The Wild Bunch · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The children come first. Before the disguised outlaws ride into Starbuck, before a single shot, Peckinpah lingers on a knot of kids crouched in the dust over a scorpion. Red ants are swarming it. The children are laughing. Then they heap dry straw on top and set the whole writhing thing alight, still laughing, while the temperance band plays on. Hold that image. The film spends two hours explaining it.

Deleuze has a name for what those ants disclose. He calls it the originary world — a savage substrate of pure drives that a naturalist film reveals beneath the ordinary social surface. The border town of 1913, with its bank and its marching teetotalers, is what he'd call the derived milieu: the everyday setting. The scorpion pit is the truth underneath it. This is the impulse-image at work — appetite, cruelty, degradation erupting through the crust of civilization — and once you've seen it you start to feel its pull everywhere in the picture. Deleuze's other word for that pull is the line of slope: an irreversible downhill drift toward exhaustion and death. Everyone in The Wild Bunch is sliding down it. The plot is just the speed of the descent.

Why reach for Deleuze at all here, on a Western? Because he gives a precise name to the thing the film is secretly about. In the cinema Deleuze calls the movement-image, a man perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action resolves the situation; the editing serves that chain. That is the whole grammar of the classical Western, and Pike Bishop's bunch are virtuosos of it — they perceive, they ride, they shoot, they take what they came for. The horror the film keeps rubbing in their faces is that none of it lands anymore. The automobile, the machine gun, the railroad's reach: the world has stopped answering to action. Deleuze located this exact failure — the crisis of the action-image, men who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive — in postwar Europe, in Antonioni's drifters and Rossellini's ruins. Peckinpah stages it as a gunfight Western, which is the audacity, because it forces the obsolescence into the open. The Bunch can still act beautifully. It just changes nothing. The West is already gone before the credits.

Now the invention, the thing that put this film in every editing manual since. Bergson noticed that cinema samples motion at what Deleuze calls any-instant-whatever — ordinary, equidistant instants, not the posed and decisive 'privileged' poses of older art. Peckinpah took that idea and broke it open. He ran as many as six cameras at once on the massacres, several overcranked to different speeds, and handed the pile of footage to Lou Lombardo, who intercut the registers. A body takes a bullet and time dilates; the cut snaps back to real-time chaos; another body, another register. What he found was a way to make you feel the instant of death as duration — to pry an interval open inside the action and hold it there. This is the action-image straining toward something it can't quite become. Deleuze's time-image is built on temps mort, dead time where nothing advances and you simply endure what you see. Peckinpah smuggles that stillness into the middle of a shootout. The violence is balletic and unbearable at once because he has taught the cut to slow time down without stopping the world.

Watch the great walk to feel the other register. Four surviving men, wordless, abreast, march the length of Agua Verde to reclaim Angel. Nothing is said and nothing yet happens. Deleuze would call this a gest — a posture, an attitude of the body that lays bare a whole social and moral relation. The walk exposes everything the plot has refused these men: it converts certain defeat into a chosen thing, dignity assembled out of nothing but the way they carry themselves. Then the encompassing situation finally calls out its decisive act — Deleuze's large-form action-image, force closing on force — and the act is collective suicide.

The craft debts are exact. From Kurosawa's Seven Samurai comes the multi-camera telephoto coverage of combat and the doomed-defenders shape; from Sanjuro, the arterial squib-geyser Peckinpah scaled into a flood. Ride the High Country was his own first elegy for old gunmen and gave him Lucien Ballard. Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre supplied the moral rot of Anglos coming apart south of the border, and Sturges's Magnificent Seven the men-on-a-mission frame he inverts into tragedy. Most pointedly: Penn's Bonnie and Clyde had just married slow motion to bursting squibs, and Lombardo codified what Penn improvised.

Here is what it did to film. Griffith built convergent parallel montage for the last-minute rescue — two lines of action racing together so someone is saved. Peckinpah keeps the convergence and removes the rescue. The lines race together and everyone dies. He industrialized the dilation of death into a structural principle, and the bloodstream of modern action cinema — Scorsese, Woo, Bigelow, Mendes — runs straight back through this picture.

So rewatch the opening. The ants. The straw. The laughing children. Peckinpah told you on the first reel exactly what kind of world you were in, and how it ends.