The Wild Bunch Analysis

 The Wild Bunch

Directed and Co-Written by: Sam Peckinpah

This film felt like a unique experience, because the conflicts, and the plot points in a Western are specific to the world of the film and you can't take the story and set it up in another world/genre. Usually we can do that, the story and setting can be separable (example for same story set in different worlds - Arjun Reddy, Devdas, Dev.D) but in Westerns, with conflicts like bounty hunting, quest for money, robberies - they seamlessly belong to the world. This film is a Revisionist Western - a subgenre of Western which started in the late 1960s where there was more moral ambiguity than the traditional westerns. I always root for moral ambiguity not only because it makes us uncomfortable, but because it arises a lot of questions in ourselves and we learn more about ourselves. Watching a morally ambiguous film with another person could be a nice way to know about them.

This film has mind-boggling amounts of violence - loads of gunshots, blood oozing out, things getting blasted and destroyed and this reminds me of Tarantino's answer to a journalist when asked about the reason for violence in his films 'because it's so much fun Jan!' and he apparently is inspired from Peckinpah's films. Experiencing a lot of violence on film almost mimics a cathartic experience where your mind goes through intense, loud stuff for quite a while and part of the gratification is actually experiencing normalcy after the violence is done with. Probably this is the purpose of having violence in films, the characters act as a surrogate for our angst and the experience of watching the film acts as an outlet.