Peckinpah´s The Wild Bunch is worth watching because the cowboys in it have nowhere to go to. They´re older and they don´t have to make it anywhere because where they are is all there or rather the end of a genre. Theirs is not the Old Testament-no journey to take; nothing promised; no land to land in-. For them, life and death are simultaneously equal and present. The simultaneity of the living who are already dead is filmed as sexy.
Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or,more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what. Though they are handsome, white, leading men not dressed all in black, he literally shoots the life out of all anticipatory leanings. Once the orgasm is over we can just lie back, close our eyes, and relax, though we are neither liberated nor fulfilled. They are dead, finished, no American fantasy can help them now.
