden is the practical philosophy of rebellion against the world’s cowardly habits of living” (xv). If we are only attuned to the merely literal, syuzhet dimension of The Wild Bunch, the text might appear considerably less idealistic than Walden. If read symptomatically, however, the film discloses a forceful rebellious passion which extends beyond the sheer egotism of the bunch. Whereas on the diegetic plane the motivations of the protagonists seem rather apolitical, generated by self-interest more than by sublimer purposes, sub-textually their actions emerge as signs of an anarchistic, politically charged temperament protesting the “cowardly habits” of late 20th century conformism. The Wild Bunch, I suggest, is a film which intensifies its existentialist thesis to such an extent that its philosophy becomes communicable only through acts of outrageous brutality. If one for a moment is able to look beyond the film’s sometimes baroquely exaggerated statements (the snobbish would predictably say “lack of subtlety”), one would find that all the violence in the film is complemented by moments of insoluble moral and existential doubt. Let me briefly point out some examples. In the beginning of the film, as the bunch is ambushed by Harrington’s men, the fight sequence is marked by almost unnoticeable gestures of hesitation. Especially the character of Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) is shown lifting his rifle, taking aim but declining to shoot at his target, who is his former partner Pike Bishop. This relation is reciprocal. In addition, the citizens participating in the meeting of the Temperance Union are caught in the crossfire, and both the bunch and the ambushers express a sense of irresolution at the prospect of killing innocents. Nevertheless, as is characteristic of Peckinpah, the savage instinct prevails over the philanthropic. Secondly, as the surviving members of the bunch escape from the town of San Rafael, Pike Bishop (William Holden) dispassionately executes one of his own men because the victim has gone blind and will slow down their escape. This is 174


perhaps the most barbarian moment in the film. Notwithstanding, although this act ostensibly comes across as just another instance of senseless, amoral cruelty, it resonates with a much more complex meaning; when one becomes aware of the indestructible code of outlaw honor which binds these men together as a cohesive group of not only criminal associates but moral companions, one comes to understand that Pike Bishop’s act was a sacrifice not of but for the unity of and commitment to the group. This is ultimately a moral stance which materializes fully in the climax of the film, in that the impulse to retrieve Angel from Mapache fundamentally is the same impulse as the one which commands Pike to sacrifice his friend during the escape. With regard to the psychological and ethical problems animating the figure of Pike Bishop, Prince finds the scene with Pike in the whore’s bedroom prior to the massacre to be a vital illustration of the ambiguous moral principles in the film: The narrative have delineated so clearly Pike ’s tendency to abandon or desert his comrades, and has so clearly pointed to the bitter disparity between Pike’ opportunism and his desperate perception of the ethical code that eludes him, that Peckinpah chose, with remarkable artistic temerity, to play the crucial moment of Pike’s epiphany without dialogue. (123)

In the final analysis, it is from the devotion to the principle of unyielding loyalty that the rebellion, violence and anarchy of the bunch arises. Hence, actions which at first appear to reflect nothing but insensible and shallow brutality, may be found to contain an immanent, tacit set of idealistic principles. The violence in The Wild Bunch may be inexcusable, but it does emerge from a coherent moral system. If Peckinpah’s text is a filmic display of a transcendent, organic romanticism, its tone nevertheless carries a melancholy strain, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth. According to Stephen Prince, this feeling of an occasionally violent spleen “inheres in the genre of the western, forever focused upon the vanishing of the West, a lament for the loss of a frontier whose passing has left the modern era immeasurably poorer” (119). The significance of the fading of the frontier as an inestimable source of the western’s melancholy can hardly be over-estimated. 175

