Transcendentalism and Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Abstract

This essay uses the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to attempt a better understanding of the violence depicted in the film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia by Sam Peckinpah. The throughline in the work of these artists is the belief that the performance of violence degenerates the perception of the wrongdoer, disconnecting them from nature and enabling further violence. An aim of this study is to reassess the value of the film under scrutiny as a self-reflexive work where the director acknowledges and criticizes his own complicity in aggravating the problem of violence. The thesis examines three essential Transcendentalist concepts associated with violence: comparative thinking, compensation, and possession. These are examined through the lens of their political context at the time of their writing since the defining problem of slavery affected these ideas and is the explicit object of criticism in their writing, just as the context of the Vietnam War is what informs Peckinpah’s own didactic efforts against violence. This essay builds on the work of Stephen Prince in particular, which later scholars ignore, to investigate his insights about Peckinpah’s complete rejection of violence. An aim of this essay is to dispute the readings of the later scholars, who maintain Paul Seydor’s framing of Peckinpah’s violence as redemptive.