Jack Reacher, The Last Stand, Parker, A Good Day to Die Hard, Red 2, Gangster Squad, Olympus Has Fallen, and Bullet to the Head.
Take a closer look at the poster images for almost all of these films. Notice something? What do you see but an endless armada of oiled, gleaming weapons, Glocks, Colts, and machine guns cradled at crotch level, just waiting to leap into blazing life. All those guns, cocked and ready to go. The image for The Last Stand is particularly straightforward in its depiction of a machine gun erupting from the groin of Arnold Schwarzenegger. No penises allowed in Hollywood films, but you can have as many guns as you like. When is a cigar not a cigar? When it's a warm gun instead.
Sad old bad guys
It is curious, or not, that a great many of these films feature men of a certain age -- Willis, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, et al. Actors, and I use the term generously, who came of age in the great '80s action era, shooting shit up for fun back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Those same dinosaurs are still making movies. They're older, creased and baggy, missing hair and relevance, but determined to prove that they've still got the shit. Impotence be gone! In the case of The Last Stand, which is a movie that isn't as much watched as endured, all the action tropes of old are trotted out. The gang's all here -- a ruthless criminal mastermind, an aging sheriff, an ambitious young whippersnapper, a gorgeous babe, as well as reams of hapless cops and tatted up bad dudes.
The real stars of the show aren't the humans so much -- they exist to get blown into interesting chunks -- but the guns. Oh, the guns... Really, there wouldn't be much happening without them. The plot of the film primarily exists as an excuse for a series of extended firefights. In quick summation, the plot is just this: the FBI are preparing to transport a Mexican cartel leader by the name of Gabriel Cortez, a very bad hombre, as entitled as a dauphin and just as pouty. Things go terribly wrong, and the drug lord escapes in a souped-up corvette that can drive faster than a jet! Woo woo! The FBI give bungled chase, but like any arm of the American government they are basically boobs with badges. It's up to the little guy to stand up and fight the good fight.
Meanwhile, in a sleepy little border town by the name of Sommerton Junction, Sheriff Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) just wants to while away his twilight years in peace and dusty tranquility. He has done his time in the big bad city and seen enough bloodshed for any one human. But badness is coming at 200 miles per hour towards Sommerton, and the sheriff must rally his raggedy-ass troops and prepare for battle. It's hard to care very much about the people involved, whether it's the local gun nut played as all teeth and eyeballs by Johnny Knoxville, or Rodrigo Santoro, who plays Martinez the army veteran, who I immediately forgot about, such is his profound state of blandness. Even poor old Harry Dean Stanton shows up and is blown away before you can say "It's a long way from Paris, Texas." The real star of the show is a 1930s Vickers Machine gun, or as it is more colloquially referred to, "Crazy little bitch Nazi killer."
If you got rid of the people entirely and just made a film starring guns and cars, it would be just as well. The camera eschews human feeling for long, loving shots of the Corvette, a snarling beast of a car that streaks through the night like a panther on meth. So too guns are given lingering, loving close-ups, and they hammer bullets into meaty bad guys who spurt bloody mist and blow up. Beside such sleek objects, the humans look sad indeed. The final showdown takes place between a big red Camaro and the Corvette, which slam their metal bodies together in a homoerotic display that would shame even the most hardcore porn stars. But it all ends with a bang and whimper. When the humans are forced from their cars to do battle with just their stringy bodies, you can't help but feel a little disappointed. All the roaring thunder is gone, and it's just two men flailing and groaning as they wrestle each other to the ground and bonk their heads a little.
The film itself doesn't even warrant much vitriol. It made me feel sad more than anything, in the same way that Detroit's tattered buildings and boarded up houses do. It seems like a relic of a bygone empire, in the same way that old Schwarzenegger is a husk of his former bulging self, with his old man stiffness and sticky clumps of hair. If you showed me his sad old penis, I might burst into tears.
Guns off screen
Back in the real world where guns are a genuine American tragedy, another show is taking place. The Senate hearings taking place south of the border are more dramatic than anything that Hollywood rolls out, from the breathy depiction of women as fragile maidens needing to protect their virtue with the help of a trusty AR-15 to the seemingly endless back and forth about what the Second Amendment really means.
Really, you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. The notion that an armed guard in every U.S. classroom is a good idea boggles the mind. A society of armed teachers, armed librarians, guns at the movie theatre and at the grocery stores seem like a Schwarzenegger film run amok. In the great gun debate, cinematic violence is regularly ganged into the discussion. Arguments have erupted like firefights, with various loudmouths opining on and on. (Watch Tarantino lose his shit and begin to foam at the mouth, contending that movie violence has no correlation to real violence.) While most Western countries, Canada included, watch the same films that the Americans do, we are less apt to run out and shoot up the place simply because we can't get our hands on weapons that easily. Or so the ease-of-access argument goes. It makes a certain kind of sense, but guns have long been around and the mass shooting are a more recent phenomena. So what gives?
Let's go back to our old penis argument for a moment. When you picture NRA types, what image comes to mind but old Charlton Heston, clutching a rifle in his now, cold dead hand, the ultimate old NRA kook. If you expand the notion that guns are, for some, at least a symbol of manhood, then taking away guns is catamount to a national castration. At least this might explain some of the hysteria attached to the gun debate in the U.S. Lots of people have attempted to draw a connection between the decline of male power and the rise of mass shootings, but there aren't many immediate, nor simple answers.
If you look at it in purely cinematic terms, the shoot out is a celebration of the lizard brain, the reactive, vengeful thing coiled at the base of your skull, a remaindered section of an older, rougher era. Much like the Second Amendment itself. As so many films make explicitly clear, guns are easy to use, ubiquitous and they don't need to learn any lines since it's always the same. "Bang, Bang, Bang." When you run out of plot, or ideas, or script, just pull out your gun and start shooting. It's a device that is often insanely boring, formulaic, tiresome, take your pick of words. The worn-out quality of so many of these action films (witness the dismal profits raked in by The Last Stand) ensures them a quick death at the box office. But still they keep coming, tumbling off the assembly line, like so many horrible bloody widgets.
The larger question is whether the corroding effect of near-constant violence does long-term damage. I leave it to my beloved Anthony Lane to sum it up a recent New Yorker essay. Writes the fine Lane: "What does it mean for the majority of us, the nonviolent millions, that, year after year, we should observe such a rising flood of savage fictional acts that, after a while, we scarcely notice or mind? And is there anything that a filmmaker could or should do to stem the flow?"
Damn good question.
The plasticity of the human brain is such that it adapts almost before one has time to realize things have changed. If we really wanted to, we could get rid of guns in movies. And in real life, it wouldn't be that difficult. We could banish them as completely as we have cigarettes. But in the meantime, the adage seems to be "Shoot 'em, if you got 'em."
Original Article
Source: thetyee.ca
Author: Dorothy Woodend
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