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Numerous other critics corroborate Prince’s assertion, among them Terence Butler, who also stresses the sense in which the westerner’s violence expresses a kind of lamentation (22). In his book Savage Cinema, Prince even goes further, claiming that melancholia is one of two analytic frameworks imposed upon the film in order to counterbalance the purported aestheticization of violence. 9 Director Alex Cox formulates a similar view in the following statement concerning this disposition toward melancholy in Peckinpah’s protagonists: “That was the great thing about all of Peckinpah’s films, the sadness that the characters have inside them” (quoted in Prince, 120). That Peckinpah in some respects can be considered a modern-day Transcendentalist is a claim which easily finds support in the romanticist ethos informing the militant anti-authoritarianism of The Wild Bunch. His screen characters articulate what Prince calls a “mournful stance,” true, but the sadness we detect in this film is different in kind from that of other classic Western texts such as Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) or even Peckinpah’s own Ride the High Country (1962). The Wild Bunch communicates a playful and sometimes even suicidal waywardness which contrasts with the sense of mere exhaustion and resignation which inform especially Ford’s film. Although nostalgic sadness in itself is a feeling sufficiently “Romantic,” The Wild Bunch more vividly than most other Westerns merges this feeling with the more prototypically and consistently romantic attitude of rebellion. Paul Seydor remarks: “Peckinpah has often been called a romantic (by himself, among others), which is usually taken to mean that his films express powerful feelings, that he is sympathetic to individuals as opposed to society, and so forth” (1980, 116). Of course the attributes Seydor mentions would in varying degrees map onto a large number of American movies, but rarely in such a profoundly furious fashion - and never in the same scope - as in The Wild Bunch. Moreover, the association of Romantic ideas with acts of violence has probably never before been made so explicitly and forcefully; in The Wild Bunch the two are rendered indistinguishable. This is by far the most troubling aspect of Peckinpah’s fiction, and the one most difficult to justify. Violence and the inviolable rights of the individual (who needs protection 9

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The other is what Prince conceives of as self-reflexiveness, which finds expression in three stylistic devices identified as didactic tableaux, irony and mirror imagery respectively.


from society’s repressive conformity) appear to issue from the same source in many of his films. The serene musings of Thoreau and Emerson are a far cry from the ferocity with which Peckinpah orchestrated his Neo-romanticism in The Wild Bunch. Nevertheless, as I have previously indicated, the film seems to suggest a certain kinship with texts in the Transcendentalist tradition, particularly Walden, Civil Disobedience, Nature and Self-Reliance. In the latter Emerson writes that “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is what is against it” (958). This somewhat solipsistic statement constitutes something of a blueprint for the moral philosophy of the quintessential Peckinpah protagonist. Crystallized in brief references throughout The Wild Bunch - in formulations such as Dutch Engstrom’s reply to Pike Bishop, “It’s not your word that counts, it’s who you give it to,” and Pike’s own “When you side with a man, you stick with him,” and in actions such as the decision to return for Angel - the transcendental ethos of Peckinpah’s film asserts itself as the principal morality of the narrative. Pursuing that which is after their constitution is precisely the dominating logic of the bunch members; their deeds are as instinctual, as is also this director’s approach to filmmaking. When evaluating the quality of the film’s ending, Robert Culp makes the adroit observation that “in 1969 it is supremely valuable to see once more in our fiction men who...make a decision (neither good nor bad ... simply a Right decision, balanced on a hair) and back it with their lives” (8). There is both in Emerson and in Peckinpah a cultivation of the individual and of intuition and nature which borders on the fetishistic. For the latter, violence is shown to form an intimate correlation with this disposition which, at times, has obscured the irrepressible humanist foundation of the director’s work. Another element of the romantic-transcendental sensibility shared by both Emerson and Peckinpah is the conspicuous lack of belief in progress. With respect to The Wild Bunch we have already noted the narrative’s antagonistic position toward the many technological devices alluded to in the film. Mapache’s automobile is used as an instrument of torture, guns have become far more advanced and lethal than before, and the various innovations in communication technology, evidently, are to a 177

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large extent the cause of the bunch’s Mexican exile in the first place (the leaders of the historical wild bunch, as one may recall, fled to Bolivia when their American territory became too small for their adventures). Finally, the vanishing of the old West and the closing of the frontier which provide the most salient background for the film - are themes which animate the veneration for the agrarian past at the expense of the technological future. Again, the kind of perspicacity which Peckinpah articulates through images, Emerson conveys in writing: “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Its progress is only apparent ... It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken” (970). The last sentence is particularly appropriate for an understanding of the artistic obsessions with which Peckinpah struggled, and helps explain why so much of his filmic output could be described as a cinema of loss. If some of the Emersonian ideas suggest an affinity with the intuitive morality of a film like The Wild Bunch, the writings of Thoreau seem even more closely aligned with Peckinpah’s ambition. There is a strangely germane correspondence between the writer and the filmmaker in the romantic accentuation of Nature and non-conformity so characteristic of Transcendentalism. In the essay ‘Walking,’10 for example, Thoreau presents this declaration as his opening remark: I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society: I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee and every one of you will take care of that. (579)

The passage reads as a virtual statement of intent for the release of The Wild Bunch, and as such the words could just as well have been spoken by Peckinpah himself. Pike Bishop, Dutch Engstrom and the rest of the 10

