Cito extractos del artículo que enlazo más arriba:
(...)
The film as a whole is far more complex than most people give it credit for. Most egregiously, the central dynamic is routinely mischaracterized. David Sumner isn’t even remotely a meek, cerebral pacifist being forced to turn violent by a gang of less civilized thugs. For one thing, he’s a thug himself. And David isn’t particularly meek, either. He’s just small, which renders him passive and ineffectual around bigger men or groups. But whenever he senses an advantage, David is no less a bully than the louts who surround him. In moments when he feels confident about his standing, David is openly aggressive, making his eventual “transformation” more a leap of degree and style than of substance. I doubt that the casting of Hoffman was incidental. Any number of larger actors could have played a character amounting to nothing more than a representation of intellect vs. physicality. With Hoffman — whose fussy, methodical perfectionism fits hand and glove with this role — you get a calculating control-freak of a guy whose stature dictates that he be passive in aid of self-preservation, whether he wants to be or not. And it’s obvious from nearly frame one that he does not want to be passive. He guards this secret rage like a junkyard dog, bristling at any invitation to reveal or act on it and displacing its force by heaping petty tortures onto the woman he married.
(...)
Peckinpah’s condescension toward David is the point of the entire film, and there’s nothing slight about it. Nor is Peckinpah’s derision an expression of anti-intellectualism. Instead, it is David’s cruelty and hypocrisy that seem to rile the director. Not because he’s a primal beast who won’t acknowledge his glorious manhood until he picks up a weapon to defend his home and his principles (a crock of an interpretation if ever there was one), but because he’s a bully of a different stripe whose “principles” amount to fancying himself more civilized by virtue of the trappings he’s inherited or acquired.
Having adopted tactics that are seemingly passive, David wants and expects to dominate other men without having to fight out in the open. Consider the props he brings along to this rustic, working class village: well-publicized educational credentials; a trophy wife who also happens to be the once-’n’-future prize cow of the town; wealth enough to rent the local manor; a “job” that pays him to sit on his ass all day; and a ludicrously inappropriate sports car. On top of all that, he’s an American. Before we even know him, we know him, and so do they. When the locals eye the stranger, it’s not just his unfamiliar face catching their attention. He’s out of place in a calculated way, prepped-up in white slacks and sneakers to ride in his white roadster through a muddy, dusty, grimy town for which nothing white or sporty was designed. David is deliberately other in a way that’s meant to shield him through implied elevation.
When he first meets Charlie, he sizes him up as both a threat (his apparent history with Amy) and a lesser man (laborer). In a smarmy attempt to establish his impeccable civility, David addresses Charlie as “Mr. Venner,” to which Charlie responds by inviting David to call him Charlie instead. Mr. Civility’s response is to decline to respond at all. Instead, he trots over to the pub to spy on his wife and her ex, though ostensibly to buy some cigarettes. Once inside and done with the spying, he approaches the bar and asks for “any American brand” they’ve got, a fairly obvious insult that’s topped off when he declines to accept those cigarettes as “paid for” by one of the brutish regulars. David’s not just thoughtless in his approach to the locals; he’s aggressively thoughtless, unwilling to cede one brick from his delicate fortress of advantage.
David never stoops to rudeness, of course, because rudeness would bring him down from his perch. Instead, he’s affably condescending to the point of self-effacement, though he never loses sight of the line he’s drawn between himself and others, and he fully expects them to observe it, too. While outwardly friendly to the men in his employ, it never occurs to David to extend them the courtesy of familiarity. Throughout the film, the locals refer to him only as “sir” or “Mr. Sumner,” and throughout the film, he’s not once moved to discourage their deference, even when it’s revealed to be brazenly insincere. It’s not so much that David relishes lording his status over the other men in an openly tyrannical manner, because he certainly does not. Rather, he counts on their awareness of that status to protect him by limiting their willingness to undermine or harm a figure with authority. They work for him, after all. What better insulation could he have? And what greater insurance against rejection or insurrection could there be than his admirably benevolent approach to feudalism? In David’s eyes, they have no cause to disrespect him, so high is the road he travels. As the film progresses and their disdain for him becomes pointed and unbearable, he’ll show them who he is, all right. Not who he could become if provoked, mind you … but who he is.
(...)
