Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
1974 · Sam Peckinpah · Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia on Sightlines
A man drives across Mexico with a burlap sack riding shotgun. Flies keep settling on it. He talks to the sack. He calls it Al.
That is the image everybody remembers from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and for years it was filed as evidence: proof that Peckinpah had gone from The Wild Bunch to grindhouse in five years flat. Look at what is actually in the car. Bennie is not carrying proof of anything. He is not carrying a symbol. He is carrying a piece of a dead man that strangers will pay a million dollars for, it is going bad in the heat, and he has started supplying its half of the conversation.
Deleuze has a word for an object like that, and it isn't symbol. It's fetish.
In Cinema 1 he clears a space between two kinds of image everyone already knows. On one side the close-up, where a face holds a feeling that never gets discharged into anything. On the other the action film, where a man reads a situation and changes it. Between them he puts the impulse-image, and he takes its anatomy from literary naturalism, from Zola, whose people are moved not by psychology or plot but by appetites that use them up and throw them away. Stroheim and Buñuel are his film cases. The structure is fixed. There is a derived milieu: a real place with an address and working hours. Under it an originary world, a savage zone of pure drive that the milieu is only the crust of. There is a fetish, a fragment torn out of the world, usually off a body, that the drive fastens onto. And there is a line of slope, the one irreversible downhill run naturalism knows how to tell.
Run the film through that and it stops looking like a director in freefall.
Derived milieu: a tourist bar in Mexico City where Bennie plays piano for people who want something local with their drinks. Originary world: everything the road opens into once he leaves, shot by Alex Phillips Jr. in available Mexican light that flatters none of it. Dust, heat haze, cantinas, a brothel, a cemetery. Peckinpah does not cut between the two worlds. He lets one come up through the other the way sweat comes up through a shirt.
The fetish is on the seat, buzzing.
Here is why the distinction earns its keep. A symbol means something. Deleuze files symbols under the mental-image, in thirdness, the register Hitchcock worked: an object exists to put characters into relation and hand the audience knowledge. The MacGuffin is the pure case, microfilm or uranium, a thing with no properties except that everyone wants it. Kiss Me Deadly, direct ancestor of the head-in-the-sack, took that to its nihilist limit with the great whatsit. Peckinpah does something cruder and stranger. He gives the MacGuffin a body. A MacGuffin does not rot. This one rots, and draws flies, and rides beside the driver. Nobody in the picture can tell you why a head is worth a million dollars. They only want it, and the wanting has no argument behind it. The moment the pursued object starts decomposing on screen, the film drops out of meaning and into drive.
That fall is the plot. The quest is hollow by construction, because Alfredo Garcia is already dead before frame one. There is no task. There is only transport. A bounty picture normally runs on the gap between wanting and getting; Peckinpah closes the gap early and asks what's left, and what's left is freight and cost. The closer Bennie gets to the money, the more completely he is stripped of dignity, then of love, then of life. That is the line of slope written as a screenplay. In naturalism, plot is entropy with dialogue.
The rhythm carries it. Peckinpah brought his violent montage to Mexico, the multi-angle burst that shatters a gunfight into shards, the slow-motion accent. He did not bring the camera battery he had marshalled for The Wild Bunch, or the budget for set pieces. What the film has instead is long dilated stretches of road and waiting and drinking, and then a shock. Deleuze calls those stretches dead time: screen minutes where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. Peckinpah uses them the way a hangover uses an afternoon. Violence does not arrive here as a climax. It interrupts a nap.
Two things he blocks on purpose. Oates plays most of the picture in cheap sunglasses, which shuts down the affection-image at the source, since a face you cannot read reflects nothing back. And the scene partner Bennie gets has a face with nothing behind it at all. The film's celebrated conceit, his growing intimacy with the head, addressing it aloud as Al, is staging that turns a horror prop into the vehicle for grief: a man performing tenderness at an object because there is no one left to perform it at. Oates built Bennie, the glasses and the slouch and the shabby self-deluding romance, as a deliberate echo of Peckinpah himself. Deleuze, after Pasolini, calls that fusion free indirect discourse: the camera stops observing the character and half-speaks as him. It is why the self-disgust never plays as satire. Peckinpah didn't watch a loser from across the room. He put his own sunglasses on him.
