Violence, in most movies, is pretty standard—you get shot in the face by Scarface, your neck broken by Steven Seagall, or eaten alive by sharks. How many time have you seen a man thrash about as he is nearly decapitated by a bear trap? That’s Straw Dogs, a movie that must have been much more shockingly violent for the audiences of 1968 than it was for me (or us).

The film follows David Sumner, an American mathematician, and Amy, his English wife, as they leave the Vietnam-era maelstrom of the US for the bucolic Cornish countryside. There’s a sense of foreboding from the very beginning of the film, when you see the local mens’ lascivious stares at Amy’s chest—she’s a “liberated” woman who doesn’t wear bras. Throughout the movie, the locals—and I mean mostly the men—come off like they either think with their fists or their dicks or some combination thereof.

Of course, hostilities and misunderstandings accumulate, Sumner’s masculinity is questioned. The piece de resistance of the movie, if you can call it that while ignoring your body’s squirm, is the protracted rape scene. I don’t know how many rape scenes I have seen in films over the years—not a lot, I think—but there are two that stick in my mind the most: one of them is the rape of Monica Belluci’s character in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and the other is the rape of Amy in Straw Dogs. I can definitely see how some would accuse this scene of being a male chauvinist fantasy—the man attempts to rape the woman, but before you know it, she stops resisting it and starts wanting him. Of course, unlike Irreversible the rape scene in SD is a “double-rape”–its when the second man, Norman, rapes her.

Following a tip from Aric Queen I took a look at director Sam Peckinpah’s wikipedia page, and yes, the guy was a quite a character. Coke fiend, alkie, and talented director. But for that very reason, his patched career is much more interesting than those middling directors that neither lead interesting lives nor make interesting work.

The last scenes of Straw Dogs, where David successfully defends his house, woman, honor, and dignity from the local mob is a classic by any standards, and is, in the words of Aric Queen, a cross between Home Alone and True Romance–not the comparison I would have or could have thought of, but funnily effective as a description of the movie. Hoffman’s transformation from mild-mannered mathematician to defender of his homeland security is a bit far-fetched.

I haven’t read that many reviews of the film, but there is a thorough, lucid, and intelligent look at the movie by Dan Schneider, both on his site Cosmoetica as well as on the Alternative Film Guide. I think the last few paragraphs of that DVD/movie review are worth quoting here:

Straw Dogs, for its part, is plagued by a simple-minded script, unrealistic characters and situations, thus wallowing in gray mediocrity. Worse yet, lesser films on violence are almost invariably dull. Straw Dogs proves the rule. In fact, its own self-importance is what makes Straw Dogs far less enjoyable than, say, Last House on the Left or Night of the Living Dead. The former is so silly and unpretentious that its images and violence lodge in the viewers’ mind — such as the infamous fellatio-biting scene — while the latter is simply relentless pedal to the metal violence that is inexplicable.

Straw Dogs should have been more grounded in reality, or more campy, or more straightforward in its naked bile for mankind. As it is, it sits on the fence, and it is so predictable that it becomes
tedious. There’s not a moment where a viewer can get into any of the characters and identify with them — let alone care for what happens to them. Note that Peckinpah will show the beginning of acts of violence, but never the results — e.g., we see no real penetration of Amy, and we do not see David’s actual violence. The camera always looks away — even when he is tossing grapefruits at his cat. While this may seem commendable on the director’s part, it also neuters the visceral effect of the violence, so that we get in effect a serial killer of a film tidied up for children, showing all the “fun” of violence with none of the consequences. Thereby, Peckinpah’s set-up is not a statement of ethics, merely an unjustified and poor artistic choice.
In short, being controversial does not always equate with quality, and Straw Dogs feels increasingly like a puerile attempt to shock viewers (something it no longer does), despite its pretensions of offering something deeper. Ultimately, it no more than a passable B-movie with a pedigreed director and A-movie production values. Ironically, the very lack of such pretensions is what makes something like Last House on the Left work better, while a film like Night of the Living Dead touches far deeper into the human psyche.

Schneider’s two major points are interesting: the first is just that the film isn’t all that good, by the standards of Peckinpah’s oeuvre as a whole, or when compared to other movies exploring similar themes and made around the same time. The other and more subtle point is that the film is amoral—that this is an anarchy, where anything goes because no one really gets punished for it. And if, as Schneider says, you never see the effects of violence (he mentions, correctly, that you never see the cat getting hit by the grapefruit)–then what Roger Ebert asserted about the moral outrage of the film ought to be questioned.

The meta-issue of why films get misinterpreted is another can of worms. Schneider’s most acerbic criticism is for the film scholar that does the commentary on the movie, but also for others like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own point of view, but Schneider is quite precise in laying out what he thinks is wrong with other critics’ interpretations—where their use of words and assertions fail to describe the film in front of us.
I really admire the intelligence of Schneider’s essay, and it humbles me to know to think about how, despite watching so many movies over the last few years, I have not developed the incisive analysis and insight into movies that I had wished for.