Within the Moral Eye— Peckinpah's Art of Visual Narration
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WITHIN THE MORAL EYE— PECKINPAH'S ART OF VISUAL NARRATION BY SUSAN ELAINE MARSHALL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1984 Copyright 1984 by Susan Elaine Marshall for my parents and for Angela TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 Notes 12 CHAPTER ONE BETWEEN WHAT IS IMMUTABLE AND FAILED: THE IMAGE EMERGES IN THE WILD BUNCH 13 The Camera Eye Gets Going: Cinematic Convergence in Starbuck 13 Photographic vs. Cinematic: The Cinematic Eye Centers 15 Penetrating Ants and Scorpions: The Cinematic Eye Sees the Life in Violent Action 18 The Camera Eye Flashes Back; Narrative Disjunction in Deke's Method of Law 22 Freddie's Regenerative Laughter: The Camera Eye Turns in to the Center 24 The Cinematic Eye Penetrates Pike's Image 27 The Bunch and the Camera Eye Enter the Old World ... 31 The Bunch and the Ritual Female: Transforming within the Green World 34 The Bunch and the Red Automobile Penetrate Agua Verde . 36 Pike Sees the Moral Female; Angel Deconstructs .... 39 Escaping the Old World's Design: The Bunch Advance as New Worlders 42 Shooting Out of Structure: The Bunch Blast the Bridge 44 The Bunch Go Forward; Deke Evolves Peripheral Images . 49 The Bunch Center; The Camera Eye Quickens 51 The Bunch Give Way to the Camera Eye; The Camera Eye Shoots Free 55 The Bunch Resurrect; The Camera Eye Makes a Beginning 60 Notes 63 CHAPTER TWO LOVING WELL: THE MORAL PASSION OF MALE AND FEMALE IMAGES IN THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE 67 From "The Bunch" to "The Ballad": The Camera Eye Links via Cable's Image 67 Beginning the Moral Advance: The Camera Eye Imagines Female Value 73 Digging into the Source: Cable and the Camera Eye Discover the Water's Image 76 TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued) Cable Builds and the Camera Eye Frames 83 Cable Encounters the Man of Words; The Camera Eye Allows for "Springing" 85 Cable and the Camera Eye Unite with Hildy's Image 89 Cable and the Cinematic Eye Imagine Human Value 92 The Camera Eye Strips Down to Images; Cable and Hildy Prepare to Converge 96 The Camera Eye Imagines the Flag; Cable Links into the Communal Frontier 102 Cable and the Camera Eye Spring to Life; Hildy Gives the Light of Her Image 105 Cable and Hildy Prosper; The Cinematic Imagi- national Conjoins Image and Song 108 Cable's Image Still in the Center; The Cinematic Eye Advances HI Cable and the Cinematic Eye Visualize Taggart .115 and Bowen: The New Divinity Becomes Visible . Hildy Metamorphoses Through Cable's Eye; The Cinematic Eye Centers in Cable 119 Cable Imagines His Death; The Cinematic Eye Frees His Genius 122 Notes 126 CHAPTER THREE GETTING AWAY ON GASOLINE AND SPIRIT— THE NEW BUNCH CONVOYS 130 Coming On 130 Centering 133 Making Connections 149 Convoying 1"3 Opening Out 171 Notes 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY i79 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH i83 a Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy WITHIN THE MORAL EYE— PECKINPAH'S ART OF VISUAL NARRATION By Susan Elaine Marshall December 1984 Chairman: William R. Robinson Major Department: English This study explores the new species of morality that Sam Peckinpah's cinematic imagination creates in The Wild Bunch , The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and Convoy in its interaction with the moving color image. The new morality appears most prominently in the process of growth — three-phase "moral advance" — that emerges both within the movies, and from one to the next. This new morality is not a structure imposed upon the narrative, but an inherent method that arises with and in the con- crete acts of the movies' images. In its largest dimension, the birth of the new morality in Peckinpah's movies enacts the transformation from a morality of words to a morality of images, or from literary to cine- matic art. Structurally, the study proceeds from the earliest to the latest of the three movies. Chapter One shows how Peckinpah's imagination, working through the narrative act of "shooting out," comes to dispose of the Bunch's characterization as killers and to see them as new images valued for their powers of transition. The chapter further seeks to elucidate the difficulties that the imaginative camera eye encounters in shedding the constraints of historical and documentary narration implicit within the movie's opening black and white still-shot. Chapter Two shows how Peckinpah shifts his focus from the male "bunch" to the individual, and brings forward the transforming potential within the female image. Through the moral encounter with Hildy's image, Cable