STRAW DOGS III
Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs
At film’s end, when Amy takes a few moments before shooting the last assailant — who is attacking David — Prince sees this as evidence of their bad marriage. In actuality, that is clearly the character fighting through her trauma while trying to act. Likewise, he takes a hard line on Venner’s supposed rape of Amy, mouthing the usual banalities and misinterpretations even though, as stated above, what takes place is clearly not rape. Much of his ‘analysis’ is of the sort where an egghead reads some deep significance into an eye gouge in a Three Stooges comedy short.
Disc Two is better. It has all the supplements, including the 82-minute documentary Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron, a 26-minute vintage film of Dustin Hoffman on the set of Straw Dogs, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with Susan George and the film’s producer Daniel Melnick, selected correspondence between Peckinpah and both his viewers and his critics (Time magazine’s Richard Schickel and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael), as well as three TV trailers and the film’s original theatrical trailer.
The booklet insert comes with a 1974 Canadian print Peckinpah interview by André Leroux, and an essay by poetaster Joshua Clover, which is almost as ridiculously bad as Prince’s commentary. At one point he even claims the following:
One might do best by calling it a war movie; Straw Dogs is unthinkable without recourse to Vietnam. Made in 1971, little illusion left about the nature of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, the movie invokes the conflict namelessly almost from the start. The campus troubles Amy and the ‘uncommitted’ David have left behind can be nothing other than anti-war protests.
This is a patent absurdity. It’s like claiming Paradise Lost is a critique of Cromwellian England, yet lacking anecdoture for support. Merely because David has left the U.S., and is an American in a foreign land does not evoke Vietnam War parallels, for he is not a Colonialist. Well, David has also gotten a grant, which could have had residency requirements; plus he’s simply a White Liberal type with a penchant for travel, as we learn. But even if we accept that he came to England to avoid the draft or make a political statement, the rest of the demented violence of the Cornish locals has no direct parallels to Vietnam. None.
In his defense, Clover is not the only critic who has butchered their interpretation of the film. The infamous Pauline Kael loved Straw Dogs, but mislabeled it ‘fascist,’ as if a band of local loonies are the equivalent of a nationwide junta, while many of her female acolytes condemned both the film and the director for ‘misogyny.’
Even the powerful Roger Ebert muffed his criticism of the film. While he correctly thought it one of Peckinpah’s weaker efforts, especially when compared to The Wild Bunch, his reasons were unfathomable. Ebert wrote: ‘The most offensive thing about the movie is its hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on the moral outrage with a shovel.’ The very thing that sticks out about Straw Dogs, however, is that it is amoral. The characters are shown doing crazy and violent things, but with little consequence for their behavior. That is not hypocrisy, it is anarchy.
Overall, Straw Dogs is well-crafted, but lacks any real depth; it is especially wan when one considers all the decades of intervening cinematic treatises on violence. In truth, Peckinpah was simply not that profound a filmmaker. In a sense, he was a more barbaric version of Alfred Hitchcock, who was similarly fascinated with violence — though Hitchcock’s films were generally less scattershot in quality than Peckinpah’s. Neither man, I might add, had the depth to truly plumb artistic greatness. If they ever achieved it, however briefly, it was by sheer happenstance, not by design.
Its own self-importance, in fact, is what makes Straw Dogs far less enjoyable than, say, Last House on the Left or Night of the Living Dead. The former is so silly and unpretentious that its images and violence lodge in the viewers’ mind — such as the infamous fellatio-biting scene — while the latter is simply relentless pedal to inexplicable violence.
Straw Dogs should have been more grounded in reality, or more campy, or more straightforward in its naked bile for mankind. As it is, it sits on the fence while being so predictable that it becomes tedious. There’s not a moment where this viewer could get into any of the characters and identify with them — let alone care for their fate.
Also, note that Peckinpah will show the beginning of acts of violence, but never the results — e.g., we see no real penetration of Amy, and we do not see David’s brutality. The camera always looks away, even when he is tossing grapefruits at his cat. While this may seem commendable on the director’s part, it also neuters the visceral effect of the violence so that we get in effect a serial killer of a film tidied up for children, showing all the "fun" of violence with none of the consequences. Thereby, Peckinpah’s set-up is not a statement of ethics, but merely a poor artistic choice.
Shock filmmaker David Fincher (Fight Club), a manifest Peckinpah acolyte, once said, ‘I’m always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws is the fact that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again.’ Well, aside from his love of a rather routine Steven Spielberg thriller (and the director seems to have gone all downhill since then), Fincher’s dictum is not met here for even the controversy of the alleged ‘double rape’ and the violent ending seem nowadays to be much ado about very little.
In short, being controversial does not always equate with quality; Straw Dogs feels increasingly like a puerile attempt to shock viewers (something it no longer does) despite its pretensions of offering something deeper. Ultimately, it is no more than a passable B-movie with a pedigreed director and A-movie production values. Not a single image sticks out in this viewer’s mind, not even the film’s blurred opening of kids in a playground — which quotes Peckinpah’s earlier The Wild Bunch. And when an artist cannot at least equal his earlier glories, that’s a sure sign of a lesser work of art no matter how one interprets the piece’s inner workings.
© Dan Schneider
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
1 Academy Award Nomination
Best Original Dramatic Score: Jerry Fielding
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Tags: Classic Movies, DVDs, Film Reviews, Jerry Fielding, Roger Ebert, Sam Peckinpah, Straw Dogs
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Thanks for the good review. The last lines were “I don’t know my way home” “That’s okay, I don’t either.”