By Danielle Cole

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a film that grabs attention with title alone.  A harbinger of the violent ride on which we are about to embark.  Films with guns are often commenting in some way about dominance.  It is a desire each of us has: to conquer something, be it within ourselves, in relationship to others or the world.  It is closely related to the innate drive towards survival, to defend ourselves when we feel threatened.  Our protagonist, Bennie, helps us explore both the internal and external threats to dominance.  He has big emotion to content with: greed, desire for revenge, fear, and even love.   He becomes a man on a mission to live a bigger, better life, exemplified when he pleads his case to Elita, “I could have died in Mexico City or TJ and never known what the hell it was all about.  I got a chance.  A ticket and we’re not gonna miss it.”

Dominance 

As said above: Guns = dominance.  Whoever has the biggest, fastest gun; the best aim; and the most bullets—wins.  Bennie is able to take on quite a number of armed assassins and defend them all, that is of course, until the very end.  Even then the amount of gunfire is so out of proportion to what it would actually take to kill one man, but this is used with thematic brilliance.  It is one determined dominance versus another.  Bennie takes on the world with bravado and an exaggerated invincibility that eventually runs out.

This theme is played out in regards to age as well, and in both directions.  The only character that survives the shootout when Sappensly and Quill (Robert Webber and Gig Young) come looking for Bennie is an old man. Showing dominance of old age or seniority over vernal characters.  Later youth dominating adulthood is shown when Bennie shoots El Jefe: there is a little boy walking around looking at the carnage.  Rising up, as it were, when “the boss” no longer can.  There are multiple scenes throughout depicting basic male dominance over women.  Sappensly elbows a woman in the face while talking to Bennie with absolutely no reaction of shock, outrage or even dislike from the bystanders.  Similarly, when Bennie delivers the head at the end, Max (Helmut Dantine) smacks a woman giving him a pedicure with a magazine.  And again, no reaction.

In the very beginning scenes El Jefe says that Alfredo is like a son to him.  He seems to have hoped Alfredo would succeed him but Alfredo’s betrayal (by impregnating El Jefe’s daughter) ruins that hope and El Jefe orders him dead as a move of power.  He could have simply ruined Alfredo’s life, denied him the riches he otherwise would have been promised, but instead he has him murdered in the ultimate consequence for messing with the wrong guy.

Here-and-Now

“Human beings have gradually become fantastic animals who have to satisfy one more precondition of existence than any other animals do: human beings have to believe from time to time, to know, why  they exist—their race cannot flourish without periodically trusting in life, without believing in reason in life!”

Living in the present moment is an edict suggested widely in psychology (and some religions). However, it seems there can be two intents in such an instruction.  One to cease the teleological yearning for a better time; to stop making sense of current suffering as some sort of penance for future happiness.  Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19^th century German philosopher oft credited as a Nihilist, would say that this attitude combats sickness.  He thought that coping with current suffering by hanging onto the promise of a brighter future, discredited the present.  That it sets up an inherent negative view of our ordinary, daily experience. He chided humans for seeking the “real” truth of life: “Human beings have gradually become fantastic animals who have to satisfy one more precondition of existence than any other animals do: human beings have to believe from time to time, to know, why  they exist—their race cannot flourish without periodically trusting in life, without believing in reason in life!” Perhaps it was not that Nietzsche believed in nothing, but more that he believed in the importance of immersing one’s self in the present moment whether it is good or bad.  Elita echoes this idea when she says to Bennie, “Just being together is enough.”

Another view to wrestle with is that to live in the present can potentially green light impulsive behaviors.  If all I have is this minute right now then what I feel is paramount.  Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a strong example of both of these readings.  We see Bennie beginning his journey to Alfredo’s grave in order to gain money so that he may have a better future.  But we see him, also, killing any threat that crosses his path out of impulse.  None of his murders were premeditated.  He kills so that he can keep moving forward in that present moment.  He even says when shooting one of the men from the green station wagon, (who is already dead) “Why? Because it feels so Goddamn good.”  Nihilism tells us that there is no great meaning to anything.  That there is no base or real truth to be found and if there is no truth there is no purpose or meaning.   Said so pointedly by Bennie when talking about desecrating Alfredo’s grave: “There is nothing sacred about a hole in the ground.  Or you.  Or me.”

