The Cathode Ray Mission: The Wild Bunch and the Grammar of Violence

My normal routine with these blogs is to perform something of a formal and thematic analysis of a work of art that has grabbed my attention and discussing it in relation to its aesthetic or historic context, with film being the primary interest. Within that broad venture, I’ve found that the work I tend to be most compelled to write about is of a more lowbrow nature, horror and genre films and things of that nature, as many of the highbrow works I gravitate towards have usually been fairly comprehensively discussed in a manner that satisfies me, and I try to stay away from the middlebrow as much as I can (think Oscar bait). I want to do something a little different with this one: instead of talking about Sam Peckinpah’s classic revisionist Western The Wild Bunch as I would normally, and which it absolutely deserves, I want to do a closer analysis of a single scene from the film, the opening bank shootout, and see what Peckinpah is doing that makes it so brilliant.

(This is an abbreviated version of the scene, but it gets the gist across if you need help following along.)

The film opens on a group of men in US military uniforms entering a town on horseback, among them are Pike (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), Angel (Jaime Sanchez), and the Gorch brothers, Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson). These five men are going to get up to some more trouble over the next 150 minutes but for now they’re strangers to us and to the townsfolk. Their mission is unclear but their official signifiers are enough to garner respectful nods and salutes. They tie their horses up outside a bank and proceed towards the building, but along the way Pike bumps into an old woman and scatters her parcels to the ground. Him and Dutch pick them up and kindly offer to walk the woman inside. At this point it’s glaringly obvious that these men are not exactly who they seem, and we’re left waiting for the other shoe to drop, which we get an indication of in a separate party. On a rooftop overlooking the bank, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) and a group of men are camped out with guns and ammunition. One of them sees Pike’s gang approaching the bank and alerts the others, who ready themselves for the fight. Inside, Pike grabs the teller and throws him down, and the others pull out guns of their own and hold the bank customers hostage. “If they move, kill ‘em,” Pike announces, freeze frame on the final credit, “Directed by Sam Peckinpah.” We’re off to the races now.

In addition to just being insanely stylish and cool, this small moment is a formalistic statement of purpose for the director. The Wild Bunch is Peckinpah’s most famous movie and retroactively regarded as a classic, but he developed a reputation in his career as an extremely controversial filmmaker, pushing the envelope for violence in his films further than anyone had before. In the post-Hays code Hollywood, nobody really knew how much they could get away with as far as sex and violence went in a studio film; Hitchcock was obviously ahead of the game in 1960 with Psycho, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde set a new benchmark in 1967, and two years later Peckinpah raised the bar once again. It was a radical reimagining not only of the Western film, but in its emphasis on stylized violence it helped to lay the groundwork for the action film. “If they move, kill ‘em” is an efficient twist of character and narrative, but it’s also a gesture towards what’s to come, a development of a more brutal, confrontational cinema that has dispensed with the old-fashioned morals and restraints.

Talk is cheap, though, and Peckinpah had the goods to back it up. After they rob the bank, Pike grabs the teller and holds him against the window. Just as a temperance parade is marching past, he pushes the teller out the window into the road, cueing Thornton’s squad on the roof to begin opening fire, at which point hell breaks loose. A confused mess of gunfire begins, as Thornton’s men rain fire down on civilians and Pike’s men, Pike’s men return fire, and the civilians start lashing out at everyone. Pike’s gang gets away with some casualties, Thornton’s men failed in their job and sustained losses of their own, and a litany of townspeople are lying dead on the ground. The shootout lasts for several sustained minutes of mayhem, and ends up being a masterclass on how to direct and edit chaotic action.

Peckinpah was not the first to take a spectacular, stylized approach to a Western gunfight (Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood had already completed their trilogy at this point), but there is a particular synthesis he achieves between content and form that is more forceful and jarring than his peers, and has in the years since become somewhat of a common approach to action scenes. Starting first with the cinematography, Peckinpah wields the camera like a gun. There’s no sweeping pans taking in landscapes, every movement is sudden and exists to emphasize action. Quick zooms, quick pans, over-the-shoulder shots, it’s simple stuff but it’s effectively destabilizing in conjunction with the speed of the editing. Efficiency is the name of the game here, the camerawork is not intended to be exceedingly complicated, but it can give that impression because of the sheer volume of shots being utilized in this sequence.

