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In some constitution - I believe that of the United States of America - it is written that all men are created (born) equal. This implies, naturally, that the natural equality among individual men corresponds to an inequality in the outcomes, due to various and concomitant circumstances, such as personal inclinations, family wealth, education received over the years, work done, interaction with one's peers, and, in short, everything that shapes the character and personality of the individual.
In the view of the mentioned constitutionalism, imbued with Enlightenment philosophy, there implicitly emerges a sort of division between man as a product of nature (pure "potentiality," even in the Aristotelian sense) and man as a product of culture, both his own and of the times he lives in (pure "act," always in the terms dear to the Greek philosopher), and there is no doubt that the "cultured" man - in the broadest sense of the term: homo sapiens but also homo faber - is a creature decidedly more worthy than the "natural" man, if only because his knowledge indirectly allows the whole community to enrich and develop itself, until reaching that happiness that some North American constitutions listed among the fundamental rights of the individual.
However, it is easy to emphasize how the boundary between nature and culture is, ultimately, extremely tenuous, given the schematism inherent in the same categories outlined above: in other words, this distinction betrays the typical optimism of Enlightenment thought (and the constitutionalism derived from it) and the claim of the Enlightenment scientist to control reality, reducing it to a scheme. However, variables such as emotions, impulses, the unconscious, and everything that contributes to defining the sphere of the "irrational" are overlooked.
"Straw Dogs" by Sam Peckinpah, an American with ancestors among Native Americans, invites us to reflect on the ridge that separates culture and nature, reason from violence, self-control from destructive outburst.
The story - set in a gloomy England (the land of origin of the American Founding Fathers) - is about a timid math professor who retreats with his beautiful and provocative wife to a country house located in a remote part of the English countryside. The beautiful and coquettish lady, neglected by her husband engrossed in constant speculations on mathematical models, attracts the attention of a band of young local workers employed in the renovation of the professor's house, to the point of being raped by them. This will trigger the unexpected and unforeseen reaction of the professor, in a spiral of hate and violence.
The enduring allure of this film lies in the continuous and repeated contrasts that animate it: the professor represents simultaneously culture and speculation, in opposition to the vitality and sensuality of the beautiful wife and the roughness and physicality of the peasants; at the same time, the intellectualism of the professor seems to conceal his impotence and his disinterest in sex, and primarily in his wife, in contrast to the marked masculinity of the workers, who neither know nor want to control their impulses against the provocations and allusions of the professor's wife. All the highlighted contrasts, however, have a breaking point in the sexual violence suffered by the professor's wife: he abandons his purely rational dimension, his remoteness from the world and the flesh, becoming himself a perpetrator in a rediscovery of his brutish nature and his vocation to destroy.
It is significant to note how the protagonist's nature has a turnover when his wife is affected, yet the explanation of his reaction to the peasants' impositions remains ambiguous: a desire to defend his wife, driven by a moral conscience, or rather a desire to reaffirm himself as the sole owner of the woman's body, defending only by extension his lady? We are not given to fully understand, and in this conflict, one can notice the subtle charm, perhaps morbid and overwhelming, of the film. This charm, nearly forty years after its release, sometimes allows "Straw Dogs" to be labeled as a reactionary, fascist, and antifeminist film, and other times - and it is my modest opinion - as a film of raw and desperate realism.
A final remark on the choice of the apt protagonist: in 1967, the era of the Summer of Love which is so celebrated these days, Dustin Hoffman played the timid graduate in Mike Nichols' famous comedy, experiencing the first sexual pulses and liberations in his encounters with a girl and her mature mother. In 1971 the same actor, in the role of the professor, almost seems to celebrate the funeral of the '68 illusions, leaving space for the eternal violence of the individual and the pessimistic representation of a man who cannot abandon his feral nature despite the cyclical attempts of cultural - and countercultural - emancipation that follow one another in history, remaining firm in his individualism.
Aren't these the true roots of the United States and of Peckinpah, rather than those imagined by the Founding Fathers?
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