Straw Dogs, the Remake

       I remember going to see the Sam Peckinpah Straw Dogs at the Visulite Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, with my friend Terry Layman.  This was in 1971.  We went to high-school together, and went to Wake Forest University together until I got kicked out.  We were never good friends because Terry was two years ahead of me in a time of our lives in which stuff like age and rank really mattered.  When we went to the movie, I was a city desk reporter for the Florence Morning News in Florence, South Carolina, and Terry was teaching high-school English in Chester, South Carolina.  Suddenly we had more in common, lived near each other, and started hanging out.

 

       I remember being really intrigued by the film poster, the closeup of Dustin Hoffman with one lens shattered in his delicate wire-rimmed glasses.  But we went in without really knowing what the movie was about.

 

       It turned out to be a real bonding experience for us both.  We came out thrilled and hugging each other, and filled with excitement.  Terry and I became very good friends after that.  He worked with me and Deborah Whittle in our first Paris street circus in 1972, and has had a brilliant career since then as a stage actor and director.  When the students at the Honors College asked me to direct theater, Terry is the guy who advised and guided me. He is easily the person I admire most from Charlotte Catholic High School.  This night was not what started his acting drive, although it changed me as a moviegoer.  No, the night just started our friendship.

 

       What I think we loved about the movie was the way Dustin Hoffman's character handled the pressure on him.  Threatened by gun-toting thugs who are much stronger then him, his character, David Summer, prevails because he is smarter than they are.  There was something bone-chilling about Hoffman telling Susan George calmly as the bad guys were shooting through the windows and setting fire to the house, "It's gonna be all right." And that's the story: the little intellectual shows he can be a thug more easily than the thugs can be smart.  The fact that the little guy won, and that he'd won through calm, intellect and self-confidence, mattered deeply to both of us.

 

       And so, loving this movie like I did, it was a problem for me when Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that Straw Dogs "the first American film that is a fascist work of art."  Kael had her infamous likes and dislikes.  She hated Clint Eastwood, for example, and called his Dirty Harry movies  "medieval fascism."  Peckinpah was a director with many hits under his belt, but this movie generated a lot of controversy.  Roger Ebert called it "A 19th century mix of Kipling and machismo."  I spent a lot of time thinking about how this movie that had so touched me could be called fascistic.  It was maybe my first exercise in what real intellectual life is like: thinking things that you don't want to think, or that scare you in the thinking.  Could I share pleasures with fascism?  What a vexing thought! I think, in retrospect, it was the very emotional high that had worked so well on me that was the problem: the problem is not the violence, rather it is the pleasure produced by it.

 

       I wonder what Kael would think of Rod Lurie's remake of the movie 40 years later.  I watched the remake last night on pay per view, and could not help finding the ripple effect of the political and social that trouble our times -- the applause at Republican debates over the number of executions in Texas, the cheering for the hypothetical uninsured 30-year-old being left to die without medical care, the booing of the gay service man on active combat duty in Afganistan -- stuff like that.  If Peckinpah's film is a fascist work of art, the remake is agitprop for an unlettered and shockingly far-right film audience completely disconnected from and disinterested in art.

 

       The biggest difference, the one you notice right off the bat, is the way each director sees David Summers.  Dustin Hoffman's Summers is small (Hoffman is around 5'6"), scrawny, and is easily intimidated by the big and brawny locals.  By contrast, James Marsden, who I think is one of the X-Men, in the remake is your Hollywood stud: tall and thickly muscled, high cheekbones, a prominent jaw, square pecs and hard buns.  This means it's hard to buy the final fight scene with Alexander Scarsgard (who plays a pretty-boy vampire on True Blood) -- it looks like a slap down between two Abercrombie models.  This in turn means the victory is no longer about the scrawny intellectual who somehow amazingly defeats the schoolyard bullies.  Hoffman says his line at the end of the fight scene -- "I got 'em all" -- with a kind of wonder and disbelief; Marsden says it with a sense of conclusion and consummation, because, Goddamit, that's what you do when somebody threatens your property and your woman.  Lurie ends his film with Marsden standing alone in front of his burning barn, solitary, and righteous.  Hoffman's Summers is driving the mentally ill guy back to town, and says he doesn't know where he's going or what's coming next.  The remake seems deliberately to bleach out all the ambiguity and difficulty of the earlier film.  The killing that starts the attack on the Summers farmhouse, for example, is accidental in the Peckinpah version -- the drunks are squabbling with the constable over a shotgun that goes off and kills him.  In the Lurie version, the drunk ringleader, a retired football coach played by a ranting, cussing and altogether over-the-top James Woods, murders the sheriff just as he's giving his word nobody will get hurt.  The bloodbath that follows is no longer the effect of a blinding need to survive; instead, it is an act of justice.

 

       The most controversial element of the Peckinpah film is the double-rape of Amy Summers, played by Susan George.  The first shot of the film is Amy's nipples poking through a tee-shirt as she walks bra-less through the little Welsh village.  Kate Bosworth's Amy wears a sports bra as she runs barefoot down the unpaved country lanes around the small Mississippi town to which Lurie has relocated the setting.  Where George's Amy is pouting and over-sensualized, and, above all, sexually needy, Bosworth's Amy is secure and athletic feminist who argues with her husband about her right to show all the skin she wants.  The remake is also unforgivably prudish, given its subject matter.  After an argument with David, Amy exposes herself to the locals working on the barn roof.  George exposes her breasts to the screen as she does to the workmen.  Lurie cuts away behind Bosworth just as she drops her blouse.  I think taking out the nudity here, and in the rape scene, also shifts the film's focus, and says something important about our culture.  You get the horror and violence, but don't get the sex or ambivalence.  There is nothing to confuse you.

 

       Peckipah's Amy surrenders to the overbearing physicality of Charlie, even has he rapes her.  The two had been a couple in a younger life, when Amy was growing up in the village.  But the rape in the first version is the most disquieting, and certainly also the most controversial, thing in the film.  Del Henny's Charlie is a big, hyper-muscled, hairy-chested man, and when he pulls off his sweater on top of a pinned and terrorized Amy, the camera cuts away to an earlier scene where Hoffman delicately pulls off a tank top (what we call a "wifebeater") and carefully takes off his glasses for sex.  Peckinpah forces you to experience the rape from Amy's perspective at the same time as he objectifies her on the screen.  After a minute, she surrenders to Charlie.  Skarsgard isn't musculed enough to produce this effect, and so his Charlie terrorizes Amy without the overpowering physique, so that she never loses herself to respond sexually to him.  This change manages to make the 2011 version less troubling but more explicitly violent.

 

       If Peckinpah's film is fascistic, this one is just pornographic.  As I write this, Republican presidential candidates are debating contraception, and the states are passing anti-feminist and anti-abortion laws that two years ago were impossible to imagine.  I think the remake of Straw Dogs may help us understand what we've been witnessing in our social and political conversations this year.  All the vexing questions posed by the original are here worked out in advance: David is a hunk, so we don't believe he's intimidated by the other hunks.  Amy doesn't show her nipples, and is not sexually confused or disoriented.  The original thrilled Terry and me when we were 21.  This version produces a sort of gloating satisfaction with our sense of justice and the violence that insures it. You get what you ask for, I guess.