Crossposted from Kubrick on the Guillotine's Screen Women Column
Straw Dogs has been the centre of discussions about misogyny in the movies since its 1971 release. It has prompted outspoken criticism and disgust from a wide swathe of audiences, meeting accusations of ‘fascism’ from The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. However, the film was also defended by other critics, who championed the film’s skilled deployment of atmospherics and locale. Sam Peckinpah, of course, had a legendary reputation as a hard-drinking tough with a penchant for crafting virile, nihilistic films deeply entrenched in masculine American myth. It’s no surprise, then, that Straw Dogs, while a marvellously well-made film in other regards, provides a neatly and offensively retrograde attitude toward women’s roles. In fact, it is a film that characterises women as weak and untrustworthy while simultaneously holding them up as sexual beings.
The tale unfolds in a sleepy West Country village, starring Dustin Hoffman as David, a timid mathematician, and Susan George as his childish new wife, Amy. They are taunted, threatened, and eventually attacked by a group of local men who are hired to work on their roof, but set their sights on Amy instead. The film is tense and malevolent, building an oppressive air of dread that culminates in the much-discussed rape and home invasion. If Peckinpah’s interest is in driving the diffident introvert into his most repressed violent urges, asking how far a man should allow himself to be pushed – than his final violent explosion speaks volumes of the film’s positioning on the topic.
Read the rest at Kubrick on the Guillotine.