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Watching Sam Peckenpah's 1971 'Straw Dogs' I found myself sort of stuck while watching its most controversial segment midway through the movie:
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Susan George as Amy getting assaulted sent a seriously mixed message as I watched the rape. Peckenpah has her giving the local (and old fling) serious yes/no messages throughout the first half of the film and even forewarns her husband that the violence in the closet was daring them that they could have her. So when the local (cant recall his name) forces himself on her, she takes some smacks and manhandling but ends up rather enjoying herself. Now I'm keen to rape fantasy and on some level having an old lover 'take you' is something I get, especially with the ensuing rape that follows. But her behavior afterwards leaves me pondering whether Peckenpah just really hates women or whether she was actually trying to reconcile her husband's peevishness during the final assault on the house. Was she just trying to get him to man-up all along, with every attempt only urging everything a step in a worse direction? The addition of Janis and her flirtations with the village idiot/molester says to me it isnt that simple.
If this seems convoluted, fogive me. I'm trying to figure it out, ask for alternate ideas and not blow the entire movie for anyone ignoring the spoiler alert.
I love 70's film for its daring in crossing lines.. My question is was Peckenpah being complex and insightful or simply misogynistic?
***************************** SPOILER ALERT *******************************
Susan George as Amy getting assaulted sent a seriously mixed message as I watched the rape. Peckenpah has her giving the local (and old fling) serious yes/no messages throughout the first half of the film and even forewarns her husband that the violence in the closet was daring them that they could have her. So when the local (cant recall his name) forces himself on her, she takes some smacks and manhandling but ends up rather enjoying herself. Now I'm keen to rape fantasy and on some level having an old lover 'take you' is something I get, especially with the ensuing rape that follows. But her behavior afterwards leaves me pondering whether Peckenpah just really hates women or whether she was actually trying to reconcile her husband's peevishness during the final assault on the house. Was she just trying to get him to man-up all along, with every attempt only urging everything a step in a worse direction? The addition of Janis and her flirtations with the village idiot/molester says to me it isnt that simple.
If this seems convoluted, fogive me. I'm trying to figure it out, ask for alternate ideas and not blow the entire movie for anyone ignoring the spoiler alert.
I love 70's film for its daring in crossing lines.. My question is was Peckenpah being complex and insightful or simply misogynistic?
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Re: Straw Dogs
Tue, December 2, 2008 - 3:08 PMgangster,
The question you brought up has been debated a lot regarding that scene.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Dogs
I have yet to see though...don't know where I could rent it in Phoenix except thru Netflix. -
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Re: Straw Dogs
Tue, December 2, 2008 - 3:41 PMMy guess is misogynistic. It was kind of a thing with '70s movies--post-Freudian, post-Vietnam, dawn of 2nd-wave feminism, etc. There's a real hatefulness toward women in '70s movies that you don't really see in those from any other era, in my opinion. There was no reason to be complex about gender relations, because nobody in the 70s was really asking those questions--well again, feminists were, but they didn't get a whole lot of airtime, and when they did, it was stuff like Kramer vs. Kramer, or Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Pekinpah just takes it to an extreme--making spashy and explicit with Hollywood production values what you could mostly only see in exploitation flicks in porn houses before that.
There's earlier stuff like The Graduate which really _is_ complex, because of the way Anne Bancroft plays Mrs Robinson (a hell of a lot more sympathetically now than I am an adult than I remember her when I was younger). She got stuck in a horrible stultifying marriage because she got pregnant before marriage--this comes out in the stories she tells Benjamin, who doesn't care because he can't see her as a person at all, just as a seductive threat. But her backstory doesn't get a lot of focus either.
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Re: Straw Dogs
Tue, December 2, 2008 - 3:57 PMI just reread what you actually said, GB, and I get why you're musing about complicated rape scenes. I'm reminded of a similar scene in High Plains Drifter--one of my favorite movies--the whole mixed message thing, only it's clear that she actually does like it.
I don't think that's so much feminist as maybe, going along with your train of thought, some way to ask the question in movies that also wasn't being asked very well at that time in culture, what did women really want sexually and how did they experience it, following the long repression of the 50s and the equally long and equally repressive free love thing in the '60s, which usually wasn't free for the girls who ended up pregnant with some hippie's kid. And maybe, following this implication, was something much wilder and much less permissable than what they're getting at home.
But I still don't like how narrow the options are--rape or toxic domesticity. Things get fun again in the '80s, with a whole bunch of movies about girls who just wanna have fun.
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