Straw Dogs (1971)

The most easiest thing to take away from Straw Dogs is that it's absolutely horrible. Why go further? You don't even want to think about it. I've been making comments like, "I left the room so I wouldn't have to watch the rape scene, then came back just in time for another one to start. Thanks, Peckinpah."

An equally reductive but far more forgiving reading is that David (Dustin Hoffman), the visiting intellectual who reacts to a home invasion with extreme violence, has been upgraded from pantywaist to action hero. He is ... Mathematician Rambo. The nightmare is a baptism of fire.

Neither reading does the film credit; both neglect Amy (Susan George, magnificently nuanced), the film's centre, and her relationship with David.

Walter Chaw eloquently makes the case that David is the villain of the piece:

He's cruel to his wife, comparing her to a child when she's lonesome and an animal when she's amorous, and he blames her for his detachment from himself. She gets impatient during foreplay if he chooses to take a moment to set his alarm or remove his watch, ergo she must be a nymphomaniac of low breeding.

David is dismissive and superior. When placed under stress, he overrules her choice, slaps her and orders her upstairs in a scene redolent of her earlier rape.

But what does it mean, then, when it eventually falls to Amy to save him? I suppose Chaw would say that she is doing as she is told, or making a choice of one man over another, but still a man. She does have only one shot.

I'd like to think that it's a choice for herself -- that David is not the only one who has learned how to fight back. Perhaps David will get to the town and find a lynch mob waiting; perhaps the fact that he spends much of the siege tending to his glasses is symbolic of the fact that he hasn't truly changed. But I'd like to think that Amy has: that she's been left in charge as much as she's been left behind.