Straw Dogs Puts Peckinpah’s Masterpiece at Center of the Fall Season
In an online exclusive feature, CityArts critics examine Hollywood’s remake obsession and its negative effects on film culture. Armond White reviews Straw Dogs’ art legacy and takes on the review of record. Gregory Solman recalls what makes Peckinpah great that Rod Lurie just doesn’t understand. And John Demetry analyzes the treacheries of Hollywood hackwork.
Pekinpah As Pop, Peckinpah As Classic
Think of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs as a pop myth, not some vulgar expiation of unruly, anti-feminist temper—or Hollywood exploitation of same. Its story, by now a notorious legend, digs into a primal event: a modern, civilized man forced to use brute cunning to protect his home and property. Peckinpah’s dismantling of social custom comes from an era unlike today when popular filmmakers, through personal intelligence and experience, believed art had a serious purpose. The new remake of Straw Dogs trashes that precept and the disaster should resound throughout the art world. Anyone who cares about art in any form should rise up against this foul remake.
Let’s give Peckinpah’s most controversial work its due by relating its most startling scene—a sexual assault on the hero’s flirtatious wife that is more than she or casual moviegoers bargained for—with an equally provocative work of classical art, Titian’s 1559 painting “The Rape of Europa.” This isn’t a wild stretch but a reminder of the depth and vision serious filmmaking ought to share with other artifacts of our cultural heritage.
Europa, 1560-62 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Italian (Venice), ca. 1485/90-1576 Oil on canvas, 178 x 205 cm. Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts.
Consider how art scholar Susan Benford’s description of Titian fits Straw Dogs’ hotly contentious scene: “This grand painting portrays the abduction of Europa by a determined Jupiter, disguised as a bull. Europa is a reclining nude both submissive and resistant, appearing both abandoned with desire and frightened, beneath a calm blue sky with threatening storms. The Putti, or Cupids, in the sky and atop the dolphin, are mesmerized watching the tension between the lovers, while the nymphs vague on the distant shore, watch and wave helplessly. Both her generous, billowing flesh and Jupiter’s tail seem to quiver with excitement at the pending sexual act…Each time I visit it, I feel that Titian‘s bull’s eye—inescapably leering, impossible to avoid—is the most intensely painted of any eye in Western art, human or animal. It’s riveting, dares you not to stare back and is not to be missed.”
Peckinpah’s bullseye in Straw Dogs is proof of how cinematic art equals the power of the classical arts. Its uncompromising vision and intensity is what we no longer expect from today’s fawning, dumbed-down Hollywood. Reviewers who applaud the Straw Dogs remake readily liken it to cheap-thrill blockbusters, but neglect to recall Peckinpah’s heroic antecedents.
To remake Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs shows Hollywood’s usual barbarism, a shameless assault on our cultural heritage. Worse than the shoddy film itself is the complaisance shown by reviewers who accept the trashy new remake as part of their own business routine. These circumstances trap all those moviegoers who never saw Peckinpah’s 1971 original or maybe never even heard of it, in cultural ignorance. It normalizes vulgarity, inanity and disrespect for culture.
After the cultural battles won by Picasso, Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, it’s shocking to have to defend Peckinpah against 21st-century vulgarians who do not distinguish his artistry from grindhouse smut or social exploitation. Peckinpah’s films were infamous for bypassing cultural niceties. Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Junior Bonner, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Killer Elite, Convoy and The Osterman Weekend all exploded genre conventions. Despite their controversial dynamism, those films updated moral movie watching reflexes to accommodate the post-WWII reactions to the American legacy—mostly romantic attitudes about loyalty, crime and family.
Peckinpah redefined the modern complexities of masculine and feminine identity by going deeper into the feelings associated with the western (a moral epic in High Country, Wild Bunch and Junior Bonner) and action movie (a test of personal and political ethics in Alfredo Garcia and The Killer Elite). Straw Dogs combined the genres; its unnerving virtuosity got under the already crawling skin of white-flight, feminist, Vietnam-era America. The story of an intellectual (played by Dustin Hoffman when he embodied the zeitgeist) retreating to rural life but unable to avoid the call of the wild, distilled a brilliantly simple narrative into a something as discomforting and unavoidable as psychotherapy. With The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah’s visceral, kinetic style—lyrical, viscous, slo-mo details—forever changed editing technology to reveal the raw ferocity and elegant absurdity of violence. Only Sergei Eisenstein—and no one after Peckinpah—captured a collapsing human body so memorably. (Artist Robert Longo’s 1980s Falling Men series paid tribute to this.)
