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Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Note: As this article contains several references to (and spoilers for) Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, readers unfamiliar with that film will likely have a hard time following much of it. I make no apologies; I only hope that this article is incentive to drop what you’re doing and go rent both films immediately. If The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah’s requiem for the West, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is his folk song. It took me three viewings of the latter film to catch this distinction. Those who accuse Pat Garrett of sticking too closely to the former’s vision, as I did after my first encounter with it, ultimately miss this point. Here is a film that visually recreates the sort of legendary song that the old, dying men of The Wild Bunch sang to themselves on their prairies. Here, in Billy the Kid and his band of ragamuffins, are the heroes emulated with William Holden’s immortal, final words, “Let’s go.” Here were the mythological gods worshipped by Pike Bishop, Dutch Engstrom, and the others driven deeper and deeper towards their inevitable, gory conclusions. If both films utilized similar images, it is because the members of the Wild Bunch modeled their existence after the old cowboy songs they cherished, and one of those songs was Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. With all due respect to The Man Who Show Liberty Valance, the legends are the key within this folk song, not the facts. Here, Billy the Kid is the rebellious local celebrity who is on the run not because he is bad (in reality, he was pretty damn bad), but because he is a threat to the established hierarchy of wealthy landowners. Like any folk hero, he has the peasants on his side, and thus wields the true authority over the land. Fighting fire with fire, the landowners respond by offering Billy’s old friend and fellow outlaw Pat Garrett the job of sheriff. Pat accepts the role at first to save Billy, convinced that he can talk his old friend into fleeing to safety in Mexico. When Billy and his band refuse to budge, the film becomes a sort of cat-and-mouse game, with Billy constantly eluding Pat across Texas, and Pat realizing that the only conclusion to this game is Billy’s death and the loss of his own soul. It is appropriate that Peckinpah begins his film in mid-sentence, long after the story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett has begun. So do folk songs, which are more interested in capturing moods and gestures than narratives, even though they often contain three-act stories. This is not the place to learn about the exploits of the notorious outlaw William H. Bonney and sheriff Pat Garrett, an old friend-turned-enemy who ultimately tracked down and killed the Kid (this isn’t a spoiler—it’s confirmed in the very first scene). The film starts long after the friends cast their lots on differing sides of the law, and it doesn’t question their motivations so much as it simply records their interactions. Director Sam Peckinpah assumes the role of a sad singer who knows that his tale will end in tragedy, but not before he meticulously documents the plights of likable, flawed heroes. The film therefore unfolds like a series of quiet, haunted melodies, glued together by its folk soundtrack (more on that later) and confirmed, ultimately, by its final image of a lone desperado riding quietly into the sunset—a moment that brings the different melodies together by revealing the road to which they all lead. By casting the young folk singer Kris Kristofferson as Billy and the familiar western regular James Coburn as Pat, it is difficult to misinterpret Peckinpah’s point, especially in the Vietnam era in which the film was made: Being an outlaw doesn’t make you the villain, and being the traditional law enforcer doesn’t mean you represent justice. Billy’s downfall is not that he is a killer—everyone is a killer here—but that he refuses to bend to hierarchy that makes certain killings legal. Pat bends to save his own life, only to ultimately lose himself in the process. It is impossible to miss that throughout the film, Pat Garrett is the one dressed in black. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is not the first western to suggest that the “civilized” law of the west is corrupt and the outlaws are the true heroes—a notion reinforced by classics like Shane and High Noon, and one that dates all the way back to ancient Robin Hood legends. But the casting of Kristofferson and Colburn in their respected roles contemporizes the idea in a politically charged era when reemerging folk music was creating new mythology in opposition to an overpowering government. The Vietnam War created its conflicts in America among disenchanted youth, and it was folk singers like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, and Kristofferson who defined those disenchantments for a generation. Peckinpah’s casting thus reveals the morally