Film Dunce is a weekly series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a movie that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never seen. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.
It’s easy to argue that we, as a society, have become steadily desensitized to violence. As groups like Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence, and whoever puts those irritating offensive content stickers on albums, point out, there’s a whole lot of bad, mean stuff in pop culture these days. It only stands to reason that in a world of cinema that now includes no less than seven Saw films and a remake of I Spit on Your Grave, we’re a little more hardcore than we used to be. After all, Drive was one of my favorite movies of last year, and that graphically showed a woman’s head exploding. With that in mind, my next entry for our Film Dunce feature is Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah’s contentious meditation on violence. And may I just say, holy shit.
If there was ever a movie that the passage of time and cultural mores did not dilute or de-fang, Straw Dogs is it. First released in 1971, Straw Dogs was immediately controversial for its portrayals of brutal violence, moral ambiguity and most famously, a graphical and brutal rape scene. Of course, Peckinpah, the man behind The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, was not exactly a stranger to cinematic brutality. But the reputation Straw Dogs has for graphic violence obscured a pretty significant aspect of the movie: it’s not just a violent movie, it’s about violence. It’s a fine distinction to make, particularly in a medium that has a strong tendency towards solipsism and metatextuality. Peckinpah’s film is not about violence in film or even about how acts of violence define us as people, like David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence; it seems to be far more about the inherent violence in us all, lurking under a façade of amiable personality.
Of course, Straw Dogs is gripping without even its queasy subtext. Mild mannered mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moves to a quaint English hamlet with his wife Amy (Susan George), and an atmosphere of tension and passive-aggression kicks in that never relents. The inhabitants of the village are curiously antagonistic to David from the start, and the film leaves it maddeningly ambiguous as to exactly why. A studly young local formerly had a fling with Susan, which seems to be the ostensible source of tension, but more than that, there’s hints of xenophobia, class conflict and nationalism that flicker through just enough to hint at the underlying hostility. Watching Straw Dogs, even after over 40 years of increasingly graphic violent movies, is an exercise in watching sublimated violence, aggression and innuendo. At points, even the non-violent scenes of the movie become more than just kitchen sink drama, and approach the quiet dread of well-made horror.
And as for the film’s centerpiece, the notorious rape scene in which Amy is brutalized by her former flame and further by one of his chums, who holds them both at gunpoint. Speaking as someone who has voluntarily watched Irréversible on more than one occasion, it’s still rough even by modern film standards. It’s not even so much the physical aspect of the scene that is so affecting and makes one squirm; that the young woman in question seems to be acquiescing to and even enjoying it raises many uncomfortable questions and implications. It’s disquieting, to say the least. I can’t imagine any modern time period in which inclusion of such a scene would not be controversial. But essentially everything about Straw Dogs is just as disquieting as I imagine it would have been in 1971. It’s the rare kind of movie that retains its uncomfortable, unsettling power regardless of how inured we’ve become.
