Gabrielle Murray,
This Wounded Cinema, this Wounded Lfe: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
ISBN: 0 275 98058 8
176pp
US$89.95 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by Greenwood Publishing Group)

Those who champion the films of “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah are an impassioned and dedicated critical bunch. Indeed, by contrast with the critical neglect of his late-sixties peers – Arthur Penn, Roman Polanski, or even Robert Altman – Peckinpah’s devotees are many, comprising an ad hoc army of loyal outlaws and garrulous misfits dwelling on the frontiers of academic film study, anachronistically flying the auteurist flag even while riding across variously generic “Horizons West”. Few of those critical companions are women, however, and fewer still are Australian women like Gabrielle Murray, who reads Sam Peckinpah in light of classical and modern philosophy – to the point of claiming that Peckinpah’s films “exist as a kind of primitive, radical, and rudimentary philosophy because of the ways in which they relentlessly explore and attempt to render experiences of the fragile and corporeal nature of human existence” (3).

The classical philosopher most invoked in This Wounded Cinema, this Wounded Life is Heraclitus, of the famous Fragments. Indeed, it is the fragmentariness or plurality of experience in its “universal flux” that evinces its cosmological unity in Heraclitus, and it is the universality of death – understood by Murray as definitive of “the human condition” – that is the paradoxical ground of meaningful experience. Hence Heraclitus authorizes a “both/and” (versus “either/or”) relation to existence, an existence frequently figured as a “dancing spurt of flame”, life’s only certainty being “the ever-present fact of universal death – the death of what is familiar and the birth of something alien” (15). It is this fluxual relation of life and death that marks Peckinpah’s violence as “utopian”, in Murray’s analysis. It also authorizes her willingness to downplay historical or generic determinants in favor of existential or anthropological approaches to film.

The modern thinkers Murray appeals to are numerous, though she privileges Edgar Morin as a (post)modern Heraclitus, if also a contemporary of such (roughly speaking, “ontological”) film theorists as Kracauer, Sontag, and Cavell. Like Heraclitus, Morin emphasizes death (“our unearned death penalty”) as the fundamental human reality, which paradoxically underscores the value of life; but he sees the “imaginary” or “mythical” doubling of life by cinema as compensatory and revelatory, even if what is sometimes revealed is the impoverishment of imagination and community by modernity and technology.

The utopianism Murray ascribes to Peckinpah is most readily and least controversially on view in such openly lyrical films as The Ballad of Cable Hogue (USA, 1970) and Junior Bonner (USA, 1972), though even in these raucously gentle fables the “utopia” is “relative” (to borrow a term from Camus) rather than absolute – the latter being associated in Murray and Peckinpah alike with the tyrannical certainties of capitalist progress and fundamentalist Christianity. Depictions of utopia in Peckinpah are transitory, provisional, momentary. Utopia is a shady Mexican village, a sensual embrace, a pastoral landscape.

But in claiming that Peckinpah’s violence has a genuinely utopian aspect Murray depends crucially on the philosophical claim that life and death are inextricable – such that finding beauty in one means finding beauty in the other – but also on the critical claim, advanced by Thomas Elsaesser and Richard Dyer, that “utopian” refers to an affective (rather than strictly representational) quality of film, what Elsaesser calls “psychic continuity” and Dyer calls “sensibility.” This conflation of “sensibility” and “philosophy” is evident in Murray’s claim that, “In Peckinpah’s aesthetic of violence, he explores the paradoxical nature of this ecstatic self-liberation, illuminating the exhilaration of this experience, as well as its regressive potential, and in doing so, he reveals both the deadly and the enchanting nature of these confrontations” (72).

The multi-layered lyricism that Murray finds in Peckinpah’s metaphorical, often violent montage sequences is also on view in Murray’s critical exposition. Though her analytical method is close-reading à la William Rothman, she repeatedly cuts away to theorists and philosophers to gain different vantages on the films and the issues they raise. (Only the last chapter – in which Murray describes Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Mexico/USA, 1974) as evoking the Heraclitian paradox that “life and death are intertwining, simultaneous processes embodying an ever-changing tension” (106) – lacks this kind of critical/theoretical “intertwining”.) Thus, after her initial chapter, which adduces Heraclitus and Morin, Murray’s second chapter brings Mircea Eliade into the conversation before discussing The Wild Bunch (USA, 1969) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Likewise, Murray’s fourth chapter adduces Robert Elliott and Albert Camus before discussing the utopian features of Junior Bonner.

To my mind, Murray’s most resonant chapter is chapter three: “Deep Play: Rituals of Violence and Enchantment”, which treats Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (USA, 1973) under the aegis of (among others) Clifford Geertz. While acknowledging that modern experience is far from “universal”, and is generally lacking in that sense of the sacred that once rendered even blood sacrifice on the Aztec model communally “enchanting”, hence socially practicable, Murray nonetheless explores the possibility that “The human capacities for participatory relations of identification and projection that… ritual reveals are similar to those we experience at the cinema” (59). Put otherwise, films, like rituals, stage or “display” social anxieties. Hence the claim that “Peckinpah’s sequences of violence grant form, meaning, and resonance to the tragedies and miseries of human brutality, violence, and death, while also offering insights into our transitory, yet corporeal being” (59).

All of which may make Murray’s “Deep Play” chapter and the book as a whole seem like a coherent and sustained apology for Peckinpah, though in fact the book’s energy derives more from “unresolved tension” than “coherence”, more from a commitment to explore the meanings of our investments in the films than to justify those investments to others. As Murray’s many references to other critics attests, she is acutely aware of the risks she runs, and of the negatives that shadow the enterprise. Indeed, her employment of Geertz’s “Deep Play” discussion of Balinese cockfighting – quite apart from its uncanny applicability to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid where poultry figures (via chickens, fighting cocks, wild turkeys) as a sustained, even horrific, motif – directly addresses the “irrational” quality of our “over investment” in popular rituals. But, like Geertz, Murray sees these rituals as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They are, in Geertzian terms, “disquieting”, and exactly because brutality of a particular sort may be required, according to Geertz, for us to “see a dimension of [our] own subjectivity”.

The tension here between Murray’s utopianism and Geertz’s anthropologism is palpable, but enacting that tension is exactly the point. This Wounded Cinema, this Wounded Life does not break much interpretive ground regarding individual films, though Murray’s critical descriptions are often felicitous – her wonderfully thoughtful remarks about the “rape” scene in Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, for instance. The real drama of the book, rather, involves Murray’s eclectically lucid efforts to acknowledge the utopian strain in Peckinpah, as establishing the tension that makes his famously brutal stories so compellingly, so heartbreakingly human. (Sometimes that means bearing up under the pressure of Peckinpah’s own enraged despair, though rage too can be utopian.) To the extent that human life, per Heraclitus, is a “dancing spurt of flame”, perhaps it takes an impassioned camera-dancer like Sam Peckinpah to capture it for and on the screen. Given all the mindless montage pyrotechnics of our post-digital, action-cinema era, it is hard to disagree.

Leland Poague
Iowa State University
Created on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 | Last Updated: 19-Jul-05