Straw Dogs (1971)

Sam Peckinpah

UK

118 min, color, English

It is impossible to view Straw Dogs without reference to its historical time frame: the Vietnam War, and the civil rights violence. It is also nearly impossible without reference to the various forms of abuse and violence in the film itself: psychological, and physical, rape, and murder. This has always been a controversial film, repeatedly labeled as horror, fascist, exploitation, seen as a glorification of violence, of machismo triumphing through brutality, or as a carrier of misogynist attitudes, taking the objectification of women to new lows.

The story is simple as a plot: the American mathematician David (Dustin Hoffman) and his stunning British wife Amy (Susan George) go for a year to the small village in Cornwall where Amy grew up. Almost immediately, they are beset by various seedy lower-class locals, including Amy's ex-boyfriend. The psychological drama escalates with various confrontations between David and the locals, David and Amy, Amy and the locals, and the locals among each other. Two of the locals rape Amy but she never tells David. When he shelters a local who has (unknown to David) just murdered a girl and the others come to demand him, the situation gets out of hand. The film ends in an orgy of violence with David dispatching all assailants to their deaths.

As simple as the plot is, its content is difficult material. It is easy to misread the film, but once one delves beyond the overt flashes of violence, one finds an extremely gratifying picture made even more subversive because Peckinpah does not give any answers to the critical and scary things he draws our attention to.

On the surface, the film is about the confrontation of the civilized and urbane David with the brutish, almost moronic, locals. They threaten him, but his high pacifist ideals render him unable to stand up to them. Only when they "cross the line," and threaten the lives of him, his wife, and the seemingly innocent other individual, does he feel justified in responding with violence. He finally "becomes a man," or some such nonsensical interpretation that thoroughly misunderstands Peckinpah's intent. So, let's go through some of the more interesting aspects of the film in detail.

David is quite explicitly hiding from something back in America, although it is not made clear what. He seems to be running, unwilling to commit (in the words of his wife), or make a stand. It is quite obvious that he is a pacifist who disapproves of America's war in Vietnam but who does not have the courage to do anything about it. His displeasure with physical violence is clear in the exchange with the locals when they ask him whether it is true that America has become so violent that it is dangerous to walk in the street and whether he has ever seen violence: "Only between commercials," he says bitterly, which they shrug off as the American's attempt to be witty.

Violence is everywhere, and America is knee-deep in it. Like or not, people are dying in Vietnam, and people are dying in the streets. Pacifism, however, is not the morally upright position its defenders make it out to be. It is more akin to an ostrich with its head in the sand, hoping that if one does not look at the unpleasantness, it will go away. David has escaped on necessity to look at reality, but finds himself confronted with its equivalent, which, although on a much smaller scale, is however intensely personal. He has to deal with a bunch of grubby low-class workers prone to violence who clearly envy him and wish him harm.

And herein lies the ambivalence of this film. On one hand, Peckinpah is at pains to demonstrate that weakness invites violence by goading others to take what they want by force. It gives them an excuse to do what they want. But on the other hand, David's weakness is apparent rather than real. He is a bully of a different sort: the civilized, brainy, condescending one who is convinced of his superiority and who feels he has license to attack the ones he perceives as weak. It could be his wife, whom he consoles with things like "you are not that stupid, you just need help sometimes." Or it could be the locals whom he feels he can manipulate by entrapping them into a confession about their murder of the cat. Or it could be the vicar, who gets loud music and Montesquieu blasted into his face as David delivers a quick rant about religion. Or it could be the rather brutish Tom whose offer of cigarettes he dismissed, who was shamed by the magistrate with a refusal of a drink, and for whom (among others) David instantly orders a round of drinks before condescendingly leaving the pub. He is cruel and domineering, although his small size prevents him from being physically violent most of the time. But he is violent and abusive nonetheless. The worst part about him is that he feels that he is better than everyone else.

And so it comes as no surprise that his lordly manner eventually provokes the locals to take something that David believes belongs to him: his wife. She is perky, her breasts are tempting, her mini-skirt especially so. Yet, they do nothing more than stare and dream about fucking her. She clearly wants them to sweat, she did not pose for them naked without reason. She wants to be free to flaunt her sexuality, enjoy the attention, but not feel threatened. This is fine, and it would have worked too if it were not for her husband. After all, the locals do display very strong aversion to violence against women (e.g. when it comes to Henry). When Amy wants David to do something about "the stares" which she feels are almost "licking her," he does nothing. She really couldn't care less about these licks, but she does care about her husband avoiding yet another issue where he has to take a stand. Their marriage is disintegrating, she cannot even get him jealous enough anymore.

