“I don’t know my way home.”
“That’s okay. . . I don’t either.”
That is the dialogue in the closing scene of director Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent 1971 film Straw Dogs. The first line is delivered by Henri Niles, the mentally impaired character played by David Warner in the film. The reply comes from David Sumner, the highly intelligent (perhaps too intelligent) character played by Dustin Hoffman, a character who has just violently defended his rented house against armed intruders—a defense that has resulted in the death of a number of those intruders, as well as some other individuals.
That closing dialogue takes place after all the violence—at least all the overt violence--has finally ended, and David is driving Henri back to the place where Henri lives. By what each says, neither knows his way home. However, Henri’s not knowing his way home is utterly different from David’s.
Henri has what he experiences as a home, a place where he feels he belongs and to which he wants to return. It is just that because of his mental difficulties he doesn’t know how to direct David to drive there.
On the other hand, David no longer knows just where, if anywhere, he has any such place of his own, a place where he feels he belongs and can live his own life. David is homeless in a deep and deeply disturbing sense that Henri’s very impairment protects him from ever having to experience. It is such utter lostness from all home that finds expression in David’s final words, especially as delivered with the enigmatic grin with which Dustin Hoffman delivers them.
2.
Do any of us know our way home today?
Hardly.
Just where, if anywhere, do any of us today have a home at all any longer—any place where, as we honestly experience it, we truly belong?
Why don’t we know our way home today? Whom in Peckinpah’s film do we most resemble in that regard? Henri or David? Are we of today not all, whether we have been brought to acknowledge it yet or not, just like David Sumner, who is forced by his own eruption into violence to acknowledge that he no longer knows his way home, at the end of that so graphically and disturbingly violent film?
Even more crucially, isn’t the all too ever-present threat of our own eruptions into extremes of violence itself rooted in the very same radical homelessness to which David’s own eruption into such violence finally calls his attention?
In the scene at issue at the end of Peckinpah’s film, the underlying sense of David’s verbal acknowledgment of his own lack of knowing the way home any longer is something that only David himself can discern. It is an acknowledgment really directed solely to himself, not to Henri, the only other person in the car. Henri’s mental impairment assures that he will not understand what David is saying, and David knows that perfectly well. In what he is actually saying, David is talking to himself.
In so talking to himself, David is at last receiving a gift for which his whole life up till then has been preparing him. If he continues to be open to it, that gift will eventually bring him home again, but letting him truly know his home for the very first time. The gift to David, as it were, of his own outburst into violence is the shattering of his illusions about himself, and the revelation to him that he is indeed utterly homeless.
David’s violence shows him that he is homeless in a way that has nothing to do with having some “house” to defend against intruders, as—in an earlier scene in which the violence is just beginning to erupt into the open—David says is what he is going to do. David’s homelessness has nothing to do with the lack of adequate housing. Rather, it is rooted entirely in the deeply ingrained tendency to erupt into violence against anything or anyone who augurs to reveal precisely one’s very homelessness itself to one, a homelessness far more radical than any such lack of housing.
3.
What is David’s problem, and by implication our own? Just why can’t David and the rest of us find our way home anymore? Henri’s inability to find his way home is due to his mental deficiency; but what about David—and all the rest of us by implication? What is the cause of David’s and all of our inability any longer to find the way home?
Is that condition due to some sort of moral failure on our part? Something for which we ourselves are to blame, such that with a bit more courage and discipline we might have been able to avoid having lost our way home in the first place? Or is it something else?
It is something else.
Our homesickness is rooted in our own involuntary uprooting. We are wandering aimlessly in search of home, having lost all sense of where we are and how to get home again, because we have been torn out of what previously provided humans their home: We have been torn out by the roots from our “native soil.”
Understanding that, however, leaves us to ask just what our true “native soil” is?
That is a question that we all need to ask, alone and together. I will therefore let it remain open, as I should—at least for now.
Final scene of Peckinpah’s film