So is David Sumner’s revelation in the aftermath of the climax in Sam Peckinpah’s less known masterpiece, Straw Dogs. Everything about the film should scream ‘Classic’ or ‘Blockbuster’- Directed by the man who brought The Wild Bunch to the big screen, starring Dustin Hoffman (fresh off The Graduate), and sporting the ever-popular style of the spaghetti western, Straw Dogs was poised to become a gritty cornerstone of the thriller genre.
But Peckinpah never has been one to play to the mainstream status quo. What he brought to the screen with Straw Dogs in December of 1971 was more shocking, more brutal, more disenchanting than any of his productions to date, and would never again be rivaled by any of his later films (even the famously drear Pat Garrety and Billy The Kid; or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). Audiences attending the Cineplex expected to see a modern day western, what they saw instead was a challenging (albeit impressive), probing discourse on the nature of violence, and the meaning of masculinity.
Dustin Hoffman is David Sumner, an American mathematician moving with his new wife, Amy (played by the nubile, not-quite-innocent Susan George) to her home town in rural England. This quaint setting serves well to put the audience immediately at ease. The English countryside is often associated with peacefulness, and escape from the rigors of life in our modern, fast-paced society. This is exactly Peckinpah’s intention, it seems. The delightful gentility of the setting prevails, even when we are introduced to the film’s antagonists with the first ten minutes. It is an unnerving contrast to the ultimate violence played out later. This particular setting contrasts so well that it has been nicked, referenced, and imitated by countless films hence (such as The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974) and An American Werewolf in London (1981) a decade later). Perhaps if the events in question were to happen in a more tumultuous environment, they would not be near as distressing as they are.
Almost immediately after the newlyweds’ arrival in town, we are met with Charlie Venner, Amy’s once-upon-a-time suitor, and his volatile uncle Tom Hedden. Throw in a few untrustworthy men fixing the roof of David’s shed, and the village idiot Henry Niles, and this once peaceful town seems ripe for conflict. It is only too obvious, however, that the tranquility of the couple’s surroundings is simply a veil. We watch as the men David pays to refurbish the shed help him to set up an antique ‘man trap’, which looks remarkably similar to a very large bear trap. We sit idly by as he discovers his wife’s cat strangled and hanging in the closet. And all the while, David Sumner remains passive, even when the workers mockingly call him ‘sir’. Amy spurs him to confront them about the cat, to which he is painfully resistant. He is calm, collected, and reluctant to upset the tranquil order of things in the countryside. And when Amy exclaims, “You are a coward!” we are thinking the exact same thing. This is the first time when Peckinpah hints at a theme that we already believe we know: Manhood is inextricably connected to, and measured by, violence.
The clock is wound to countdown until the world explodes the moment David’s apparent enemies invite him to go duck hunting. Charlie Venner and his compatriots helping to mend David’s shed designate a spot in the wilderness for him to sit to catch the ducks that they will ‘flush’ his way. In an almost too-well expected turn of events, we realize with him that they have left him there, miles from home, to await what unfortunate events will transpire in his absence.
It is strangely ironic that the next sequence is often cited as the point at which the film becomes controversial and disturbing, when in fact it is far from the most violent or graphic. Charlie Venner shows up at the Sumner residence and visits his past obsession, Amy. He forces himself upon her. Ultimately, it becomes obvious that all is not as it should be… she begins to enjoy it. We, as the audience, are broadsided with an incredibly unsettling thought. Do we, as movie-goers accustomed to so much violence, enjoy the attack, the rape of our senses, just as Amy does? Is violence a pleasurable diversion to us, instead of the violation that it should be? The juxtaposition of Amy’s rape with David’s guilt over killing an innocent duck compounds our dilemma. The moment is not controversial. It is probing. It is disturbing not because of what it depicts to us, but because of what it reveals about us, the violent nature within ourselves.
Sam Peckinpah further acquaints us with this disenchantment by not following the incident with any form of closure. Amy doesn’t tell David what happened, and Charlie Venner goes about business as usual. The explosion of violence that we know is coming finds its avenue through a completely unrelated circumstance. Henry Niles, the aforementioned village idiot, runs off at a party with Tom Hedden’s daughter. Tom, Charlie, and the three others (who left David high and dry in the moors) form a group eerily similar to an old west posse to find him, and lynch him. David and Amy find themselves in the middle of the situation by chance when they accidentally hit Niles with their car, and take him home with the intention of trying to get him to a hospital. Inevitably, Tom Hedden and Co. discover Niles’ presence at the Sumner home, and the fight that David must wage is no longer his own. In this moment, Peckinpah surrounds the situation with a sort of pointlessness, a senselessness that the audience cannot comprehend. No one can be in the right. Because of this, the moment in which David becomes a man- “I will not allow violence against this house”- seems completely empty.
The clock, wound ever too tight, explodes. Tom Hedden shoots the magistrate, who had believed he could resolve the matter by simply talking. In Peckinpah’s world men are violent and the magistrate, ever diplomatic, could not survive it. Amy, who until this point has been pushing David to act, loses her previous objectivity and pleads for Henry Niles to be turned over. Hedden, Venner, and the others begin breaking windows. For David Sumner, the world has turned upside down. He must kill or be killed. Still, the explosion of rage and brutality that he unleashes goes far beyond necessary. The longer the conflict continues, the more senseless it becomes. And David himself escalates it. He begins by simply wiring one attacker’s hands together at the window to effectively trap him. From there, we watch as he boils oil on the stove to use as a weapon, bludgeons attackers with a fire poker, and opens them up with a shotgun. But in the middle of all the chaos, we are still under the preconception that he is simply defending his home. Then, Peckinpah flips the world on us once more.
Charlie Venner himself rescues Amy from being assaulted (yet again) by one of his own fellow attackers, killing him with a shotgun. In any other film, a less honest film, a fake reality, David and Charlie would reconcile their differences, apologize to each other, and help to clean up the mess. But, Peckinpah seems to say, violence is masculinity, and one has to see it through. David uses the moment to attack Charlie, ultimately putting the over-sized man trap over his head.
Whom do we root for? For whom do we cheer? Certainly not Amy, her irresponsible flaunting of her sexuality was the root of much of the conflict in the first place. Charlie? Tom Hedden? One cannot side with the dead. And in the end, David understood- to defeat monsters, one must become a monster. For a brief moment, he reflects on what he has done, “Jesus, I killed them all…” How do we make heads or tails of the tragedy, the senselessness?
Peckinpah’s answer? We cannot. The final lines of the film reflect the aimlessness of human existence, and of violence.
“I don’t know my way home,” Henry Niles says as David drives him down a deserted road.
“That’s okay,” David says, “Neither do I.”
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