The Wild Bunch - How To Reinvent a Genre By Attacking its Values (WGA's best screenplays #99)
Context
THE WILD BUNCH came out in 1969 and was controversial for the bloody and realistic violence it depicted. The screenplay was written by Sam Peckinpah and Walon Green, while Green and Roy N. Sickner are credited with the story. Peckinpah also directed the film, his fourth western in a row. The film was a commercial and critical success and earned two Oscar nominations, for its script and score. It has carved a place for itself in film history as one of the first broadly successful revisionist westerns, despite and even because of its gritty violence.
Premise:
It’s a western, but everyone is tired, violent, dirty and corrupt, the authorities are nowhere to be found, and the violence is excessive, realistic, painful - and eventually futile.
So what happens? (Spoilers, obviously)
PIKE leads a group of outlaws on what he hopes will be their last robbery. However, they’re ambushed by DEKE, who has been hired to hunt down and kill them. Pike and the bunch barely manage to escape, and then discover that their loot has been swapped for a worthless decoy.
Hunted and a little over the hill, they head to Mexico, where they are hired by the corrupt GENERAL MAPACHE to rob a shipment of weapons heading to the American army. The gang executes a meticulous train robbery that is almost ruined by Deke and his posse, who predicted Pike would target the shipment.
Pike’s gang deliver the arms, and the General pays them - but he also takes one of their members (Angel) prisoner, to torture and kill him (earlier Angel killed one of the General’s lovers). At first Pike and his men simply move on and try to forget what happened, but because of their code, they can’t just leave Angel behind. They decide to go on a suicide mission to rescue him. Pike and the gang confront Mapache, and a violent, chaotic shootout ensues. Pike and his gang gun down many of the soldiers, but by the end of the bloody battle, they are also killed.
What Can We Learn From It?
Lesson #1: genre innovation
THE WILD BUNCH isn’t the first revisionist western, but it’s considered the first widely successful one. Through its tone and values, THE WILD BUNCH manages to abruptly shake up the genre. One way to illuminate its distinct choices is to compare it with another revisionist western that came out the same year - BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, written by William Goldman.
Both films subvert the wetsern’s usual traditions, cultivating a sense of the end of an era, but they use vastly different tones to achieve that. Goldman’s script uses humor and heart, while THE WILD BUNCH is pervaded with mourning and weariness. The protagonists are starkly different: Butch and Sundance are presented as lovable rascals who learned to game the system, but don’t adapt when that system is waning out. Their rebellious spirit is correct, but they’re out of tune with the times. Pike and his men, on the other hand, are depicted as violent criminals, who have been so corrupted by a system that adores violence (as celebrated in so many westerns before), that there is nothing left in them but guilt, greed and violence. At the one instance they try to do something good, it leads to their doom. THE WILD BUNCH’s commentary is much more acerbic.
The films’ seemingly similar but thematically different endings are also telling. Both groups of protagonists go out in a blaze of glory, but the emotion each film elicits about their death couldn’t be more contrasting. Butch and Sundance receive an elegant freeze frame, leaving them fixed forever as the individualistic, optimistic entrepreneurs they were. Pike’s gang? They get riddled by bullets while they murder dozens of people around them, and the main sense we get from their final action is futility, not heroism or triumph.
Violence has always been an inherent part of westerns, but its full consequences were skimmed over: if someone got shot, they’d grab their chest, grunt and fold over, almost as if they were simply having a heart attack. The violence was often narrativized to serve some cause or ideal - the debate was who got to use it, to what purpose, and when has it gone too far. THE WILD BUNCH changed all that. THE WILD BUNCH’s treatment of the genre suggests that its attitude and values are corrosive, and the logical world they would create isn’t the sanitized stories we’ve been seeing, but this nihilistic, morally bankrupt world Peckinpah’s film depicts. The novelty and truth of this was so original and powerful that it made THE WILD BUNCH stand out - it was a sharp new take on the genre.
The conventions of the genre you’re working in may seem set in stone, but there are always ways to innovate. Genre innovation often has to do with VALUES. Watch the classics of the genre and ask yourself which values have changed? Think back not just to what you love about the genre you’re writing in, but what don’t you love? What feels outdated? Bridging that gap will help you write a genre entry that’s new and original.
Lesson #2: Generating Theme by Defining Good and Evil
One of the ways to generate theme in a story is by carefully choosing who loses and why, who wins and why, and how we should feel about it. In a typical blockbuster, a “good” character wins because of a positive value (courage, integrity, altruism), and “evil” loses because of some negative value (corruption, arrogance, choosing violence) and we’re happy about it. In tragedies “good” characters lose because of a negative value and we’re sad about it. McKee calls this structure the controlling idea of the film. John Truby talks about the importance of defining what is good and bad in the world of your film, and uses THE LORD OF THE RINGS as an example, where good is defined as caring for nature and animals. THE WILD BUNCH uses its controlling idea to push its premise to its extreme, making a point that goes beyond genre reinvention into social commentary and political allegory.
