Straw Dogs Sam Peckinpah\'s 1971

Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah's 1971 film Straw Dogs is a cinematic masterpiece that happens to contain gruesome imagery and themes of violence and nihilism. Peckinpah built the screenplay around Gordon William's novel the Siege of Trencher's Farm and apparently renamed the story Straw Dogs to echo a passage in the Tao Te Ching. Whether or not Peckinpah derived the title of Straw Dogs from ancient Taoist literature is irrelevant. However, the title offers telling insight into the tone and theme of Peckinpah's movie. Straw dogs, like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, are brainless. One of the main messages of Straw Dogs is that a mob mentality stems from mindlessness, and that mindless violence is a pervasive social sickness. The film's setting n a small insular town in England was not an arbitrary choice. In fact, the clash of cultures and worldviews becomes a central theme in Straw Dogs. Davide Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) represents Reason. He is a mathematician. He is not driven by passion. He believes in rule of law and is shocked to find that the townsfolk in his wife's place of birth take the law squarely into their own hands.

Peckinpah is not glorifying violence in Straw Dogs; far from it, the filmmaker is deploring the type of primitive mentality that leads to rape, betrayal, and anomie. What Peckinpah accomplishes with Straw Dogs is remarkable in that he turns protagonist David into a straw dog too. David's insistent rationality makes him a cold lover and distant emotionally. He is also patriarchal and patronizing, treating his trophy wife Amy (Susan George) like a child. Peckinpah plays up their relationship with frequent references to Amy's childlike mischief and playful sexuality. She will not wear a bra and teases her husband.

Interestingly, the only sex scene in the entire movie is not between David and Amy but between Amy and her former lover Charlie Venner (Del Henney), a violent yet erotic encounter that culminates in her being gang raped. The scenes in which Amy and David are in bed together do not depict them having sex; in one scene they frolic under the covers as David claims to have lost a chess piece. Their sex life clearly lacks maturity and mutual respect, and Peckinpah makes it clear early in the film that Amy is frustrated with her dull husband.

Straw Dogs is permeated with symbolism, one of the features that makes the film remarkable. The first and most immediate symbol is one that foreshadows the violent climax of the movie: the antique bear trap that Amy purchases. Being trapped is a motif in the movie, as the couple plus Henry Niles are trapped in their house during the film's climax. Hunting is also a theme. David becomes an ironically literal sitting duck when the local lads take him on a duck hunt, leave him alone to sit on a stone and tell him the ducks will just come on out of the woods and jump into his sack. David is emasculated many times in Straw Dogs, adding further nuance to the film's title and also proving that Peckinpah was in no way condoning the misogyny or violence but commenting harshly on its root causes.