nocal posted:

The violence is one of the best aspects of this movie. Westerns were, mostly, morality plays where a good guy shoots a rapacious injun who at last has the decency to die a bloodless death.

Peckinpah always depicted violence as it exists: it's disgusting and decidedly *not* transformative. The thread that runs through many of his movies is that a protagonist kills to "be a man," but at the end it seems that he's not "good."

I think that that's a refreshing take on *true* violence, even today. It can read as nihilistic, but I'm not sure why we accept that violence is a positive force.