Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971): Censorship and Genre Hybridity: Class Handout

Filmed in St Buryan (near St Ives) in Cornwall, Straw Dogs was released during a tumultuous period in the history of British censorship: the long-standing Chief Examiner, John Trevelyan, had recently retired and his replacement, Stephen Murphy, was faced with a number of controversial films, including Straw Dogs, Ken Russell's The Devils and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. As with A Clockwork Orange, the chief problem with Straw Dogs revolved around its sexual violence, specifically a scene in which Amy (Susan George) is raped by two men—with one of her attackers (her former lover), Amy appears to consent to and even enjoy the act.

At the time, films made in Britain tended to consult the BBFC at the pre-production stage and again during post-production. Murphy advised the filmmakers to trim the second rape of Amy; due to the cuts, the sequence appears to involve a moment of buggery, which to some audience members made the already harrowing sequence even more upsetting. (Censors in the US made even more cuts before giving the film an 'R' rating: in this instance, the British censor was more lenient.)

Straw Dogs was given an 'X' in the UK, during a time in which jokes about rape were seen as permissable; in the 1967 PG-rated comedy Western Waterhole 3, James Coburn refers to rape as 'assault with a friendly weapon'. However, during the 1970s attitudes began to change, and by the time the Video Recordings Act came into play (in 1984), rape was considered a taboo subject. Consequently, post-VRA Straw Dogs was denied a video certificate until 2002: it was banned outright in 1999. However, after consulting a team of psychologists, in 2002 the BBFC gave the uncut version of the film an '18' certificate for its home video release: the psychologists concluded that the film contains a problematic but ultimately responsible treatment of the issue of rape: despite Amy's apparent concession to the first rape, the second assault is presented as harrowing.

Based on a middling novel by 'Gordon M. Williams' (a pseudonym) entitled The Siege at Trencher's Farm, Straw Dogs was directed by Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), and was his first venture outside the Western genre. In fact, the film contains many references to the Western: the Cornish village is presented in the same way as a Western town, and the local yokels ('hired hands' employed to rebuild the Sumner's garage) are quite simply an outlaw gang. The central portion of the film revolves around the siege of the Sumner's house, a narrative device familiar to viewers of the Western (where the forces of the 'wilderness' lay siege to a 'civilised' space: compare with The Alamo, Rio Bravo).


The film also refers to the themes of the Western, and it subverts the Western's attitude towards violence (i.e. that violence is justified and therefore acceptable if it is 'retaliatory'--in other words, in self-defence or an act of revenge). In Straw Dogs, once the characters become involved in violence they lose all semblance of humanity: Hoffman's mild-mannered mathematics professor becomes a bestial monster who murders several men (and, if that wasn't enough, appears to enjoy their deaths) before leaving his clearly disturbed wife (their marriage apparently irretrievably destroyed) and driving off into the night with the local simpleton; at the end of the film, David doesn't 'know [his] way home', and apparently doesn't care. The film depicts men who succumb to their (self)destructive impulses and unlearn their civilised behaviour, apparently celebrating their loss of identity. Is Peckinpah saying that 'real men' should be violent? I don't think so—David's fate is presented with irony. But it's up to you to decide. Critics who took the film's tagline ('The knock at the door meant the birth of one man... and the death of seven others') too literally certainly thought so, and New Yorker critic Pauline Kael labelled the film 'fascist'.


From the siege onwards, the film also refers to the iconography of the British horror film: an isolated house, swirling mists, night. Additionally, the film's cinematographer, John Coquillon, had also shot Michael Reeves' horror-Western hybrid Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General, and with that film Straw Dogs contains an autumnal that is as cold as slate and which reinforces the icy dread at the heart of the narrrative (which snowballs as events progress).

Peckinpah used to like to talk about David Sumner's (Hoffman's) complicity in the violence that befalls him: Peckinpah claimed that at several points in the narrative, Sumner could have stopped events from snowballing, but chooses not to because of his inbuilt bloodlust: subconsciously, although he claims that he's running away from violence, Sumner wants to become involved in conflict—he wants to spill blood. As Peckinpah put it in an interview he gave to Playboy, 'Violence is ugly, brutalising and bloody fucking awful. It's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people, we have violence within us'.

At the time of the shooting of Straw Dogs, Peckinpah was becoming interested in the work of Robert Ardrey, the author of The Territorial Imperative and African Genesis. An anthropologist and screenwriter (!), Ardrey argued that at the heart of all human behaviour are the drives for territory and procreation. Because these impulses are built into our genes, they inspire competition, and hence the impulse for violence is a core aspect of all of our personalities. Much of Peckinpah's work has been interpreted as an exploration of Ardrey's thesis. 'Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival'; 'Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditons'; 'we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides': Ardrey


In the film, the horror genre's representation of violence as horrific and disturbing jars with the Western's celebration of violence, and produces a film in which violence is presented with a great deal of ambiguity: Peckinpah provokes his audience, asking them to respond to violence without directing their responses. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Straw Dogs is that we get from the film what we bring to it: the film amplifies our existing attitudes towards violence, whatever they may be, and consequently individuals respond to the film in very different ways.

©Paul Andrew Julian Lewis, 2005