complicated air in which protest songs are born, and consequently parallels it to the time of the untamed West, when perhaps the outlaws were the original rock stars, defining a generation with their own form of protest. Peckinpah thus sheds light on why men like the Wild Bunch would justify their behavior: Why follow a law, after all, that their legendary heroes have dismissed? That the film is a clear hero myth, and that so many of its images and dialogue emulate The Wild Bunch—particularly the opening scenes in which the characters reminisce (a line anyone from the Wild Bunch could have uttered: “Times have changed, but not me.”), and the final moments after Pat has killed the Kid and sits thoughtfully within the desolation he has perpetuated—make it impossible to separate the two films. But the tone here is lighter, subtler, with less emphasis on the carnage of the West’s dying days and more on the characters’ mythological connection to the land and its people. The Wild Bunch, of course, was a nearly apocalyptic tale of quiet, reserved outlaws who had survived the new century and must resort to their own violent self-destruction to finish off the dead dream of the West. Pat Garrett is its inverse: It is as if Peckinpah took the story of The Wild Bunch, exaggerated its characters, and then turned the volume of the surrounding story down to create soft meditations out of situations that were before blood-soaked and traumatizing. Consider the many shootouts, featuring guest stars that run the full gamut of Hollywood Western icons. Favorites like Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, L.Q. Jones, and R.G. Armstrong all figure into key moments and have extraordinary death scenes, but never do they reach the threshold of violence that Peckinpah created in The Wild Bunch. Their deaths are soft meditations, quiet melodies, and further evidence that civilization is pushing the older codes of the west into oblivion. These actors’ scenes almost play like elegies for their careers, which bound them to the Western. Only death can ultimately separate them from the frontier, though they all long to escape. Pickens in particular plays an old deputy sheriff recruited by Pat to track down some of Billy’s posse, and in a fleeting scene before the shootout that kills him, he looks longingly at an unfinished boat that he hopes will one day “float me out of this damn territory.” The boat remains unfinished, and its image lingers later as Pickens, now a fatally wounded man, sits quietly by the river and waits for death. The lesson learned: No matter how hard outlaws of the west may try, there is ultimately no way they will ever learn to think beyond their guns, and only guns will remove them from this land. The outlaws of The Wild Bunch have become so familiar with this code that they can play it out in fast-forward, and they do so. But not before they memorized the slow, reflective song that taught them this lesson. Well, maybe there is a way out, but it is not worth the consequences: Most of Peckinpah’s major westerns (also including The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) feature characters driven out of American territories and into Mexico, where safety certainly exists for outlaws seeking sanctuary. But in all of these films, Mexico is only a superficial solution; as one character tells Billy, “You'll just end up like all the other gringos—drinking tequila, shitting out chili peppers, and waiting for... nothing.” Yes, there’s refuge in Mexico, but for Billy to go there is to lose his reason for living—the adventure, the thrill, and, damn it all, the hero worship. For Pat, getting Billy to Mexico is both men’s salvation, but this plan only reveals the disconnection between them. Pat wants “to live until I’m old and gray;” Billy is too busy living to plan that far ahead. Despite all warnings, it never seems to occur to Billy that remaining on the Texas border is his death warrant, and this is ultimately his fatal flaw. Or perhaps he does know—certainly Pat leaves clear warnings—but he willingly chooses death over boredom. Could this also be is why the Wild Bunch, when they leave for Mexico, choose to pick a fight with a general who they know they cannot beat? Mexico promises “…nothing;” at least a glorious death is something they don’t have to wait for while living out their final days in protected monotony. In the law’s corner, surely Pat Garrett is the antithesis to Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch: Both men are deputies for corrupt lawmakers hunting the old friends on the Texas border. But unlike Thornton, Pat ultimately crosses a line from which he can never return; he manipulates, schemes, and kills to further his hunt in a way that would have made Thornton recoil. That’s because Thornton is connected enough to the wild bunch to realize the consequences of his betrayal. Pat never stops to consider his actions until his deeds are done, and it is too late by then. Thornton finally cannot bring himself to kill his friends, and all that is left for him to do is lament over their deaths. Pat Garrett eventually laments over Billy’s death as well, but he cannot do so without also realizing that in killing his friend he has betrayed himself. Peckinpah reinforces this idea with a simple, powerful shot of Pat following up his fatal bullet into Billy with an immediate second bullet fired into a nearby mirror. Pat looks at himself through its shattered remains, and his twitching face suggests that it is only in this instance does he realize what he has truly done and how far he has allowed himself to descend. There has been much speculation about what Deke Thornton must have been thinking about as he silently sat among the massacred corpses of his friends in The Wild Bunch’s last scene. