Take This Badge Off Of Me

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 47
Sam Peckinpah, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) swaggers into the old Spanish mission where the outlaws congregate, showing off his newly minted badge. Not long ago, he was one among this anarchic bunch, but the territorial government has empowered him to bring law to the frontier. Garrett warns his old friend William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) that the government wants Garrett specifically to bring down Bonney. Here’s your first and only warning, Garrett says: get out or get killed.

I remember first watching this movie as a teenager, impelled by the reputation of director Sam Peckinpah, and by this movie’s famous soundtrack, composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. The classic “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” comes from this movie. As a kid, I was appalled by this movie. I watched as it ticked down a list of traditional Western character tropes, all of whom died in the kind of bloodbath for which Peckinpah is famous.

What I didn’t understand, watching it with a kid’s wide-eyed situational ignorance, was the context in which this movie was made. Peckinpah himself had become an unlikely countercultural hero. Though twenty years older than his principal audience, he understood their Vietnam-era malaise. He also understood the self-destructive violence which drove characters in mercilessly explosive classics like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, as he feuded with production houses and self-medicated to control his bipolar disorder.

William Bonney, good-looking and rife with charm, ignores his friend’s warnings. He came west to escape Back-East law, and reinvented himself as Billy the Kid. For him, outlaw status isn’t a failure to obey the law; it’s an act of obedience to his truest self. He believes the frontier myth of complete autonomy; he sees the West as Rousseau’s “state of nature.” Billy scorns Garrett, leaves the mission, and returns to his career of rampage.

But if Billy has become the amoral extreme of libertarian thinking, Garrett has become the opposite. By accepting a badge, he also accepts the Back-East government’s strict Calvinist interpretation of law. Humankind, he now believes, is irredeemably sinful, and must be restrained by law. As a lawman, his right to enforce order upon everyone else is absolute, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in pursuing that goal. Law is Garret’s goal, not a means.

Kris Kristofferson (left) and James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Here’s where my teenage self reacted with initial revulsion. Raised in an atmosphere of country music, John Wayne movies, and Zane Grey novels, I believed American Western myths of hard-bitten individualism and frontier pluck. Peckinpah chooses the most extreme versions of that mythology: the strict lawman who believes the frontier must be tamed, and the wild-eyed outlaw who glories in the absence of law. The two must fight, and destroy everyone who comes between them.

I failed to understand the context. Peckinpah released this movie in 1973, the same year America’s involvement in Vietnam juddered to an unsatisfying halt. The American myth had devolved into extremes, not dissimilar to those depicted onscreen, and likewise destroyed everything that came between them. Even Bob Dylan’s involvement, as both composer and strange, enigmatic character, served to repudiate the entire previous decade. He’d been reduced to “Alias,” a character with no name or loyalties.

And yes, Peckinpah destroyed every Western stereotype. I saw that correctly, but utterly misinterpreted it. In one memorable scene, veteran cowboy actor Slim Pickens plays a sheriff conscripted into Garrett’s posse. A gunfight ensues, and Pickens is gut-shot. The camera lingers over him trying to hold his entrails in, eyes wide, while his wife tries to comfort him. The iconic Western character is dying, and knows it.

Pickens would parody this trope the next year, in Blazing Saddles.

Unlike in Peckinpah’s earlier films, made when he was relatively sober, these characters have limited motivations. Unlike, say, David Sumner in Straw Dogs, Billy and Garrett don’t learn or change with the story; they simply possess absolute morals, and kill to support them. But like jazz, this movie isn’t about what it’s about. Billy and Garrett don’t learn, but everyone caught between them certainly does. The lessons are cold, and usually final.

I misunderstood this at 17, because my upbringing strictly refused to accept the lessons of the post-Vietnam era. Worse, looking around today, watching my country getting shredded by a similar adherence to absolute morals, I see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t learn. Today’s moralists even use the same cowboy imagery I grew up with. And now, like then, those who follow absolute morals aren’t hurt, but those caught between them are getting killed.