Straw Dogs · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He takes off his glasses. That is the whole film in a gesture. For an hour and a half David Sumner has been a man who looks — at equations on a blackboard, at the leering work crew through the farmhouse glass, at his wife's body and his neighbors' contempt — and does nothing with what he sees. Then the siege comes, and before the killing starts he folds the glasses away. The instrument of seeing is set down so that the hand can be used for something else. Peckinpah builds his most disputed film on exactly this hinge: the passage from a man who can only perceive to a man who finally, terribly, acts.

Deleuze gives that hinge a name. He calls David a centre of indetermination — the interval, the living gap where perception arrives but action does not yet leave. A reflex fires instantly; David doesn't. The provocations stack up — the hanged cat in the bedroom closet, the false hunting invitation that strands him on the moor, the men he's hired to fix his garage watching his wife — and each one lands in him and stalls. This is what Deleuze means by the crisis of the action-image: the old contract of cinema, where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, has broken down. David sees and sees and the sensory-motor circuit won't close. For most of the film he is what Deleuze calls a seer, a voyant — someone the situation has outrun.

What makes Straw Dogs strange, and why it scandalized 1971 alongside A Clockwork Orange and Dirty Harry, is that it does not stay in that modern stall. It violently re-instates the very thing the New Hollywood was dismantling. The final defense of the farmhouse is the action-image restored at full, archaic power — what Deleuze calls the large form, where a total situation presses on a man until one decisive act transforms it. "This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house." The siege is a binomial in its purest state: force against force, one man against the milieu of the village, the encompassing hostility of the place — the synsign, the situation that surrounds and calls forth the act. Peckinpah even keeps the old respiration of the Western, the alternation Deleuze found in those films between the vast space of the moor and the taut, narrowing line of the farmhouse interior, until the home becomes a kill-box.

But look at what the village is made of. The men of St Buryan are not characters with motives so much as appetites — Charlie's old claim on Amy, Tom Hedden's drunken menace, the pack instinct that turns a church social sour. This is the impulse-image, Deleuze's degenerate, naturalist register, where pure drives erupt beneath the social surface. Coquillon's Cornwall — damp, grey-green, mud and low cloud, refusing the picturesque — is what Deleuze calls a derived milieu: a concrete setting that turns out to be the thin skin over an originary world of hunger and cruelty. The man-trap mounted on the wall is the film telling you so. It hangs there as a mark, an object meaningful by its customary chain — you see the iron jaws, you know they will close on something — and Chekhov's rule is also a law of drives. The glasses, set against it, become the film's true symbol: the whole organizing relation of the picture, intellect versus animal force, condensed into one prop and then removed.

The most contested four minutes in Peckinpah's career are an argument about montage. The assault on Amy is cut in the grammar Peckinpah inherited from Eisenstein's Odessa Steps and refined on The Wild Bunch — colliding fragments, overcranked slow-motion laid against normal speed, an action both prolonged and shattered. Deleuze would call this the pathetic, dialectical cut: shots that collide to produce a third thing no single shot contains. Here that third thing is an undecidability the film refuses to dissolve. The editing splices the present with flash-forwards and recollection-images of Amy and Charlie, and stages her response so that it will not resolve into either consent or pure violation. This is falsifying-narration in its rawest form — two mutually exclusive truths held as co-true, the cut itself made to lie. It is the part of the film that should never be defended and can never be un-seen, and its power is exactly its refusal to let the audience finish processing it before the plot moves on.

The lineage is honest about its debts. High Noon gave Peckinpah the civilized man abandoned by his community; Seven Samurai and The Birds gave him the homestead defended against an escalating siege; Potemkin gave him the collision grammar; The Wild Bunch, two years earlier, gave him the multi-speed montage that moralizes the instant of death by stretching it. What Straw Dogs added to the discourse is the suggestion that the action-image — the hero who acts, the home defended — was never civilization's opposite but its buried originary world, waiting in the interval for the glasses to come off. Watch it again, if you can bear it, and watch David's hands. The film is the story of what they were always going to do.