Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a mess. Peckinpah's style is obtrusive. There are tons of cuts in the film, enough to make it noticeable and to distract. The score is melodramatic and heavy-handed. The film climaxes in three shootouts, all of which leave the hero, a piano player, still standing like Bruce Willis in a Die Hard movie. To say that it taxes credibility is to severely understate the situation. It would also be understating the situation to say that the film goes on too long. For being the only film that Peckinpah ever had final cut on, these scenes inspire great suspicion that a studio executive tried to force some sort of resolution and action sequence onto the film. There is also the problem of Warren Oates. The man is a ham, conversing with the severed head of Alfredo Garcia in a manner that is less suggestive of any growing insanity on Oates' part as it is of Peckinpah attempting to stretch out the screen time. He wears dark sunglasses and drinks all the time. So did Peckinpah, I have been told, a fact that does more and not less to make the performance distracting.

All of this is true, but the film really really works. It has a sort of impact and power that a polished film would be entirely unable to duplicate. Like that head in the title, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is an ugly but unavoidable fact. One of the problems that I had with The Wild Bunch, or at least one of the things that surprised me about it, was that it looked so much like a John Ford movie. Or something that I would expect to see on TNT, if you know what I mean. The picture was a colorful and entertaining epic, just with more blood and sex. As The Wild Bunch is meant to be the ultimate in nihilist cinema, it bothered me that it would speak in a populist cinematic language. The Wild Bunch was unfortunately a transitional film, more of a product of the '60s than of the '70s. I have perhaps been too hard on the film, and a rave by Stephen Hunter is giving me several second thoughts. However, what is undeniably absent from The Wild Bunch is the grit of exploitation. The film is too pretty. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is not a pretty film. If Peckinpah is a nihilist, his attitudes have been especially well expressed through Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This film contains very much the grit of exploitation. Hell, it's not only gritty, it's abrasive. Your skin will peel off when you rub against this thing. The film is plausibly less violent than The Wild Bunch. Although there is a severed head, we do not see its removal. When people get shot there is but a spot of blood; it doesn't squirt or pour. However the film seems even angrier and even more hopeless. It putters around in a drunken stupor, stinking of stale piss and covering deep suffering with callous indifference and a complete lack of inhibition or pride. As a document, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a masterpiece and a highly meaningful experience. I feel that it would be foolish to suggest in any way that you should not see it.

The film begins deep in Mexico. A wealthy landowner has discovered that his daughter is pregnant. He has his hired goons twist and break her arm in an attempt to discover who the father is. Peckinpah cuts to a shot of her home when it snaps and she screams and cries. Sam's a nice guy. She admits that it's Alfredo Garcia, an employee of the father. The father announces that he will put a bounty on Garcia's head, one million dollars. This scene is extremely disturbing. It's not as much the fact that the father has his daughter's arm broken; it's that he sees Garcia's impregnation of her as having little to do with her. He sees it as a personal affront, and is clearly unconcerned about her physical or emotional well-being. Two of the father's goons go looking for Garcia and come upon a brothel where the Warren Oates character, Bennie, plays the piano. Bennie does some asking around and discovers that Garcia had spent his last days living with Bennie's girlfriend Elita, a prostitute. Bennie is enraged at Elita, dragging her out of a singing gig and demanding to know what happened. She says that Garcia spent three days and three nights with her. A final goodbye. Bennie responds that he wants to kill Garcia, only to have Elita explain that Garcia is already dead. He had gotten drunk and drove onto some rocks. While he is mad at Elita's infidelity, Bennie is more taken back by the fact that Garcia has been with HIS woman. Sleeping with Garcia is an attack towards HIS pride. This is to be fairly expected, but we discover that this is somewhat of a recurring theme for the film. Both Bennie and the father see these women as commodities and as extensions of themselves, and are less able to acknowledge them on an individual level. While Bennie is quickly able to overlook the fact of Elita's infidelity, he is not able to pay any credence to her relationship with Garcia. Bennie learns of a bounty on Garcia's severed head from the thugs, and begins to go out on a search for it. This is certainly more about money for Bennie than revenge, as he has been able to reduce Garcia into a severed head. He takes Elita on the quest with him. She loudly, sincerely and very painfully protests when she discovers Bennie's motives. Bennie doesn't only fail to get it, he really doesn't care.

