Sam Peckinpah: How Dare You?

Let's remember these people before we all go to Hell.

For those of you with short memories, the man pictured in the previous post is Sam Peckinpah, an American movie director from the Sixties and Seventies responsible for three films I love--Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, Junior Bonner and Convoy. He was a legend in his own lifetime ( and I can say that about Sam without fear of contradiction), partly because of the degree of violence supposed to be in his films, and partly because of the slow-motion technique he used to depict the violence: at the key moment in any scene, when fist connects with chin or bullet enters belly, everything slows down in a Peckinpah movie, so that the collapse over a table or the tumble through a window can be viewed in exaggerated detail.Audiences loved it.

Those with greater knowledge of the movie business and the machinations of Hollywood celebrated or reviled Sam as someone who stood outside the system--a ferocious, unpredictable drunk who clashed relentlessly with the money men financing his pictures because he was determined to make them his way. Sam was no respecter of power, and ultimately his inability to kiss the corporate posterior dramatically affected his career. But that's the way it is when you're a genuine outsider.

Without getting too pretentious (like I can resist), it's the philosophical content of Peckinpah's work that survives. Sam's best work is all about the same thing: what it means to be a free thinker in a shrinking world. Focussed by his abhorrence at the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Sam viewed the modern world as a place in which the majority of people were content to abandon their own individual personality and conscience to the mentality of the group, the town, the nation. But Sam's heroes, like the man himself, can't do that. And the movies tell us what becomes of them. Invariably, because the conformist mentality is as vicious as it is superficial, the outsider dies. And if anybody reading Suffolk Punch wants to argue with that thesis I'd be glad to hear from them.

My own separate thesis is that Sam belonged to a generation of men. Laugh if you will, but I believe it. Iron hard, relentlessly and perversely individualistic, with a philosophical depth that can only be found in those who swim their own way, they look like mythological giants compared to the whiners and weepers and fanatical bathers and skin moisturisers who have come along in the decades since. Look at Sam and his bretheren--more of whom in other posts--and you'd think that the male gene pool was being gradually diluted with each generation: from full fat to semi-skimmed and finally to the skimmed male who bears so little resemblance to his forefathers he will be presumed to belong to a different species. And I am part of this dilution, though I hold the race memory of better times. If I seem unduly obsessed with old heroes at times, it's because in celebrating them I am trying to remind myself how to be someone I can be proud of.

How dare you?, incidentally, refers to the speech Kris Kristofferson made at Peckinpah's funeral when he looked down at the assembled "mourners" and saw the faces of the very same Hollywood producers and businessman who had dedicatedly persecuted Sam throughout his career because he wouldn't do what they told him to. Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing.