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In 1972, two of Hollywood’s most independent filmmakers -John Huston and Sam Peckinpah -directed two pensive, deceptively inconspicuous movies which probed the existential malaise afflicting a particular form of American masculinity. Fat City(1) -Huston’s first American film in more than a decade -was released to much critical acclaim, and reviewers came to rank it alongside his best previous efforts like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The African Queen (1951).(2) Commercially, however, it was a modest failure.(3) With Junior Bonner, Peckinpah thoroughly defied the anticipations of critics and spectators who expected (and craved?) another cinematic blood orgy like the one in The Wild Bunch (1969), or in his previous and supremely infamous film Straw Dogs (1971). The Steve McQueen-fronted follow-up to Peckinpah’s most controversial film was a slow, somewhat contemplative and leisurely paced picture, virtually free of the violence with which his name had been inextricably linked in the past. It was therefore disappointing that Junior Bonner was almost completely neglected by contemporary critics.(4) Even without the violence, the film rehearses themes quintessential to the Peckinpah oeuvre, marking Junior Bonner as a modern-day western. Attempting to redress the poverty of critical attention that these two films received, I propose in this essay to explore the following hypothesis: Fat City and Junior Bonner are films whose fundamental preoccupation is the generation of images of male desolation. While the former narrates a cynical and wholly un-sentimental tale of urban decay and masculine plight, the latter retreats into an insurmountable nostalgia for the past which ultimately severs its relations to contemporary concerns. Because of this, Fat City prevails as the film whose vision retains hope despite the seeming hopelessness of its environment. Junior Bonner, on the other hand, wallows in the process of mourning the passing of old values and has thus little to offer, or invest, in the social transition from the ”Old” to the ”New” West. Furthermore, the cinematic styles of the two movies, though apparently similar on the surface, represent radically different approaches to the construction of film narrative. Huston’s text is a model of screen naturalism,(5) whereas Peckinpah’s continues the project of The Wild Bunch of (violently) fragmenting and dissolving the continuity of story space.

Topographies of Defeat