Pat Garrett is a death-haunted figure throughout the film… Half of Peckinpah’s westerns – including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the most mournful, the most obsessed with age and fading options of them all – are set sometime before 1895, the date when the frontier was declared “closed”, and freedom, until then historically available, was supposedly taken off the shelf. Garrett’s struggle with freedom and integrity, age and change, survival and adaptation, are what make him central to the film, its tragic hero. They are not tied to a sentimental conception of history but to certain psychological themes, to the needs and choices that always confront Peckinpah’s westerners as they age, and find themselves in various times of transition (like the Lincoln County War and the economic and political emergence of New Mexico). Partly this is why Billy seems such a hypothetical embodimentof freedom, and not a particularly viable one, if it only involves the freedom to hang out, shooting the heads off chickens, and means that he must always remain the “Kid”.
Despite his historical particularity, Garrett is, in his death wish, in the death-centredness of his life, not unlike other Peckinpah heroes…
If Garrett never finds a satisfactory role for himself… it is part of a general malaise in the film. Work, it seems, must always be an alienating activity in this budding socioeconomic system. This makes Pat Garrett, if not a Marxist Western, then a truly disenchanted one, in both the 60s counter-culture ambience conferred by the casting of Kristofferson and Bob Dylan, and in Peckinpah’s own Western practice, which one critic has described as post-Wild Bunch, post-Sergio Leone, post-Antonio das Mortes. In this situation, filling the void between the dropout ethos of Billy and his gang and the new economic exploitation, games have a prominent role and a shifting, ambiguous meaning – escape from and rejection of alienated labour, but also, in their competitiveness, a metaphor for the businessmen and the power players.

Richard Combs, A Fabulous Melancholy and a Greater Design: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, “Monthly Film Bulletin”, vol. 56, no. 668, 1 September 1989