With Amy, David removes them solely to sleep or have sex, and even then only when he’s prepared to direct the action himself. The rest of the time, he glares at her through those transparent little walls like a father reproaching a pesky child. There’s a great “glasses” moment between them late in the film, when Amy is sitting distraught in bed after the rape and David returns home from the hunt. He sits down, takes his glasses off and announces that he’s going to fire the workmen the next day. Desperately wounded and angry about her fate, Amy spews recriminations about David’s failure to confront them sooner about the murdered cat, though she doesn’t reveal a thing about what happened while he was gone. Outraged by her attack, David reaches for his glasses and slaps them back on before launching into a tirade about her childish antics having robbed him of the chance to confront the louts, then further berates her for her own cowardice in not confronting them herself.
Not only is his stern daddy act some seriously dirty pool, his counter-attack to her valid accusation is utter bullshit, because he’d pointedly waved off her suggestion to leave town while simultaneously insisting that he’d handle the cat confrontation himself. Amy had neither a voice nor a choice in the matter; such was his determination to stay in control of her while also proving that he wouldn’t run from them. And now, in their bedroom, he’s facing a woman whose wounds and anguish are patently visible (her face is clearly bruised), but he looks right through her because all he can see is his own humiliation and rage. She’s straining to tell him that their situation is desperate, but all he can hear is “I told you so,” which wouldn’t hurt half as much if he didn’t know that she was right. Instead of even trying to read her, he’s furious with her for so accurately reading him. Forget the carnage to come in the siege. This marriage is already a bloodbath.
(...)
We’re never truly on balance, because we know enough to know more than they know about some things, and we know enough to know who doesn’t know about some things, but we’re essentially stuck inside the scenes with the characters, trying to read their faces and body-language well enough to guess what the hell they’re really up to inside of their own heads. It’s a film full of gazes and glances that talk over the dialogue, which frequently feels like something the characters toss out as distractions to fill the void between them while they size each other up. Because it’s a movie led by one big movie star who’s surrounded by unknowns, our inclination is to align with Dustin Hoffman’s David. And because David seems — at first glance — to be more sophisticated and civilized than the backwater rubes of the village, we’re further inclined to view him as the protagonist; a hero set against a gang of villains whose brutishness is right there on the surface. We are trained to root for movie stars and we’re trained to look for counterpoints. Peckinpah knows this and he does want to exploit it, but only to the point where our discomfort at aligning ourselves with the David he reveals makes us queasy with doubt, if not shame. David is not a counterpoint to the louts; he’s a lout in sheep’s clothing. When he escalates the conflict in the final act, David says to Amy, “This is where I live. This is me.” And for once, he’s telling her the truth.
(...)
Peckinpah’s reputation as a manly man making manly movies about manly men really bit him on the ass when Straw Dogs was released, so primed are critics to blur the line between storyteller and advocate. For many a right-thinking, sensitive soul, this movie confirmed his misanthropic reverence for macho violence and his Neanderthal attitude toward women. It’s an odd way to read a film that — to my eye — unmasks misogyny for the juvenile, hypocritical insecurity-salve that it actually is, but the label endures to this day. Never mind that Amy’s character is the lone object of sympathy in the piece. If Peckinpah introduces her with a tit shot, his cards are already on the table. No need to wonder what, if anything, he meant by that choice in the bigger picture. And no need to think beyond whatever immediate salaciousness he’s implied with such a disrespectful viewpoint. She’s a slutty, braless nymph who’ll get what she’s got coming to her later, or at least we’re supposed to hope so.
What’s galling about this attitude is the notion that Peckinpah deliberately created a character who “asks for” or “deserves” an ugly fate, then served up that ugly fate for our popcorn-addled enjoyment. Try as I might, I’ve yet to unearth a scene wherein Amy says or does anything for which she deserves to be punished, let alone a scene wherein she deserves to be gang-raped by “friends,” belittled, dismissed and abused by her husband, terrorized by violent drunks, or abandoned amongst a sea of corpses while dumbstruck with trauma. What I see is a woman who speaks but is not listened to, who tries to become more adult but is treated like a child, who assumes that she’s safe among friends and with her husband but is dragged across rooms by her hair, slapped, punched and sexually objectified within a labyrinth of macho pissing matches.
Is going braless really a crime of such enormous magnitude? And is there no point at which the responsibility for men’s behavior and choices rests on their own shoulders? From the outset, Amy’s gravest sin is her effortless desirability. And yes, that opening shot of her breasts is a provocation. Peckinpah wants you to want her and knows that you will. But what you do with that wanting is all about you. It’s got nothing to do with Amy or with Susan George or with Peckinpah. The point at which anyone — be it you or Kael or the lecherous cretin in the seat behind you — deems her a slutty baby-doll who deserves to get what’s coming is the point where the viewer’s own misogyny overwhelms what’s on the screen. Blaming the director for making you feel something that’s not strictly dictated by the content or tone of his film is a weak-kneed bit of scapegoating in the face of uncomfortable thoughts.