There is no good in THE WILD BUNCH. Not a single character in the world of this film represents something remotely positive. Pike and his crew aren’t hunted by some righteous lawmen - but by Deke, who is motivated by revenge, greed and fear, and his crew indifferently kills civilians. Mapache clearly isn’t good - he is an oppressor, and a greedy, violent glutton who tries to double-cross the bunch and also tortures Angel. Of course Angel isn’t innocent, because he murdered his ex for being with Mapache… And on and on. Pike and his men talk of their code, but flashbacks show that Pike betrayed Deke, and his men don’t seem all that loyal. We end up being in Pike’s corner mainly because he seems slightly less terrible than everyone else, and because he has a relatively modest and harmless request: to retire in peace.
So if everyone in the film is bad and violent, surely they must have some powerful motivations? Surely their schemes are ambitious and successful? Not quite. The film’s magnificent opening score, a violent shootout incurring dozens of casualties, is also an exercise in futility - the loot is actually fake, a decoy. The glorious train robbery leads to Angel being caught and tortured; the machine gun Pike steals off the train becomes the stand on which he’ll die. Not only is no one good in this world, but no one wins. Even Deke, standing over the bodies of his enemies, seems more empty than triumphant. The one ‘good’ act Pike and his gang do - their decision to save Angel - feels both futile (we don’t think they have a chance against that army) and too little too late - by the time they get there, Angel is barely standing. Even this chivalrous act is emptied of its nobility. These choices strip away any possible positive value from the characters' acts of crime and violence, shaping what the film thinks of such acts.
This pervading sense of empty victories, and endless, pointless violence, must've spoken deeply to the American public at the time, and in particular the left. The Vietnam war was pitched as a”good against bad” war, but as the war went on that dichotomy slowly eroded. In order to reflect that, you can’t keep making movies with good guys and bad guys. So THE WILD BUNCH chose to tell a story whose narrative suggests that when it comes to violence there is no good or bad, only empty victories and death. THE WILD BUNCH gets extra points for being a little abstract. When the film came out, Vietnam was on everyone’s mind, so the allegory was hard to miss. Today, you could watch THE WILD BUNCH without ever thinking of the Vietnam war, or any war… but you’d have to be blind to miss its points about violence and morality. This abstraction makes it a little more timeless.
Lesson #3: Opening image
We mentioned the power of the opening image in MEMENTO, and THE WILD BUNCH’s opening minutes also hold a powerful, emblematic image. A group of kids trap yellow scorpions with a horde of red ants, and watch as the ants slowly wear down the scorpions and eat them. If that violent animalistic image wasn’t enough, the kids later burn these animals altogether, foreshadowing the futility of the violent, animalistic battles we are about to see.
Structure breakdown
Inciting Incident/Plot Point 1: The gang realizes the loot was a decoy, and has to devise another ‘one last score’.
Midpoint: Leaving the train robbery with the weapons.
Plot Point 2: Deciding to go back and rescue Angel.
Climax: The shootout with Mapache and his army.
Two interesting things stand out. First, all of the turning points and decisions affect the group as a whole, and aren't specific for Pike, the protagonist. Pike is more fleshed out than the other characters - he makes most of the decisions, he is driven by guilt, and has a complex history with Deke, the antagonist. Yet his fate and arc aren’t distinct from the group. This decision, in my opinion, limits the emotional effect of the film, at least in the classic Hero’s Journey sense. The other interesting thing is that the film’s Inciting Incident and Plot Point 1 merge. The main reason to introduce an I.E. as early as possible is to prevent the audiences from getting bored - but there’s little fear of that in the case of the exciting and disturbing sequence that opens this film. In THE WILD BUNCH, the first act wisely focuses on a prolonged, violent and suspenseful robbery that does a lot of heavy lifting: it perfectly sets up the world, characters, mood (weariness and violence), and stakes of the story.
Personal Opinion
THE WILD BUNCH has more things going for it than the 2.5 points mentioned above: it has at least two memorable sequences, and a specificity of tone and atmosphere that is hard to shake off. But I think that apart from its innovation and commentary - those crucial and audacious decisions of theme, genre and tone - it's the brilliant aspects of the production that make the film stand out: it is impeccably cast, wonderfully directed, and its editing was a breakthrough at the time and still holds today. That being said, from the vantage point of 50 years some of its innovations have lost their bite. The violence won’t shock any GAME OF THRONE veteran, and the moral ambiguity of antiheroes is something we’ve grown more accustomed to. With the western genre losing prominence, THE WILD BUNCH’s subversion doesn't feel as urgent.
I appreciated THE WILD BUNCH more than I enjoyed it, and it feels more like a window to a moment in time than a great story. The nihilism and somewhat allegorical characters made it hard for me to get emotionally invested. Should it be on this list? Well, that depends on the list you’re making. I see a list like this as a tool to hold up paragons who tell magnificent, timeless stories. But it makes sense to pay respect to the historical context of movies, to scripts whose innovation and daring were trailblazers at the time, even if some of their power has waned over the years.