Peckinpah is well-known for making ultra-manly westerns, and the machismo of the Western is clearly illustrated in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I then perked up when the two bounty hunters who recruited Bennie were identified as homosexuals. Gay cowboys are the most dangerous cowboys of all, because they haven't any threat of women domesticating them. They are wholly individualistic. In my controversial review of John Woo's Broken Arrow, one can better understand how John Travolta's swishy supervillian fits into a Nietzschean context. As manliness is defined as freedom, the ability to have sex outside of a strong domestic setting, the ability to keep on roaming with other men and not have to concern yourself with women, is established as the ultimate of desirable traits. (While one of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia's killers is very concerned when his partner is killed, indicating that they were in a relationship, I do not feel that this really compromises the virtues of the gay cowboy, for they still are not required to settle down in one place. That is the key.) Why, gay cowboys don't even need to stop off at the brothels!! I realize that this all seems awfully absurd, and indeed it is. Gay cowboys seem to exist only in revisionist/updated/partially satirical westerns like this, Broken Arrow and The Road Warrior. It is a technique that helps draw attention to and possibly take the piss out of western mythology. The two bounty hunters are not really developed as characters and are clearly not the focus of the film. They are not really treated with derision, except I think to the degree that they are not at all affected by anything that happens. The other characters carry a definite psychology and are twisted and conflicted. These guys are too cool for school.

I do not feel that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is hateful towards women exactly, but the world that they live in is. The images that it presents of its female characters are quite simply painfully brutal. In one of the film's most talked about scenes, Elita asks Bennie why he has never asked her to marry him. Bennie tells her that he never thought of asking her to marry him. "Well, ask me," she says. "What?" "To marry you." "Will you marry me?" he sheepishly admits. She begins to cry. In another scene, two bikers come into the scene to casually rape her. She provides little resistance, and tells Bennie not to save her. "I been here before, and you don't know the way," she tells him. There is a very curious scene where her rapist doesn't seem to want to go through with it. She wanders over there and seems to try and talk him into it. She can barely think of anything else happening. Elita takes a shower sometime afterwards, and Bennie just sits there watching her, telling her that he loves her. Later, when the head of Alfredo Garcia has begun gathering flies and rotting, Bennie puts it in that same shower. "A friend of ours tried to take a shower in there," he tells the head. Tried to take a shower. The shower is of course typically representative of baptism. It is especially disturbing when it follows a rape, as it brings to question just what sin is being baptized away. Remember in Boys Don't Cry where Hilary Swank was forced to take a shower. She wasn't just meant to wash away the come, she was meant to wash away the "dyke" and the deception that she perpetuated on her rapists. Similarly, the implication of Elita's baptism is that she is washing away the "whoredom" of her hated femininity. This is tragic. Even more tragic is Bennie's ascertation that she had failed. She had only "tried" to take a shower. It is shortly after baptizing the head that Bennie decides not to cash it in. Bennie's baptism of the head is his means to take away the sin of both Garcia and Elita. One does not need to look at this as much as redemption of Garcia and Elita, as much as evidence that Bennie has both forgiven and accepted them. While the wealthy father does not care about how his daughter felt about Garcia, Bennie learns to care about how Elita felt about him. Bennie's ability to learn to humanize both Garcia and Elita, a severed head and the next worse thing, a whore, is still not able to provide the film with an adequately uplifting ending. Bennie's evolution does not suggest spiritual wholeness, as much as an exhausted attempt to let the suffering finally melt away. Bennie differs from Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant then, as the final results prove sincere, but confused and incomplete. The good in Bennie is a weak variety, which makes its presence all the more tragic.

