The Wild Bunch - Themes

Themes

Critics of The Wild Bunch noted the theme of the end of the outlaw gunfighter era. Pike Bishop says: We've got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast. The Bunch live by an anachronistic code of honor without a place in twentieth century modern society. When they inspect General Mapache's new automobile, they perceive it marks the end of horse travel, a symbol also in Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970).

The violence that was much criticized by critics in 1969 remains controversial. Director Peckinpah noted it was allegoric of the American war in Vietnam, whose violence was nightly televised to American homes at supper time. He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitized, bloodless television Westerns and films glamorizing gun fights and murder. "The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut ... It's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing, and yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people." Peckinpah used violence as catharsis, believing his audience would be purged of violence, by witnessing it explicitly on screen. He later admitted to being mistaken, that the audience came to enjoy rather than be horrified by his films' violence, something that troubled him.

Betrayal is the secondary theme of The Wild Bunch. The characters suffer from their knowledge of having betrayed a friend and left him to his fate, thus violating their own honor code when it suits them ("10,000 dollars cuts an awful lot of family ties."). However, Pike Bishop says, "When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal." Such complex oppositional ideas lead to the film's violent conclusion, as the remaining men find their abandonment of Angel intolerable. Pike Bishop remembers his betrayals, most notably when he deserts Deke Thornton (in flashback) when the law catches up to them; and when he abandons Crazy Lee at the bank after the robbery (ostensibly to guard the hostages).

Note that in the era of the film's release, there was a man named Bishop Pike, an Episcopal bishop who very publicly opposed the Vietnam War and was featured in mass media as such.