Straw Dogs

 

The darkest movie of 1971, and perhaps the most disturbing in the career of the great provocateur Sam Peckinpah, begins with what could be considered the year’s silliest joke. We first meet the newlywed protagonists David and Amy Sumner loading a humungous “Man-Trap” into their car like the Flintstones getting dinosaur ribs at the drive through. It’s a Chekov’s gun so colossal it threatens to tip the car over with its metaphorical heft. “Jeez”, we think in jest, “I wonder if that things going to go off in the third act?”

Such an overt piece of tension based machinery clues us in right from the start that this film will end, as most of Peckinpah’s do, in cranked up, brutal violence. What gives Straw Dogs such a memorable and controversial legacy is that this time the violence is uncommonly anti-cathartic; it settles none of the tension built up in the ninety minutes prior, only serving to further unmoor the films point of view in a wold without trust, boundaries, or basic social structures. Once the man-trap is sprung, there is no way home.   

Filmed near the beginning of Sam Peckinpah’s imperial phase, an astonishingly productive, near decade long run of features starting with The Wild Bunch becoming a breakout hit in 1969, Straw Dogs found its director more in step with the trends of Hollywood and society than he would ever be again. 1971 was a landmark year for movie violence pushing the boundaries of just how dark and graphic audiences were willing to let it be, with A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, The French Connection and The Devils causing their own self-contained panics over the course of a turbulent twelve months. Despite anxieties over their content however, most of these movies became hits with an American audience disillusioned with the death of the progressive ‘60s counter culture and a government still mired in a war producing graphic images that were becoming increasingly widely seen across the country.

This cultural unease was fertile ground for Peckinpah, a deeply troubled man haunted by his own experiences with violence at the very end of the Second World War and falling deeper and deeper into substance abuse and erratic behaviour. His films often closely reflected and interrogated the darkest parts of his psyche, the violence, misogyny, paranoia and isolation that by 1971 were beginning to infect a morally unanchored population.

Even viewed through the prism of decades old attitudes however, Straw Dogs remains one of the more divisive movies ever made by a major American filmmaker. While the violence in Dirty Harry, for example, would seem positively quaint by the mid ‘80s at latest, Peckinpah’s film is still as provocative fifty years on and is at times almost unwatchable in how honestly it exposes the absolute darkness buried away in the minds of men. Not all men, as we are so often reminded, but more than we’d like to believe. Because the film is unarguably misogynistic in ways that hit horrifyingly close to home for anyone who has been either the source or the recipient of such hate. To engage with this film is to be forced to confront cultural myths about men and women that are shockingly prevalent, and then be shown the inevitably destructive outcomes of those attitudes. 

 

Somewhat paradoxically the central figure in this story, David Sumner, is a pacifist, or at least he claims to be, trying his hardest to diffuse confrontations through the mechanisms of modern, organised society as opposed to descending into macho posturing or aggression. He’s a mathematician, all theory and no action, who moves into a house in the rural hometown (more of a village really) of his new wife Amy, as strong-willed and playful as he is meek and rigid. The idea of David’s pacifism clashes not only with the world the film places him into, but with his own nature as well. Quite early on it becomes clear his ideological opposition to action is really covering for a deep set fear, of inadequacy, potential failure and crucially, lack of control. His frustration and paranoia of not being fully in command of his wife are shown in two early exchanges over the new house and the cat that comes with it. David grumbles that the cat doesn’t answer his call, Amy quips “Do I?” “You better” he answers with a smirk. Later, sitting by the fireplace, he asks her about the furnishings. “That your daddy’s chair?” Again she answers with a telling jab, “Every chairs my daddy’s chair”.

It’s a sharply written back-and-fourth that reveals so much about their electrically charged relationship, most of all how David isn’t really in charge of anything he thinks he should be. He’s living in a house he married into, in a country that isn’t his, with a wife that won’t lie down and be whatever domestic, docile creature he wants her to be. Even the cat won’t listen to him.

David hides these regressive desires behind a façade of modern liberal progressivism, fronting as an intellectual who abhors violence and mob justice, who just wants to settle down in the country and start a happy, carefree family. It’s a dishonesty the film is well aware of, and aiming to deconstruct by priming and triggering the man-trap hanging at the centre of the couple’s new world.

The agitation in Straw Dogs comes from a group of local men led by Charlie Venner, an old flame of Amy’s, who David hires to fix the roof of the garage adjacent to the new house. These men are the embodiment of the old world David thinks he’s above, obnoxious, stupid and tribal. They can barely contain their attraction to Amy, constantly leering at her in a way so obvious it functions as intimidation, of both her and her husband. They have no regard for the couples personal space or privacy, operating on the principal of “the strong will do as they please…” It’s an attitude reflected by most other members of the village as well. When Tom Hedden, Venner’s alcoholic uncle, is cut off at the local pub, he responds with escalating violence and threats until he gets the pint he wanted, crushing the bartenders hand into a glass before the locals calm him down. The attitude to law and order in this sleepy English village is not so far away from the frontier towns of Peckinpah’s western films; it’s a world David doesn’t fit in with at all.

 

That sense of isolation only adds to the fraying relationship of the central couple. Their house is located far from the rest of the village, with only a single winding road leading to civilisation. David is unwilling to make any real effort to connect with any of the locals and as a result keeps Amy from making any friends either. They spend more and more time with just each other for company, David working and Amy cooped up with the cat, locked in a house that begins to feel like a snow globe. They peer out at the locals, who in turn peer back at them, neither really able to figure the other out. And then the snow globe starts to crack.                     

