Gabrielle Murray,
This Wounded Cinema, this Wounded life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah.
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004.
ISBN: 0 2759805 88
US$89.95 (hb)
176pp

All they saw was the violence.
(Pauline Kael qtd. in Murray, 6)

Analyzing the work of Sam Peckinpah is a little like defending Huckleberry Finn or Heart of Darkness; each endeavor endlessly conceals, even as it undresses, the ugly underbelly of genius. Peckinpah’s apologists behave as though they are obligated to defend the indefensible. Consequently, in spite of the value of moral insecurity always looming like Agua Verde buzzards above studies of Peckinpah’s work, the constant defensiveness of Peckinpah critics persistently begets either/or thinking.

By embracing the ‘complexity’ of Peckinpah’s vision, Gabrielle Murray’s study seeks to avoid oppositional thinking. Instead, Murray suggests that Peckinpah’s work exemplifies a utopian vision obscured by critical taglines obsessed with gore. Unlike other defenders of Peckinpah’s violence, Murray locates her optimism not in violence as critique of itself but rather in the human experience of film. Perhaps Murray’s most ingenious move is to reassess the ways in which audiences are moved by Peckinpah’s violence minus speculation about causal relationships or ideology. She argues that “the utopian ideal that [Peckinpah’s violence] arrives at is a negative one, but the experience of this intense, exhilarating vitality is utopian” (70). Along the way, Murray draws on philosophical and theoretical voices sometimes neglected during the reigns of cine-structuralism and cultural studies, among them Heraclitus, Edgar Morin, Stanley Cavell, Inga Clendinnen, and Clifford Geertz.

From Heraclitus, Murray borrows the idea of “universal flux,” wherein, in the words of the philosopher, “It is one and the same thing to be living or dead, awake or asleep, young or old. The former aspect in each case becomes the latter, and the latter again the former, by sudden unexpected reversal” (qtd. in Murray 13). By keeping in the critical foreground this constant paradoxical interplay of life and death described by Heraclitus, Murray is able to claim that aesthetic “experiences” of otherwise destructive violence may have “utopian” potential because they affirm the value of freedom and life. As Murray claims, “In Peckinpah’s violent aesthetic we see and feel that raw edge that exists between life and death” (130). Combined with a notion borrowed from Edgar Morin that the cinema has a capacity to “re-enchant the world” (17), along with numerous references to the ritual quality of film grounded in Clendinnen’s study of the Aztecs and Geertz’s anthropological cornerstone “Deep Play: A Description of the Balinese Cockfight,” Heraclitus’s “universal flux” becomes one ingredient in a more potent critical cocktail well mixed by Murray into a coherent philosophical vision regarding Peckinpah’s work. Indeed, Murray’s vision for Peckinpah is far more appealing than Peckinpah’s own tendency to associate himself with what Christopher Sharrett (1999) calls “such reactionary drivel” as the “deterministic theories of Robert Ardrey” (Sharrett 82).

Leland Poague’s 2005 Screening the Past review of Murray’s book covers Murray’s theoretical ground in more detail, and I highly recommend Poague’s review to readers interested in intersections of philosophy and film. However, in spite of the fact that most of Murray’s pages are spent crosscutting between what Poague calls “close-reading à la William Rothman” and development of her theory, what I find most interesting in Murray’s argument is the brilliantly simple observation that Peckinpah’s work is best understood through the ‘experiences’ of viewers. It is mostly through certain indescribable moments of experience that Peckinpah’s work inspires me. Dundee’s (Charlton Heston) discovery by Teresa (Senta Berger) after the Major’s long, self-loathing drunk in Major Dundee (USA 1965), the cryptic but layered moment with the prostitutes and tortured bird before the final march in The Wild Bunch (USA 1969), Junior (Steve McQueen) and Ace (Robert Preston) carnivalizing the frontier parade and bucking through the clothes lines in Junior Bonner (USA 1972), Doc (Steve McQueen) and Carol’s (Ali MacGraw) awkward first sex scene in The Getaway (USA 1972), and the deaths of Black Harris (L. Q. Jones) and Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (USA 1973), these and other moments of ambiguously moving experience account for the constant interest in Peckinpah in spite of some of the more meat-headed and philosophically silly ideas in his films. And it is these types of effects that Murray’s book attempts to describe, often, ironically, through overlong summaries of what she admits cannot be adequately rendered in words.

Unfortunately, Murray sells her insights about experience through unnecessary acts of exclusion. For example, she replaces the reductive trend in cultural studies of “context” without experience with the reverse, i.e., experience without context, arguing that “We need to move beyond generic and literary-historical frameworks if we are to explore the more universal appeal of these films” (7), as though our experiences of the films are separate from these contexts. As a result, Murray’s book sometimes leaves me with an unclear notion of ‘genre’ and ‘context’, for example, when she asserts that Peckinpah’s violent “tableaux resonate with meaning that says something significant to us about our fragile, mortal being and our ever-consuming world” (7). Are “tableaux” not generic? Is “our ever-consuming world” not a “historical framework”?

Like the best criticism on Peckinpah, Murray’s book attends closely to Peckinpah’s work. Nevertheless, Murray’s book, like many on Peckinpah, often retreats from the contradictions it raises. Consider, for example, the following passage:

Peckinpah has been called a “wounded romantic,” an “idealist,” a “fascist,” and a “misogynist.” Probably, to do justice to the complexity of these films, we need to take into account all of these claims. However, the most important value of these films is to have rendered, with zeal and passion, the paradoxical nature of the human condition. (6-7)

Perhaps unintentionally, Murray reduces the very ‘complexities’ she seeks to address, leaving us with abstract universals like ‘the paradoxical nature of the human condition’.

Murray’s book is an interesting addition to studies on Peckinpah, especially in her suggestion that we explore the experiential nature of Peckinpah’s work, a suggestion refreshingly free of phenomenological jargon. However, in her zeal to avoid the abstractions of context-without-text and established western antinomies, Murray resurrects older abstractions. Consequently, she frequently short-changes the importance of gender in Peckinpah’s work, though I do not think it is her intention to do so. And her framework, even with the ambivalence it affords to Peckinpah’s brand of utopianism, often leaves little room for discussions of Peckinpah’s difficult ironies, which are more readily addressed by the now less fashionable frameworks of critics like Jim Kitses (1969, 2004) and Paul Seydor (1980, 1997).

Matt Wanat,
Maryville State University, USA.

Works cited

Sharrett, Christopher. “Peckinpah the Radical: The Politics of The Wild Bunch.” Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Stephen Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 79-104.

Created on: Sunday, 17 June 2007