Peckinpah knows what he’s really up to, and there are plentiful details sprinkled throughout to support a much sadder, more contemplative view of Amy’s fate. From scene one, David is condescending and dismissive toward the woman he supposedly loves. When she attempts to describe the book he’s come there to write, he cuts her off in mid-sentence with a “Good try …” blatantly expressing his disdain for her intelligence. Instead of climbing into the car to leave as she expects, he walks away without explanation, forcing her to ask repeatedly where he’s going (turns out that he’s going inside the pub to get a more candid view of her interactions with Charlie). At home, he overrules her intention to move a heater upstairs, complaining that he needs it more in his space, case closed. He’s patronizing when she’s trying to teach herself chess (deliberately messing with her at the point when she’s sure she’s got a good move). He puts off her sexual advances until he’s ready to direct the action and he seems self-conscious about their displays of affection in front of other men. He’s annoyed if she hangs around him in his study, but suspicious and confrontational if she goes outside to chat with the workmen. He drags his feet when she asks him to fix the toaster or calls him to dinner, but complains openly about unfinished household tasks he deems to be her purview. When he’s angry with her, he scolds her like a child. And when she needs him most, he abandons her emotionally or literally, so caught up is he in his own needs or preoccupations.
Theirs is a horrible, hurtful marriage, though it’s not technically “violent” until quite late in the movie. David seems to have married a beautiful, flirtatious, girlish woman only to hate her for being exactly what he thought he wanted. There’s a revealing moment during his contretemps with the pastor that cuts to the heart of his mixed feelings about having a trophy wife. David is attempting further one-upsmanship by describing his academic objective to Rev. Hood, but the holy man is so distracted by the sight of Amy mixing a drink that he’s obviously not even listening. The look on David’s face is priceless, as if Amy is a weapon so thoroughly unsuited to this exchange that she’s morphed into a liability and wrecked his shot at the intellectual knockout punch he was winding up to deliver. Immediately after they say their goodbyes, Peckinpah cuts to the Sumners preparing for bed, and Amy complains about how awful he’d been to the reverend. David responds with, “No … I like him. And his wife is very attractive.” It’s practically a non sequitur, except that it betrays the moment upon which David is still most focused: when Amy’s allure got the attention that he’d wanted for himself. Even when she’s doing nothing but being, she’s a bit of a thorn in his side. Again and again, Peckinpah shows David incapable of being happy with her as is. In fact, the one and only time that David is entirely loose and playful with Amy comes directly after he’s probed her for information about her past relationship with Charlie and she’s claimed that nothing sexual ever happened between them; a revelation that makes him positively giddy. He never comes close to that state again until the final shot of the movie, and Amy’s nowhere in the frame.
When it comes to the most vehement charges against Peckinpah’s supposed misogyny, the central point of focus is usually the rape scene, which is frequently described as too erotic to be anything but wish fulfillment for both the audience and Amy. Taken out of context, it may seem a difficult scene to defend, but why take it out of context? Amy has no reason to mistrust her ex-boyfriend Charlie, though she undoubtedly suspects that he’s visiting because he’s still attracted to her. She may even find his enduring interest intriguing enough to explore further by letting him in, but so what? Is there any preceding scene between them that should lead her to expect that he’ll rape her? Should those of us who’ve let ex-boyfriends into our homes without being raped be deemed unnaturally lucky? Subliminally disappointed? Peckinpah at his darkest is not half as misanthropic as those who assume she should have known what was coming as soon as she opened that door. Ditto for those who view Amy’s attempts to stop Charlie’s advances as coy ways of saying “yes” by feigning “no.”
(...)
It’s a baffling assertion, considering that Amy doesn’t at all appear to want the rough stuff. In fact, she’s in agony while being slapped down and dragged by her hair. She does beg him to stop. She does resist. She looks utterly horrified. She’s weeping. And it’s only when Charlie threatens to hit her again that she submits. (Wait a minute … I thought she wanted the rough stuff?) And when Charlie does commence with the rape, Amy never quits crying. When we first get her POV, she’s focused on the fireplace, as if looking for a mental exit through which she might better endure the inevitable. And when she does shift gears into the part where she seemingly enjoys the rape, it’s commenced with her whispered plea to Charlie to go “easy.” If she likes the rough stuff so much, why not keep fighting? Why not give him more reason to hit and restrain and pummel her? What Kael seems to miss in this deeply ambiguous scene is that Amy effectively seizes the power from Charlie by submitting. Not only does she lessen the damage done to her body, she converts his cruelty into sympathy; she reminds him that he actually cares for the person inside of the body he’s assaulting. And then she asks him to comfort her, which he does. Only then — after the rape is finished and he’s humbled — does she appear to be responding to him emotionally. Not once during this scene is Amy not in tears. And not once does she show a preference for the rough stuff. That Peckinpah has used their mutual history to allow for ambiguity is brave because it’s so disturbing. In addition, he builds to this scene from a position of sustained tension in general, assuring an erotic component by virtue of the eroticism inherent in sustained tension itself. That the scene inevitably plays as both heated and repulsive is the point, really, because your response is less about what Amy wants to happen to Amy than what you might want to happen to Amy.
