The Wild Bunch (1969) review
The last march.
The apocalypse is not a new business in Hollywood. Shortsightedness has been a novelty: the hottest thing in town: they’ve grown accustomed to seeing the world as a thing, tangible (a devalued commodity?) –– at most, a planet-target to be destroyed as blithely as a glass is shattered. Many of the great westerns were apocalyptic films: the world, then, was seen as an intricated historical machine, a rather complex scheme of interrelations – symbolic, material, subjective, etc. There is no finer example than Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969). Why? It’s the genre’s final act, therefore it is conscious of all previous conventions which allowed for it in the first place.
The Wild Bunch is a total western: it combines the historical progression of civilization and the apocalypse which inevitably accompanies such process. We are much too used, as scientists increasingly occupy culture, to thinking the world as a mere set of all physical properties: but there is not a world beyond "world", whatever that is. A world with no conception is no world at all. A world is much smaller than we assume. The indigenous populations which occupied what is now the catastrophic remnants of the American continent know that very well. Their world ended–– and rather quickly: an apocalypse.
It is, then, no coincidence that the definitive scene of The Wild Bunch takes place in a farewell procession in Mexican territory. The “puro Indios”, who already are beyond the end of the world, bid farewell to the warrior-cowboys who are struggling to avoid their own ending, the end of their world, given the advance of technology and State capitalism. The farewell is, then, not only a sublime and most dignified send off, it is also a death march for the outlaws' last ride–– a death march which will only be completed in the last shot of the film when the farewell song (La Golondrina) plays again: then it turns into a welcoming.
The “puro Indios” are saying: “You are about to become history, like us, world-less creatures, eternally on the margins, the limbo, the unending time of the end. So welcome ye outlaws and cowboys, welcome ye who are crushed by the same machines and killed by the same guns! Like us you fought and like us you must lose: you are the losers of history, of progress – welcome to the endtimes, which from now on is always present”.
When the angel of history comes for you it’s not a pretty sight. The only thing certain: a vast track of blood. And those who bleed know it. Throughout the film there’s one constant and that is the gaze of the poor and the downtrodden: a mixed look of sympathy, admiration and pity for the bunch–– they share the same fight and are bound to lose. The downtrodden, the humiliated know it already and they look at the dying outlaws from a privileged epistemological standpoint: what’s happening to the wild bunch happened to them first, they already know what it’s like to stand in the way of progress: barbarism. In fact, they don’t know any other facet of progress.
An analogy is worth here: the wild bunch is, as it were, like the white low and middle classes of today’s developed world–– once they seemed to have it all, now, however, they are being peripherized and smashed by that same progress which made their fortunes possible in the first place. The puro Indios in the film, however, hold the epistemological advantage that today the underdeveloped world has–– they’ve always known the realities of progress and capitalism, of “modernity”, always felt in their spines the material precariousness of this brave new world.
No ideology could be strong enough to sugarcoat the realities: freedom, equality under law, and all other universalisms of classical liberalism were hailed by colonial elites as they flogged their slaves. And there was no contradiction: these ideals and the true material realities of the colonial world not only could live together but were necessary to each other in a way–– the economic exploitation of the colonies was the necessary presupposition for the English gentlemen to speak freely, most deep and distinguished about the dignity of man and the wonders of progress. The periphery of global capitalism never had the illusion of an universal historical progress–– there was but violent domination and a mix of stoic resignation, cynicism and scorn for these “great ideas” of Western civilization. They saw those ideas in brute practice.
Much like the Puro Indios in the The Wild Bunch the suffering peripheries of the world today look to the once-developed nations and say: you are becoming like us (e.g., the suburbs of Europe are, all but in name, African and Arab suburbs now). As Aimé Cesaire put it: the boomerang effect: the imperial modus operandi eventually comes home.
The outlaw way of trailing and chasing the victims is, eventually, conjured against the outlaws themselves: the agents of Law, the very disciplinary machinery of the State and its capitalist partners become, now, the true bandits, the professional criminals who chase out and murder away the old ways of wild marauding.
There’s only one end to this: bloodshed and body-counting. The bunch realizes this, at the very end: they give up trying to escape and walk head on to their reckoning–– they go down in a bloody shootout, as bloody as it gets. They realize that, though they cannot win, they can at least choose how to die: and their choice is one of honor among thieves–– no man can stay behind for “these are men!”, not mere instruments or disposable associates, but “one of us”: indeed, to live outside the law one must be honest.
After the end, that is, when the endtimes materialize and become the only horizon, what is there left to do for the remnants? The Wild Bunch ends with resignation not in defeat, but in defiance: “It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do”. The surviving members, now forever excluded from civilization, ride away as a sequence of shots remembers the miraculous laughter of the heroic bunch: a final tribute to those who lived up to an ideal of humanity, however misguided, and found no other way of ending except in violence, as the times demanded.
The Portuguese title to The Wild Bunch, rather mysteriously, captures the main idea of the film better than the original: Meu Ódio Será Tua Herança, or: My Hatred Shall Be Your Heritage––– Bravo! Progress, modernity, history – they all bequeath but one thing for all sides, the winning and the losing, and that’s the constant renewal of hatred, our only birthright.
