On what Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) is actually about beyond the controversy it generated.

Straw Dogs was controversial at release because of its violence and its sexual content. The controversy has obscured what the film is actually doing, which is a sustained examination of the relationship between civilization, masculinity, and violence.

Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, an American mathematician who has moved to rural Cornwall with his English wife. He is passive, intellectual, and committed to the idea that rational discourse can resolve any conflict. The film is a systematic destruction of this position.

Peckinpah is not making an argument for violence. He is making an argument about the inadequacy of David's pacifism as a social philosophy: it works until it meets a situation where the other parties don't share its values, and then it leaves its holder defenseless.

The final act of the film is disturbing because it shows a man who has been forced into violence discovering that he is good at it. The discovery is not presented as liberation. It's presented as a loss: of the self-conception that organized David's life and that the film has spent ninety minutes demonstrating was always a fiction.