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This essay was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862.


bunch are not only rebel criminals in conflict with modern society; they are also narratively speaking in a state of dissociation from the other characters in the story. Throughout, the film continuously stresses their separateness, their detachment, from the environment in which they are embedded. In the beginning of the movie each member of the bunch is introduced in a freeze frame, a stylistic gesture whose function is to underscore the sense of disconnection associated with these protagonists. Through the use of the freeze-frame, the wild bunch are literally lifted out of the time and space of their narrative surroundings. As the bunch ride past the group of children torturing the scorpion, we tend to behold the bandits from their point of view, a perspectival set-up which heightens the alien-ness of the bunch in the encounter. Furthermore, the fact that Pike Bishop and his men are disguised as soldiers suggests that they are detached even from themselves. Still more manifestations of this separateness occurs, most notable of which is the long walk the four members of the bunch make as they proceed to confront Mapache at the end of the film. The effect of this formally facilitated dissociation of the bunch from their environment, then, highlights the notion of the group as “part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society,” as Thoreau puts it. His plea for “absolute freedom and wildness” is also the bunch’s plea; they are losing the former while retaining the latter, and it their excessive violence seems to arise out of this gap. Even today The Wild Bunch presents an extreme statement, and at the time of the film’s release Peckinpah fell victim to critics who found him to be something regrettably short of a champion of civilization. Perhaps the director shared Thoreau’s contention that there were enough such champions; at any rate the vocalization of a Romantic Weltanschauung through the concern for absolute freedom and wildness is an essential component of their thinking. It is no wonder that these 19th century sentiments provide such a valuable framework in which to grasp texts such as The Wild Bunch. Essays such as ‘Walking’ and ‘Self-Reliance,’ as well as Nature, I would argue, are essentially anti-materialistic in spirit, and propose an almost pantheistic communion with nature as the highest level of human gratification. In this sense Thoreau and Emerson appear to be highly compatible with the cultural sensibility of the 1960s, with the 179

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countercultural streak of American cinema during that period and with writers such as Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers. This critique of conformism and progress, so prevalent in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau and in The Wild Bunch, returns with an unprecedented vigor in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), a film which broaches these issues much more explicitly than does Peckinpah. Overcome with a deep sense of cultural malaise and personal apathy, the main protagonist (Edward Norton), an insomniac, develops schizophrenia and turns to violence as a panacea for his emotional numbness. There is a specific linkage in this film between the logic of consumerism on the one hand, and the paralyzation of feeling on the other. On the image-track, if not on the soundtrack, Jack is presented to us as a kind of Winston character out of 1984, mechanically enacting his role as a good worker and consumer and becoming increasingly disenchanted with the situation. Violence comes to represent for him a means by which he can reconnect with life. As his fight clubs obtain more and more followers, Jack begins to perform his highly idiosyncratic form of civil disobedience, which is to demolish the strongholds of consumer society, the financial institutions. Despite its somber mood, the anti-materialism, anarchy and glorification of violence in Fight Club are couched in a romantic sensibility which is closely related to that of The Wild Bunch and in turn that of the Transcendentalists. Atkinson’s description of Thoreau, for example, would be equally apt for the character of Jack. Thoreau, he writes, “made up his mind that most of the ways in which men earn a living are degrading and that men sell themselves into perpetual bondage by conforming to the traditional ways of the world” (xi). This is exactly the insight Jack in Fight Club learns to appreciate as well. There is one peculiar aspect of the violence in Peckinpah’s film which sets it apart from at least one dominant 20 th century aesthetic movement with a certain predilection for brutality, namely that of Futurism. When juxtaposed with this school of artistic expression, the violence in Peckinpah gets foregrounded in a way which reinforces its affiliation with nature also in its formal mode. The difference can be conceived of as one between organical and mechanical styles of violence. In The Wild Bunch, the sequences dominated by violent action - the Starbuck confrontation at the beginning of the movie and the Agua Verde massacre at the end - are filmed in a fluent fashion which dissolves time and space into an abundance of fragmented images that 180


