2 - Peckinpah the Radical:The Politics of The Wild Bunch

Summary

It is unthinkable that the 1995 rerelease of The Wild Bunch (1969) almost didn't happen due to a controversy within the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) about the need for the film to carry an NC-17 rating. Considering the amount of violence in the 1990s cinema, particularly in the work of such self-consciously indebted heirs to Sam Peckinpah as John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, suppressing The Wild Bunch would have been one of the more dismal ironies of the age. The irony would have been all the more profound considering the relative depth-lessness of these newer directors and much of the male-oriented action cinema that trades so heavily in violence. Looking at Peckinpah's work today, one cannot help but perceive the massive social and cultural break that has occurred within the past twenty years; indeed, one could argue that the period and the cultural tendency called “postmodernity” is something post–Wild Bunch. Peckinpah, so often referred to as the “master of violence,” or similar malarkey, was among the last social critics produced by Hollywood. His use of violence, like all thematics of his work, is deeply involved with profound humanist and antiauthoritarian concerns that sometimes verge on radicalism. Peckinpah's great compassion for the human condition and for the characters he created is something totally alien to the glacial movie-brat worldview of a Tarantino that showcases obsessively various favorite tropes and images of commercial cinema and consumer culture.