As the film increases the tension between the Sumners and their unwieldy roofers, Peckinpah begins to revel in layers of contradiction. The men leering at Amy are consistently shown as degenerates and clear villains, even as the film leers with them, frequently framing actress Susan George in ways designed to titillate. It puts an audience in an uncomfortable position of complicity with what’s happening, also showing David’s lack of action in defending his wife and property as worsening the situation. You want him to just go out and confront the men, chastise them, puff his chest out a little, and in doing so succumb to their worldview of “might makes right”, which the film never presents as anything other than gross and destructive. It’s an unsolvable knot of tension that strains both the audience and characters unbearably close to their breaking points, and then things get so much worse.

The cat is killed, hung in the closet, and Charlie’s boys are clearly to blame, but David still refuses to take action, even in the face of such a blatant violation of every value he claims to uphold. When the men invite him to go hunting with them his desire to fit in with the culture that to this point has ostracised him outweighs any other moral concern, to the angry dismay of Amy. At this point the rules supporting polite society have fallen away, and there is now only one conclusion to this story, it’s just David doesn’t know it yet.

While everyone is out hunting Charlie Venner finds Amy at home alone and forces himself on her. It’s here where the film is fully taken over by the darkest, most toxic paranoias of Peckinpah, whose career is littered with scenes of forced infidelity. As Amy is raped there are multiple shots strongly suggesting that she begins to enjoy it, that she still has an attraction to Charlie, a stronger, more sexually aggressive man than her husband. The film is darkened further by the reveal that Norman Scutt, one of Charlie’s friends, has followed him to the house and convinces him at gunpoint to help Scutt rape Amy a second time, which Peckinpah later suggested acted almost as a punishment for “enjoying” the first assault.  

 The fixation on Amy’s complicity in the first attack is based on a still common myth about rape, perpetuated by men who are more concerned with losing “their woman” and by association their masculinity than with the trauma of the victim herself. Earlier in the film the sentiment is foreshadowed by David telling Amy to put on a bra to avoid being ogled by the roofers, placing the blame for any harassment solely on her decisions. She is disgusted by him, but the movie is Peckinpah’s and so his anxieties over the control of women wind up dictating the direction of the film, with horrifyingly honest results. Amy is the victim of both the rapists in the film and the sexist psychology of the man who made it.

 

At this point the modern concepts of a stable family unit, pacifism, community cohesion and intellectualism have been fully besieged and dismantled by the uncontrolled aggression of the local men, but they don’t wind up winning the film philosophically speaking, for this is a nihilistic picture, and the man-trap has yet to be sprung.

As the couple make their way home early from an uncomfortable local church event, David hits the village idiot, Henry Niles, with his car and decides to take him home and call an ambulance. Amy is reluctant, knowing the man’s poor reputation in the village, but David laches on to the man’s fate as a way of reasserting himself to the locals and his wife. When a group led by Tom Hedden and Charlie show up at the house claiming that Niles has harmed Tom’s daughter, and drunkenly braying for mob justice, David becomes more determined to resist them, choosing this as the hill to die on as he finally stands up to the locals.       

It seems he might have succeeded when the local lawman Major John Scott shows up and tries to diffuse the situation, but during a scuffle Hedden blasts him with a shotgun and the metaphorical man-trap is sprung. Everyone determines they are in a fight to the death now, and the small mob starts trying to break into the house.

In a typical rape-revenge film or domestic thriller, this is where the violent ending would serve as catharsis for the crimes committed by Venner and the rest of the “Bad Guys”. Our hero would exact righteous retribution and the married couple would end the story shaken, but ultimately closer as a unit, status quo restored. Straw Dogs does not end this way. The twenty minute sequence of David defending his home is not cathartic or satisfying, but an endless downward spiral as our nominal protagonist loses every sense of the man he once was. Every value is abandoned, everything he had, a home, a profession, a sense of identity, is lost to the void of all-encompassing anarchy.

The films visuals become literally darker as the violence escalates. Feet are shot off, heads are caved in, boiling oil is thrown on faces. The lies David has been trying to uphold about himself fall away as he is forced to abandon any pretence of civility. He does this in spite of Amy, who is mostly horrified by the whole thing, and though she does wind up shooting one of the men, by the end of the climax their relationship is unsalvageable, one more thing lost to the void. Venner is the last man standing and in the final moments Amy seemingly can’t find a meaningful difference between her rapist and her husband, then David smacks the man-trap over his head, springing the jaws shut and finally releasing the films tension. Man trapped.   

After winning the day, David drives off with Niles, in order to take him home, leaving a completely broken Amy alone in a burning shell of a house. The cars headlights barely penetrate the solid wall of darkness that surrounds the car. “I don’t know the way home” says Niles. “Neither do I” replies David in a rare moment of honesty. The remarkable thing about Straw Dogs is that it doesn’t make any grand statements about the right way to live. Everyone has blame, no institution is safe, society can’t hold together for very long and there are no answers for violence that don’t just lead to an endless spiral of more violence. By the end of the film we are as David is, moving without direction, destination or purpose, lost in the dark with nothing and no one to hold onto.