Anglo Manhood in the Wild Bunch

Anglo Manhood vs. Mexican Deterritorilization

Ethnicity, Identity, & Violence in Peckinpaw's The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah frames his 1969 film, The Wild Bunch, with two complementary images. During the opening credits, children drop scorpions into a swarming mass of fire ants. At the end of the movie, the Anglo members of the Wild Bunch gang fight to their deaths against a similar swarm of indistinct, seemingly interchangeable Mexican federales. In both cases, sharply delineated figures are overwhelmed by an undifferentiated mass. Not coincidentally, this mass is "red": the red of the ants, the "red" Mexicans, the red revolution sweeping Mexico (the film is set in 1913), and above all else, the blood that arcs across the screen. In 1969, Peckinpaw's slow motion mayhem broke new boundaries in the cinematic portrayal of violence. It did this by breaking boundaries between bodies--obsessively examining the ways that the borders between self and other, subject and object, Anglo and Mexican, can be crossed, violated, and obliterated. Critics typically discuss this violence in terms of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the death of the Western as a plausible genre. The modern technology that invades the end of the film, automobiles and machine guns, initiates a level of mass violence that evokes the horrors of Vietnam and demonstrates the obsolescence of a High Noon ethos. Instead of a clearly delineated hero and villain facing one another on a deserted street, we have a white man at a machine gun trying to hold off a racialized horde. Yet the fact that the he fails to do so suggests that this is also a film about what Deleuze and Guattari describe as "deteritorialization"--a potential breakdown of masculine, racial, and national boundaries.

While the war in Vietnam may be a historical catalyst for the film, its major axis of difference is not East/West, but North/South. In the opening parts of the movie, Pike and his gang ride into the town of Starbuck, Texas, disguised as US federal troops. This masquerade is possible because of the increasing presence of US troops on the border because of the revolution in Mexico. Only three years after the film is set, President Wilson would order Pershing into Mexico to punish Pancho Villa for raids on New Mexico towns (he had little luck engaging Villa). In the film, Texas is portrayed as dangerous but familiar: a place where Pike and his gang know the rules but consciously break them. In Mexico the rules don't hold. For Anglos, it is the film's political unconscious, a place where both revolution and apocalypse are possible. In the film's depiction of Mexico, Anglo viewers encounter a mirror of anxieties that have little to do with actual pre-Revolutionary Mexico. _To transpose a notion of Edward Said's, Mexico in the film functions for the Anglo US much as "the Orient" functioned for Imperial Europe.

In Peckinpah's Mexico, bodies mix and flow in ways Anglos may fantasize about, but rarely enact. His Mexico offers access to a world of female bodies, dissolving boundaries and "childish" emotions which the United States denies Pike and his gang. In Texas, the gang almost shoots each other arguing over gold; in Mexico, they frolic in a sauna. In Starbuck, Crazy Lee forces people to march and sing at gunpoint; in Aqua Verde, Dutch and Freddie dance harmlessly with the residents. As Pike and his men leave Aqua Verde, instead of being shot out of town, they are serenaded. In Starbuck, Dutch barely escapes town with his life; in Mexico, he is given a flower.
If Mexico in the film is portrayed as a place of unrestrained passion and fluid possibility, the Anglo North is represented as being governed by individuality, contract, and bodily self-control. As the gang rides into Starbuck disguised as soldiers, one of the things they pass is a temperance meeting. This distinction between cowboys and Christians is a familiar trope in the Western, but in this case disguises a similar commitment to self-regulation. For example, recent historians have discussed how temperance clubs and legislation were actively financed by corporate capitalists as a vehicle for creating a more reliable, disciplined workforce. This fit hand in glove with the gradual consolidation of many ethnicities into a blander, whiter, Anglo America. Instead of taking time off from work to drink or celebrate a saint's feast day, European immigrant workers were encouraged to shed these pre-capitalist habits in exchange for racial privilege. The predominant value in the North is the self-control necessary to acquire capital, and this as of true of the gang as it is of their capitalist foe, the Railroad.

In fact, the gang is actually superior in this regard to the forces of Anglo law and order, including the US military. In a scene central to the movie's commentary on Vietnam, the Wild Bunch successfully highjacks a train shipment of military arms.

What differentiates the gang from the US military (and from the Mexican federales) is its ability to execute goals with discipline. In the film's terms, this discipline results from a specific notion of contract. Pike governs his sometimes resistant gang by the maxim that "when you side with a man, you stick with him." Clearly distinguished individuals freely enter into contracts to protect one anothers' bodies and acquire capital. Despite differences in age, intelligence, and physical prowess, all gang members are putatively equal in their contractual relation to one another. Although the ideal is often strained, it also idealized, and ultimately becomes something the gang is willing to die for.