But she is mistaken: jealous he is, and his jealousy is established very well early on, particularly the scene where he forces her to lie about her past with Charlie and becomes playful like a child when she tells him nothing sexual had happened between them. Yes, love he may not have in abundance, but jealousy and pettiness he can spare. But he is not the one to take a stand when his wife confronts him with news of the lecherous behavior of the locals. He is not going to stand up to them. Like any self-involved narcissistic individual, he wants her to prove how much she loves him by testing her. He intentionally leaves her alone with her ex Charlie and then spies on them from the bar. He intentionally goes off on a hunting trip and leaves her alone. It is all to test her fidelity, and to make her understand just how great he is. And, of course, such a thing can never work. It is not at all surprising that Amy does not quite resist the rape (by Charlie) all that much. David has practically ensured that she would welcome it, both with his lack of concern for her and his passive-aggressive submissive behavior. She wants a strong man who wants her, and Charlie is just that. But she does not want to have sex with him, it is enough that he is there.

And what does David offer her? He dismisses her, threatens her, treats her like a stupid child with an air of bemused condescension. He never allows discussion (no heater upstairs for her, he needs it in his study), he is neglectful (no walking with her), he is patronizing (she can't learn chess, no matter how hard she studies --- he'd even pressure her so she cannot get the answer anyway), he is sarcastic (she does not understand what he does, "Nice try" he tells her when she tries to explain his work to Charlie), he is a jerk (winding the alarm clock with her purring next to him!), and he is a bastard (stops at nothing to gratify his own ego). It is no wonder that this marriage is on the rocks, he just does not care about Amy even though he supposedly loves her. This is a marriage where abuse is rampant, even if it is not overtly physical. But then, wound heal, psychological damage does not.

David is a brute, perhaps quite a bit nastier than the physical bullies at the village. His "transformation" into a killer is only a matter of degree, not of kind. It is all the more disturbing that he manages to preserve the air of moral superiority in that as well! It is worth remembering that he does not know about the rape (Amy never told him and he never bothered to find out why she has visible bruises on her face). So it cannot be the case of him defending her. Her safety sort of comes from the fact that she happens to be inside "his" house, and she happens to "belong" to him. Amy does not want to fight, she knows who Henry is, and she is quite aware that the people outside their house probably have good reason to want him. Let them have him, she says. Her position is quite strong because we know that Henry did in fact kill the girl.

And here's where Peckinpah throws us in a loop: David turns around and all you can read in his eyes is utter contempt for Amy. How can she possibly suggest such a gross thing? Turn over a possibly innocent man to these brutes? Not while he breathes! All of it takes several seconds of silence to convey, and Hoffman is absolutely superb at doing it. Yet, the result is that six men will die and the killer will go free. That is the price of moral superiority.

This view is subversive because it runs close to the American ideal of innocence: David's stand for Henry actually feels right, and that is the problem. We find ourselves rooting for the killer because we know that David is not aware of his guilt, so his stand would appear everything a morally upright man should do. Amy is the weakling and we are horrified at her willingness to sacrifice this man to ensure their survival. Or so it would seem.

Morality can be just as destructive... nay, it is twice as destructive as amorality, which you can always count on to seek out self-interest, hence preservation, hence less violence. The moral high ground position is such that anyone occupying its rarefied ether would not count lives, with the motto "every life is precious," they are ready to destroy thousands to save one. The inherent contradiction of the "moral" position is never questioned, it is never explored, and it is a sanctified dogma one questions at one's own peril. Peckinpah's bold assault on this dogma is all the more startling because he was directly attacking the collective hallucination of the entire upper-class American society at the time: Vietnam abroad, and the civil rights movement at home.

How does David react to Amy's plea to be let out and Charlie's attempt to diffuse the situation? He hits her, drags her by her hair (recalling the rape scene where Charlie did that to her), and then tells her to shut up, scaring her that the savages have gone too far and would have to kill them both if they come in. But the shooting of the magistrate was clearly an accident, unlike all the killing that David is about to indulge in. It is not even clear that the "boys" would hang around if they get Henry. They had not come to brawl with David, after all, three of them were in his house, and they allowed themselves to be pushed out without ceremony.

It is absolutely unbelievable how this film has been consistently misread ever since its release. Critics dismissed it as glorification of Neanderthal machismo that finds expression only through violence, a fascist piece of work whose attitude toward women was deplorable, and as an exploitation piece devoid of any substance. How can any of these charges hold water is beyond me. As I tried to show, violence is integral to the story, but there is no suggestion of approval or disapproval: It just is, it exists, and failure to account for it would cause it to erupt.

