#79 ‘The Wild Bunch’
Bullets, Bloodlust, and the Last Stand of the Masculine Delusion
The Wild Bunch (1969) is a scorched-earth elegy for the American cowboy—an operatic bloodbath where aging outlaws cling to their code like a whiskey-soaked security blanket while the 20th century quietly reloads behind their backs. Directed by Sam Peckinpah with both reverence and rage, the film is hailed as a masterpiece of revisionist Westerns. And it is—if your definition of revisionist includes replacing romanticism with nihilism, but keeping the women disposable and the guns fully loaded.
The titular “bunch” is a band of grizzled men out of time: Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), and a handful of other war-scarred, emotionally bankrupt bros who rob, drink, kill, and wax nostalgic about the Good Old Days—when murder came with a handshake and a moral code. They’re being hunted by Pike’s former partner-turned-lapdog Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a man who’s basically been deputized to sell out his past in exchange for a future that doesn’t want him either.
The plot? Thin. The violence? Operatic. The real story here is about decay—of men, of honor, of a mythic West that never really existed but sure looks poetic in slow motion. Peckinpah films every shootout like a ballet choreographed by a war criminal. Blood spurts. Children cheer. Men die in glorious, gut-ripping agony. It’s not gratuitous—it’s sacred. Masculine suffering turned into myth.
But let’s talk about who’s missing from the myth. Women in The Wild Bunch are prostitutes, victims, or both. They exist only to be ogled, assaulted, or executed—tools of male rage or consequence-free pleasure. There is no interiority. No narrative space. Just background detail to emphasize how far the men have fallen or how justified they are in falling further. Peckinpah’s women aren’t characters. They’re corpses with timing.
The film tries to critique the violence it depicts—but it also fetishizes it. Pike’s final stand isn’t tragic because it’s brutal. It’s glorious because it’s brutal. The film pretends to condemn the bloodshed while shooting it in high art slow motion with a choir of gunfire. It’s like watching someone denounce alcoholism through a martini-soaked monologue.
And yet, the film’s self-awareness is real. The Wild Bunch knows its men are relics. It knows they’re broken. But it also loves them too much to let them grow. Their loyalty, their code, their desperate need for meaning in a world that’s moved on without them—it’s all played straight. And in that straightness lies the most dangerous lie of all: that self-destruction is a form of virtue, as long as it’s done with grit and a shotgun.
3.5 out of 5 morally ambiguous shootouts
(One for Holden’s haunted gravitas. One for Peckinpah’s uncompromising direction. One for the brutal choreography of disintegration. Half a star for having the guts to say goodbye to the Western, even if it didn’t burn the myth as thoroughly as it wanted to. The missing stars? Gunned down alongside the women who were never offered names, arcs, or the dignity of surviving someone else’s redemption story.)
