Time for filmmakers to lay down weapons
Will a new generation finally call ‘BS’ on cliché movie gun violence?
At a recent screening of Game Night, a larky comedy starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, the audience cringed when McAdams’ character playfully stuck a handgun in her mouth, unaware it was real and loaded.
Elsewhere, an audience eager to see Black Panther first had to slog through trailers for a new Mission: Impossible movie, a Deadpool sequel and a remake of Death Wish, in which Tom Cruise, Josh Brolin and Bruce Willis can be scene brandishing firearms with varying degrees of macho swagger and ironic snark.
U.S. President Donald Trump recently suggested that violent movies are to blame for violent behaviour. That cause-and-effect argument is too simplistic, even taking into account the hypocrisy of an industry whose biggest stars routinely decry gun violence while the studios they work for valorize it on screen.
It’s the images themselves that are looking increasingly outdated, tone-deaf and stale as audience expectations undergo a profound generational shift.
Just as the grieving Parkland students have surprised all of us by their unwillingness to accept thoughts, prayers and other platitudes as a response to the carnage they witnessed, it’s possible to imagine the generation they so eloquently represent will no longer find guns to be cool, consequence-free or funny.
Game Night is funny. And, unlike too many films, it shows the effects of being shot. At one point, blood sprays promiscuously over a den, soaking keepsakes and a family dog. Later, a character pretends to be shot before suffering an actual excruciating bullet injury. After the initial shock wears off, we see that it’s all chill, with no one we care about getting gravely hurt. The reaction at the screening I attended was hesitant laughter, but mostly quiet gasps of discomfort.
As filmgoers, we’re conditioned to understand gradations of realism from years of watching guns used as props, symbols and signifiers, going back to the beginning of cinema with The Great Train Robbery (1903) to the exploits of Dirty Harry and the theatrics of Quentin Tarantino. The occasional naturalistic crime or war movie aside, firearms are most often cast not as thoughtfully deployed weapons or tools for sustenance, but as shorthand for macho street cred and an easy way to inflate otherwise weak stakes. They’re either treated as toys or as fetishes, but rarely are they taken seriously.
Esthetic assumptions can change, however, as we’ve seen in recent years wherein audiences have demanded more inclusive casts and more enlightened sto- rytelling. It might be optimistic, but not unreasonable, to wonder if the teenagers who have come of age in the post-Sandy Hook era will reject trivialized, “stylish” or worshipful depictions of firearms the same way that their contemporaries reject worldbuilding that is monochromatically white or female characters who can only be weak, passive or one-dimensional.
How much longer before we call a Parkland-inspired “BS” on the use of guns as style points, whether in the form of an overcompensating accessory for Tom Cruise, the stuff of sarcastic posturing in Deadpool 2 or as vectors of vigilante overkill in Death Wish? All the strutting, fretting, locking and loading feels tired to the point of obsolescence: overkill, literally and figuratively.
Violence and bloodshed will always be an element of cinematic language, as long as people are drawn to stories about suffering, survival, life and death. In the hands of a genuine artist, they can lead to potent catharsis and the chance to grapple with our own mortality. But glib, cynical violence no longer sells, and guns are anything but a game.