Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: Renegade’s Requiem

By Steve Erickson

Essays—

Jul 2, 2024

<em>Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid</em><em>: </em>Renegade’s Requiem
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Had all five found themselves in the same cantina—and it’s not impossible that at some point they did—they might have called themselves the Wild Bunch. All fashioned themselves outlaws or at least flirted with the idea: screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer, a homegrown Beckett whose novels were bulletins from Armageddon; lead actors James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, the former from a generation of ugly-cool amoralists who hijacked movie stardom and the latter a Rhodes-scholar janitor who emerged as the hottest country songwriter since Hank Williams; costar and film composer Bob Dylan, the 1960s’ single most revolutionary figure in any medium, Warhol notwithstanding; and director Sam Peckinpah, the best American filmmaker of his time who wasn’t named Kubrick or Altman. Among them they had enough genius, ego, and creative firepower to generate any brilliant enterprise from the dust up, not to mention the neuroses, arrogance, and alcoholism to completely fuck up everything. On 1973’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, they managed to do a little of both, producing one of cinema’s towering westerns, in which self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter.

If the western was going out of fashion when Peckinpah got to it in the 1960s and early ’70s, the genre has always attracted renegades outside their time. The violence of Peckinpah’s contradictions has become a cliché: a poet-barbarian born to ranches and rifles and versed in theater and history, who loved not just Johns Ford and Huston but also Ingmar Bergman and Italian neorealism, with a daily liquor consumption more accurately measured in crates than bottles, “Bloody Sam” was known to have brought a pistol to at least one studio meeting, the sort of gesture that reflected his feelings about the studios while occasionally disinclining the studios to hire him. At once a classicist in the tradition of My Darling Clementine, High Noon, and Shane, and a revisionist in the spirit of Johnny Guitar, Forty Guns, and One-Eyed Jacks (for which he wrote an early draft that was rejected), Peckinpah was both seduced by the western and suspicious of it. In one of those rare periods of American culture that didn’t reflexively reject nuance, he instinctively, maybe even unconsciously, understood that the western’s lessons were as fatal as its glories were futile when it came to revealing the crazed, unkempt country out of which the genre was born.

With all due respect to 1962’s Ride the High Country, 1969’s The Wild Bunch, and 1974’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Garrett is Peckinpah’s greatest movie, an examination of how American power and greed corrode the stuff of freedom and friendship. “How does it feel?” Billy asks his old friend about selling out to the cattle barons (echoing a classic Dylan song in the process), to which Garrett wearily answers (echoing another Dylan classic), “Like times have changed.” Billy retorts, “Times, maybe. Not me.” As with all of Peckinpah’s most important films, regarding Garrett in autobiographical terms is irresistible. If you wonder whether the filmmaker is Garrett or the Kid in this allegory of innocence, betrayal, and the obliteration of a brave and savage American spirit, the answer is: yes. Like all great artists who never saw the point of having a cake you can’t eat, Peckinpah has it every which way in Garrett: his vision of the Old West is utopian and anarchic, lyric and sordid, preposterously male with its few rare women the only voices of reason, all invoking the bard’s power and the beast’s primal ruin. Peckinpah deromanticizes everything he has ever romanticized, then romanticizes the deromanticizing. The most turbulent production of a turbulent career—shot in faraway, dusty Durango, Mexico, with a crew racked by illness and cameras that didn’t work and a studio that never showed any faith in it—Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is, among other things, the story of an artist who gave himself too much license for too much excess while also never really cutting himself a break for an instant.

The documented Garrett and Billy lived just long enough to create legends that swept away facts, but it’s worth noting a few facts anyway. A southerner who fled the wreckage of the Confederacy for the Southwest when he was still a teen, Garrett eventually became a U.S. marshal and Texas Ranger by way of bartending, buffalo-hunting, and a bit of his own law-bending. He would kill a handful of men in his life, one of whom was definitely Henry McCarty of New York City, known as William Bonney by the time he got to New Mexico, known as Billy the Kid by the time he got to immortality. Dead at the age of twenty-one, Billy is believed to have dispatched at least one man for his every year on this earth, though it’s unclear whether he did it with as much brio as Kristofferson or, for that matter, Paul Newman or Val Kilmer or Robert Vaughn or Richard Jaeckel (a sheriff stalking Billy in this movie) or any of the dozens of actors who have played the Kid on-screen over the decades.

Less clear still is the relationship between the Kid and Garrett or whether they actually had one outside the bond forged by legend. At its simplest, that relationship was a complicated rivalry, and at its most psychologically byzantine—with a decade’s age difference between them—it may have involved the conflicted son-father dynamic seen here between Kristofferson and Coburn, both of whom, it should be noted, are considerably older than their real-life counterparts. Peckinpah compounds Wurlitzer’s paternal paradigm with one of his own: the two men are sides of a common coin. This is where the movie becomes a Rorschach of the filmmaker’s soul no less than is Alfredo Garcia, where Warren Oates is the Peckinpah figure who follows an obsession or personal code—for Peckinpah, there never was a difference between the two—that only he understands, to a bloodstained end only he considers transcendent. As Garrett, Coburn is Peckinpah the compromised old pro under contract to the powers that be to blow away his untamed desperado self, the more bullet holes the better, though at the moment of truth Garrett can bring himself to fire only a couple of times, the second at himself in a mirror. In a brief cameo as a coffin maker, Peckinpah is a one-man Greek chorus chastising Garrett for his corruption and urging him to get the dirty deed done already.

