I watched a DVD of Sam Peckinpah's ---the cinematic poet of violence---Cross of Iron(1977) last night. It is about World War II: on the Russian front in 1943 in the Crimea.The German s are retreating after the Battle of Stalingrad and the war is lost.

It is told from the German's perspective and that of the common soldier, and it explores the horrors of the war and the psychological damage the unremitting violence inflicts on its participants. However, it doesn't glorify violence.

Peckinpah, who saw himself as the rebel, the outlaw, also uses a film about the Germans to make a comment about America’s involvement in Vietnam. It becomes a boys own annual of survival amid the chaos of war.

The American west is dead and is reinvented in war and so we have war as the shootouts from The Wild Bunch. The world is l death-infested and men are hard-wired for killing.

Our dreams of a better life give way to finding affirmation in a violent death even though the cause is lost. Male friendship, misogyny, hatred of authority, freedom found in anarchy, living by one's own moral code, and affirming individuality in the ecstasy of violence.

You choose sure death to living life as a compromised failure.That's redemption.