We don't expect to get the money. We count on gettin' killed.

Experiences of violence, sickness, pain and anguish are among the range of extreme states that concern George Bataille. Principally to the extent that they are uncontrollable. Essentially they shatter the composed rationality of the centred individual. In this way, such experiences open onto a mode of communication that exceeds language/the rational. Communication for Bataille, requires "a being suspended in the beyond of oneself, at the limit of nothingness." [1]

That which is revolting and shocking, that which disarms the predictable patterns of thinking and feeling, that which lies at the extremes and unavowed interstices of social, philosophical or theoretical frameworks are all objects of Bataille’s fascination.

Encounters with horror, violence, eroticism that miraculously transform into experiences of laughter, intoxication, ecstasy, constitute for Bataille inner experiences that overwhelm the sense of distinction between interior and exterior. At the limit of knowledge – "un-knowing" is activated, a process in which subjectivity is torn apart, unworked at the core of mental and physical being.

Longbaugh: A heart is the only thing that has value. If you have one, throw it away.

How can one see the extent to which horror and violence become fascinating, asks Bataille? Bataille advanced the notion of a cinema that would powerfully evoke bodily sensations in its spectators. Cinema should be visceral; it should rip the spectator from the complacency of life. The self, the comfort of identity should be sliced-up and fragmented. Identity lost in a frenzy of images. Cinema should make you sick, alter the body, and push you towards an abyss of flickering images. And if these sensations are fear and disgust, if the film makes one cringe, look away, this is because one is conditioned to maintain identity, to be oneself, to remain coherent.

Cinema can open up the space for new possibilities: the visceral sensation of the loss of self. This loss of self that the cinema produces is not a lack. Nothing is missing; rather something new is produced. We are given a glimpse of the hidden disgust inside of us, and we are entranced. Every vision hurts. Perception is pain. Bataille asks what limits of perception can cinema set itself? What pain will spectators refuse? What sensations can cinema engage?

Bitter and bizarre, Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun (2000), is a clever, confused and stylised essay on the meaning of violence. Godard's self-consciousness and Peckinpah's nostalgia for mythologised brutality go into an extraordinary range of tones and styles together with a film technique which embraces a distinctive experimental approach. The Way of the Gun offers no simple moral resolution. Given access to a world where Bataille's vision is actually evoked, the spectator is caught up in both the excitation and horrors of a world where the notion of "endless expenditure" is the norm.

From the opening sequence of fractious casual violence to the numinous blood-spurting finale, McQuarrie completely re-imagines the crime-film and Western mythology. Looking at the passing of the traditional old West/Outlaw from the point of view of marginalized gangsters. Though he spares us none of the callousness and brutality of either Parker and Longbaugh or Sarno and Chiddock, McQuarrie nevertheless presents their macho code of "honour" as a positive value in a world increasingly dominated by corporate/executive power and political corruption. The flight into Mexico, where Parker and Longbaugh virtually embrace their death at the hands of Sarno and his hired-hitmen, is a nihilistic acknowledgement of the men’s anachronistic status. In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Dick Pope's superb cinematography complementing McQuarrie's darkly elegiac vision.

The Way of the Gun penetrates so far into the horror that the spectator is engaged directly with filmic sensation. Caught up in the visceral impact, without artifice, the spectator acknowledges the extent to which horror becomes fascinating.

Negative emotion is an appropriate mode in which one might appreciate the complexion of McQuarrie's vision – a film narrative of layered emotions and shifting morality encapsulated in an ill-conceived kidnapping gone uncontrollably wrong.

In The Way of the Gun the line establishing hero and villain is infintesinably drawn. Two drifter’s low-lifes (Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro) – pseudonymously named in voice-over as "Parker" and "Longhbaugh" – (the realife last names of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) are as close as the film comes to "heroes" - two trigger-happy, cheerfully amoral petty hoodlums with a penchant for extreme violence, torture, robbery and blackmail.

During the films first sequence Parker and Longbaugh needlessly start a fight with a young couple which ends with Parker violently assaulting the woman. Later they think nothing of kidnapping a heavily pregnant woman, an act for which they feel no remorse – "We didn't come for absolution. We didn't ask to be redeemed." – And if they prove morally ambiguous figures, the "villains" are even more extreme. Each character from the criminal boss, Chidduck, the sharp-suited henchman, the boss's wife Francesca, even the surrogate mother Robin, who is carrying Chidducks baby, have their own motivations.

Parker: A plan is just a list of things that aren't going to happen.

Learning of a surrogate mother Robin (Juliette Lewis) being paid $1million for her services, Parker and Longbaugh devise a quick plan to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Unbeknown to these hapless desperados, the father-to-be is a powerful underworld boss, Chidduck (Scott Wilson) who for reasons of his own needs to get the girl back without paying a ransom. On the kidnappers trail are not only two bodyguards from whom they took the girl, Jeffers and Obecks (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt) but also Sarno (James Caan), Chudduck's all-purpose clean-up-man and self-described "adjudicator". As they cross the Southern border towards the Mexican desert, heading towards a bloody climax in an isolated bordello, everyone is reduced to their most basic instincts in order to survive.

For Bataille the experience of violence is bound up with the transgression that defines both the limit of human systems of existence and the place of the particular being in relation to his/her state. Violent transgression of boundaries turns on abjected forms of existence, animal/taboo, "leaping into the unknown with animality as its impetus." [2] From such an expenditure of energies, in its embrace of the rejected, profane world, violence paradoxically accedes to the sphere of the sacred. Hence the violent attraction of limits and taboos. The dreadful apprehension of death, producing the "inner experience" which "places us before a nauseating void."