STRAW DOGS II – Dustin Hoffman, Susan George
Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs
Tom Hedden loathes the Niles clan, even though his family is just as sick. In fact, all of the English villagers, including Amy, are sick in some way. This fact shines through in her claims that she hates being ogled while doing everything to encourage it. The lone exception to this seemingly genetic inbreeding is the town constable, Major John Scott (T. P. McKenna).
Amy tries to spur David to act more manly; this is especially true after the locals kill the Sumners’ cat and hang it in their closet. Some critics claim David killed the cat, but it’s clear from his initial reaction to it that he is wholly unaware of what happened, for it is the same visceral reaction he had to earlier violence at the local bar. She subverts his attempts to corner the workmen into admitting their deed, and in reaction he accepts their invitation to go bird hunting the next day. This is when Venner goes to the Sumner home and the infamous ‘rape scene’ occurs. Actually, Venner does not rape Amy — just as there is no rape scene of Tippi Hedren by Sean Connery in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie.
It is a classic violent sex/seduction act. She says no, but her body says yes as she leans up against Venner, rubbing against him. When he rips her robe and tosses her to the couch, she simply lays there and makes pouty lips at him before writhing her body to accept his thrust — long before one could declare such an action a mere physical response to orgasm. She neither screams nor resists, getting even more passionate as the violence rises. (Feminists may not like it, but many women do get turned on by rough sex in which a man dominates them, especially after they’ve put up token resistance.)
When he penetrates her she has visions of sex with David; after he comes they lay side by side, cuddling. This is not a rape. She loved the sex, and only hated her loving it for Venner is more overtly manly than David — right down to his brawny chest hair. When he is done, however, he does become an accessory to rape when his buddy Norman wields a gun and Venner holds Amy down as Norman sodomizes her. Only during this scene is she being fully resistant. But we have seen her at her worst: the eternal cock tease and harridan who loves emasculating her husband; the faithless wife who invites violent sex to ‘get back’ at David’s impotence (if not sexually, than emotionally); and then the bitch who gets her comeuppance when Venner assists his crony in sodomizing her. Of course, all the men in the film will get far worse than Amy does, but feminists apparently stopped watching the film at this point, content that they had ‘proof’ of both the film’s and director’s intent.
The ending is famed, and justly so. In the car, Henry says, ‘I don’t know where I live.’ David smiles and says, ‘That’s all right, neither do I.’ If only the rest of the film had the subtlety and enigmatic poesy of that ending, Straw Dogs would truly be the masterpiece its acolytes proclaim. It’s not, for a number of reasons aside from the trite characters and plot. Indeed, John Coquillon’s cinematography and the editing by Paul Davies, Roger Spottiswoode, and Tony Lawson are not up to earlier Peckinpah standards.
Also, in Straw Dogs the use of slow motion is not nearly as effective as in The Wild Bunch because it merely extends the lame situations, rather than focus on the pain. For instance, when Venner and David fall down a stairwell struggling over his rifle, there is simply no need for it because:
- a) it is in the dark,
- b) it releases some of the adrenaline the scene has been building before the climax
- c) it’s simply not filmed that well.
Similarly, when Venner slaps Amy before their sex scene there is no reason for the use of slow motion because it it does not detail her pain or eroticize her body. (The Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Fielding neither heightens nor distracts, thereby rendering it functional at best.)
The two-disc DVD by The Criterion Collection is a good package, but with some clunker features. Disc One has Straw Dogs — a good transfer in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, plus, for unknown reasons, an isolated music and effects track, in addition to a terrible commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince. Prince’s commentary, in fact, may be the worst I’ve ever heard, even worse than Annette Insdorf’s execrable commentary on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue. It’s as if every bad critic of the last several decades has been distilled into Prince’s inane monologue.
There isn’t a single aspect of Straw Dogs that he does not misinterpret, even when the evidence contradicts him on-screen as he speaks for Prince is not interested in objective analysis but in the hagiography of a film he calls a masterpiece. For instance, he parrots Peckinpah’s claim that David is the villain of the film. Why? Well, neither director nor critic can explain that, but it sounds provocative and it is the sort of red herring that artists like to toss out to the stolid to feed their interest in art that otherwise does not engage on its own merits. Thankfully, he does reject the idea that David is the Machiavellian cat killer who manipulates all the violence in the film.
Unfortunately, however, Prince does buy into the noxious notion that all art is a biographical corollary to the artist; i.e., that David is somehow a representation of Peckinpah, his own rages and fears of masculinity, and his own ambivalence toward marriage. Thus, he sees the Sumner marriage as a bad one, although we see that theirs is actually the only successful male-female relationship in the whole film, even more so than a brief snippet of the local preacher and his wife. Simply because they argue and snipe does not mean the marriage is bad, which only begs the obvious — has Prince ever been married? For, if not, it would explain much of that misinterpretation’s provenance.
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Tags: Classic Movies, DVDs, Film Reviews, Sam Peckinpah, Sex, Stephen Prince, Straw Dogs, Susan George, The Criterion Collection
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