Conversation Fear - Crying for the Scorpion

As originally posted at Dark, But Shining some seven months after it had officially closed its doors. Old ghosts and all.

Oh, you didn’t think I’d let Halloween pass unnoticed, did you? And after all, horror is where it finds you, where you’re not expecting it. And where better than the abandoned field, the neglected site once thought utterly dead? You cut across it on the way to school, following the path worn down by a thousand other kids just a little bit late to class, hoping to shave off a moment from your evening trek. Secretly you speed up your pace, all the while assuring yourself that it’s no scarier than it is in the daytime.

And then your foot catches, something digging into your ankle just above your shoe. If you hadn’t been hurrying, you might not have tripped. Galvanized by adrenalin, your muscles too ready for flight, you instead fall to the grass (twisted and stringy like the hair of your crazy aunt, the one that you always hid from), paralyzed. Good thing it was just a stray root and nothing really dangerous, right?

Ah, but I love a good digression.

I was indeed hoping to find a proper subject to talk about this Halloween. And by “proper”, I mean unexpected and yet cogent to the matter at hand. FIGHT CLUB? Been done. CHINATOWN? That was last year. KRAMER VERSUS KRAMER? Okay, that was mostly a joke at Rick’s expense (you all remember Eat More People, right?), but still, that was…three years ago. Time indeed flies like an arrow. At any rate, I was in an ever-increasing bind. Nothing was coming. And really, I’ve talked zombies to death and back. Looking kinda grim. No Halloween this year. Called off due to lack of interest and inability to look beyond the pale.

But sometimes, sometimes Netflix is kind to me. And by “kind” I mean that they dropped the answer right in my lap. For you see, THE WILD BUNCH arrived a couple days ago.

Now, I’m not going to go all looney and suggest that THE WILD BUNCH is actually a horror movie dressed up as a western (as I’ve done in the past with other, perhaps inappropriate films.) That said, there’s certainly moments where it seems that way. And Peckinpah wastes no time in getting right to it. First few minutes, while the credits are still rolling and the protagonists are making their way up the main street, dressed as soldiers, ready to hit the railroad office, we see a group of children clustered around something, some kind of enclosure. They’re laughing and smiling. Maybe they’ve got a puppy or a bunny rabbit in there, charmed by its infantile wiles. They’re certainly pretty happy, excited, perfectly normal kid kinds of things to be. Then the camera allows us a shot of what’s going on in the circle of children.

It’s a group of scorpions being torn apart by a nest of red ants. The larger creatures are staggering drunkenly, fighting against a literal wave of swarming insects. The scorpions strike uselessly, maybe killing a single ant here or there, but where one falls, an army stands ready to take its place. The children laugh and poke the helpless creatures with sticks, cheering at the sport. Legs and pincers and stingers become tangled by a seething rage of ants, their frantic limbs glistening in the light of noon as the scorpions twist and are consumed. The children laugh some more, before they finally strike the scene by burning the nest with chaparral. It’s swept aside while the robbery unfolds.

Peckinpah knows what the hell he’s doing, because that opening is the action of THE WILD BUNCH in microcosm. The final, climactic shootout between Huerta’s army and Pike, Dutch and the Gorch Brothers is nothing more than the ants and the scorpions writ large. And we’re the children laughing in the face of that awful spectacle. You know it’s true.

Granted, there’s a difference between ants and men, isn’t there? Wasn’t that cataclysmic battle brought on by a sense of honor, of four men at the end of their rope going to die to avenge the death of a comrade (and to absolve themselves of their own guilt in it, their own betrayal?) It’s enough that the deed is done, no matter that it brings upon them their own deaths, right? The fact that they did it, that they sought redemption for selling out Angel, that alone sets them above the ants and the scorpions, yes?

Maybe.

It’s almost a pity that THE WILD BUNCH wasn’t the last western (hell it wasn’t even Peckinpah’s last western, as he went on to direct PAT GARETT AND BILLY THE KID) because there’s an encompassing sense of finality about it. At least right until the end, where Thornton and Sykes hook up with the Zapatista rebels in the ruins of the tyrant Huerta’s fortress. The outlaws turn to rebels, having gone past mercenaries and thieves long ago.

But even so, I can’t help but feel a twist of loathing in my heart for those children.

Apologies to Rick and Kevin and the rest of the DBS crew for stirring up these old bones. If there’s impropriety, it wasn’t my intention. But what a better day than Halloween to raise the dead, if only for a little?