I recently saw Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS for the first time, a film that hasn’t lost its power to disturb since it was released in 1971. I’d read about the controversies: the supposed glorification of vigilante violence as Dustin Hoffman’s mathematician David defends his home against an onslaught of braying locals in a small Cornish village, and the depiction of the rape of his young wife Amy (Susan George) at their hands, who seems at first to resist, then to literally embrace her ordeal.
It’s clear to see why the film put so many people into a spin at the time, when the depiction of violence in the cinema was being interrogated in films such as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, another unsettling and fiercely intelligent piece of cinema. But what I think makes the film so disconcerting is how it confuses, complicates and manipulates the viewer’s sense of moral code and appraisal of what constitutes appropriate action.
David is portrayed as cold, cowardly and emasculated, though in Hoffman’s hands his character retains a knowing sociability. Is his final frenzy of rage the opening of the bottle of his repressed masculinity? Or is it simply the case that he refuses to bow down to those who would intrude on his property, an American sense of protecting what is rightfully his?
And perhaps this protection of his property extends to his wife, who he roughly handles as she tries to let the aggressors in. It’s her character that presents the most problems. Is she asking for what she gets by wearing short skirts and being seen topless by the men working on the house? Is she somehow an unspeakable embodiment of female desire that David can’t contain?
Many thought the way Amy is treated stemmed from a misogynistic sadism of Peckinpah’s, but this seems harsh in retrospect. Just as David has escaped the civil rights rioting on the American campuses to study in the English countryside in the film, I think Amy presents the difficulty men had in coping with the women’s lib movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and the perceived threat of greater political, social and sexual equality.
Read more about the film here.
