In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, Sam Peckinpah raises that pesky issue of consent with his dark 1971 thriller Straw Dogs!
1971 was ayear when cinema took a turn for the dark, thematically any way. With the MPAA ratings system allowing for more adult-oriented content in the marketplace like sex, language, and violence, directors and writers began exploringthe seedier side of life with more authenticity than ever before. In 1971 alone,Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Gordon Parks' Shaft, Roman Polanski's Macbeth,Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and William Friedkin's The French Connection all plumbed the depths of the human psyche and found it to be a place of violence.
None of those films, however, offered such a scathing indictment of the human condition as Sam Peckinpah's bloody film Straw Dogs.Adapted from Gordon Williams' 1969 novel "The Siege of Trencher's Farm"by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman, Straw Dogs seems to say that inside of every man is a violent animal waiting to escape, and pacifism is only a façade designed to keep the animal at bay. Controversial in its day for the explosion of violent content in the film's third act, Straw Dogsis probably now more controversial due to a completely different act of violence perpetrated right around the film's mid-point.
Backing up just a bit, the film stars Dustin Hoffman—allegedly just doing it for the paycheck after several other actors rejected it—as mild-mannered American mathematician David,who moves with his young wife Amy (Susan George) to her hometown of Wakely in theCornishcountryside. Many of Amy's friends, including her ex Charlie (Del Henney, who looks like Duran Duran frontman Simon LeBonin Mickey Rourke's Sin City makeup), immediately resent her new husband, mostly because they're all xenophobic stereotypes whose schtick is even more chilling in our current times. David, being a pacifist, does his best to try and mend fences by hiring Charlie and some of his ex-con buddies to do some renovation work on their cottage.
Being the classic intellectual American pushover, David continually refuses to confront the men over their poor work ethic and confrontational behavior, much to Amy's chagrin.Hoping to endear himself to the men, David agrees to accompany them on a hunting trip, though the whole thing is actually a ruse on their part to get him helplessly lost in the woods. Charlie then doubles back to the house, knowing Amy is alone, and the following ensues...
As you might have noticed in the span of ten seconds—between the 20 and 30-second marks—she goes from saying "no" to passionately wrapping her arms around her ex as they make out. Over theensuing ten seconds, she fights back again before once more giving in to the passion of the moment. Much of the controversy surroundingthe scene has to do with theway the scene was initially cut, as a troubling thing happened on the way to an R-rating.The ratings board wanted the scene to be shorter, considering how problematic it was,butreducing the length of the scenebrought about a whole new set of problems.
What you watched is the full, uncut version of the scene first releasedin the early 90s as part of a bid to have the original cut of the scene restored. For twenty years, people were watching a studio chop job of the scene, cut to remove most of her resistance and focus more on the "pleasurable" aspects in the scene. Removing those bits of context are even more unsettling when you consider that another assault occurs immediately after this one. Charlie's right-hand manNorman enters the room shortly after this and holds Amy at gunpoint—while Charlie holds down her arms—and assaults her.
It's horrifying, but it has a natural progression from the original intent of the first scene. Amy has become worn down by trying to fight back and now she realizes that she's being used in this game as well. She may have initially been under the impression that David was their sole target, but now she's horrified to learn that she was their target all along. By deleting her resistance to the first assault, it makes her seem more complicit in the overall scheme, which is a rather insidious implication. It's a troubling scene in a troubling film and has sparked debate over the last 50 years as to the underlying meaning of it all.
This is by no means meant as a defense of Peckinpah's decision to include any sexual assault in the film at all, let alone using it in two scenes.Peckinpah was somethingakin to the Ernest Hemingway of filmmakers. He straddled the line between the old guard and the new punks. He was a drinker and a fighter and a lover of life and ahunter and a walking conundrum. The two men also shared a noticeable lack of attention to their female characters. Peckinpah could have done more for Amy as a character, earned her a bit more empathy in the first act rather than spending time setting up David as a moral pillar of virtue. Yes, that makes his third act killing spree all the more interesting on a psychological level, but it's at the expense of the film's second lead character.
What this scene, its context, and its history trulyshines a light on, however, is the futility of a ratings system that seeks to deem certain things fit for public consumption simply by removing context. It's a pretty bad standard to set andit persists to this very day in terms of sex, violence, and their collision.
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—In a Wild MomentGets Lost in Translation asBlame it on Rio
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—No Amount of Plausible Deniability Can Excuse What's Going on in Caligula
