CRITICAL MASS

Film, TV gun fantasies a big yawn

Top British agent James Bond, 007, (Sean Connery) has a licence to kill in From Russia With Love.
Top British agent James Bond, 007, (Sean Connery) has a licence to kill in From Russia With Love.

When I was a kid there were guns all around.

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The Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22 is a semiautomatic rifle in an AR-15 style package.

I remember them, the rifles propped in closets, the nickel-ed .38s in my father's (unlocked) desk drawer. There were shotguns in cabinets. I've heard some people say they never thought about them, that they were just part of the landscape. I'm not sure I entirely believe that, I think we were fascinated by them. (I never played with the guns in my house -- I was too afraid of my parents to do that. But I would pull open the drawer or slide back the closet door to stare at them sometimes.)

We saw them everywhere but especially on TV, little black silhouettes in the hands of the cowboys and the soldiers. What are those old statistics? Someone said that by the age of 18 the average American kid has witnessed 20,000 murders on TV, most by handguns. And someone else says the brain doesn't really distinguish between what is real and what is make-believe. I don't know if that's true; I hope it's not. But as a child I saw lots of people get pretend shot and pretend die.

I knew what some of the guns meant. Chuck Connors as The Rifleman had a rifle instead of a six-shooter because he was not a gunfighter, just an ordinary, decent man who stood up to the bad guys. Nazis had those scientific, high-fashion Lugers. The blunt, blocky lines of a Browning or Colt sidearm signified American decency and competence. By the time I was 10 or so, I was an expert in the semiotics of handguns.

That's why Dirty Harry's gun confounded me.

It was a Smith & Wesson Model 29 with a 6½-inch barrel. In 1971's Dirty Harry, Harry -- Clint Eastwood -- pulls it on a wounded bank robber (played by Albert Popwell, who wasn't listed in the film's credits but who got to act alongside Eastwood in all the Dirty Harry films) as he delivers his most memorable soliloquy:

"I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

Now, at the time I didn't know anything about the Model 29, other than it looked odd in the hands of a San Francisco police detective. It was a very big gun, not the sort of thing one would imagine fitting comfortably in a detective's shoulder holster. And, though at the time it really was the most powerful production handgun in the world, it wasn't a very popular model.

In fact, it was such a slow seller that the gun manufacturer had ceased production of the model. This meant that the production designers weren't able to come up with the precise model the script called for -- which was a Model 29 with a less risible 4-inch barrel (like the one Lee Marvin used in 1967's Point Blank) -- and had to settle for the 6½-inch version. (According to some sources, Smith & Wesson built, at Eastwood's request, a version of the gun with an 8-inch barrel as well. Apparently this was seen as overkill.)

And its appearance in Dirty Harry made the Model 29 an iconic gun -- it immediately went back into production, where it remains to this day. (Before the factory started turning out new models, used Model 29s tripled in price.)

All this despite some rather obvious drawbacks to the weapon. As mentioned, it's heavy. And its fabled power could be a drawback in an urban tactical situation where a shooter might be concerned about "overpenetration." Plus its recoil is so powerful that it takes most shooters a moment to gather themselves after every shot. In some situations, that's a terrible disadvantage. (Unsurprisingly, Eastwood never fired a live round from the gun on camera, but he was conscientious enough to test-fire the gun on a shooting range so he could experience and mimic the weapon's kick. Every time his fires his weapon in the film, he mimes the recoil.)

Actors don't always bother with real world nuances -- the idea is to make the violence seamless and stylish. For instance, the reason actors sometimes hold their handguns sideways in the movies is so that it's easy to get both their face and the weapon in a close-up shot. And the reason some police officers do it is because they've seen it on TV and the movies. There's a permeable membrane between life and art that allows two-way traffic.

...

Because of Dirty Harry, who last appeared in a movie in 1988, it's not hard to find an S&W Model 29 today -- although you could spend as much as $2,000 for one. (Their suggested retail price in 1970 was $194.)

