What in the Peckinpah? When was this movie made? Violent, chilling, and nihilistic even by modern standards, it is no surprise that audiences in 1969 blanched at this offering, and astonishing that critics of the time seemed to appreciate it. Fifty years before Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Don Draper, Pike Bishop appeared on the screen to show reality as it is: nasty, brutal, and short.
I did not enjoy this movie, but I have been hoisted by my own petard, and have to admit that it is great. My current standard for the question is to ask, as a Reader's Digest critic evidently did at the the time of this one, "Why did this movie need to exist?" Peckinpah's own answers are only the surface of a deeper truth. One of his stated goals was to de-glamorize violence: "... it's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing," as quoted in David Weddle's biography. He also drew parallels with the violence of the Vietnam War, as broadcast nightly at the time.
But at its heart, this movie is not about violence. It is about the worldview that allows it. It is not only the blood that would have shocked contemporary audiences. The gratuitous nudity, casual sex, profanity, drunkenness, bloodthirstiness, and general lack of a moral center make it a wonder that it was created at all, let alone screened. The opening sequence reveals the truth: as we watch the movie, we are all those children, gleefully torturing bugs, and watching as they devour each other. Once we exit the theater, however, we are no longer the children. We are the bugs.
