Rod Lurie’s brilliant remake of Straw Dogs – one of the seminal films of the 1970s – opens Friday. The film retains the plot, characters, and violence that made the original film extraordinarily controversial, but Lurie has made some significant changes, and he says he is trying to make a different point than Sam Peckinpah made.
In my view, the movie makes a third, more important point — one that is critical to consider in the days after the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
Back in 1971, Peckinpah’s film was savaged by many of the leading film critics: Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that it was the “first American film that is a fascist work of art.” A young film critic named Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that it was “offensive” and “totally committed to the pornography of violence.” Thirteen critics wrote to the Times in London to revile the film. In its first public preview, a third of the audience walked out.
Lurie’s film is no less violent, and like the original it features extraordinary performances — this time by James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, and James Woods in the roles originally played by Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Del Henney, and Peter Vaughn. But the contrasts between the two films are the clues to their respective meanings, and taken together, they provide some important insights about “fascism” then and now.
In both movies, a young American named David Sumner returns with his attractive wife Amy to her small hometown, so David can work on his writing. Peace and quiet are the essence of what he seeks. The town is an oppressive place, with townspeople (especially Amy’s old boyfriend) instinctively antagonistic to David. The tension — cultural, sexual, interpersonal — is present from the opening and builds throughout, heading toward a rape of Amy while David is lost in the woods with a gun in his hands, on a fool’s hunting trip. The climax of the movie is an orgy of violence that leaves the characters and the audience both stunned.
In the original, the town is in the English countryside and David is a math professor working on a book about astrophysics, seeking refuge from the campus protests of the Vietnam War, about which he has failed to take a stand. In Lurie’s remake, the town is the American Deep South, and David is a screenwriter from Hollywood working on a screenplay about Stalingrad in World War II. Lurie has brought the conflict figuratively closer to home, placing it in a setting that involves not characters from two countries but two parts of America.
Lurie has said that the message of his remake is distinctly different from that of Pekinpah’s film: “At the end of [Peckinpah’s], the hero finds the animal inside him. At the end of my film, the hero finds the man inside him.” But there is an even broader point, one made more apparent by considering the different real worlds in which the two films were made.
I haven’t seen the movie but I recognize the phrase “straw dogs”
It is used by Lao Tsu, and I remember it being explained that there is a Chinese festival where dogs are made of straw, revered for the festival then burned – and that, I suppose, it was Lao Tsu is referring to. We have our time in the sun then we are cast off.
What Lao Tsu said has nothing to do with the movie. And what this author came away from the first movie is nothing like what I came away from it with. My impression is that he should have killed them sooner and more violently for what they did to him and his wife. The totally cruel and stupid way they acted earned them a violent death. His acts were the acts of a peaceful man driven to desperation. What I get from his article is that he thinks we should preemptively strike out before there is a reason, not in self defense. Self defense is good, preemptive strikes are what the terrorists do.
This is not what Machiavelli advises. He says, that men are not Angels, and so cannot be governed like them. Because men are fallen, it is better to act cruelly, in a limited fashion, to forestall great evil, than to act in a moral fashion, and allow great evil to grow until it cannot be stopped without horrific sacrifice. The story of WWII is missed opportunities. When Hitler was weak, and re-militarized the Rhineland, his own generals wrote in their diaries they would overthrow him if the French sent in their police force, which was at the time far greater than the entire German Army. Similar points were missed with Anschluss, or the Sudentland.
Neither Peckinpah nor Lurie seem to understand violence. Evil men exist everywhere (and women are often drawn to it, the Peckinpah scene is probably more realistic given the female frenzy over say, Skarsgard’s “evil vampire” in Tru Blood or the other vampires of female fiction). They are not defeated by being “nice.” Our entire middle class society is basically, unsustainable in the long run depending on being “nice” instead of regular brutality to deter evil men from worse.
Imagine a remake of Straw Dogs in 1985. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie would last five minutes … the bully getting folded up like a cheap suit, all over.