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid provides us with a clue: Perhaps he was thinking of the story told here, in this folk song that he had heard countless times in his life. Perhaps he was considering how he chose not to make Pat’s mistake, and this knowledge provides one, small thing to be grateful for in a mad, sickening world of death. As the film is a folk song, it is appropriate that Bob Dylan supplies the soundtrack, which follows the tradition of Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (which itself referenced the music of several John Ford westerns) of providing ongoing commentary for the events in the film while they happen. The narration isn’t a distracting move (as it was in the otherwise classic western Keoma), because A) it’s great music, and B) Peckinpah masterfully casts Dylan himself as the enigmatic Alias, a newspaper printer who quickly becomes Billy’s right hand man. The role is small, but combined with the soundtrack, it was the correct choice to give Dylan equal billing with Colburn and Kristofferson. He is the fool to Billy’s King Lear, ever-present and thoughtful, lending his insight to a game Billy who understands that the man will be his voice to the world after he is gone. I believe that soundtrack playing throughout isn’t the voice of Dylan at all, but rather the voice of Alias, who narrates and mythologizes the tale along the way. The look that Pat and Alias exchange after Billy’s execution is a poignant, silent revelation: Both men know that the story won’t end here, and that the songs sung about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will never feature a tune in the former’s favor. The soundtrack itself confirms the truth in this wordless exchange, and so do the characters in the Wild Bunch, who have clearly heard Alias’ song. Like most of Peckinpah’s major works, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is notorious for its various cuts, most of which were done by a studio that didn’t understand Peckinpah’s desolate visions and simply wanted routine action vehicles. Of all the various studio hack-jobs of his works, Pat Garrett’s emasculated, 90-minute theatrical version was the greatest scandal. Whole portions of the film’s quiet meditations were removed and reedited, resulting in a film with no character development and little consistent rhythm. A 106-minute European cut did little to help the film’s reputation, but it did indicate more of the film’s hidden greatness. Both cuts were deservedly dismissed in their time, but since then two longer, healthier cuts have surfaced: A 122-minute “workshop” print by Peckinpah himself that was first screened in 1988, and a 115-minute edit by Roger Spottiswoode released in 2005. Both feature essential footage not seen in the other; only by viewing both do we see the scope of Peckinpah’s true artistic vision. Somewhere between the two, the definitive version has yet to be constructed. I’ll admit that I didn’t get that vision at first myself. I was too distracted by the film’s similarities to The Wild Bunch, and I felt that Peckinpah had already made a film about suicidal desperados in the age of the dying West. But as the distance grew between myself and my first viewing of this film, I was unable to shake several of its images and ideas from my head, and I realized that I was remembering quieter, softer moments that played polar opposite to the elements that moved me in The Wild Bunch. Revisiting both films, I found that they were foils for each other, and that the folk qualities of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid spoke to the motivations of Pike Bishop and his lonely cohorts. In doing so, the film penetrates deeper into the heart of the West than perhaps any film ever made, exploring with affectionate, elegant observations the type of soulful ballads that were born on the prairies and created the western genre in the first place. Cast: Warner Brothers presents an MGM release. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. Written by Rudy Wurlitzer. Rated R, for violence, language, and sexuality/nudity. Running time (depending on the cut): 90, 106, 115, and 122 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: May 23, 1973. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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