Blame Peckinpah if it makes you sleep better at night, but you were the one who was aroused, and it’s not as if he’s encouraging you to be proud of it. In fact, he hedges his bets and underlines his main point by having Norman arrive and sodomize Amy while Charlie holds her down. Yes, Norman’s carrying a weapon, but even after he sets it aside, Charlie feels compelled to do right by his fellow man in the moment and facilitate the assault. When push comes to shove, failing to act as “one of the boys” is at least incrementally worse than betraying the girl you think you still love. Is there a more nauseating moment in the movie than Peckinpah’s close-up of Charlie’s finger tenderly caressing Amy’s cheek while she howls in agony? Not for my money. Exactly which terrible thing is Peckinpah saying about women with that shot? And later when she’s sitting wounded in bed, furious and desperate about her husband’s refusal to recognize her pain, is she secretly relishing the exciting afternoon she had with the boys? And the next night at the church social, is Amy’s tearful breakdown to flashbacks of Charlie’s assault meant to be read as a wistful bit of swooning over how much she enjoyed the rough stuff?
What place do these scenes have in Peckinpah’s misogynistic world-view? Are they insincere, winking palliatives placed there to cover his ass, or do they count as part of the movie? Perhaps I’m being naive, but I’ll afford him the benefit of the doubt, because so much of the movie is about the undeserved, systematic objectification of Amy. Besides, in spite of assertions that Amy is a bubble-headed sex toy who digs it when men force her into service, she must be smarter than she looks, because she seems to have grown a lot between the opening scene and the last act. By the time she enters the church social, she’s no longer relaxed and comfortable in that gorgeous body. Now she’s stiff, closed-off and drawn in on herself. Plus, she’s finally donned a bra. Hurrah! On top of that, her self-destructive tendency to afford trust to the men around her has morphed into just the sort of blanket paranoia that nice girls undeserving of rape should so obviously embrace. Contrary to David’s skepticism, there may yet be hope for Amy’s chess game.
(...)
As dreadful as the various acts of carnage turn out to be, it’s the drama between David and Amy that plays as most horrific. A big part of the reason we root to keep the thugs outside is our natural inclination to protect Amy, particularly in light of what she’s already experienced at their hands. But protecting Amy is the last thing on David’s mind. Her safety is little more than by default, a function of her position on his team. In view of the set-up that leads to this bloody showdown, the siege exists not to turn David into a man Peckinpah can finally respect for his willingness to get violent, but to unmask the depth of his contempt for the woman he claims to love. When it’s eventually down to David versus the last remaining thug, he’s utterly dependent on Amy to save him by shooting the other man as they scuffle. She hesitates just long enough to register whether she might have another choice beyond killing, then finally pulls the trigger, though it clearly horrifies her to do so. And what is David’s response? He glares at her reproachfully for being so slow, then climbs the stairs and pats her on the cheek with withering condescension, despite the fact that she’s cowering and deeply traumatized. He continues upstairs to collect Henry, then casually puts on a jacket as he’s leaving to drive him back into town. Almost as an afterthought, he turns and asks Amy if she’ll be okay. Still in shock, she nods silently while David walks away … abandoning her amid the corpses and destruction without so much as a second thought.
This is supposed to depict the triumph of macho prowess over mealy-mouthed intellectualism? This is a celebration of a weakling finally becoming a man? Surely Peckinpah was a skillful enough director to have conjured palpable triumph if he’d wanted us to feel triumphant. Instead, the ending is ugly and unsettling, with Amy left alone in devastation and David driving away into darkness with a smile so inappropriate to the results of his “stand” that we cannot help but wonder what the fuck? If Peckinpah truly wanted to make Death Wish, he’d have made Death Wish. But Straw Dogsisn’t a vengeance orgy at all unless you’re not quite paying attention. The locals aren’t avenging Janice’s murder and David isn’t avenging Amy’s rape because you cannot avenge events you don’t know exist. Peckinpah goes out of his way to construct a showdown without a shred of genuine justification, letting the audience sift through the facts for themselves if they need or want to justify their own bloodlust from the comfort of their seats. He can’t have simply failed to notice the gaps in logical justification because they’re just too enormous. Consider the moment when Charlie is armed and chooses to kill Norman instead of taking Norman’s suggestion that he kill David so they can both rape Amy during the siege. David’s immediate reaction to Charlie saving Amy is not to thank him or reconsider the situation, but to attack and kill him.
