Sam Peckinpah’s masterful film The Wild Bunch illustrates traditional White philosophy’s insights concerning White art. The Wild Bunch follows a roving gang of criminals, who rob a train transporting armaments in order to sell them to a rogue Mexican army tormenting Mexico. For 2,000 years, White western philosophers and society have focused on ‘beauty.’ If we regain our focus on beauty, we can redeem our society. But, for this to work, we each personally need to improve ourselves aesthetically via our clothes and comportment.
The Wild Bunch shows criminals as evil as any ever depicted. Our titular Wild Bunch rob and steal for a living. And, given a chance, several of the Wild Bunch members enjoy prostitutes in wine baths. The film opens with a shootout in which many, many innocent people die. From an ‘art for art’s sake,’ we have no basis upon which to judge this depiction of corruption. But, White philosophy has long aspired to integrate philosophy into the big picture. It has long denied art for art’s sake’s contention that art can be removed from all social considerations and exist — as it were — outside of the world. Art presupposes an audience, and it either elevates or denigrates the intended audience. Art does not only live in a sealed-off world.
Our Wild Bunch protagonists have an ethic of loyalty to whoever happens to be in their gang. But, they have zero connection to wider morality, America or White civilization. Yet, as we cannot extract art from society, the Wild Bunch too exist in space. Most of the film takes place in Mexico, wherein a fast-life philosophy of having many babies and barely educating them reigns. With an average IQ in the 80s, Mexico has long suffered government instability, revolutions and violence. When the Wild Bunch enter a corrupt society, it confirms their cynicism. Their national displacement undermines their ethics. Life among less developed races loosens our connection to our lands, undermines our potential and denigrates us as Whites.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) taught that aesthetics rather than logical arguments uphold morality. Rather than individually, rationally recapitulating arguments for or against morality, individuals adopt the assumptions of their society. Surrounded by beauty, we understand holiness. If we have zero models of saintly behavior, we will only have the slightest idea that moral behaviors exist. In The Wild Bunch, clothes powerfully symbolize this dynamic. The Wild Bunch pull their first heist dressed in soldiers’ uniforms. People trust them. As part of their ruse, they behave kindly to old people. Immediately after the failed heist, their clothes deteriorate. The Mexican rebels they run in with wear tattered uniforms of a feigned, faded moral order. Clothes make an army. Clothes show a relationship to civilization. Fine clothes show aspiration and a direct connection with the striving civilization. Slacker clothes show one’s aloofness from one’s civilization.
The sole idealistic person in the Wild Bunch, Angel (Jaime Sanchez), forsakes his pay in gold in order to obtain a crate of stolen weapons that will allow his people to fight the corrupt government. At the climactic end of The Wild Bunch, their American leader, Pike (William Holden), undertakes a redemptive act wherein he leads his men on a suicide mission to rescue Angel from the rogue Mexican army. Pike’s redemptive act reflects his code, wherein criminals have loyalty to each other. But it also shows respect for Angel’s dedication to a higher cause. If Pike had an a priori loyalty to his White Christian civilization, had he inhabited a mental landscape that included actual angels, he would not have needed a suicide mission to redeem himself. Pike may have been a model White man.
Medieval philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), understood that we did not purely judge art based on its showing moral behavior. In a more realistic version of art for art’s sake, they lauded well-made art. As part of that criteria, the art’s style had to fit its message; additionally, it needed to concord with reality. The filth of the Wild Bunch’s clothes and the destitute Mexican towns Peckinpah filmed in show artistic fidelity to reality. Moreover, Pike, prior to leading his men to redemptive suicide, often talks of his fears of growing old and frail — his fear of what will happen when he retires. These concerns ring true to us older people. The film’s famous final bloodbath, with its gruesome slow-motion deaths, shows the horrors of war in an appropriately gruesome way. So, even though it highlights repugnant morals, we cannot dismiss the value of Peckinpah’s craft.
Yet, Aquinas would never just praise art without reference to content. St. Thomas tells us that the beauty of art ultimately lies in its intellectual content. Woven through with integrity, art’s intellectual nature shines by reminding us of both ourselves and God living in thought — the beauty of consciousness. The Wild Bunch’s use of uniforms shows the personal connection between our minds, our clothes, morals and hierarchy — Whites’ pride and traditional philosophy of the most beautiful civilization that ever existed. Our clothes, our pride, should tie us to the Acropolis to Gothic cathedrals. We see The Wild Bunch’s merit of realism in that it starts with a religious revival meeting but descends into hell. This is happening. The only lack of realism in Peckinpah’s masterpiece may come from Pike’s choice to achieve suicidal redemption in the name of a Mexican’s honor. Let us hope that Whites, however, feel awe at their race having built the greatest civilization ever known and feel valor in the call to sacrifice for it.
John K. Press is an Arktos contributor and the author of The True West vs. the Zombie Apocalypse.
