Violence Patterns in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969): Critical Reading

Abstract

This paper focuses on the issue of violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) through explaining some of the cultural and historical implications of violence in the 1960s such as Vietnam War, the Mexican war and also the explosion of the feminist movement and some other important social and political upheavals that shaped the cultural context of the 1960s in America. It also sheds light on Sam Peckinpah’s approach of violence screen and stylizing violence and the representations of violence as a tormenting and brutalizing reality that matches the spirit of the age in addition to the social, political, and colonial conflicts of the 1960s. Violence and the implications of violence in The Wild Bunch whether social , cultural, psychological, or humanistic have been discussed in brief in order to show the critical approach of the film as being a rich and didactic film to watch, especially in terms of its rich cultural and historical contexts.