It was Warren Oates, in Badlands (1973, directed by Terrence Malick) that brought you to Sam Peckinpah's tonally incoherent masterpiece Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, released in August 1974, barely a week after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Both reviled and praised, the film falls somewhere in between the cracks of aesthetic judgment: even thirty-plus years later, it is still too warped to fit comfortably within the parameters of evaluation.
What to make of a film that asks viewers to take seriously a man engaged in extended monologues with a fly-covered severed head? Even more disturbing, the protagonist--the ostensible "hero" of the film--has a moral compass that is practically impossible to decipher. Does the film expect us to identify with Bennie's (Warren Oates's) tunnel-vision quest for the head of Garcia, and the ensuing murder of scores of people, or does it expect us to view his quest from a bemused, jaded, paranoid-fatigued, post-Watergate, pre-Quentin Tarantino, ironic position?
At 10 minutes:
"Goodbye my brothers from Ohio. Goodbye my brothers from Illinois," sings Bennie as the (gay?) gunmen searching for Garcia enter Bennie's. Up to this point, the film has been relentlessly episodic, fragmented, compressed. The Americans enter. They become quiet tyrants of the bar. This shot frames them--one of them--in the background, smiling. But they are killers. Americans. Representatives of the Republic of Nixon, of Vietnam, and yet closeted counter-culturals. Viva Zapata the patch on Bennie's jacket seems to read, the name of a 1952 film starring Marlon Brando, directed by Elia Kazan, based on the life of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who fought for the peasants against the corruption of the politicians and its administrative functionaries. Hero or anti-hero? Bennie is neither.
40 minutes:
This is moments before the first of several violently incoherent scenes in the film, as Bennie and his girlfriend Elita make their way to an off-road spot for a little food and romance, only to be menaced and then attacked by some motorcyclists (including Kris Kristofferson). But I love this shot, as Bennie's face is obscured through the dirty windshield, the mid-day sun drenching them both. Elita is relaxed, smiling, holding her guitar: they are both bathed in false hope. Sunshine. Glass. Chrome.
And 70:
A terrifically disturbing scene--echoed later in the Coen brothers' Blood Simple and in the general tenor of Quentin Tarantino's films from the 1990s--where Bennie (having gone to sever the head from the body of Alfredo Garcia) is attacked and awakens to find himself half-buried in the grave, along with Elita. He awakens and spits dirt from his mouth, like a resurrected man. Of course, Elita is dead, which only seals his descent into self-destructive madness. He holds her tenderly. He kisses her. This is the film at its most chaotic, because--having refused to make us believe, on an emotional level, that Bennie and Elita really love each other--the film asks us to care. Oates's performance in this scene is practically baroque, and it's a sign of either the genius or failure of the film that it expects us to share in his sorrow.
David Thomson has written that a handful of Peckinpah's greatest films--including Alfredo Garcia--are "metaphors for the eating of shit required in making a picture." His characters have a job to do (deliver a head) and they do it, no matter what the cost. But I think Peckinpah's true legacy is that, in a handful of films, he managed to persuade audiences to care about characters from whom they are emotionally detached. From Pulp Fiction to The Dark Knight to Watchmen, this is still the case. Peckinpah's last laugh was on the audience.
P.S. Dan North has upped the 10 / 40 / 70 ante. Check it out here, via the ever-excellent Film Studies for Free.
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