182 Straw Dogs

[flyonthewall2983]

^ And James Woods, making this the second Peckinpah remake he's done.

[cdnchris]

I was trying to figure out what the hell you were talking about and then unfortunately remembered The Getaway. At least Basinger got naked in that.

[panicprevention]

They will probably re-release it since the remake is coming out in 2011 starring James Marsden. I am sure the remake will suck (similar to Sleuth).

I hope you're right since both the Criterion and MGM release are OOP.

[kaujot]

Of course, Sleuth didn't get a release, even with the remake.

[Lemmy Caution]

This is the Japanese Straw Dogs cover I usually see:

Pretty horrifying.

[Venom]

Interesting to see Deliverance and Fight Club brought up as comparisons. Personally I always thought of Bergman's The Virgin Spring. Both are deep statements on the nature of violence/revenge and in the end leave you uncertain as to whether "good" really won out. As low budget and unpolished as Craven's The Last House on the Left was, it was very faithful in this regard. The hacks who made the 2009 film didn't get the message at all and created nothing but a cheap torture porn cash-in devoid of any depth whatsoever. Which I fear may be the case with the Straw Dogs remake. When I first heard of it, I thought someone was playing a sick joke. But unfortuneately it is real, and completed. What a very sad time for the medium. Very very sad.

[Person]

Speaking as an atheist, I see all revenge as sad, an error, a falsche bewegung. I have felt the desire many times in adult life (as a child, I would plot in a most pitiful manner) but those infrequent, brief impulses have yet to crystalise into something unequivocally authentic and not petty, personal, grubby.

Yet, revenge in art, on the stage and screen, is immensely satisfying. To see the bartard(s) squirm in their piss-drenched trousers and then expire before the justified protagonist's eyes is often an almost cosmological moment of otherwise trammelled truth.

Th greatest revenge story, in my eyes, has always been Dumas' epic. Enemies must be vanquished. This is a golden law of the universe. But take care to label one as an enemy. True enemies are rare. "I must not flatter myself that they take me for such a fool." Great words. The Innuit of the Labrador peninsula have the right idea: leave in the first sight of even the smallest trouble. A great people, an antithesis. The Naskapi believe in "The Great Man" who lives in the chest, near or within the heart and who only gives what we so-called rationalists call, "good advice". The Great Man is immortal, wise, peaceful, harmonic, true, pure. The ego is spiteful, lusty, silly, forceful, willful. An "ego" wrote these very words.

The Great Man lives in all Americans, Scotsman, Latvians, Iraqis, Afghans, Chinsese and all so-called Nations. But we don't adhere to The Great Man's counsel. This is the great failing of modern mankind.

[matrixschmatrix]

This isn't really a revenge drama in any way- David doesn't know about the rape that could be said to motivate it, and the whole final act is a home invasion, not a hunting down. David is protecting his home, not getting back at anybody.

I think part of why the movie is so mixed, and so sickening, is that unlike a revenge drama, there isn't really a point at which you can say 'if only he would show mercy, everything would have worked out fine'- handing over the molester would have been a fairly evil act, if a pragmatic one. Obviously, Prince is right in that nobody in this movie comes out as admirable, especially David, and if anything a revenge motivation would make him more human and less demonic. Revenge is ugly, but it shows emotional connection, which David lacks.

[colinr0380]

The thing I like most about Straw Dogs, and which makes it such a powerfully complex piece of work, is that it sketches in a lot of inflammatory 'triggers' for what occurs (could it be Amy 'teasing' the locals with showing off her American husband, having a high faluting attitude to former peers, up front attitude towards expressing herself and lack of bra?; it must be David's outsider status and wish for isolation that rubs both the Hedden gang and the wider community up the wrong way?; perhaps it could be the festering class resentments of the working class Hedden gang fuelled and magnified by a drinking culture and unrestrained sexuality?; but surely there must also be some responsibilty of the society at large for what occurs - the society that lets the town child molester wander the streets, or the Hedden gang unofficially terrorise the town - with the representatives of the Church and the law either extremely unsympathetic or totally ineffectual, just with delusions of power and control?), yet the film is very careful not to make any one aspect (or person) responsible for everything that occurs (and even more careful not to suggest that many of these attitudes don't stem from understandable motivations or frustrations), more everyone is responsible for their small individual actions, which hit on all sorts of different levels, and which might be insignificant in themselves but which cumulatively push events to an explosion.

