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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Reviews >D. Harlan Wilson's Peckinpah an Ultraviolent Romance

Peckinpah an Ultraviolent Romance
D. Harlan Wilson
Shroud Publishing
ISBN Number: 9780981989426

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          Director Sam Peckinpah is best remembered for his oeuvre of stark, often hyper-violent films, including Straw Dogs, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and 1969’s The Wild Bunch, a gritty, stark, and groundbreaking Western about the last days of a 19th Century gang of outlaws (no relation to Butch Cassidy’s actual band of the same name), all of which have earned places on many best-of and worst-of American film lists in the last decade. Peckinpah’s sometimes borderline-surreal direction and his interest in the effects of brutal, Jacobean violence on average people would inspire the work of contemporary filmmakers such as David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino (whose appreciation of The Wild Bunch has been well-documented) and have been the subject of several critical essays and documentaries.

          But rarely—if at all—have writers explored Peckinpah’s influence on 21st Century America through fiction. Certainly, none has done so as imaginatively and enjoyably as D. Harlan Wilson, a frighteningly talented cultural theorist and writer of “irrealist” stories who is sometimes additionally categorized as a surrealist or Bizarro writer. His latest novel Peckinpah an Ultraviolent Romance is a gore-shock Kafkaesque rampage that clips along like Peckinpah’s trademark editing—alternately slow and fast—and which will likely thrill fans of Peckinpah and those who have never heard of him alike.

          By way of preamble, I wish to note that I fall into the latter of these camps. Apart from a few clips of The Wild Bunch, I have no direct experience with any of Peckinpah’s films (though, like many people in their twenties, I have seen and enjoyed films by Tarantino and Lynch). While my ignorance did not blunt my enjoyment of Peckinpah, it has likely made that enjoyment at least somewhat superficial; I will likely have missed many of the references and allusions that give this novel added depth and provide Peckinpah fans additional amusement and insight. My review, then, is inevitably aimed more at the casual fan or the Peckinpah-ignorant.

          Fortunately, an open search engine and even the most cursory understanding of American cinema will easily enable such novices to navigate the cultural minefield that is Wilson’s “ultraviolent romance.” The novella’s cinematic, disjointed plot (told in fifty-nine vignette-length chapters) takes place in a Middle American town riddled with Dollar Stores, Wal-Marts, inoffensive Protestant churches, and, of course, the ubiquitous stench of pig shit.

          But true to irrealist form, all is not as one would think, for as Wilson defined his style of choice in an August, 2009 interview with Dark Scribe Magazine: “…irrealism depicts absurdist, dreamlike, but generally recognizable worlds in which the cause and effect schema that you and I are subject to is either slightly or egregiously off-kilter.” Naturally, then, the Indiana town is named “Dreamfield,” and it is also a place where chainsaws grow inside corn husks, a local boy regularly splits vending machines in half barehanded, and the local lake’s water will strip human bones in twenty seconds.

          Thus, life for Dreamfield’s citizenry is simultaneously dull, hilarious, and grotesque, full of incidents replete with excrement, “pseudoexistentialist” debates, and trips to such irrealist portmanteaus of Americana as the “tanning saloon,” a description of which puts a contemporary, banal, and brilliantly “off-kilter” spin on a common location in Western film, thereby anarchically invoking the spirit of Peckinpah’s bloody contributions to the genre.
          Pale with repentance, the congregation waited patiently to enter the saloon, still mumbling about warlocks and witchery and pro-choice, anti-gun, non-evangelical, neo-bourgeoise, pro-intellectual demonology.

          Creak of saloon doors.

