4 - Ballistic Balletics: Styles of Violent Representation in The Wild Bunch and After

Summary

Displays of armed violence in American cinema go back at least to Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), with its multiple gunfights and its sensational concluding image of a bandit firing his revolver directly into the camera lens. This seeming assault on the audience, which contained the “special effect” of hand-tinted orange-yellow gunsmoke in contemporary prints, marked the beginning of an uneasy relationship between spectators and on-screen gunplay that has been tempered by the cultural/political status of real armed violence in American society at any given point in time and quite obviously persists today. Historically dependent on the current state of motion picture technology and prevailing mechanisms of content censorship, the relationship was aggravated to the point of rupture during the late 1960s when two films broke the bounds of conventional representation to become flashpoints in a heated national debate over gun violence. Produced in the climate of rebellion that followed the assassination of President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson's precipitous escalation of the Vietnam War, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) bracketed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the worst urban riots in the country's history. Both films combined the use of slow motion with blood-filled squibs (explosive devices concealed beneath an actor's clothing and triggered electronically to represent bullet strikes) to depict the impact of bullets on the human body – enhanced, in The Wild Bunch, by spurting arterial blood and gaping exit wounds – setting a new standard for ballistic violence on screen that clearly echoed the real-world context of political assassination, ghetto uprisings, and Vietnam.