If Pike's code epitomizes these values, they exist in a polar opposition anchored on the other end by Mapache, the general of the federales in North Mexico, and along a border policed by Angel, the Mexican member of the Wild Bunch. Angel is the sort who will eventually lead the revolution. He agrees to participate in the arms heist only on the condition that he is paid in guns that his impoverished countrymen can use in their struggle against federales who spend as much time raiding the countryside as they do fighting Villa's forces. Mapache, on the other hand, is portrayed as slothful, treacherous, stupid, and childlike. In other words, the movie finesses its racism by having "good" Mexicans and "bad" ones. "Good" Mexicans, like Angel and his Pueblo allies, are disciplined, efficient fighters, governed by ties of loyalty and commitment. "Bad" Mexicans encapsulate those institutions and values that Anglo culture defines itself against. In a cultural trope stretching perhaps as far back as Anglican portrayals of Catholic Spain, Mapache's Mexico is a world of superstition, feudalism, and titillating excess. The Oriental despot relocated to the Americas. In contrast to Pike's freely-entered contracts, Mapache and his followers are united by chains of wealth and patronage, power and appeasement. In his almost Rabelaisian excess, he represents a world where the scripts of liberal individualism no longer work. Gratification is immediate instead of delayed. Power is overtly autocratic instead of ostensibly contractual, and commodities are more important than capital.

Mapache, then, is a Harrigan, the US railroad baron who dispatches bounty hunters after Pike and his gang, made uncomfortably concrete and immediate. Harrigan controls men's bodies with laws and cash; Mapache does it with guns and goods. And even Harrigan falls back on (others') guns, because finally, in this movie, that is what control of the self and other selves comes down to: the ability to inflict pain and death. And pain and death, perhaps not surprisingly, are what the film falls back on when significant boundaries threaten to become deterritorialized.

The orgiastic slaughter at the end of the film terminates several of its structuring tensions. Angel, whose status in the gang had been tentative, becomes worth dying for. (In brief, Mapache kills Angel for giving guns to the villagers and the rest of the gang kills Mapache, sealing their own fate). Pike, in deciding to shoot one of Mapache's German military advisors as well, proves himself to be a loyal US outlaw instead of a mercenary traitor. The seductive promise of Mapache's "barbaric" existence is rejected. And a homoeroticism running beneath the surface of the film is allowed to break out. Three homosocial dyads recur throughout the film: Pike and his partner Dutch, Pike and his former partner Thorton, and the two other Anglo members of the gang, Sykes and Lyle. Sykes and Lyle are perhaps the most typical. Early in the film we find that they enjoying sharing prostitutes, something we later see them doing. Just before going to try and retrieve Angel from Mapache, they are haggling with yet another prostitute over whether she should be deserves to be paid for two patrons or one. In other words, sharing women conflates personal identities and boundaries. Because of a woman's presence, they are able to take a pleasure in each other that remains within officially heterosexual bounds. Dutch's ties to Pike are more intense because they are less overt, finally becoming explicit in the final scenes of the movie when they die together. The whole sequence of their death literally breaks down racial and physical boundaries as blood--male and female, male and male, Anglo and Mexican--runs together. The self-control that the movie repeatedly values as Anglo is released in an orgy of violence and border crossings made safe by the fact that it ends in death.

Thorton, Pike's former partner forced by the railroad to turn bounty hunter, closes the movie. Though viewers are given numerous flashbacks of the two, he only encounters Pike in the present when he finds his body among the slaughter. After a pause before the spectacle of Pike's rigid hand still clutching a phallic machine gun, he leaves Pike's body and takes his pistol. This is in effect a decision to abandon bounty hunting.

Shortly thereafter he joins Angel's people in their struggle against the federales. To some extent, he serves as the audience's structural proxy, a sympathetic observer who admires and outlives his quarry. But his decision to become a different kind of outlaw at the film's end, also contextualizes The Wild Bunch's relationship to other films. On the one hand, The Wild Bunch serves as a middle term in the transition from hero to outlaw to vigilante movies. No less than Apocalypse Now this is a film about a will to power that official military forces, whether US or Mexican, lack. Both Pike and Thorton are capable of doing what needs to be done, and live by a code that others pay lip service to, but are unwilling to follow when extreme dedication or sacrifice is called for. If The Wild Bunch is a movie about the death of the Western, it is also the gateway to the Anglo "male rampage film," a prelude to Rambo. If the traditional forces for upholding power prove to be ineffective, the solution is to "go native" as Thorton does by joining the Pueblo guerrillas. In a similar way, the disintegration of white bodies in the final shoot-out prepares the way for the reintegrated, cyborg bodies of post-Vietnam manhood. To the extent that the Western "dies," the monadic Anglo male, standing out in broad daylight and playing by inflexible rules, dies with it, his body torn and scattered in a hail of mechanized bullets. Only four years after Peckinpaw's film, viewers would see Yul Brunner portray a gunfighter in Westworld who was integrated because he was a machine. Yul Brynner, the impetuous Russian-American who seemed vaguely mechanical to begin with, would pave the way for Arnold Swartzenhegger, the similarly accent-laden and mechanical actor whose Terminator seemed merely an extension of Anglo masculinity's reconstituted but increasingly prosthetic nature in the postmodern era. The arc is from Pike's dead hand clutching a phallic machine gun, to Brynner's machined replica of a phallic male body, to Stallone or Schwarzenegger's steroid-enhanced body as a machine--an overtly prosthetic, supplemented body ready to reinforce old oppositions through newer, less traditional means.

Warren Hedges, English Dept., Southern Oregon University, 4/97