are played off against each other. The latter scene in particular has often been described as a dance of death,11 and it is this frenetic organicity that more than anything else captures the distinctive representation of violence in The Wild Bunch. In contrast with this formal strategy, futuristic depictions of barbarism appear rigid, inflexible and inorganic. If nature is a thematic metaphor for Peckinpah’s art, the machine is a metaphor for that of the Futurists’. The movement, which emerged around the figure of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Milan in 1909, discarded all previous aesthetic traditions and sought instead to establish a new type of art for which modern technology was the primary inspiration. Stylistically, Futurism was characterized by hard, angular and often semi-abstract shapes and lines which contributed to an overall impression of militant aggressiveness. In 1914, Wyndham Lewis founded the avant-garde movement known as Vorticism, 12 which was a British variation of Futurism, and in the 1920s Marinetti’s conception evolved into the general movement of Constructivism. 13 Provocatively announcing “the end of art,” Constructivists made the machine the ideal for their aesthetic expression, partly because, as they argued, the machine flaunts its form and thereby acknowledges its mechanic rather than its organic quality. For the constructivists, the machine came to represent a model for their conception of the new artwork after the end of art. Just as the machine is characterized by an assemblage of

11

See for instance Cathrine Russell. Narrative Mortality. Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 187.

12

The term Vorticism originates from a remark made by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, who claimed that all creative art emanates from an emotional vortex. Painters such as David Bomberg, known for for instance The Mud Bath (1914), and Wyndham Lewis himself (i.e. A Battery Shelled, 1919) were among the exponents of Vorticism.

13

Constructivism was an inter-art movement founded by Vladimir Tatlin around 1920. Much Constructivist art was abstract, and served various social purposes. Within the graphic arts poster designs such as the one for Dziga Vertov’s KinoEye were typical of a Constructivist style. Other acclaimed exponents for the movement were Meyerhold and his theater, and the poetry of Mayakovsky. In terms of lasting influence, Constructivism has perhaps made its most significant contribution within the realm of architecture.

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functional parts,14 so should form and function be the principal parameters for the ideal work of art. Thus, in constructivist practice experimentation with spatial contours and geometrical shapes became the paramount concern. According to Vladimir Tatlin, the founder of the movement, the artist should adopt the function of the engineer, crafting aesthetic forms like the mechanic tending to the machine. 15 In their fascination with modern machinery, transport and communications, the Futurists, Vorticists and Constructivists manifest aesthetic principles which are antithetical to those of a director like Peckinpah. Moreover, Marinetti, Tatlin and the other proponents of this early 20th century movement glorified the modernity which the filmmaker loathed so much. These discrepancies, however, may not in themselves be sufficient to warrant a scrutiny of the relationship between Futurism and Peckinpah. Where the two converge, obviously, is on the topic of violence. The Futurists in particular entertain quite a favorable perspective on violent action, whereas Peckinpah, in contradistinction to his mythical persona, was an artist deeply disturbed by the endemic quality of violence in modern society. That Peckinpah and the Futurists differ in their stylistic fashioning of violent material, therefore, has a certain saliency. As I have argued elsewhere, the director establishes an aesthetic of violence which is highly organic in its formal arrangement; the Futurists, on the other hand, display a stylistics which is fundamentally inorganic, or mechanistic. This is in itself a paradox, since some of the ideas stated in the Futurist Manifesto hold dynamic movement to be a chief metaphor of their practice. In the first manifesto, published in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, Marinetti writes that the aims of Futurism are “the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness ... courage, audacity and revolt ... aggressive movement, a feverish insomnia, the gymnast’s stride, the somersault leap, the slap and the punch” (quoted in Segal, 146). Furthermore, article 7 states that 14

The term montage, so vital to the study of film aesthetics, arose from this notion of assemblage.

15

Among the prominent graphic Constructivist artists we find El Lissitzky (Composition, 1920), Alexander Rodchenko (Composition (Overcoming Red), 1918), Ljubov Popova (Space-Force Construction, c1920-21), László MoholyNagy (CHX, 1939), and Vladimir Tatlin himself (Monument to the Third International, 1919).