evolves his individual human worth; and the camera eye, imagining Cable's story as a traditionally verbal form— "The Ballad" —comes to release Cable's visual powers, and in the process expose the limits of his humanistic character. Centering the cinematic eye's inherent powers of action as they are evolved within Convoy , Chapter Three works out the concrete process through which the movie brings into view a new universe of images. The chapter proceeds, through the movie's narrative act of "convoying," to perform the transformation out of the old divisive morality promoted by Lyle and the "voice of reason," and into the new visual morality — apparent in the image of Rubber Duck— that the movies, as narrative art, enact. INTRODUCTION When I first began looking at Sam Peckinpah's movies and trying to make sense of them, I was struck by two things. First, given what appeared to me to begin as simple, straight-forward stories, I was excited by how exuberantly alive the movie's images were and by how much there was to see. Second, as I read the criticism that was available on the movies, I became annoyed by its complacency. Most of the voices speaking about Peckinpah movies sounded utterly secure in their pro- nouncements without ever touching on the event in them that I was re- sponding to. I began to wonder whether we were seeing the same movies. Equally distressing was the fact that, of the movies I had access to, the ones I tended to like better—particularly The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Convoy—were almost unanimously panned by critics and by people I talked to. Cable Hogue, described as "vacuous and ineffectually humor- 1 2 ous" and "a critical and commercial failure," disturbed critics with its "problematic" ending. And Convoy was usually written off as a Western about trucks. Movies that tended to receive serious attention were most often the violent ones, like The Wild 3unch . But at the same time it was hailed as a classic Western, The Wild Bunch was deplored for its violence. The more I looked at the movies, and the more I read — 2 about them, the further those two experiences diverged —and the more I came to rely upon what my eye was seeing. At least part of the discrepancy between the visual and critical experiences with the movies came from the fact that, for the most part, the critics were "reading" the movies; they were approaching them as though they were literary events with critical notions that, while they may work for literature, do not always transfer to a medium that nar- rates through moving color images. For example, critics usually ap- proach The Wild Bunch as a movie "about" violence. Even Peckinpah, dis- cussing the movie in interviews, takes this attitude: "I was trying to 3 make a few comments on violence and the people who live by violence." However, "violence" as a theme in the literary sense of an idea that is literally "laid down" on (that is the etymological meaning of "theme") the narrative, or of an idea that the narrative illustrates, does not for account for what happens in The Wild Bunch . It does not explain, instance, how the violent cinematic action of the shootouts always works to free the Bunch from some restriction on their movement, or how the camera's violent action always exceeds what the Bunch intend. Without doubt, the Bunch are violent men; but the violent acts performed through the camera eye do more than simply express their character or illustrate a theme. It is Peckinpah 1 s artistic good sense, and the good fortune of the viewers of his movies, that the Peckinpah talking about them is not the same as the Peckinpah making them. Among the critics, Paul Seydor gives a more sophisticated account of Peckinpah's cinematic "style" in The Wild Bunch— an account within which he includes the cinematic violence performed through the shootouts — 3 and its relation to what he sees as the movie's themes and to its characters: In the hands of a genuinely serious artist, style is never a mere extravagance used to decorate the material. It is determined by the material, has something of its own to say, and constitutes a kind of subtext that runs parallel to the main text. If the artist is any good, if he has mastered the resources of his craft, then it is not unusual to find that the style is telling us much the same thing as the manifest content of the artwork is telling us. We have seen that Peckinpah's fragmented editing and telephoto compositions have a psychological import. They also have a thematic import intimately related to the psy- chological import. What the visual style is trying to tell us is what the film itself is trying to say: style becomes thus synonymous with and inseparable from meaning.