Even if Peckinpah’s imitators imitated him for the worst, the culture was changed for the better through his fearless look at the desperation and folly within mankind. He used slo-mo not for titillation but for a shocking awareness of time and mortality. That’s what makes Straw Dogs possibly “Bloody” Sam’s greatest film, the movie that least needed remaking. It only, constantly, needs appreciation, acknowledgement and acceptance. The battle for understanding art continues.
Critical Complaisance or Critical Collusion?
A new 21st-century Straw Dogs remake would only be necessary if it reacquainted audiences with the difficult realities that Peckinpah’s singular style exposed and claimed a hand in. But that’s exactly what our acquiescent, commercially vulgarized culture misrepresents. Not to pick on the New York Times’ laudatory review of record but it typifies the problem of a non-rigorous, incurious, cultural attitude that forgets heritage and is too compliant with commercialism. Perhaps by detailing the Times’ negligence, the problem of cultural lassitude can be identified and avoided.
Kate Bosworth and James Marsden in 2011's Straw Dogs.
Starting with referring to remake director Rod Lurie (who parlayed a journalism gig into a Hollywood career) as a former “film critic” presupposes that Lurie had some sort of cinematic expertise to transfer. But Lurie’s lousy filmography (The Last Castle, The Contender, etc.) suggests quite the opposite. Straw Dogs could only be remade by an imbecile with no knowledge of Peckinpah’s artistic or political achievement. Calling Peckinpah’s film a “venerable and violent button pusher” yet commending Lurie’s as “odd and interesting” perverts standards of intellection and aesthetics. Loftily pretending that Lurie’s “hyperbole is more amusing than offensive” only confirms our culture’s false sophistication.
In 1971 critics were appalled by Peckinpah’s blunt violence and eroticism; today those aspects of cinema are shrugged off, ridiculed. Lurie extracts the seriousness from Peckinpah’s primal story of a man defending his house from intruders, yet the Times huffs that he’s “holding a fun-house mirror up to an America that seems, at the moment, to thrive on polarization and mutual contempt.” This doesn’t help. It’s sophistry that accepts the contrivance of Liberal partisanship as a game.” To confuse Lurie’s inanity with a polemical purpose is a fatuous way of selling contemporary product while disrespecting—and demeaning—a redoubtable masterpiece.
It took more than Quentin Tarantino to derange the appreciation of movie violence from a moral aesthetic to a fan boy delectation. As with a hack like Lurie, the derangement must be abetted by media shills who pretend that this vulgarization is OK. It’s useless to blame “the sensibilities of the times” as an excuse for Lurie’s crudeness. Citing “Something of the corrosive, absurd logic of the culture is captured in the interactions between David and the gang of good ol’ boys who become his mortal enemies” misses the point Randy Newman made so well in his 1972 album Good Ol’ Boys, where Liberal-Conservative tension was more actively engaged.
Referring to Peckinpah’s savage tableau as “a nasty, queasy, fascinating document of its era” is a rank criticism, similar to the kind of belittling Maureen Dowd practices. Peckinpah’s art is not of an era but of soul. To praise the mindless Lurie for “uncover[ing] an unacknowledged layer of feminism” in the story misses the complexity of Peckinpah’s original vision.
Peckinpah’s daring should not be forgotten but deserves to be met with daring, rigorous critical standards. Initially the rape in Straw Dogs (source of the film’s politically incorrect controversy) drew more ire than the rape in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange due to Peckinpah’s Titian-like pitilessness. Peckinpah didn’t distance horror with Kubrickian cool or with Lurie’s trite politics. Critic Kyle Smith aptly ridiculed Lurie’s remake by juxtaposing it with Kenny Rogers’ more honest and affecting pop hit “Coward of the County.”
In the original Straw Dogs, Peckinpah’s fraught sensuality and compacted male fears subverted p.c. feminism so much even non-feminist Pauline Kael sought different terms to critique it. Her slam “fascist” reacts to the unsettling power of what Peckinpah evokes; it peculiarly tags the film as something it isn’t. The sex and violence in Straw Dogs are the brushstrokes Peckinpah uses to convey man’s personal confusion. After David’s manly defense of home, he drives into the dark with his doppleganger idiot who complains, “I don’t know my way home.” David’s response “Neither do I” isn’t fascist triumphalism but boldly admits personal moral alarm. It’s different from the utter moral and aesthetic confusion that Lurie stirs up. If we recover our cultural standards and make useful critical comparison of original and remake, we will realize, like Smith’s apples-and-oranges comparison, how Peckinpah’s apple kicks shit out of Lurie’s Clockwork Orange.