“Heaven and earth are not benevolent,
They treat the ten thousand things equally,
in the same way that the straw dogs are treated.
Neither is the sage benevolent,
treating every one equally”
This is the compete text.
The first lines refer to heaven and earth following natural movements without favor. There are earthquakes and floods and random events, they happen when and where they do without prejudice. No part of earth is favored over another.
The extension is then that the teacher, or sage, should not treat any student or disciple, etc, any different. They are all the same and should be treated without Favor, as Heaven and Earth are not benevolent to any one person.
I’d rather watch the remake of True Grit. At least the violence in that is there for a reason.
Let’s see – the director wants to make this film different (someone left out the word “courageously”)and he wants to send a different message. So he comes up with a totally novel idea. He sends a Hollywood script writer (read sensitive, Obama voter) to the rural South (read right wing gun and bible clingers).
Yup, no prejudice there. Just your average Marxist screenwriter finally shooting those rape inclined, bigoted, racist and global warming denying Tea Party people.
Wow, brilliant and so timely. I think I’ll skip the movie. Saw the first one and I got the point.
Agreed:
How about placing the story in a black ghetto or hispanic barrio…. nah too politically incorrect, what most people don’t realize is that folks in the south are more mannered and more inclined to give people their privacy and space than the meddling do gooders in the west and upper east coast… will give the PC movie a pass…
I thought it sounded good until I read “deep south”. Of course, none of the actors are from the south. Definitely not Skarsgard or Woods. I see a movie with a lot of bad southern accents and Hollywood morality. I’ve seen this before. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…drool…snore…zzzzzzzz…
You got it!
When will the Hollywood-NYC axis realize that playing into their creepy Reconstruction based biases make them look stupid to many in the audience.
A small berg in peninsular Michigan, or say, outside Buffalo, NY, would be both less alienating and more realistic.
“. . . whose defense, coming so late, after things have gotten out of hand, helps bring catastrophe to everyone involved.”
Compare that thought to this Instapundit entry by Glenn Reynolds:
HE THINKS THIS IS SOMETHING TO BRAG ABOUT: Jimmy Carter: ‘We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war.’ But, of course, his craven and inept example encouraged all our future problems in the region, where a firm response would have quashed them. If only he’d been as tough with hate-filled terrorists as with marauding cats.
Posted at 10:13 pm [Sept 10] by Glenn Reynolds
hello. if male violence is natural, and inevitable- i would prefer a movie with more action, and less social boredom. contrarily, rampant group slaughter of seemingly unstoppable force, -would entertain me to the point of fearing leaving the security of the movie theater. i feel relatively safe, that one lunatic will always exist in the environment, and i will casually leave the theater, to take my vigilant chances. a true fascist, able to motivate contagious legions of peoples, is more frightening: and makes the likes of present politics child’s play- and could frighten me to my bones. i would not waste my time watching this wrongful interpretation of southern culture, about a socially incompetent individual, without heavy sedation: and entirely nothing better to do (would have to be strapped in intensive care and immobile, with only one channel to view). this piece was not an encouraging promotion.
“The violence that ends the movie is not gratuitous, and it is not nearly as shocking as things we have experienced in real life: throwing an old man in a wheelchair off a ship. ”
I had forgotten that incident. Thanks for the reminder. But apparently Democratic ad makers haven’t. Just makes that anti-Paul Ryan ad even more offensive.
There is no point to this film, other than pure nihilism (and, of course, violence for the sake of money at the box office).
Setting the new version in the Deep South is just another example of the Hollywood Left bashing the good people in the American South, primarily white people of course, who are politically-correct targets for abuse.
We aren’t savages, we’re Tea Partiers, and that’s exactly why they want to smear us. They’re afraid we’ll win elections and break their grip on the hearts, minds, and bank accounts of America.
Yep. I’d be curious to know when was the last time the author actually witnessed the types of violence he lists. This idea of movies portraying “life,” is horse hockey.