Deleuze dates the collapse of the action-image to postwar cinema and lists its symptoms. Two are here in full. The voyage that transforms nothing: Bennie drives a long way and arrives at the only place a man in his position can arrive. And the plot behind the plot that nobody sees the top of: two bounty agents in suits, their employer above them, above him El Jefe, played by Emilio Fernández, a great Mexican director cast as the patriarch whose wounded honour started the machine. Bennie never sees its shape. He is inside an errand. Peckinpah's westerns ran on the large form, where an encompassing situation calls out the decisive act that changes it. The act at the end of this one changes nothing except the body count, and he chooses it over the money.
The debts are specific. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre built the on-location Mexican greed parable that ends with the reward worthless, and Bennie's bounty is Dobbs's gold blowing away, restaged as meat. Out of the Past supplied the fatalist walk toward your own death for a woman and a payoff, inherited whole and stripped of its elegance. Vera Cruz seeded the cynical gringo working south of the border for cash. From his own Ride the High Country Peckinpah carried over the aging man holding a private code through betrayal, the moral architecture Bennie still has on him while it is being taken off him, and from Major Dundee the Mexican location grammar he reuses here at close range.
Forward, it founded no school. It granted a permission. After this you could put a corpse in the passenger seat and play it for mourning instead of gags, shoot a crime film that looks like a bad afternoon, and build a genre object designed to spoil on camera. Peckinpah said it was the only one of his films released exactly as he meant it. Reviled, then reclaimed, it is the picture where he stopped making the chase beautiful.
Watch it again, and don't watch the head. Watch the flies. Then ask the question the film leaves open: if he walks away from a million dollars at the end, what was he carrying it for?
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — The whole architecture: a bar-job milieu opening onto a savage Mexico, a body-fragment everyone wants for no stated reason, a protagonist run downhill by appetite rather than plot — 'a meditation on machismo and futility' ending in a suicidal act of revenge.
- fetish — The severed head in the burlap sack — a part-object literally torn off a body, 'first as a hidden object of value and then as a grotesque, buzzing companion in the passenger seat,' charged with compulsive force and worth a million dollars to men who can't say why.
- derived-milieu — The Mexico City tourist bar where Bennie plays piano for the gringo trade — a documentable workplace with hours, presented as the thin social crust over everything the road opens into.
- originary-world — Real Mexican locations shot in available light by Alex Phillips Jr. — dust, heat haze, dirt roads, cantinas, a brothel, a cemetery, frames loaded with flies and decay — a zone of pure drive beneath the tourist milieu.
- entropy / degradation — 'The closer Bennie gets to the money, the more thoroughly he is stripped of dignity, love, and finally life' — a bounty plot whose genre momentum is converted into annihilation rather than payoff.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The quest structure 'hollowed out and turned against itself': the target is already dead before the film starts, so no act can transform the situation, and the closing act of revenge is suicidal.
- voyage-balade-form — The road-movie spine of 'the road, the waiting, the drinking' — a trip through the Mexican underworld that transforms nothing and delivers Bennie to annihilation rather than to a changed situation.
- condemnation-of-the-plot — The chain of command Bennie never sees the top of: Gig Young and Robert Webber as predatory bounty agents, Helmut Dantine as criminal power above them, Emilio Fernández's El Jefe presiding over the story's engine of vengeance.
- temps mort — The film 'spends long stretches in a slower, more dilated rhythm — the road, the waiting, the drinking — so that the editing alternates between torpor and shock,' with the Wild Bunch slow-motion apparatus reduced to occasional accents.
- affection-image — Oates plays Bennie in cheap sunglasses, a face blocked from reflecting; his scene partner is a severed head, a face with nothing behind it. Addressing it aloud as 'Al' has him supplying both halves of an affect with nowhere to go.
- free-indirect-discourse — Oates's appearance and manner were built by actor and director as 'a deliberate echo of Peckinpah himself, making Bennie a kind of authorial surrogate' — the author's vision fused with the character's rather than observing it from outside.