This cannot be empty action staged solely for our mindless pleasure, because it would be so much easier to stage it differently and guarantee our mindless pleasure. Let David know about the rape. Have Charlie turn the gun on David. Show David comforting and defending his wife during the siege. Eliciting unequivocal male-fantasy-fueled cheers from movie patrons is not beyond the skills of the average hack, so how did Peckinpah fail so miserably to insure pleasure or the comfort of certainty from all that pain? Instead, we’re kept off balance throughout and are left with events that would be all but impossible to celebrate except by deliberately ignoring what’s been shown, and by deliberately ignoring our own unease as the credits roll. I’m fascinated by people who praise his ability to disturb them while simultaneously implying that they’re the only ones savvy enough to be disturbed; or rather, the only ones savvy enough to be disturbed in a way that inspired them to wonder what he was up to in the process. The rest of us rubes are too stupid to escape his diabolical trap unscathed, of course, so thank god they’re around to sound the alarm lest we’re moved to party in the aisles when the lights come up. Vigilant opposition to reckless pandering is legitimate critical turf, of course, but it’s disingenuous (and more than a tad ironic) to frame that complaint with such blatant pandering to the proto-PC “humanism” of the same smug elitists Peckinpah probably aimed to rattle in the first place.
Mine is something of an eccentric perspective, I suppose, but some of the filmmakers most routinely labeled “misanthropic” or “misogynist” strike me as uncommonly brave and thoughtful (not to mention creative) in their explorations of disrespect toward women. Accident of proximity and the shared spotlights of controversy and banning have forever linked Straw Dogs to that other 1971 contemplation of violence, A Clockwork Orange, though I’d imagine that Kubrick and Peckinpah were both bright enough to shrug off such comparisons as glib and superficial, seeing as their respective films could not be more different in form or function. But I doubt Kubrick shrugged off Straw Dogs, because its central conceit was so lovingly cribbed when he adapted The Shining a decade later. Again we have the tale of a disintegrating marriage masquerading as a genre piece; and again we have a “loving” husband who goes through a transformation to bullying killer that’s no substantial transformation at all. Toss in the isolated family apparently besieged by local monsters, add a dash of “wife whose style and habits might be seen to bring her misery upon herself,” and you’ve got Straw Dogs as a black-comic supernatural thriller. Oh … and just for good measure, cast a massively famous, charismatic movie star as the husband and surround him with virtual unknowns, all the better to confuse the audience as to when to cut bait and recognize the protagonist for the petty creep that he actually is. Both films are deeply sad without being sentimental or maudlin, but you’ve got to cut through the surface to get at the real stories being told about the humdrum, bloodless violence that sometimes passes itself off as love. Peckinpah did something interesting enough to merit homage from the ultimate in iconoclastic control-freak directors; a claim (or shame) few others can make. He also made a movie whose power to grip and disturb has not waned in more than three decades; an even rarer feat.
When Peckinpah set out to make Straw Dogs, he simply had to see something of David in himself, even if he didn’t really want to. For such a blatantly fictional construct that’s pitched so high, its emotions ring uncomfortably true. We’ve all been bullied and we’ve all been the bully at least once in our lives. The longing to control how others regard us drives us to acquire the means to dominate, and it’s this effort that makes us violent in ways both petty and profound. Displacing long-harbored resentments onto those weaker than ourselves is a game we carry from playgrounds to boardrooms to bedrooms, not to mention street fights and battlefields. David believes that the trappings of affluence and sophistication make him better than the unwashed thugs, and he can’t stop himself from expecting them to agree. The more they seem not to, the harder he tries to appease them into changing their minds. He’s no pacifist; he’s a quisling wannabe. And it’s Amy who gets sacrificed in the aborted bargain. If there’s a more scathing, unyielding deconstruction of the darkest edge of male social politics on a movie screen, I’ve yet to run into it, and I’m not sure I’d want to. And if Peckinpah also implicates himself with remarkable precision, that’s hardly accidental. This is no celebration; it’s a dirge.