Besides, last time I went to a flick, the people sitting in the seats were more interesting to watch than the screen…
What we have going on, is “radical Liberalism”. No different, really, than “radical Islam”. Their intent is to dominate.
Appeasement has never worked. No matter what face is painted on it.
I haven’t seen the original, but I will see this one.
It sounds a little like the recent movie “Death Sentence”. In my opinion, that was one of Kevin Bacon’s best rolls recently.
I am bottomlessly fed up with bad-redneck movies, but Mr. Richman knows a good show when he sees one, so… All I can say is, I don’t care what the benighted southerners do to this screenwriter/protagonist as long as you can promise me right now that nobody even dings the Jag XKE he’s tooling around the countryside in.
I think there is in this new version of the film a remnant of the typically anti-Americanism and anti-Red-State-ism that is de rigeuer in Hollywood these days: It is no longer sufficient to have Yorkshire villagers be the violent bad guys: Now, the bad guys of course have to be Southern rednecks, who as we all know are brutal and violent and ignorant.
The 2011 version may have introduced new layers of meaning to the script, but it also — perhaps as a sop to the Hollywood producers who financed it — continued hammering home the relentless Hollywood message that Southerns/conservatives/Republicans/rednecks are savage morons.
There were a spate of films in the early ’70s about people having the veneer of civilization ripped away to expose their underlying animalistic nature: The Italian film “Swept Away” in which a communist sailor and a rich socialite are reduced to caveman behavior after getting stranded on an island; “Deliverance,” in which the urbanite campers become murderers after hillbillies stalk and rape them; “Straw Dogs,” described above; and several others. In all, the message is the same: the genteel niceties of civilized behavior are just an illusion; under the right circumstances, we humans are capable of anything. Anything.
I saw the original 1971 Straw Dogs long ago and thought it was a great film, even back then. I saw the message as, “Don’t presume that the effete passive-seeming nerd is a wimp; poke him with a stick long enough, and he will destroy you. He has the same capacity for violence as the morons around, him, but he has wisely suppressed it because he unconsciously knows that his smarts combined with his violent nature makes him a very dangerous specimen indeed. He doesn’t want to ‘go there,’ but if forced into it — watch out.” And I think this is the same message the world needed to learn and did learn after 9/11, with America itself in the role of the Dustin Hoffman character: We may look soft, but if you fuck with us, all bets are off.
This new 2011 version, according to Rick, has embedded in it an argument for pre-emptive action: “a film that dramatizes the awful consequences of men who think they are better than the world, who are oblivious of the gathering storm, who defend themselves only when they have no other choice — and whose defense, coming so late, after things have gotten out of hand, helps bring catastrophe to everyone involved.” This posits that the violent outburst of the main character is a bad thing, something which could have been avoided with proper manliness in the first place. But according to the filmmaker, the violent outburst is admirable: “At the end of [Peckinpah’s], the hero finds the animal inside him. At the end of my film, the hero finds the man inside him.”
I would argue that the point is this: the “man inside us” is “the animal inside us.” This fact is neither good nor bad, just true. And as long as everyone remains aware of this, then a mutual respect obtains and we can indeed live in peace. Society’s tranquility masks its underlying tensegrity.
Zombie — yours is a good and interesting interpretation, and close to what Peckinpah was trying to convey with his film (given his comments at the time) and perhaps what Lurie is trying to convey with his remake. I also agree with you that there may not be a real distinction between the main character finding violence in himself (Peckinpah)and finding himself in violence (Lurie).
But this movie is more subtle and layered than “The Man from the Left Coast Defeats the Rednecks from the South.” Alexander Skarsgard’s portray of the principal villain and James Marsden’s portrayal of the main character show that what is involved here is neither a hero nor a devil. Skarsgard responds to a vacuum Marsden creates. My own view, contrary to the terms used by Lurie, is that David Sumner is not the “hero” of either film. And Amy is a much different character in the remake than she is in the original — part of the problem in the original, and closer to the moral hero in the remake, if there is one.
