Editing The Wild Bunch (section)

==Themes==
Critics of ''The Wild Bunch'' note the theme of the end of the outlaw gunfighter era. For example, the character Pike Bishop advises: "We've got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast." The Bunch lives by an anachronistic code of honor that is out of place in 20th-century society. Also, when the gang inspects Mapache's new automobile, they perceive it marks the end of horse travel, a symbol also in Peckinpah's ''Ride the High Country'' (1962) and ''[[The Ballad of Cable Hogue]]'' (1970).<ref>{{cite book |first=Garner |last=Simmons| title=Peckinpah, A Portrait in Montage| publisher=University of Texas Press |year = 1982|pages=82 | isbn= 0-292-76493-6 }}</ref>

The violence that was much criticized in 1969 remains controversial. Peckinpah noted it was allegoric of the American war in Vietnam, the violence of which was nightly televised to American homes at supper time. He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitized, bloodless television Westerns and films glamorizing gunfights and murder: "The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut ... it's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing, and yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people." Peckinpah used violence as a [[catharsis]], believing his audience would be purged of violence by witnessing it explicitly on screen. He later admitted to being mistaken, observing that the audience came to enjoy rather than be horrified by his films' violence, which troubled him.<ref>{{cite book |first=David |last=Weddle|author-link= David Weddle| title=If They Move...Kill 'Em!| publisher=Grove Press |year = 1994|pages=334 | isbn= 0-8021-3776-8 }}</ref>

Betrayal is the secondary theme of ''The Wild Bunch''. The characters suffer from their knowledge of having betrayed a friend and left him to his fate, thus violating their own honor code when it suits them ("$10,000 cuts an awful lot of family ties"). However, Bishop says, "When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal."<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NjLdMBBPQUcC&pg=PA163 |page=163 |title=Sam Peckinpah's Feature Films |last=Dukore |first=Bernard Frank |publisher=University of Illinois Press |year=1999 |isbn=0-252-06802-5}}</ref> Such oppositional ideas lead to the film's violent conclusion, as the remaining men find their abandonment of Angel intolerable. Bishop remembers his betrayals, most notably when he deserts Deke Thornton, in flashback, when the law catches up to them and when he abandons Crazy Lee at the railroad office after the robbery, ostensibly to guard the hostages. Critic [[David Weddle]] writes that "like that of Conrad's ''[[Lord Jim]]'', Pike Bishop's heroism is propelled by overwhelming guilt and a despairing death wish."<ref>Weddle, pg. 318</ref>