At times the film seems to be quoting the late career of Pasolini. The household of the landowner is dark and elaborate, whispering nuns and the girl's entirely passive mother glimpsed in a handful of static shots. Like Pasolini, Peckinpah is going for two distinct effects here. The first is an attempt towards true mysticism. The approach is awestruck and deadpan. The second is an attempt towards deep sarcasm and irony. One wanders if these characters are looking up to God, or if God is looking down on them. There is something ultimately sad and fearful about the sequence. When the girl screams and we cut to the outside of this castle, we reflect that there isn't anywhere there who will be able to hear her scream. Pasolini is also evoked during Elita's rape scene. The biker rips off her clothes. They slap each other and then the biker walks off. She stands there, seemingly unmoved and the image reminded me of the Virgin Mary in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Peckinpah reserves affection and pity towards Elita and does not seem to regard her with any guile. The image of this topless Virgin Mary isn't Peckinpah's attempt to cheapen her, as much as to show how cheap she already is. The image is caustic and sad, for it is the establishment of her femininity as whore.

Those images are the most direct examples of the film's aesthetic. However, the country of Mexico is portrayed in general as a sort of holy land. A good deal of the people that Bennie and Elita encounter are mostly poor, possessing little else but fatigue and a stark solemness. While they probably did not take a vow of poverty, they remind of apostles and holy men, clinging on in a maelstrom of decay. There is one point in the film where Bennie even calls Alfredo Garcia his saint, and he is going to get a piece of him just like the Church obtains pieces of their saints. In addition to the baptism symbolism, this cements Bennie as a reluctant holy man. Like the Bad Lieutenant, he is a vulgar, weakened blasphemer somehow pressing his inner spiritual goodness in a world filled with figures much more at ease with their holiness.

While the first half of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia involves Bennie and Elita retrieving the head, Elita dies before she can continue with the second half. The film then becomes a thriller with Bennie battling with a series of bounty hunters over the head. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is then only an action movie half the time, and this must be reconciled with the other half. A traditional film might have Garcia be the protagonist and running from bounty hunters, and this approach would be much more emotionally involving in a sense than Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This obviously is not the point of the film however. One finds that after Elita leaves the film, her presence grows stronger in our memories. She becomes as much a character in negative space as Alfredo Garcia. This, I think, is really the final point and value of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. As I have said, this film is ugly and direct. If it is sloppily made, we are relating it on a non-existent plane of reference. I do not believe that the film would really make as much sense if it were told any other way. Some, I think, will make the argument that the film is filled with entirely disgusting and unsavory characters and is shameful in its treatment of the Elita character, who spends much of her time onscreen in the nude.

I have discussed this last point throughout this review, and I'm going to discuss some more on why this is important. Elita is valued for her sexuality, but the film is not itself sexy. In her sex scene with Oates, he keeps his clothes on, she doesn't. This is telling. She has revealed more to him, and has invested more emotional trust in him, than he has her. The next morning he drags her out of bed and she laughs. The fact that she so casually regards this manhandling compounds our sympathy for her. Bennie is a sleaze, and she still adores him, very much because he is most everything that she knows. Bennie gets off far worse than her. Warren Oates seems to be a short, scrawny guy. I do not recall him being this short before, but as portrayed in the movie he is almost a midget. Oates' voice resembles Michael McKean, only slightly more gravelly. He is almost always drinking, but his drinking is never a point of the film or even really the character. It is simply there. Bennie is the film's real loser, and if anyone is a figure of ridicule in the film it is him.

Accepting this attack on face value, I have wondered if we can refute a film simply because it portrays a bleak or unattractive worldview. Do we want to slice our thumbs open with a box cutter, just to watch them bleed? I have often been a defender on the depressing and the ugly, simply because I find the effects in themselves worthwhile and meaningful. I can't tell you how infuriated I become when a blurbster praises Sabrina and criticizes Bully for doing exactly what they are supposed to do. Then again, we could just as easily argue that either you dig it or you don't. It's not fair to force the gut response to be intellectualized. If I dislike a film simply because it is thoroughly unpleasant, does that not me weak? A little wussy, who wants lollipops, sunshine, kisses from kittens instead of the real world? Is establishing moral or even aesthetic limits on what we take in proof of our intellectual and emotional fragility? The point is whether or not we would be able to praise a snuff film made by Steven Spielberg. Even though a well-made snuff film is harder to attack, can we appreciate a snuff film solely on its own terms? I offer Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia for no other reason than I couldn't handle the implications of Glengarry Glen Ross. This is good depressing.