Violent Masculinity in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Movies, particularly the western genre, use aggressive violence as a qualifier of masculinity. It is essential for the western hero to resort to killing as a way to prove their “true grit”. Those who resist taking up arms are almost always branded as “yellow-bellied”. Operating in this most masculine of genres, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid attempts to re-evaluate the necessity of violence in defining masculinity. The film achieves this through the reluctance of its title characters to embrace violence, its subversion of the western generic conventions, and by director Sam Peckinpah addressing his own reputation as a violent filmmaker.

            Although both Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are both violent characters in the film, there is a sense of reluctance from both of them. Pat comes to town and warns Billy of his orders to drive him out. Billy accepts the news peacefully because they share a friendship that dates back to the “good old days”. During his initial raid on Billy, Pat arrests Billy instead of shooting him when he has the chance. Pat’s ability to kill Billy is questioned by several characters in the film including the men who hired him to do so. It is also Pat’s masculinity that is being called into question. This reflects “the struggle to define, prescribe, and sanctify masculinity as the site where violent power is exercised with a skill that embodies beauty and socially constructive results” (Dowell 8). Pat is called upon to prove his manhood while also making the world a safer place by killing.

            Pat’s reluctance gives way to violence when he does ultimately kill Billy. He doesn’t want to kill his old friend, but does so because he feels he must live up to what it means to be a man. Garrett instantly gains a place in history and respect as a real man, but the event changes him forever. “Garrett, after killing Billy, shoots his own reflection in the mirror…signifies not only Garrett’s self-disgust, but also his realization that he [is] dead inside” (Winkler 525). Similarly, the film ends this way not because it feels it is the justified ending, but because the film must live up to the conventions of the western.

            Onscreen violence is an essential convention of the western. The violence “can be seen as an especially telling manifestation of the struggles of popular cinema to balance the forces changing society and those controlling it” (Slocum 649). Because the western is inherently political and uniquely American, Violence is used in allegorical ways to represent the means that men has sought out their own identity as men as well as their national identity as Americans. Within the genre, Violence was accepted and expected during the classical and refined phase. As a baroque period western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid begins to question those assumptions in a way that later films such as Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven would take even further.

            In addition to challenging the expectations of the genre, Sam Peckinpah is also addressing his own reputation of masculinity. One of his most well-known film, The Wild Bunch, embraces the violent nature of the genre freely and even pushes it to extremes. It ends in an extremely graphic shoot out that reinforces the masculinity of the protagonists. This theme is also addressed in some of Peckinpah’s non westerns, notably Straw Dogs where the pacifist protagonist must give up his non-violent ideology and violently deal with his situation. In Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Peckinpah appears to use violence primarily because it is expected of him. He shoots the violence in slow motion as a way to “convey the horrors of the era to viewers inured by media to the real violence in society” (Slocum 659). The bloodshed in Pat Garrett is extreme because society has built up a tolerance to it, not because it is a marker of masculinity.

            Peckinpah further defies the expectations of the genre by having Pat Garrett kill Billy the Kid by sneaking up on him after Billy has made love to his girlfriend. Most westerns end with an exciting shoot-out in which the hero has a fair chance. Here, the ending feels anti-climactic. By having the antagonist use his gun to win out over a protagonist who has just had sex, the film suggests that violent tendencies aren’t preferable to being loving or passive. Even though they aren’t preferable, they still win out. This confusing and genre defying ending is an example of how “violence grew more and more prevalent in cinema and society alike, while efforts to make sense of it remained disjointed” (Slocum 660).

            Like Destry in Destry Rides Again, The lead characters of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid can’t escape the violent nature of the western genre that is used as the definition of manhood. Because society is so violent, the western heroes and villains are obligated to conform to these masculine expectations in order to act as a reflection of said society. No matter how reluctant the characters, genre, and director seem to be of violence, they can’t help but succumbing to it.

Works Cited

Dowell, Pat. “The Mythology of the Western: Hollywood Perspectives on Race and Gender in

            the Nineties.” Cineaste 21.1/2 (1995): 6-10. JSTOR. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dir. Sam Peckinpah. 1973. 2005. DVD-ROM.

Slocum, J David. "Film Violence and the Institutionalization of the Cinema." The New School

            Stable 67.3 (2000): 649-81.JSTOR. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.

Winkler, Martin M. "Classical Mythology and the Western Film." Comparative Literature

            Studies 22.4 (1985): 516-40.JSTOR. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.