Nor do I believe that either the film or my essay is an argument for pre-emptive action. The message I took from the movie is that if you stand up for certain principles from the beginning, and make clear you are prepared to use force to defend them, if necessary, the result may be that the principles will be defended, without the need to resort to actual force. On the other hand, if you signal to the world that you have no principles worth fighting for, that “peace” is your ultimate value, and you rationalize away the world, you may eventually find yourself fighting for your life, under conditions in which even your successful defense will leave a world destroyed.
BS, Zombie.
You are as mistaken as Richman when he winds up his piece with this pontificating liberal drivel: “… man is a violent creature, …”.
Man is a NOBLE creature (cit. Ayn Rand) who has the capacity for violence.
Liberals love this “man is by nature violent” crap because it justifies Statism to control him.
PS: no apologies for the proper English use of the masculine pronoun in the collective.
“What seemed shocking in 1971 no longer shocks us.”
It might have been shocking if you didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on in the real world at that time.
How can you can be shocked at the ersatz violence in some lame movie when you’ve just lived through real life events like Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, the Gulag?
The only thing shocking about it was that it violated then existing artistic conventions…where are about as important as what the dog just deposited on the front lawn.
“I saw the original 1971 Straw Dogs long ago and thought it was a great film…”
It’s o.k., but it’s not a patch on “A Clockwork Orange”, which came out the same year.
Now, that’s a disturbing (and excellent movie).
If the villians of this movie were union thugs, I’d go see it. No way will I pay good money to watch Hollyweird attacking the South, yet again.
Ironic that the original film was set in Cornwall or somewhere in the west of England.At the time the violence was shocking to us in the U.K. We associated it with America. Now it is easier to imagine but still pretty unlikely.
The original was banned for about 30yrs.
Jon Gray wrote a book called straw dogs which is worth reading,it concerns mans animal nature and the failure of intellectuals to imagine the consequences of their actions.
He is an atheist but pessimistic about human ability to construct utopias. His later book (Black Mass) concerns mans replacement of religion with secular worship of progress. I can see the connection anyway.
Mr. Richman, you write:
“Forty years later, we have a better appreciation of the nature and source of fascism in the world…”
That apparently makes you a young man who has his history from the Hollywood-NYC axis and ditzy post-50s teachers. You can write and you can think some. But in your life you have been indoctrinated by the media you try to understand. Get a job outside of media.
As well, Hollywood doesn’t deserve paeans from you for libeling the South, middle class Americans or by extension, the Tea Party.
You might guess what I think about the film’s portrayal of Southerners from my name.
I live in heaven; a really nice, well built house under 4 years old on six acres at the end of a dead-end road. We have added a hot-tub. The back of the property has 700 feet on rigolette bayou which is lined with woods or pasture for miles in either direction. I fish almost every day. I shoot my rifle from the back porch, naked if I want to. Every night my wife and I sit in the hot-tub and listen to the red wolves howl. Our back porch is actually a deck 25×70 feet. I built a really nice pergola over half of it. I planted muscadine and maypop ( native passion flowers ) on it. I hung out 6 hummingbird feeders and after two years we have swarms of the little critters, mixed with the hundreds of butterflies that come for the maypops.
I often give fish or ducks or venison to my neighbors for no particular reason, and they do the same for me. It is not infrequent that we forget to lock our doors. I have a Kawasaki Mule parked beside the house which has keys hanging in it. I never lock the vehicle doors when they are at home. Nothing has ever gone missing. Invariably passing someone on the road here means a wave, even if you dont know them. If you break down on the road, someone will stop and help, probably the first one to come along. Store clerks always say ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’. If you run into a stranger in the woods you can bet he is armed, and very polite.