Guns aren't like cars; they hold their value. They don't get cosmetic makeovers every few seasons -- a good design can stay in production for more than 100 years. The pistols I remember from my youth still show up in movies and TV shows. Though there are always innovations -- a curtain rod manufacturer named Gaston Glock introduced a polymer-framed pistol in 1981 -- most handguns look about the same as they did in the 1940s. They seem eternal.

It is impossible to imagine America without them. Guns civilized the prior tenants, herded them into containment. Made clear the way for all the stories, the Winchester '73s, the Audie Murphys, the Dirty Harrys and the James Bonds, who, despite his Britishness, functions as an aspiration model for a lot of American boys. (And, like an American, Bond had licence to bear arms -- in his case, an exotic Walther PPK.)

Yet having seen 20,000 or more murders on TV and in the movies, I can say that movie gunplay bores me these days. It feels obligatory and exhausted -- I understand it is a minority opinion but the best parts of the superhero movies are when they're just sitting around talking about their superhero problems. I'm not so impressed by the bang-bang anymore, though admittedly I've seen a lot of fake murders in the movies.

Maybe it means something that I've also seen a few in real life.

...

You don't forget your first murder.

Mine was around this time of year, in 1982, and unlike most of the murders I'd bump up against over the next decade, it wasn't committed with a handgun.

I was the sports editor for the Jennings Daily News, but it was a small newspaper and I was in the office that night when it came across the police scanner. Something bad had happened at a house a couple of blocks from the office -- across the literal tracks that divided the little Louisiana town. I grabbed my Nikon F-1 and a notebook, cut through an alley and walked briskly for a couple of blocks to a shotgun house where a couple of police cruisers had pulled up in the lawn.

Since there was no one to stop me, I walked up on the front porch and through the open door. I found myself standing between two uniformed officers I knew from Sunday afternoon basketball games. They were my age, maybe a year older. I followed their eyes down to the floor where a girl -- 12 years old, I'd learn in a minute -- was stretched lifeless on the floor. Her open eyes looked hard as marbles, her seeming intact body had the eerie air of a well kept yet vacant house. Somehow you could just tell that no one was home.

In the kitchen, a detective was sitting across the table from the suspect -- the victim's 10-year-old sister -- he was softly interviewing. She was crying quietly but answering his questions. I started writing things down, noting the print of Warner Sallman's Head of Christ and how warm the house felt, like it itself was alive.

I stood there with the cops for what felt like a long time before someone thought to tell me to leave. I went out and stood waiting in the yard, which had been cordoned off with yellow tape. Neighbors gasped and pointed from the other side, they asked me questions I answered with a shake of my head. Finally the detective came out, and we stood under a tree, and he told me what had happened. The sisters were home alone, they had an argument. The younger one felt angry and took the scissors from her grandmother's sewing basket. She plunged it downward in the base of her sister's neck.

She was so sorry.

She just wanted to change the channel.

...

Sometimes it seems to me that the point of art is to awaken latent ideas within ourselves. Art irritates as much as it soothes, it forces us to consider what we otherwise accept noncritically. I do not know if watching violent movies and television shows hurts us in any significant way but I do suspect that everything we consume somehow becomes part of us.

Each of us is liable to respond to a work of art in our own unique way, based on what we have experienced and what we believe. I wouldn't deny any artist the right to make use of whatever ideas, whatever conceits, he deems necessary to his self-expression. The world is rife with violence and weaponry and sometimes the dying dance in ways that -- if we are able to divorce ourselves from any empathy -- might seem beautiful or at least interesting to watch.

But in an America full of guns, I have to confess I'm exhausted by the trope.

I'm tired of revenge fantasies, of the careful photography designed to fetishize the appliances of death. We're stunted by the beauty of our weapons. And I really want to change the channel.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Style on 06/26/2016

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