A soon to be rapist contemplates his future victim in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, 1971.
A few fellow cinephiles are telling me that writer/director Rod Lurie deserves some kind of smackdown for some characterizations he made of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, by way of justifying his (Lurie's) upcoming remake of the film. Said characterizations appeared in a report from Coming Soon.net, and appear off-the-cuff enough that what one might call a smackdown would maybe be overkill. There's a lively—perhaps too lively—discussion of Lurie's assertion that Susan George smiles during her rape over at Jeffrey Wells' place, complete with screen grabs and smile-or-grimace speculations. Jeffrey Wells' place is hosting a lively—perhaps too lively—discussion of Lurie's assertion that Susan George smiles during her rape, complete with screen grabs and smile-or-grimace speculations. (Try that sentence, tk.) There's a "she was asking for it" quote from one of Peckinpah's more blustery interviews. (And boy, if there was ever a filmmaker who should never have done interviews...) There's some stuff funny enough to make me wish I wrote it. ("Rod Lurie is the perfect guy to remake this. I'm sure he'll work the same kind of magic that Neil LaBute did on The Wicker Man.")
But it's what Lurie says about the putative smile that nails down just how...well, just how he doesn't really get Straw Dogs. Or, to be kinder about it, how he will not see what Peckinpah is putting on screen, and projecting his own idea of what the story should be upon it. Which, of course, he will materially accomplish with his remake. "You can be certain she's not going to be smiling in the rape in my film," he says, showing, first off, that he doesn't understand the scene, and secondly, that the idea that an individual can be complicit in his/her own violation is completely beyond the pale to him.
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