The main cinematic tool to consider in the effectiveness of this sequence is the editing. Lou Lombardo served as editor on the film (later he would edit The Long Goodbye, to dramatically different but also incredible results) and would take the rapid-style cutting of Bonnie and Clyde and some of the New Wave touchstones and crank it up to the extreme. In the video I linked above, from the shot of the teller being pushed outside to the effective end of the video is 200 seconds, within that timespan there are at least 147 cuts that I manually counted, although that number is probably low, which evens out to an average shot duration of just over 1.3 seconds. This is quite drastically faster than just about any movie that came out before it, and despite the average shot length shortening immensely over time it even remains faster than some recent action movies (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol has about 166 cuts in a ~5 minute chase scene, which is about a 2 second average per shot. The reason I know this is because I had a film class a few years ago where I had to do this exact thing).

This speed conveys several things. First, there is a natural chaos to anything happening that fast, let alone a multitude of things happening that fast. With images proceeding so quickly, there is an inherent difficulty in processing what the eye is seeing adequately enough to understand it, so as a viewer you are essentially left with no choice but to stop taking the time to process the images. What’s left is a barrage of bullets, blood, and bodies that is difficult to make sense of, and translates the sensation of being in the onscreen gunfight into a cinematic, spectatorial analog.

In a similar vein, a majority of the cuts are match-on-action cuts, but are delivered with such rapidity and force that it transcends their simplicity. A match-on-action cut is exactly what the name implies, a cut from one shot to another the moment a character performs a physical action, formulated as such to mask the cut and be as smooth a transition from one shot to the other as possible; most of the actions performed in this shootout scene are, predictably, gunshots, and so we have a lot of cuts occurring simultaneously with gunshots. However, because the speed at which the scene unfolds renders it mostly senseless outside of a few choice moments, Peckinpah structures it around individual actions and reactions, one larger shootout scene composed of dozens of smaller individual gunshots. He decided to follow these gunshots to their logical endpoints, so what we get is a repeating sequence throughout this scene of gunshot → cut → person or object shot, an action cut to a reaction. And despite Peckinpah choosing to play with temporality in this scene (more on that in a minute), he keeps the physics of this loop realistic. The duration of a cut is one frame, 1/60 of a second, and in that span of time a bullet from this period would travel between 20–40 feet, which means that for a lot of these loops we see in this scene, the action and reaction occur more or less accurately relative to each other as they would in real life — the time it takes to cut from one shot to the next is nearly instantaneous, roughly similar to the time it takes the bullets being fired to hit their targets. But because every cut is accompanied by a change in perspective, because the action and reaction do not occur in the same shot, every reaction shot feels violent in a literal sense, in that what we are seeing is peoples bodies being ripped apart by bullets, and in a cinematic sense, in that these images are being formally constructed to be sudden in their arrival and confrontational in their imagery. Think of the shower scene in Psycho; this is that but happening over and over and over again. At its most ‘shot-reverse shot’ basic, it can even feel like we, the viewer, are the one receiving the bullet.

The incredible speed is the main takeaway from this scene, but the other key technique being used here is slow-motion. Slow-motion may be a meme now but in 1969 it was rarely used, which makes Peckinpah’s deployment of it all the more jarring. What’s more is that he doesn’t really use it as the centerpiece, but rather as an accent, another tool in his arsenal to highlight the speed and chaos of the event. When the man is shot off the roof of the building and falls, we don’t watch him fall to the ground in slow-motion, what we see is man falling → man in bank shooting up → man on roof shot → Angel riding and shooting → man falling → man on roof keeling over → Thornton shooting → man hitting ground → man on roof dead, all in 4 seconds. The slow-motion body falling is not in itself the spectacle to be observed, it’s a baseline of action, Peckinpah saying that in the time it takes for this body to fall off the roof all this other shit is happening. We can map this 4 second sequence across the entirety of film history, from all the way back to D.W. Griffith pioneering the technique of cross-cutting with the Ku Klux Klan’s race in The Birth of a Nation, and we can trace Peckinpah’s twist on that all the way forward to something like Inception, where Christopher Nolan takes the idea of cutting between slow-motion action and regular speed action to an exaggerated, almost comical degree. Also, slow-motion just looks fucking cool, and there really doesn’t need to be a greater reason than that to use it.

The final shootout of the film, where Pike’s gang fights what appears to be the entire population of Mexico, is just as if not more jaw-dropping than this scene, but this opening shootout is such a perfect display of style and form, it knocked me out when I saw it. Another, perhaps lesser, perhaps more sentimental lesson to take away from this scene is that compelling action is not something that people figured out in the 80’s, we’ve always had the tools to do it, all it takes is the vision.