Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wild Bunch
1969 · Sam Peckinpah · The Wild Bunch on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the children playing with scorpions before the robbery starts. (setting)
Peckinpah opens on kids crouched over a scorpion swarmed by red ants. They laugh, heap dry straw on the pile, and set it alight while the temperance band marches past.
Payoff: The first reel tells you what kind of world this is, and the rest of the film only fills it in. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls that ant pit an originary world: raw appetite showing through the ordinary town laid over it.
Watch what happens to speed the moment a body is hit. (cutting)
Lombardo cuts slow-motion footage against normal speed. A man takes a bullet and time opens out. The next cut drops you back into real-time noise.
Payoff: You feel an instant of death as a stretch of time, which is what makes the killing beautiful and unbearable at once. In the reading: any-instant-whatever. The reading calls this prying open an interval: an ordinary instant of movement held long enough to be felt as duration.
Watch how the bunch is arrayed across the wide frame. (camera)
Ballard uses the width of the anamorphic image to line the men up: riders strung along a horizon, bodies ranged down a bar or a wall, silhouettes against open sky.
Payoff: The group rather than any one man is the unit of this film, and the shape of the frame keeps saying so.
Listen to the birdsong and brass band just before the ambush. (sound)
The sound runs from near-quiet, a temperance march and ordinary street noise, straight into layered cacophony. The gunshots are mixed heavy and percussive.
Payoff: The jump from town sound to gunfire is how the film keeps violence from arriving on a schedule you can feel coming.
Watch how tired Holden looks in his first scenes. (performance)
Holden's matinee-idol face has weathered into something haggard, and Peckinpah casts Borgnine, Ryan, O'Brien, Oates, and Johnson the same way. The bodies are worn and slow.
Payoff: The casting makes the argument before the plot does. These men have outlived the conditions that gave them work.
Once you have seen it
Watch the four men walk abreast through Agua Verde. (staging)
Nothing is said and nothing has happened yet. Four survivors march the length of the compound side by side to reclaim Angel, carrying themselves as though the decision is already made.
Payoff: The walk converts certain defeat into something chosen, and it does that with posture alone. In the reading: action-image-large-form. The reading calls what follows the large form: the whole situation closes on them and calls one decisive act out of them.
Count how many angles a single killing is shown from. (cutting)
Peckinpah ran as many as six cameras on the massacres, several overcranked to different speeds. Lombardo shows one action from several vantages in quick succession, multiplying the impacts.
Payoff: The density here is where the modern action sequence begins. Directors have been taking the method apart ever since.
Watch how the last massacre rhymes with the first one. (structure)
The film is bracketed by two mass killings with the ride south between them. Parallel lines of action converge exactly the way they would in a rescue, and nobody is rescued.
Payoff: Griffith's cross-cut promised a save at the last minute. Peckinpah keeps the convergence and removes the save.
Listen to the song under the ride out of the village. (sound)
Fielding works Mexican folk idiom into the score, and the villagers see the outlaws off with a traditional song as they leave Angel's home behind.
Payoff: The music grants these men a dignity the plot keeps refusing them, and it is the only place they are given it.
Carry this in: Watch the children. They open the film with the scorpions, and they are still watching when the shooting starts.