          Inside a bartender wearing suspenders, a blue dress shirt with white cuffs, and a wingtip mustache dished out shots of tequila, hammering the shots into the bar counter before serving them. Dreamfielders gobbled packets of salt, drank their portions, and chased them with thin slices of key lime pie that they shoveled into their mouths with plastic forks. Then they took off their clothes and removed their girdles, rolls of fat spilling to the knees, and filed into a HEX booth. Fizz of electricity. In a matter of seconds, the purple light turned their white bodies into bright orange blobs.
          And then, just as in any dime-novel Western, the black hats ride into town in their LeBarons: led by the ghoulish, computer cleaner-chugging Samson Thataway, a gang known as the Fuming Garcias (a delightfully ham-fisted reference, of course, to one of Peckinpah’s more notorious films) then proceeds to commit acts of random, guignolesque violence against the townsfolk that might well have made even Peckinpah’s ironclad stomach heave. More familiar tropes then follow with Wilson’s own bizarre twist: the murder of a virtuous woman, a showdown at high noon—well, in a pool hall, anyway—between Thataway and a hero who is sexually uncertain, wielding two fantasy axes purchased from a Chinese restaurant, possibly insane, and the perfect antithesis of the strong-jawed hero of the older, heroic Westerns Peckinpah despised.

          Wilson’s blood-bucket descriptions and wild imagination together would be enough to make Peckinpah a delightful Bizarro novel, and a pretty good parody of Peckinpah’s style (at least, as I understand it). But Wilson does not stop there; rather, he mixes camera angles, stage directions, and, most astonishingly, digressions into film criticism to make his novella not only a gleeful send-up/homage to Peckinpah’s work, but a thoughtful study of it. In fact, film school graduates (and first year English literature students) will probably note that Wilson has ingeniously woven a lampoon of the infamous “five paragraph essay” into his book, through five chapterlets about the “Theory of Ultraviolence.” At the beginning, these appear to be little more than aimless scene descriptions or puzzling non sequiturs. But in the fourth theory, he pulls the theories and the entire book together.

          Wilson begins this chapter with an extensive quote from the book Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies by Stephen Prince, which Wilson uses to support his own theories about the importance of Peckinpah’s work:
          …[T]his screen ultraviolence is almost invariably extrapolated by Peckinpah from some form of real-world ultraviolence that flaps across the wasteland of History like a galactic burning flag. And this real-world ultraviolence stems directly from the desiring-machinery and dream factory of the human psyche, which, according to some psychotheorists, philosophers, and gun owners, is a repository of aggressive energy, i.e., our minds always-already imprison countless brutarians, i.e., deep down all we want to do is fuck shit up, i.e., the nature of desire is ultraviolent…But this is a simple, pessimistic, and commonplace view of the human condition frequently made in an attempt to justify various body horrors (e.g., wars, holocausts, murders, etc.). An innovative theory of ultraviolence must account for the softer side of mankind…Ultraviolence has limits. And it requires vast stores of quiet gasoline.
          Fascinatingly, this is a similar argument put forth by graphic novelist Alan Moore in his self-described pornography Lost Girls, which is first and foremost an examination of the human sexual imagination in all its wonder, horror, and essentialness to human life. Equally of interest, Wilson’s seamless combination of storytelling, history, and cultural criticism also brings to mind  From Hell, Moore’s inimitable attempt to “solve” the question of Jack the Ripper’s identity using a similar reliance on multiple disciplines. (I will note that the book’s cover blurb from Moore was the catalyst for these conclusions). Like Moore, Wilson well understands exactly where and when these “vast stores of quiet gasoline” must be poured, a fact which makes Peckinpah, for all its twisted and seemingly senseless bloodletting, a thoughtful, amusing, and provoking look at the necessity of grappling with violence—and graphic violence especially—in art. In this sense, it is both an excellent exegesis of the director’s work and a worthy companion.

          Naturally, fans of Peckinpah’s work will not want to be without this book for their next trip through “Bloody Sam’s” more shocking works, and Bizarro aficionados will want to make a note to purchase this limited-edition novella before it sells out. I would also strongly recommend this “Ultraviolent Romance” to Alan Moore’s and Matt Wagner’s fan bases and to all students of cultural theory and film studies. Wilson’s writing, always excellent, just keeps improving, and I look forward to reading his next work.
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