In Black Looks, bell hooks said that American audiences tend to resist the idea that images have an ideological component. Well certainly, but shit works both ways lady, and sometimes the picture can get a little fuzzy once you start fine-combing in the interests of an agenda. Not only does it deny art the part-autonomy it thrives on, but it also turns critics into bloated activists, bent on unearthing the great big “system of oppression” at work in our lives – because everyone’s a trophy-suspect, waiting to be mounted on some wall and exposed for the disposable fraud that they really are.

But of course it’s never as clean-cut as the personal=political versus giving the artist the benefit of the doubt. Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs splits that difference, though short changes on comfort: Even once you get past all the stuff that stained cinema history’s hands, this remains a confused and confusing film, the kind that seems to gnaw at our inability to reconcile the ideal with the actual. What I mean by all of this is that you could, say, start to unpick the seam involving Amy’s rape and dismiss this as a hetero-rape+revenge fantasy: she ‘enjoys’ the sexual submission, and David ‘responds’ by going apeshit and defending his kingdom. But that would be ignoring the precise system of ironies-as-checks-and-balances installed by Peckinpah: the way Amy never reveals to David what happened, and how his domestic sphere inadvertently comes to encompass a pedophile. Grammatically, his outburst still reads too much like an action sequence for comfort (in much the same way that the rape occasionally feels like a 70’s porno outtake) , and the build-up is too schematic to justify its primitivist price tag. And while that fact may overshadow the addendum, there’s no denying the way David ultimately comes to resemble a dog that’s just spat some dead animal out at your feet – smiling, satisfied, and oblivious.—David Levinson

» Sam Peckinpah | USA | 1971