The prevailing attitude where I live is, as Rick Richman above says, “if you stand up for certain principles from the beginning, and make clear you are prepared to use force to defend them, if necessary, the result may be that the principles will be defended, without the need to resort to actual force. On the other hand, if you signal to the world that you have no principles worth fighting for, that “peace” is your ultimate value, and you rationalize away the world, you may eventually find yourself fighting for your life, under conditions in which even your successful defense will leave a world destroyed.”. In short, an armed society is a polite society. It would have been more believable to set the movie in Hollywood, not the south.
The film’s message is a good one but Rod Lurie can kiss my southern redneck @$$. If he shows up here I will kick his.
Sounds pretty sweet (especially for those of us who prefer country living and would be happy as hell if they never, ever had to go into a city again).
I’m in almost exactly the same situation, and, believe it or not, I live about 15 or 20 minutes from downtown Oakland, Ca.
Can’t legally fire off your guns, hunt or fish right around here…but, if you don’t mind poaching, you’re in fat city. You can shoot deer right off your front deck and grab 16 inch trout out of the creek with your hands, if you’re bound and determined. And, it ain’t all that far to where you go do it legally.
Also, land here is way expensive, so I only have an acre and a half, but I have open country all around me, so it don’t really matter.
Bet I got better weather than you do, though.
Dave Surls — you might enjoy an essay written back in March 1972, by William S. Pechter in Commentary Magazine: “Peckinpah & Kubrick: Fire & Ice.” He concluded that:
“Even at his best, Kubrick is ice; Sam Peckinpah is fire. … Straw Dogs is a violent work, and, like A Clockwork Orange, it is about violence. But the violence of Straw Dogs isn’t ‘stylized’ and ‘balletic’ as it is in the Kubrick film, nor does one stand coolly and antiseptically aloof from it. Rather it closes like a trap around one until, at the end, one finds oneself grabbed by the throat and plunged inescapably into the sweaty, bloody, palpable thick of it. … Kubrick coldly lectures us that we are living in a hell of our own making. Peckinpah writhes in the flames with us, burning.”
Pelaut, WMInfidel — The “hell” in the movie is not the South (any more than it was the English countryside in the original), and it is a mistake (in my opinion) to treat the movie as one about the superiority of Hollywood over the South (if anything, it illustrates the contrary). The movie is not about two places. The “hell” is in the character of individuals, and created by it.
Suthenboy — I liked your eloquent comment a lot, and your conclusion that an armed society is a polite society is a nice summation of one of the points I was trying to make. For the reasons stated above, I don’t think Rod Lurie was making a film that contradicts that.
suthenboy,
that sounds like heaven to me. Where do you live (roughly, I’m not asking for your address.) What does a property like that cost? Where I live a place with 6 acres might be anything from £750,000 up (say $1.2m.)
How is it that the same guys who rail against the liberal, biased, soul-numbing, crap-factory called Hollywood can spend sooo much time consuming, analyzing, and discussing the trash it produces?
It’s like you claim to hate socialism and recognize it’s evil effects, and turn around and donate money and time to unions and democrats.
Somebody has to—if only to find the increasingly rare piece of
goldzircon in the midst of the Hollywood dross that might actually be worth seeing.So they dive into the dumpster and emerge with a half eaten moldy burger and declare “That is one tasty burger!” Are we all so starving for entertainment that we are going to start returning to the vomit that was considered trash EVEN BY 1970′s STANDARDS??? pleeez…I Spit On Your Grave Hollywood
Keep your violence orgy with it’s “Oh, so subtle!” political messages far away from me please. Not interested.
In the original Straw Dogs (I don’t know about the remake) the message was just standard Hollywood stuff: bad guys mess with good guys, good guys defeat bad guys, justice triumphs in the end, though not without sacrifice and loss. Nothing unusual there.
In a movie like A Clockwork Orange though, the message is: there are no good guys (eveybody’s a scumbag or just worthless), justice never triumphs, the bad guys win in the end. The hero of the movie is a complete, total and utter piece of garbage. It’s pretty grim stuff, when you stop and think about it.
It’s also a brilliantly made movie, though. It’s the only movie I’ve ever paid twice to see in the theater.