Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Abstract

Ted Haworth didn’t work on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,¹ yet his comment ‘Without patina, Sam just wouldn’t shoot it’ illuminates Peckinpah’s interest in film worlds that look, and therefore feel, lived-in (LoBrutto, 1992: 29), and is entirely relevant to discussion of the film and its affect. In the Introduction I described the film as prominently textured, and strikingly affective, while being difficult to account for in terms of its affect. This is at least in part because Alfredo Garcia is both intimate and distancing in its stylistic and narrative strategies and the movement between these attitudes is not consistent or coherent. The film resists mastery by the viewer. The subject of the narrative is unsavoury to say the least: the pursuit of a dead man’s head (the Alfredo Garcia of the title) for a Mexican crime lord ‘El Jefe’ (Emilio Fernandez), taken up by an American bartender, Bennie (Warren Oates), accompanied by his Mexican lover, Elita (Isela Vega). Peckinpah’s films are frequently challenging to the viewer, and though this is partly because of their visceral qualities, in some ways the directness of physical violence can be more straightforward in its affect.² The problems posed by Alfredo Garcia are certainly due to what Ian Cooper refers to as a ‘deliberate strategy of “anti-pleasure”’ (2011: 102). Though this is not surprising for a film whose subject matter involves the paid retrieval of a man’s head, the issue of (non)pleasure is central to the film’s affect above and beyond that particular detail.