The opening sequence of The Way of the Gun is essential, a trailer-encapsulation of everything that follows. Parker and Longbaugh lounge on the hood of a Mercedes parked outside a busy night-club. From the line waiting to get in, a young man and his girlfriend begin to holler for them to get off the car, the girl more colourfully and vulgarly. The way Longbaugh responds by casually damaging the car's hood ornament holds a certain inherent menace surpassing any verbal threat, though Parker lets loose plenty of these including the notable remark on how he'll "fuck-start" the young woman's head. As the two protagonists square off against the aggressive crowd, a physical confrontation seems immanent. When Parker initiates assault, punching the young woman directly in the face, it’s a move both shocking and inevitable. This is what you're expecting suggests the film-maker, except to a degree of intensity that proves unsettling and provocative.

This scene is extremely difficult to watch, but at the same time difficult to turn away from and forget. The Way of the Gun reminds us that a world without individuated limits is dangerous. The protagonists experience violence and murder, yet apparently can do nothing to stop it. We watch the film and get closer than we want to a painful and utterly disturbing experience. We are reminded that sensations have violent repercussions. The Way of the Gun emphasises the necessity of an ethics, even as the limits of the self-focused human are questioned/left behind, new limits would seem necessary. Where to stop must remain a valid question even as boundaries of violence and representation are transgressed.

The Way of the Gun is a film of outlandish, unblinking brutality, of redemption through extremes. The connections with Sam Peckinpah who together with Sergio Leone re-invented the screen West as a site of barbarism in the late 1960s and 1970s are strong. Peckinpah invoked a layered and complex mystical communion between the hunter and the deer with vividly visual camera technique. Similarly the dark lyricism of Bataille's theories of humanity's savage nature adds a gloss to the ultra-violence of McQuarrie's film.

The basic narrative is quickly established, while also detailing the characters Parker and Longbaugh. The manner in which they approach the screening interview at the sperm bank, evocative of the early interrogation scenes in the McQuarrie scripted The Usual Suspects (1995) demonstrates their strange bond and unsentimental worldview. When they set their plan in motion, McQuarrie is again able to disrupt audience expectations. During a guns-drawn stand-off between kidnappers and bodyguards one of the guards calmly points his weapon at the pregnant woman's extended stomach, efficiently disregarding the human value of the un-born child he's paid to protect. Then, after a mostly off-screen shootout, the camera accelerates in a parking lot only to depict two cars speeding away. Instead of joining the chase, McQuarrie lingers, forcing the viewer to consider the innocent by-standers felled.

Bataille's interest in the innate connections between the sacred and profane, between waste and luxury, between filth, beauty, eroticism and violence is what he calls "heterology". The idea eviscerates the idea of community, in the traditional sense, and displays crime, aggression and violence within communal structures, defining their importance as values within an "acephalic" universe of energies without direction – a play of forces in excess of bounded states or defined duties. The values that Bataille advances are heterogeneous to "community" even as they provide points of cohesion as sacred, unifying principles. The "acephalic" affirmation of "impossible" community emanates from a Nietzschean conception in which value is transvalued – overcoming the subordination/opposition between good and evil.

Bataille's movement beyond conventional notions of good and evil does not however involve a simple transvaluation. Rather, the notion of value retains a fundamental ambivalence in which good and evil are inseparable, a value apprehended only in anguish.

In On Nietzsche [5] Bataille depicts the sublimity of the crucified Christ whose broken and tormented body occupies a place at the summit of morality. This summit is however heterogeneous. It does not disclose goodness, but an "excess", an "exuberance of forces", "measureless expenditures of energy" and "a violation of the integrity of individual beings"; "it is thus closer to evil than to good."

The distinction between good and evil is further developed in Literature and Evil; [6] good is associated with rules and tied to the function of homogeneity – evil is a value that demands excess, a going "as far as possible." Evil bursts out from the headless summit of morality, a volcanic eruption of energies without limit – the access to an "acephalic universe".

Almost from the outset Parker and Longbaugh's "plan". a mixture of professional precision and slapdash improvisation, begins to disintegrate. The strange stop-start, cat-and-mouse car chase that preludes their getaway results in the bodyguards being arrested, while Parker and Longbaugh, with Robin in tow, resort to hijacking a station wagon.

Introducing Sarno, the weather-beaten criminal of a distinctly different era, bailing the slickly-dressed, calculatedly cool bodyguards, McQuarrie introduces one of the films intriguing sub-texts. There are those such as Sarno who turn to crime because they have no choice and come to accept the consequences that accompany it: others such as Jeffers and Obecks adopt the "lifestyle" and "get-off" on the appropriation of gangster-chic. Setting these opposing mindsets against each other in a dingy interrogation room, McQuarrie plays-out an explosive scene – Caan, Diggs and Katt, wired states emanate from clenched teeth accusatory glances and well-timed cutting remarks.

This thematic line is further re-inforced in a critical scene between Sarno and Longbaugh set during an extended stopover in a remote Mexican motel. Sarno acting as go-between for Chidduck, tries to gain Longbaugh’s sympathies while giving him no illusions about how events will turn out. Something clicks between them, as two "kindred spirits" recognize themselves in each other. Longbaugh bemoans people who "want to be criminals, but don't want to commit crimes." The line summarises this theme articulated throughout the narrative by McQuarrie as he places his sympathies on the side of "old fashioned loyalists" in the face of "new model careerists."

The crucified Christ is the most sublime of all symbols – even at present.
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885-6