the getaway. (d. peckinpah, w. walter hill, jim thompson)

Peckinpah’s film feels like the sort of film they don’t make anymore. A serious movie, even though it’s all car chases and shoot-outs. Counter-cultural antiheroes. A complex relationship. Gender wars. Effortless charisma which the lead actors actually have to make an effort to ruffle.

McQueen and MacGraw exude a kind of Iconic cool which can only exist because the narrative and direction construct the parameters within which this iconic cool is allowed to flourish. One thinks of Tarantino’s use of Pitt, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and everything about that feels contrived or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps Travolta and Jackson came closer to the real thing in Pulp Fiction, but there’s a sense that these kind of iconic figures don’t really fit into contemporary narratives. Certainly, the gender politics feel as though they belong to another era, no matter how much the film seeks to emphasise that MacGraw is just as tough as McQueen. Perhaps surprisingly in a film with this title, she is the one who does the majority of the driving. She kills bad guys too, and they are a team, even if she’s also the one who fucks up at one point, putting everything at risk. The fact that she has traded her body for McQueen’s Doc’s release is part of the unstable gender politics, but if we believe that fifty years later we have gone beyond that kind of deal, surely we are living in a fantasy world. The female body remains a token of exchange amongst powerful men, even if it’s now less acceptable to recognise this in the movies. The other day someone told me that so many of the movies that they are watching have a gay protagonist, either male or female, and this might be a way to circumvent uncomfortable truths.

However, there is perhaps another reason that the film, and it’s nerveless cool, feels so alien to today’s culture. McQueen’s Doc is a felon, a representative of the anti-establishment, and his crooked antagonists belong to the establishment. The film occurs in the hangover shadow of the Vietnam War, when faith in the system was at a low point in the USA. The counter-culture, for want of a better phrase, was seeking, in the company of Pynchon, Coppola, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith et al, another set of ethical paradigms to live by. In the intervening years, that counter-culture has been crushed, or at least co-opted, absorbed into the mainstream. It’s not so much that stepping outside the system is impossible, it’s that the moment someone goes there, their posture or pose is welcomed and monetised. So, like Pitt in Tarantino’s film, what’s left is a shell (or simulacrum) of the anti-establishment pose. By contrast McQueen and MacGraw inhabit a dirty hinterland, and are literally consigned to the rubbish dump; the only place their anti-systemic heroism can survive is across the border, in Mexico.