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It’s Garrett, then, whom this movie is really about, because among all the politicians for sale he has just enough of a moral compass—albeit missing a quadrant, with a needle spinning nomadically in search of north—to doom him to a life haunted by dishonor. Garrett’s assassination at the film’s beginning, at the hands of the same forces that contracted him to assassinate the Kid, is his only deliverance. Roles are no less Rorschachs for actors than properties are for directors: having come a long way from a Nebraska mechanic’s shop to an unlikely stardom, via a filmography of hit men and secret agents, Coburn probably had too much aplomb to be impressed by the likes of Kristofferson and Dylan, who were so New Hollywood as to barely be part of Hollywood at all. In any case, in Garrett Coburn gives his quintessential performance, even taking into account his Oscar-winning work decades later in Affliction (1997).

With more star power than acting chops, Kristofferson is startlingly charismatic considering that movies weren’t his day job. He was busy inventing New Nashville with a series of instant classics like “For the Good Times”; “Loving Her Was Easier”; “Help Me Make It Through the Night”; “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” which became Johnny Cash’s most important record since “Folsom Prison Blues”; and “Me and Bobby McGee,” which became for Janis Joplin the hit of a lifetime that was already over by the time her version reached number one on the charts. Whether you insist on viewing Kristofferson’s Kid as a lone hero or a betrayed victim, the movie now and then reminds you that there is about him a bit of the amiable sociopath, shooting people in the back and dueling at ten paces only to cheat at two, waiting just long enough with gun drawn so his opponent’s final, fleeting realization will be what a sucker he has been. All this might eclipse Bob Dylan if Dylan weren’t in a league of his own, not so much acting in Garrett as exuding mystique, which you may be unsurprised to learn he’s rather good at. It’s hard to know whether irony or intoxication inspired Peckinpah to cast the Voice of a Generation in a role whose most eloquent scene is the recitation of labels of canned beans on a store shelf. The rest of the supporting cast is one degree removed from every western in memory, including Jason Robards, Jack Elam, Barry Sullivan, Chill Wills, Elisha Cook Jr., R. G. Armstrong, Harry Dean Stanton, and, in one of the film’s most shattering scenes, Katy Jurado, bearing heartbroken witness to a dying Slim Pickens as Dylan’s stirring “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” plays in the background.

As it happened, Peckinpah didn’t like that song much. He cut it from the last version of the movie in which he was directly involved, which is included in this release with two others. When the studio demanded a shorter film, Peckinpah left the editing room; nonetheless, the studio iteration eventually released in theaters retained just enough lyricism to catch some viewers’ attention. Along with Peckinpah’s final “preview,” mentioned above, that leaves a version first compiled almost twenty years ago for a “special edition” DVD and further refined herein, which restores many of the previously deleted scenes. One cranky novelist’s perhaps heretical view is that it’s the best of the three, no less poetic than the director’s last cut but more comprehending of Garrett as a whole, greater than the sum of its recollections, rumors, and reveries. It’s a reminder that even a great artist isn’t always the most discerning judge of his maddest fixations.

Peckinpah didn’t so much choose those fixations as they chose him. Every western is about America, whether it knows it or not: among the major film genres of comedy, horror, romance, noir, thriller, musical, gangster picture, and science fiction, the western is the one that can’t be anything but American regardless of samurai templates or Italian reinterpretations. Around the world, the Old American West has, for a century of cinema, represented the last earthly frontier of the human psyche, where dreams and lies clash just for the sake of telling each other apart; in the western, passion is more violent, freedom is more rapturous, aspirations are more berserk than in any other genre of any other art form. Arguably, Peckinpah was the last filmmaker to say anything really new with the western, and therefore the last filmmaker to say anything really new about an America where every empty yard of prairie is a Rubicon, every hand empty of a gun is a grasp for oblivion, and killing passes time as easily as blowing the heads off chickens. Garrett was the last western that Peckinpah would make, and maybe it’s just an accident that this particular release, half a century later, happens to greet an America whose meaning is more at stake than at any moment since the Civil War, a nation lost among all the West’s irreconcilable visions of an American Future.

Near the climax of The Wild Bunch, in that cantina where outlaws fall together in drunken stupors and arouse themselves to rueful sobriety, William Holden finally comes to terms with what must be done: rescuing their captive compadre from overwhelming forces. “Let’s go” is all he says, and “Why not?” is all Warren Oates answers, as if honor and death are the most ordinary things in the world. Maybe in the cantina from which stumbled Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Sam Peckinpah said to the others, “Let’s go make a masterpiece,” and the others answered, “Why not?” as if none of them had anything better to do. Against a landscape of upheaval and doubt, caught in a self-loathing Hollywood career where he may have felt as much traitor as outlaw, Peckinpah made this movie about a country where one of its most stalwart values, loyalty—loyalty among men, loyalty to an idea—is cut down by the ruthless onslaught of expedient centuries. It’s the most deeply elegiac film made by a director for whom the whole point of life was its elegy.
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Steve Erickson is the author of Shadowbahn, Zeroville, and eight other novels that have been translated into a dozen languages. He is the chair of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches literature and film.

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