Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Apparently some regard Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) as his most nihilistic film. I'm going to have to track down the articles claiming it is such, for I feel the film is not only far from being nihilistic – it contains a sustained critique of the male and patriarchal violence (against women) which has been at the moral core of many of Peckinpah's most noted films (The Wild Bunch and the misogynistic Straw Dogs).

From the opening series of scenes in which a pregnant woman is abruptly taken from her lake-side reverie to be tortured by her wealthy father's henchmen to the very last scene in which this same woman gains revenge upon her father by having the film's protagonist Bennie (another wild-in-the-eye Warren Oates performance) kill him, we witness men from all stations in life treat women with casual contempt and physical abuse. Peckinpah depicts each of these men as sadistic and morally hollowed out by both the desire for and the abuse of power and, in the case of the protagonist, schizophrenic jealousy.

Peckinpah incoherently contrasts these shameful souls with the Mexican family which attempts to stop Bennie from defiling the body of Alfredo Garcia by cutting its head off and taking it to the Jefe who put out the bounty for it. Their commitment to family and the lengths to which they will go to maintain the dignity of one of their own mark them off as worthy of respect and admiration, especially when placed in reference to the odious men who stand against them.

Alfredo Garcia, like Straw Dogs, contains a rape scene in which the woman (Elita, played by the phenomenal Isela Vega) gives herself over emotionally to the man about to rape her. Yet unlike Straw Dogs, Peckinpah depicts the rapist as pathetic and incapable of completing the act when confronted by a self-assertive woman. The rapist (affectless-as-ever Kris Kristoferson) seems to sense that his attempt to rape the woman is a vile act. However, Peckinpah still can’t keep the woman from giving herself over emotionally and physically (after she has slapped and been slapped by the rapist, who subsequently walks away from her) to a would-be rapist. This self-giving seems to be a defining feature of her character: Elita is, by far, the most understanding and empathetic subject in the movie. However, that does not lessen the venality of having yet another woman “accept” her rapist. I hesitate here to say anything more general about gender (and violence) in Peckinpah’s films, but in a movie so scathing in its indictment of male violence towards women, I wonder about Peckinpah’s failure to understand the inherently violent nature of showing a woman as desirous of her rapist.