It is the whole host of different attitudes that the different characters are bringing into the situation which are colliding off of others, themselves each reacting with their own perspectives, that brings the situation to this particular bloody conclusion, and Amy's brutal double rape, while used as the centrepiece of the film and focal point around which the whole structure of the film turns, in the end is just another one of those issues affecting Amy's approach to the events which follows, much as David's experience of killing the bird and getting abandoned on the hunt affects his behaviour towards the gang. I guess it is a risky, but very powerful, move to have such a horrible subject be just another piece in the jigsaw rather than taking over the entire film, though it does understandably totally affect Amy's (and to a lesser extent Charlie Venner's and Cawsey's) perspective - and it makes it much more powerful and tragic to have it be Amy's issue which she has to deal with herself, because she has nobody to confide in. It allows for the final siege not just to be about Amy and David versus the gang, but also Amy and David's issues with each other still playing a part in their actions.

One telling moment during the build up is that the question of which particular person was responsible for killing the cat is left relatively hazy ("Scutt or Cawsey!") perhaps to suggest that the placing of individual responsibility doesn't really mean anything when events are about people putting themselves into loosely affiliated common interest groups to help define themselves, and in some ways to protect themselves against others. So for example the whole Hedden gang are in some ways tainted by Amy's rape which only two of them actively participated in. There is an interesting discussion in the Peckinpah scholar's commentary on the Freemantle about the question of whether Charlie and Cawsey would have told the rest of the gang what they had done. Likely they wouldn't, but their transgressive actions (along with the death of the Major) still damn the entire gang, preventing their righteous anger and vengeance for the death of Janice from being justified in filmic terms. Amy herself is repulsed by David allowing the child molester refuge inside their home and in some ways making him a member of their 'gang'.

In that sense David really is the destructive force of the film in wanting to escape from everyone, and only interact with those that he does let in on his own limited and biased terms. Much like everyone else in fact but he is a group with only one member. Not even Amy is really a part of it, making her the most tragic figure of the film (though Tom Hedden comes a surprisingly close second as someone at the opposite extreme of being too much the centre of his community, becoming too complacent about his position and eventually being destroyed by the actions of his clan) as she has nobody left - all her attempts to join a group seem to have failed, there is no one from her town and likely no American husband for much longer either, only a destroyed and violated family home in the middle of nowhere left for her. David, as a relatively self sufficient 'loner', is someone that society at large will always frown upon or view with suspicion perhaps even more than a rowdy gang of drunks, but also a character who damningly will likely remain able to simply brush himself down and carry on.

[Mr Sausage]

preventing their righteous anger and vengeance for the death of Janice from being justified in filmic terms

Returning to matrixschmatrix's point about the movie not allowing important characters to know certain important details that would exalt their motives to the realm of revenge, with its high tragic implications, we should note that no one besides the child molester knows that Janice has been killed. The movie does not allow Hedden and his gang a righteous motive nor an easy defense. Rather, it implicates them. I believe Hedden (although if not him, another of the gang) says, regarding the molester, "we take care of our own, here." It is manifestly obvious that they do not; and their insular arrogance and repression disguised as civic pride and responsibility just helps the narrative toward its bloody conclusion.

