STRAW DOGS, for real

Straw Dogs ends with David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman, Sphere) driving a half-witted man home during a foggy night. They're riding in Sumner's convertible, a small car fit for flying along country roads, but still big enough to hold an iron man-trap or a couple of trapped men. Sumner doesn't know it, but the man he's riding, and for whom he risked his and his wife's lives to protect, strangled a girl just a few hours before. Yet, Sumner seems to understand that killing all of the hired men who have been bothering his wife (the full extent of their bothering is also unknown to him) isn't going to restore his marriage, and while he has survived a battle for his life, it's something of a pyrrhic victory.

The American Sumner and his English wife Amy have rented a farm cottage in the English countryside where Amy grew up, and he spends his days studying advanced math and prodding a crew of local laborers to finish the garage they're building for his home. Sumner's a symbol of bookish inactivity, the sort of politically-impotent armchair jockey who can easily administer a verbal punch to the chops of an ingratiating minister, but who couldn't swing a hammer to save his life. He marries a woman who isn't even remotely his intellectual equal. There are vague statements made concerning his decision to leave America (Amy accuses him of being unwilling to "take a stand") and when the hired help talk eagerly about America's race-rioting cities like they're an exotic battle front, Sumner responds like a conscientious objector. He wants to be left alone with his chalkboard, and he wants those idle hired men to finish the damn garage so they can leave him alone. When it becomes clear that they're having a laugh at his and Amy's expense (and really at their cat's expense), he eschews direct confrontation, instead engaging in an elaborate mindgame of playing along with their jovial idleness and their offer to take him hunting with the hope that he can lull them into confession. Ironically, he more than once scolds Amy for "playing games" and, more ironically, he and Amy are the butt of the joke when he goes hunting with the hired help. Puns sadly unintended.

There are references to folklore and types. One of the hired hands is a Ratcatcher, and he wears a clown's nose to play the Fool. The Ratcatcher, like the Honeydripper, is an essential but undesirable character in civilized life, and the film, like the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, plays with the idea that the catcher's skills make him uniquely valuable and dangerous. And despite being the outsider and "Yank," Sumner's got an identifiably British name that ties him to the summoners of the middle ages and the magistrates of later days. But apart from Sumner being led away from home like the children of Hamelin, it's unclear whether these references really ground the film in any fable or story tradition apart from that dark group of films made around 1970 which deal in somewhat broad social types and center around a clash between an outsider and a native culture, e.g., Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Walkabout, The Thing With Two Heads.

As a portrait of humanity, or even merely as an object to move along the plot, Amy's character is frustrating. She regards David's work dismissively. Like a spiteful child, she erases his calculations. She isn't forthright in telling him about her past relationship with one of the hired men. She claims to be repulsed by the way the men leer at her, but she doesn't seem to be telling the truth, and David wonders aloud whether she might not want to start wearing a bra if she doesn't appreciate their attention. Her ambivalence is carried to its absurd end on the day of the hunting trip when she is raped by the man she knew previously but seems to have a change of heart about the whole deal halfway through. As if to punish her for being talked into it, she's then given another rapist, at which point she decides she really does object to the whole business. To say that Amy's character is deeply problematic as a portrayal of then-prevailing female sexuality or autonomy understates the matter. I'm reluctant to give in to that jerking knee, but I don't see much way around it. Help me out, here.

But right after Amy is taken down a few pegs, there's a curious parallel development on the other side of the tracks. The village gathers for a traditional church banquet and variety show. The entire population joins in the reverie, so the shell-shocked and apparently chastened Amy sits in the same room with her rapists. The man who raped her is part of a drunken clan of men with their own daughter and sister. She's a picture of adolescent sexual self-awareness masquerading as innocence. She develops crushes on both the married intellectual Sumner and the town pariah, a half-witted giant dubiously acquitted on a sexual assault charge. Inasmuch as the men of her clan are fiercely violative of Amy's sexual dignity, they're equally rigid in protecting that of their daughter/sister, and when they get word that she has willingly left the church social hall with the sex offender, they become a lawless mob.

The ensuing siege, in which the violated Sumners hole up in their cottage and protect the mute, wounded giant from the mob outside, is an interesting contrast. Is it the struggle of the rule of law against lawlessness, or the struggle of Sumner's calculating passivity against their active bullying? Does Amy want to let the men in to save hers and David's life, or does she just want to let them in, well, herself? And isn't the whole struggle about whether there will be one sexual injustice allowed to stand or whether there will be two?

And so Straw Dogs is about debunking all those high falutin concepts about why men fight and kill and mistreat-- not for honor or pride or the sanctity of property, or at least not property in the real estate sense. The men here fight for the purpose of keeping or gaining exclusive possession over fickle female sexual attention. They may know it or they may not, but it drives them forward and compels them to risk life and limb.