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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the children. They open the film with the scorpions, and they are still watching when the shooting starts.