Page "The Wild Bunch" Paragraph 48

The violence that was much criticized by critics in 1969 remains controversial.

Director Peckinpah noted it was allegoric of the American war in Vietnam, whose violence was nightly televised to American homes at supper time.

He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitized, bloodless television Westerns and films glamorizing gun fights and murder.

" The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut ...

It's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody 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.

" Peckinpah used violence as catharsis, believing his audience would be purged of violence, by witnessing it explicitly on screen.

He later admitted to being mistaken, that the audience came to enjoy rather than be horrified by his films ' violence, something that troubled him.