The rape scene functions at the intersection of two male conquests: Charlie and Norman finally get their prey --- Amy and at the same time David gets his prey --- the bird he kills. Women appear as trophies, like dead birds, in this competition. They are victims of the male contest, things to take when wanted and toss aside when unwanted. Although both rapists and hunter feel a tinge of regret after the fact, it does not change them in any way. Peckinpah does what every good artist always does: he reveals the uncomfortable truth that rape and murder are juvenile sports where bruised male egos try to convince themselves of their power. They are utterly pointless and devoid of any meaning except the rather fleeting affirmation of one's manhood.

How can anyone read misogyny in all this, is beyond me. Yes, Amy does "strut her stuff," but that does not make her a slut, a point she vigorously defends in one scene with David who nearly accuses her of causing the lecherous stares with her behavior. Amy, the one sympathetic character, is not beyond blame, of course. She is from this town, she knows that its ways are not the easy-going sexually liberated ways of the city. Yet she refuses to compromise and accommodate local tastes, much like David and his "any American cigarettes" does. She has married an intellectual, and she feels she has the right to lord it over the locals as well. This is not to say that she deserved to be raped, far from it. I am just noting that anyone who refuses to accept the local mores and who insists on remaining who he is wherever he goes, bears a lot of the responsibility when his behavior causes disaster.

But the rape scene is a rape scene, there's no doubt about it. Maybe Amy did submit to Charlie, but she did it under duress. She invites him in, probably intending to flirt a bit, but not suspecting things would go out of hand. The moment she realizes that he might not stop, she tries to get him out. She slaps him, and then he hits her. Really hard. She finds herself with her back against the wall and then her eyes tell the rest: she absolutely terrified, she already knows what's coming, and she can only hope that Charlie would come to his senses. She can only ask him, pray to him, but she cannot force him out. She slaps him again, hoping it would shake him out of his aroused state, but this only incites him. He hits her hard and then threatens to hit her again. She goes limp and lies in tears still hoping for empathy.

But none is forthcoming from Charlie. Amy's cries only make him more determined. Eventually, she resigns herself to the rape and begs him to "go easy" on her, yet another devastatingly effective way of conveying her utter helplessness and desperation. He is going to rape her, now she knows this, so she does the only thing she possibly can to ensure he does not hurt her even more: appear to "enjoy it." It is not at all apparent to me that Amy is actively enjoying the rape, she is crying all the time even while hugging him. She is humiliated, disgraced, and violated, and there is no denying that. She is so thorn by the experience that she actually asks Charlie to comfort her, after all, she had known him for a long time. What would a feminist want her to do? Die defending her chastity?

And then comes to most hateful and repulsive scene (not that the first rape was somehow erotic and attractive): Norman comes in, threatens Charlie with a gun, and rapes Amy as well. Charlie holds her down so she does not struggle. Her humiliation is complete, but, interestingly, this has also resulted in Charlie's own humiliation (after all, Amy was "his"). This now sets in motion a chain of events that would produce the deadly clash of his male ego and that of Norman's, who does not seem to understand that he has threaded on Charlie's "territory." It is appalling that Charlie would murder Norman for raping Amy even after he has done it himself. It is not her honor or her feelings that he is defending, it is his own small, selfish, and bruised male ego.

Peckinpah clearly did not intend to suggest that Amy somehow deserved to be raped. She may be naive, she may want to have a bit of fun, but she is not vicious, unlike David who is. The locals may want her (and you, in the audience, also want her, admit it!) but how they act on that desire is entirely up to them (and you, in the audience). She truly is innocent in all this, and all sympathies of the audience lie squarely with her, even when she suggests letting the assailants have Henry, even when she attempts to abandon David and leave the house, even when she shoots the last attacker. That scene is quite revealing as well: Amy stands shattered on the flight of stairs; she is devastated because she has just murdered a man, and it matters little to her that she was justified in doing so. He is dead, and her husband had brought it all upon them. She is shaking. David goes up the stairs, touches her with a gesture saying "Good job," picks up his glasses, and walks off. He has no moral qualms about it, he feels he is the good guy. His smile at the end of the film is even more memorable because of this.

The ending is absolutely marvelous and ambiguous, all the more interesting because Dustin Hoffman ad libbed the crucial last line of the dialogue. When Henry says that he does not know his way home, David replies, "That's all right. I don't know either." The car then drifts into the foggy night, an innocent killer and another one by choice shoulder to shoulder. David is never coming back to his own life because he took the leap that tore off his little mask of complacency that had allowed him to distance himself from the violence of his country and be a pacifist. But this is not possible, Peckinpah says, violence is here to stay, whether you like it or not. If you avoid it, you only cause its eruption to be so much worse and deadly. You must not shy away from it, but acknowledge its pervasiveness. Only then do you have a chance of living in peace. As the Romans said, if you want peace, prepare for war. And David is prepared for war, not any war, mind you, but a just one, where he is the good guy. And Amy? She is left sitting on the stairs, the one true victim of all this male competition.

February 13, 2004