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“There is no beauty now but in struggle. No masterpiece without aggression. Poetry must be a violent assault on unknown forces, to summon them to lie down before man” (146), and in article 9 one reads “We wish to glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for women” (147). An attendant opinion in this respect is the disdain for history; in article 10 Marinetti writes that “We wish to demolish museums and libraries, fight against moralism, feminism and all other forms of opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice” (147). As Naomi Segal points out, Marinetti’s rhetoric yokes together the feminine and the past as the main targets of the Futurists’ assault: “The real object of this prodigal aggression is familiarly feminine: old art (in the figure of the Victory of Samothrace, disparagingly contrasted with a ‘roaring automobile’) is a sort of grandmother no longer to be respected ...” (147). I am here reminded of the connotative significance of the motif of the automobile in The Wild Bunch, where completely opposite values are assigned to that which the image symbolizes. In Peckinpah, it is precisely the loss of the past which at least on the interpretative level triggers the violence; in Marinetti violence is practically sanctioned as an instrument with which to resist history. The substance of the Futurist agenda - the interrelation of aggression, dynamics and beauty; the glorification of war and of the machine; and the rejection of the past and the feminine - constitutes a radical politics of artistic expression against which the Romanticist ethos of Peckinpah conflicts profoundly. From the juxtaposition of the two violent stylistics a relatively systematic dichotomization might be inferred: past/future, romanticism/modernity, nature/machine, organic/mechanic. The intersection of the two aesthetic practices around the notion of violence is of course quite an intriguing correspondence, and brings us to my final point: the loss of historical vision implied in the narrative of The Wild Bunch. The temporal context within which the aesthetic statements of Peckinpah and the Futurists were made is inevitably of utmost significance if one wants to apprehend their motivations. Whether Marinetti’s manifesto would have been possible after the two world wars is doubtful. However, Western culture at the turn of the 20th century expresses a more or less infinite faith in technology and progress - in the 183

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ever increasing modernization of the future - which seems to be absolutely absent in Peckinpah, and in many other post-war artists for that matter. In this sense the director departs from the 19 th century Transcendentalist philosophy, which, it appears, retained faith in the future despite its latent pantheism and rather limited belief in the moral benefits of technological progress. In The Wild Bunch, there is not much hope for the future, neither for that of the film’s 1913 setting, nor for that of its time of production.

Bibliography Atkinson, Brooks. Introduction to Walden. In Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. & Introd. Brooks Atkinson. Foreword by Townsend Scudder. New York: The Modern Library, 1950, ix-xxii. Bakunin, Michael. God and the State. Republication of 1916 edition. Introd. by Paul Avrich. New York: Dover Publications, 1970. Brown, Kenneth R. Review of The Wild Bunch. Cineaste 3:3 (Winter 1969/70), 18-20. Butler, Terence. Crucified Heroes. The Films of Sam Peckinpah. London: Gordon Fraser, 1979. Culp, Robert. ‘Sam Peckinpah, The Storyteller and The Wild Bunch: An Appreciation.’ In: Doing it Right. The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. & Introd. Michael Bliss. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, 1-13. Dukore, Bernard F. Sam Peckinpah’s Feature Films. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1836. In: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol.1. Ed. Nina Baym et.al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989, 903-31. ------ . Self-Reliance. 1841. In: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol.1. Ed. Nina Baym et.al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989, 956-72.

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Kitses, Jim. Horizons West. Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies if Authorship Within the Western. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, 134-70. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. 1851. Ed. & Introd. by Alfred Kazin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956. Palmieri, Rory Albert Joseph. ‘The Old West and the Modern World: Western Attributes in the Western and Non-Western Films of Sam Peckinpah.’ DAI-A 45/07 (1984): 0024. Brown University, 1985. Dissertation Abstracts Ondisc. CD-ROM. Proquest. Jan 1985. Prince, Stephen. Savage Cinema. Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Russell, Cathrine. Narrative Mortality. Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Schickel, Richard. ‘Mastery of the “Dirty Western.”’ In: Film 69/70. An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics . Ed. Joseph Morgenstern & Stefan Kanfer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970, 150-2. Schrader, Paul. ‘Sam Peckinpah Going to Mexico.’ In: Doing It Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Michael Bliss. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, 17-30. Segal, Naomi. ‘Who Whom? Violence, politics and the aesthetic.’ In: The Violent Muse. Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe 19101939. Ed. Jana Howlett & Rod Mengham. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994, 141-9. Seydor, Paul. ‘Men Without Women.’ In: Peckinpah: The Western Films. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 77-139. Sragow, Michael. Review of The Wild Bunch. Film Society Review 5:3 (November 1969), 31-7.

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Thoreau, Henry David. Resistance to Civil Government. 1849. In: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol.1. Ed. Nina Baym et. al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989, 1620-35. ------ . Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1854. In: Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. & Introd. Brooks Atkinson. Foreword by Townsend Scudder. New York: The Modern Library, 1950, 3-297. ------ . Walking. 1862. In: Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. & Introd. Brooks Atkinson. Foreword by Townsend Scudder. New York: The Modern Library, 1950, 597-632. ------ . Life Without Principles. 1863. In: Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. & Introd. Brooks Atkinson. Foreword by Townsend Scudder. New York: The Modern Library, 1950, 711-32.

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