David and his wife are responsible for ignoring the obvious implications of Janice's infatuation; her brother is responsible for allowing her to do as she wishes without rebuke or warning; her father is responsible for allowing her to go about unsupervised at night with whomever she chooses while he sits in the pub; the molester's brother is responsible for not having taken steps to prevent this very tragedy. Janice's death, like so much in the movie, is the result of a complicated reticulation of petty faults and mistakes that leaves no one entirely to blame and yet no one entirely blameless, either.

[matrixschmatrix]

Prince refers to the village repeatedly as a very primitive place, and I think that's true in a way beyond the number of brutal people who live there- almost as much as in Peckinpah's Westerns, there's no sense of a society that has any power to mediate violent intentions or prevent violent behavior.

Insofar as the movie does come to the conclusion that the only way for David to achieve his goals within that community- to be considered a man, and to be allowed to isolate himself- is through violence, I think that could be more a criticism of brutal anarchy than an affirmation of it. The village is an atomized society, where the only meaningful grouping you see are gangs; every marriage is a bad one, the church has no moral force, the law has no physical force, and even the children at play are displayed like a pack of wild dogs. It doesn't even descend into violence, because the violence is there from the beginning- it explodes into it.

I don't know if Peckinpah really believed that there were places less brutal than that,or if he saw that brutality everywhere, but I think it's clear that he's disgusted by it. When you watch the Wild Bunch, you get the feeling that the men are anachronisms, primitives in an increasingly civilized world, and they're looking for something meaningful to do- violence isn't necessarily celebrated, but there's a pleasure in seeing something slot into its place and do what it's best at. That's where the Bunch find themselves at the end. Straw Dogs- ironically, given that the Lao Tzu quote could be more accurately applied to the Wild Bunch- is about a machine where nothing can slot into place, and instead of working smoothly together the gears tear themselves apart. It feels like a cut with a rusty can, there's nothing clean about it.

[colinr0380]

Returning to matrixschmatrix's point about the movie not allowing important characters to know certain important details that would exalt their motives to the realm of revenge, with its high tragic implications, we should note that no one besides the child molester knows that Janice has been killed. The movie does not allow Hedden and his gang a righteous motive nor an easy defense. Rather, it implicates them. I believe Hedden (although if not him, another of the gang) says, regarding the molester, "we take care of our own, here." It is manifestly obvious that they do not; and their insular arrogance and repression disguised as civic pride and responsibility just helps the narrative toward its bloody conclusion.

I agree, there is that sense that they are just looking for an excuse to go after Henry Niles and as soon as they hear of Janice's disappearance they go looking for him (even in an ironic way causing her death as hearing their calls for Janice causes Henry to do an "Of Mice and Men" by accidentally suffocating her while trying to keep her silent).

Much as finding out he is at David and Amy's place doesn't deter the gang from smashing the place up - it even lets them do a bit of terrorisation of the couple that comes across as just taking out their frustrations on them and teaching them a lesson. Until the Major, as a (lame) representative of the law appears, and in attempting to defuse the situation (with an overconfident sense of his own status and underestimation, even patronisation, of Tom Hedden) makes the matter a lot more serious, pushing the matter to a 'no going back' point for the gang.

Prince refers to the village repeatedly as a very primitive place, and I think that's true in a way beyond the number of brutal people who live there- almost as much as in Peckinpah's Westerns, there's no sense of a society that has any power to mediate violent intentions or prevent violent behavior.

I would agree, but also think it is about the way that 'society and culture' itself is created out of a starting point of upheaval and violence, which itself has to be brutally suppressed to create 'peace' - society is the product of attempts to create consensus to let people live together, giving them a place, self worth (and a sense of nobility through cultural and work factors), and aspirations to remain a part of society which too often is in conflict with both the underlying animal urges (Janice and Bobby watching David and Amy having sex through their window, learning from the adults, and according to the Peckinpah scolars commentary on the Freemantle disc apparently at one point an ending where the children of the village continue the attack on the farmhouse after all the adults are dispatched was briefly considered; the way that the Church social takes on a ritual sacrifice feel in the intercutting with Janice's death) and at the other end a sense of hypocrisy, greed or inadequacy in their role from those characters who are embodying 'society', fostering resentment.