Personal Incongruence 

Nietzsche believed that sickness comes from an opposition between outer appearance and concealed reality.  A view that many schools of psychology agree with.  But why conceal that which we really are?  Carl Rogers, a psychologist who pioneered the humanistic movement in psychology, would say we conceal what we find “terrible, disorganizing, abnormal, or shameful.”  Denial is a common coping method for that which we find unacceptable in ourselves.  If we can push it down and pretend it does not exist, then essentially, it will not.  However, this incongruence causes serious emotional distress.  If we deny who we are we cannot be in a state of acceptance.  It is thought that self-acceptance is a key factor in personal growth and therefore, mental health.  We are always changing whether we recognize it or not.  Refusing to recognize this process and work with it creates tension in our selves.  This tension can lead to unhealthy coping to hide feelings we are trying to deny and causes distress in relationships.  In the scene when Bennie and Elita are leaning on a tree speaking about traveling and marriage, Elita tells Bennie about a beautiful, old Spanish town she would like to visit again, Guanajuato. Bennie says “absolutamente, Baby” but when she hints that she was there with another man, Bennie says he wants to go “some place new.”  There is a tug of war with Elita and her past with both of them trying to deny a part of Elita.  Maybe Bennie knows some of it, but the feeling seems to be that he does not know everything.  When the men crash their moonlit picnic and one takes her off to rape her she says, “I’ve been here before.  You don’t know the way.”  Elita had a relationship of some kind with Alfredo but does not express her feelings about him to Bennie, who views Alfredo only as a meal ticket.  It seems neither Bennie nor Elita fully express their inmost thoughts, desires, and experiences to one another.  Bennie tells Elita he thought about marrying her but never asked and we are left to guess why. Elita says, “It’s good to know what you want, but I don’t know what I want.”  The conversation is very ambiguous and Elita cries but not tears of joy.  We are not told what it is she really does want, and this is perhaps because she does not know either.

Violence

This is a film with a staggering body count along with other violence such as rape and torture.  What does it say about the viewer?  Why watch something that, if we experienced personally, might ruin our lives?  In the book Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, Sissela Bok takes a look all the way back to Roman culture to ask why they delighted in the violence of gladiator fights.  She writes, “It was [a culture] in which violence was widely sanctioned and hallowed by tradition, in foreign conquest as in domestic culture; in which courage and manhood were exalted and weapons easily available.”  In quoting historian, Kathleen Coleman she points out, “Part of the reason is that the Roman world “was permeated by violence that had to be absorbed.””

One argument made about the threat of media violence is that it desensitizes us.  The argument goes that if we watch such movies, play violent video games, or witness horrific events on the news, we will be less likely to view these acts as wrong or unethical. Entertainment of all kinds is often seen as a way to vicariously experience things outside of our everyday lives.  Likewise it is thought that we enjoy entertainment we can relate to so that we may learn a way to react.  Think of the popularity of the formulaic romantic comedy genre with young women hoping for marriage.  They are looking for an experience they can relate to.  Arguably, we all are, be that in a RomCom or a violent Peckinpah piece. Currently, we live in a world where we are confronted with violence at an ever-increasing level.  If the vicarious experience helps us to live out our own reactions maybe in a way we feel we need to see the violence in a controlled format because we are being forced to witness it on the news and in our neighborhoods anyway.  We want to identify with the man behind the gun not the one in front of it.  In that way, films that kill a killer we have identified with are more terrifying.  We want him to survive and triumph because we want to survive and triumph ourselves.  When the killer is killed we are forced back into the feelings of helplessness and powerlessness we were trying to avoid.  Peckinpah delivers just that plot.  Bennie gets so close to escape and a life of riches.  Were you rooting for him by the end?  I would hazard to guess you were.

This film is a rollercoaster of emotions both personal and social.  It is a glimpse into a world of crime most of us will not personally experience.  It is a vicarious experience we can learn from.  Sissela Bok hopes though, that we do not learn how to be a killer, but that we learn killing is terrifying and need only be experienced with the comfort of remote in hand.

Danielle Cole is a Philadelphia-based occasional philosopher who practices psychotherapy in the suburbs. She loves films of all kinds, especially those with protracted scenes of everyday life and any art that has a personal vision.