For Bataille, it is "the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror" that blows identity apart, unleashes experience from the prison of anguish and establishes continuity with alterity: communication.

Once Parker and Longbaugh cross the Mexican border McQuarrie's film-making becomes more ritualistic and melodramatic. The main influence in these sequences is Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) in which a down-and-out American pianist in Mexico – Peckinpah's favoured landscape, symbolising freedom and an acceptance of death – paid to hunt down the seducer of a wealthy farmer's daughter, slowly and painfully rediscovers both his self respect and his purpose in life.

As the tensions escalate and bullets begin to fly, Robin undergoes a Caesarean section. In a ghoulishly comic sequence her helpless doctor performs the procedure as people charge in and out of the room and bodies pile up. When Sarno's hastily assembled group of gunmen finally arrive with the ransom money Parker and Longbaugh seem closer than ever to their reward. However, in a continuation of the generational distinction theme, they must now fight a band of men they would resemble were they to live long enough.

The climatic sequence stretches out disconcertingly – Parker and Longbaugh are no longer fighting for the money or even for the girl and her new born child, but simply for the capacity to fight again another day. Instead of the stylized and romantic freeze-frames of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at their moment of "glory" McQuarrie graphically allows bullets to hit bodies and glass to pierce skin. When the camera finally leaves Parker and Longbaugh, in a crane shot that mirrors the ending of the opening parking-lot fight, they are blooded and broken. Will they live, have they fought in vain? McQuarrie artfully cuts back to Chidduck's mansion for an ending that is apparently as cartoon/trash-like as the opening sequence, but which ultimately reveals a deeper significance.

To interrogate the highest, sacred extremes of culture also invokes, without ever even seeming to turn one's head in an opposite direction, an encounter with that which is most accessible, an uncharted wilderness associated with the most base or profane of elements. The two are joined in the monstrous figure of "base materialism" [8] – "The severed ass’s head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism's most violent manifestations." Bataille's critique of idealism and materialism in the ontological and dialectical senses, discloses another force beyond the dualities that structure human systems of thought. It turns to the Gnostic conception of matter "as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not simply be the absence of light, but the monstrous "archontes" revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action)." This is neither presence nor absence, but something monstrous in excess of opposition; neither good nor evil, but something truly, creatively evil of the kind manifested by Christ's suffering and the evil at the centre of communication. The matter which is active, dark and evil, formless and determining all modes of systematic knowledge, constitutes the extreme limit which confounds idealism and materialism.

Base matter introduces something Other, below the foundations and in excess of the idealist images of materialist knowledge. Not a "thing" in the sense of the object-world, base matter affects subjects with an alien, insubordination and disconnecting force, an exuberant, irrepressible expenditure of energy. Base matter articulating the unknown point of dissipation for philosophical/material/psychological systems, offers itself as one term among many in the attempt to address "heterology". Heterology animates the violence and agitation of sacred and profane excesses but not to integrate usefully within a system concerned with what is "resolutely placed outside the reach of scientific knowledge", it stands opposed to the appropriations of science and philosophy. The aim is neither to limit nor assimilate the character of heterogeneous elements, not to return to other systems or stasis, but to follow the disequilibrium of energies towards an expression of "the urges that today require worldwide society's bloody Revolution." [9]

In taking The Way of the Gun to new extremes, McQuarrie scrambles the "desert-noir" genre exposing the delicate arcane structure that has informed its foundation. By exploding the style from the inside, McQuarrie re-engages with the deeper values obscured beneath the surface of gangster-chic, signalling a new direction for the crime-film genre.

The real material world Bataille writes, "rejects the affirmation of intimate life, whose measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things, an affirmation that is fully revealed only in death." Death "discloses the imposture of reality", the reality of systems/rules, and reveals the heterogeneous sacred part. [10]

What is sacred undoubtedly corresponds to the object of horror…..a fetid, sticky object without boundaries, which teems with life and yet is the sign of death. It is nature at the point where its effervescence closely joins life and death, where it is death gorging life with decomposed substance.
~~ George Bataille [11]

Through the ectopia of violence McQuarrie induces the characters Parker and Longbaugh towards a "sovereign state". In Bataille’s sense sovereignty is essentially the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have us respect, in a general way to ensure the peaceful life of individuals. Killing is not the only way to regain sovereign life but sovereignty is always linked to a denial of the sentiments death controls. Sovereignty requires the strength to violate the prohibition against killing. It calls for the risk of death.

The sovereign is he who is, as if death were not. Indeed, he is the one who doesn’t die, for he dies only to be reborn. He is not a man in the individual sense of the word, but rather a god; he is essentially the embodiment of the one he is but is not.
~~ George Bataille [12]

In the relation of cinema to vision one can trace a common theme in Bataille's writings. The submission of vision to a "solar" trajectory that escapes it, dashing representational discourse upon a darkness that is inextricable from its own historical aspiration. Every history is a story, which does not mean that the story escapes history, or is anything other than history consummating itself in a blindness which occupies the place of its proper representation.