Insofar as the movie does come to the conclusion that the only way for David to achieve his goals within that community- to be considered a man, and to be allowed to isolate himself- is through violence, I think that could be more a criticism of brutal anarchy than an affirmation of it. The village is an atomized society, where the only meaningful grouping you see are gangs; every marriage is a bad one, the church has no moral force, the law has no physical force, and even the children at play are displayed like a pack of wild dogs. It doesn't even descend into violence, because the violence is there from the beginning- it explodes into it.

But I do think that there is a sense that at least the society was functioning (albeit in a violent manner in which Henry Niles and his brother would probably have ended up being driven out of the town or killed) until David and Amy arrived - their dysfunctional private relationship and back-biting almost contaminates everyone around them still further. The responsibility should definitely not be placed on them for that, and it is too simple to place a simple cause and effect interpretation on it (plus we don't get to see much of what village life was like before David and Amy arrive, little much more than Charlie's comments about his relationship with Amy from years before and that "all these chairs are my daddy's chairs"), but there is a feeling that their presence both antagonises and fascinates the town, helping to stir all the tensions up.

I don't know if Peckinpah really believed that there were places less brutal than that,or if he saw that brutality everywhere, but I think it's clear that he's disgusted by it.

Disgusted, but also fascinated by the psychology of those who define themselves through violent behaviour, and in some ways play up to their reputation (though Straw Dogs doesn't really get into the mythologising of violence so much).

There is also that section when David and Amy are arguing about why they decided to move to Cornwall in the first place, and it seems that David is trying to escape from campus demonstrations (plus when they first get to the house there is the eager question of David as to whether he saw any violence in the US "any of the rioting, sniping, shooting the blacks?"), so it seems that David is trying to remain detached from anything but his work perhaps because the world disgusts him - but does his work have value when it doesn't relate to anything occurring in the wider world? (What point is there in protecting your home when you infantilise and then abandon your wife? But then does David feel guilt for marrying a younger woman who he doesn't appear to respect, as suggested in the way that when Henry Niles is slapped by his brother that David, who has also made eye contact with Janice in the scene, seems to take the blow as well through an associated edit).

Everyone's tainted and guilty in different ways even when they might not intend any malicious damage, just by trying to isolate themselves or acting purely in their own self interest or without thought for how their actions will affect others.

[jbeall]

Terrance Rafferty's article on the remake is really about Peckinpahs' film. (Not a complaint, but justifying why I'm posting this here instead of creating a thread in the New Films board.)

[colinr0380]

That's an excellent article, I particularly liked the thematic connection with Contempt (a man refusing, or unable to, stand up for his wife - or even unable to understand why she is so upset) and the way Rafferty talks about the first rape involving Amy and David's final violent defence of the house being parallel, with both members of the couple forced into participating in something horrible which they should not 'enjoy' but in a complex way begin to.

[mfunk9786]

The 'bad guys' in the remake are in a gang called the 'Straw Dogs'. That is all.

[cdnchris]

You gotta be kidding me. I knew it would be dumbed down a bit but that's a little ridiculous, non?

[salad]

The gang's name was inspired by the Peckinpah movie

[willoneill]

The gang's name was inspired by the Peckinpah movie

So wait, are you saying that in the world of the remake, Peckinpah's original film exists?

[JakeB]

The gang's name was inspired by the Peckinpah movie

So wait, are you saying that in the world of the remake, Peckinpah's original film exists?

WOAH! postmodern.

[MichaelB]

Gremlins 2 and The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence got there first.

[Sloper]

And Jolson Sings Again.

[denti alligator]

Don Quixote, anyone?

[MichaelB]

I fear we may be making it sound more interesting than it actually is.

[willoneill]

Well a film can have "interesting" concepts, but still be a pile of shit.