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I watched the Criterion DVD of Straw Dogs. Jerry Fielding's score really works wonders within that film. I have it on LP and it's neat music to listen to on its own, very low-key, but within the context of the film, it just supplies so much creepy, hidden subtext. If I were teaching a course on film & music, I'd use Straw Dogs to illustrate many things. It's amazing.

The film is something that Hollywood wouldn't touch today. It's funny, we have R and NC-17 ratings and yet all that means is some cartoon violence and naked chicks, and yet, nothing really disturbing, nothing that really questions things comes out of the system. Everyone is to afraid of offending & losing an audience. Thank god Sam Peckinpah was a "bad boy".

I'm sure he's burning in feminist hell for this one. The wife is raped, enjoys it, and for enjoying it gets punished by a 2nd rape from another guy and all the while you feel that she's getting just what she deserves because at heart she's such a nasty, betraying person despite her good looks. Sam indulges truths you don't want to know about yourself. You won't see that in a Spielberg film.

But the movie is about a return to the primitive. The nicest & most civilized guy around winds up killing everybody in sight. All people in Peckinpah are potentially violent. Cronenberg was trying to say the same thing in A History of Violence, you don't have to look too far down the family tree to find some very snarled branches.

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Boys Over Flowers is a 50-episode anime series from 1996. It's from Toei studios and even today all Toei anime seems to look as if they were drawn in the 60s. The series is perplexing: a high school student is accepted by the school's coolest best-looking rich kids because she's the only one with guts enough to talk back to them. And while we get a lot of voice-over to tell us she has her morals in the right place, she's emotionally torn over a number of guys, thinking of one while in the arms of another and then thinking of the 1st guy when making out with the 2nd. At one level, she seems critical of the elite, but at another she seems to enjoy hanging out with them and the wealth they have & power they exert. I suppose what is great about it is that it isn't cut & dried (just like Peckinpah), but has a lot of conflicting takes on things.

The scoring is also perplexing: it sounds like it was composed & recorded in the 60s as well. They could be using stock library cues for all one can tell, reminding me of music for old TV super-hero cartoons from that era. The scoring is very over-the-top dramatic & romantic, really too much for these images, and it often swirls and pumps over shots of the characters just standing in static poses. It's also much more orchestral and much less modern than most anime series scores. It seems to place the series in some other world.

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They have a load of them available in Japan, and don't seem to be slowing down.
http://www.naxos.co.jp/onsale_japaneseseries.html

Lou, did you get around to buying more of those El Records CDs?

This week I'm adding some Morricone comps from Dagored. I believe most of these were individually released by Dagored previously, but here's a new line of 3-CD compilations gathered together under a single genre name: Maestro, Fear and Crime.

Yeah, feminists do not like Peckinpah's portrayal of the rape. It is
the vision or SICK fantasy of Peckinpah's to set up the whole rape
like it was rather enjoyable, and if you really take a good look
at his movies, he is a misogynist. In his movies, females are often
regulated to whoredom and male accessories no better than a decent
gun and fine saddle. His biographies tend to also point out his distain
towards women. There is a really interesting non-fiction book
call Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, and the author
does a fine job of contrasting two movie rapes. The author points
out that Peckinpah likes to titillate the male audience with
Sue Lyon's supposed "enjoyment," and that men enjoyed
watching this attack and were aroused. (Put wives, sisters,
and moms into this predicament, and it doesn't take on such
erotic tones. Hmmm.) Then the author points out how many
people were just horrified and sickened by the rape of Ned Beatty
in Deliverance and stormed out of the theater. And of course,
this rape was filmed as rapes SHOULD be filmed: painful, ugly,
demented, and NOT the least bit sexually exciting. Now I
wonder why the rape was portrayed like that? Interesting.

Let me say that I do admire "some" of his movies. He was
a great director, but it is too bad that he rarely gave women
a human and respected face.

Rape & prostitution feature largely in Sam's cinema and the rape in Straw Dogs has to be contrasted to ones in say Cross of Iron to see the whole scope of Sam's thinking on the subject. In Straw Dogs, it really isn't a rape at first. The assault is from an old boyfriend and she doesn't really fight back. She kind of gives in to the male desire and enjoys it. It's only when a second man she doesn't want involved shows up that it is indeed a rape.

And in a sense, this is Sam saying you really can't play with these things, that both sex and violence can easily spin out of control and are genies you can't put back in the bottle again. I don't know if Sam condones rape, I certainly do not. But I think he gets at something more truthful about people than mere ethics & principles.

Fielding's music always seems to me to be dissonant and strident but a good match with the visuals. I'm a more thematic score lover, but I really do like his score for The Wild Bunch. I was surprised when I heard his Advise and Consent which is melodious and lush. Very different from his later scores.

I can't say I agree with Peckinpah's reading of his own film, but I think one of the things that makes it such a masterpiece is the ambiguity of its morality and the unsettling way it twists and toys with the viewer's sympahties (another film that handles this brilliantly, though it is quite different in all other aspects, is Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Macon). I like to think the point is that when suitably cornered, social mores evaporate and people will revert to their most primitive instincts, as Lou and Joan indicated (though Joan's reading of it was surprisingly positive).

I disapprove of Hoffman's lackadaisical approach to his problems throughout most of the film, but sympathize as a person who has often let people I perceived to be more powerful push me around. Consequently I initally root for him when he finally takes a stand, but because I sympathize with him in this way, the extremes to which he eventually goes make me question not only his moral values, but my own.

This was at least partially what Peckinpah wanted. To one soldier who wrote a letter to Peckinpah panning the film, which he ended by calling it worthless as entertainment, Peckinpah said only "I didn't want to entertain you. I wanted you to look into your soul."

Joan: I think you and the book you reference may be correct in the way Peckinpah sets up the rape. However, if he did intend it to be arousing to male audience members, I suspect this would be another way of toying with the audience's values more than a dubious effort to keep people in the theatre. It's in keeping with his theme of primitive instincts -- i.e., men can provide all the lip service they want to the notion that rape is disdainful, but if he portrays it in an arousing way suddenly that view is called into question. Of course people are going to be offended by a rape that is portrayed as offensive, but if it is portrayed as something erotic and these same people are no longer offended, who does that say more about, the director or the audience? Being the "bad boy" that he was, I suspect Peckinpah would want such a question to be asked.

Straw Dogs is indeed ambiguous. Hoffman's character is intellectual & civilized but as a result he's repressed his instincts and can barely move without stuttering or tripping. When the final confrontation begins, he loses all of that.

The wife, despite all her chess playing, is a little dumb and somewhat mean. Not only has she allowed a man to screw her & enjoyed it, she's suffered another rape and done nothing but blame her husband for being a coward. When the final confrontation comes, she really doesn't care about the guy the mob wants to kill, she'd rather give him up than deal with any trouble. Hoffman is disgusted by her and when she threatens to leave him, he tells her to go with a smile.

Hoffman is actually pretty proud that he's killed all of these people. But, even so, he's not a hero but a killer.

One must NEVER listen to what Peckinpah says about his films in interviews. He hated to give interviews and filled them with BS. The film itself seems to go against the statement he made that throwing Warner to the mob would be the right thing to do. But I do think we're not supposed to entirely like Hoffman as either meek & mild or as a savage protector & avenger. In fact, I'm not sure we're supposed to like any of these people. There is an image in the film of two of the mob riding around on tricycles during the attack on the house that may sum up Sam's view of all adult humanity: As Joan says, we're all the kids from Lord of the Flies.

I'm reminded of someone who said "If you want to see the true face of humanity, starve a person for 3 days."