[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Just the idea that the cowboy/outlaw had become outdated. But where Ford, as you say, saw them as having a fundamental role in founding a civilisation, Peckinpah seems to have seen them as only standing in its way, and only made obsolete by another kind of violence. Or something like that.

yeah. yes.

that i see as more of a premise than a conclusion though.

i think for me the key in wild bunch is when dutch gets mad at thornton for giving his world to a railroad. and repeats furiously that what's important it's not your word-- "it's who you give it to! it's who you give it to!"

i got that with my spine

and it's about the freedom to choose your loyalties. which in the case of the gorches has to be forced upon them but in the end they get it.

see where i see both directors at different ends is how the trope of the outdated cowboy in ford serves as a call to serve whatever institution for the greater glory of some sort of legal fiction with claims of immortality beyond the individual. whereas in wild bunch where pike declares "we don't share a lot of views with our government" it serves more as a call to the individual to choose their own path in an absurd and chaotic hell in which everything is doomed to die brutally and get eaten by buzzards and/or machines and machine people. and in the end thornton watches the buzzards and he even smiles and sort of accepts this is where he is.

funny thing imdb says wild bunch is "bitter," but whoever wrote that does not get how in the closing sequence everyone is recalled by their laughter. and it's not a bitter laugh but a life-affirming human thing of being able to laugh in the face of the abyss which we but not the animals can see. and i find that to be an absolutely lovely thing and much more essential than any cause that has a flag. what people have been missing about wild bunch is the part that rises above the violence and brutality and is really beautiful.