Straight Shooter Swagger
TV’s Shooter is targeting a new generation, writes David Zurawik.
Bob Lee Swagger just won’t die. Since his 1993 debut in Stephen Hunter’s bestselling thriller Point of Impact, the ex-Marine sniper has been featured in eight more novels and a 2007 film starring Mark Wahlberg.
He is appearing on smaller screens in a 10-hour series, Shooter, starring Ryan Phillippe on Netflix. Produced by Wahlberg and co-starring Omar Epps, it’s a series that speaks with the same kind of cultural resonance to Donald Trump’s America in 2016 that Hunter’s original creation did to Bill Clinton’s.
Swagger is an enduring American creation and the TV version will likely take him to a wider audience and a new generation of viewers.
‘‘There is a built-in audience,’’ Hunter, author and former film critic at The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post says of Swagger. ‘‘(The audience) begins with serious gun people and extends through people who are strong on the Second Amendment, or just strong on a purist interpretation of the Constitution. Those people will be there.’’
They are also loyal to characters who embody their values, he adds.
‘‘He represents the old values, the John Wayne values: a universal set of values. And no matter how cynical, degraded, depraved or ugly culture gets, I believe that urtext lurks in there somewhere, and that many people are going to respond to it.’’
For those not familiar with the word, ‘‘urtext’’ means the original text to which all others are compared. So think of Swagger as a descendent of Wayne, the icon of masculinity in post-World War II America.
Hunter points specifically to the alienated Civil War veteran played by Wayne in director John Ford’s classic 1956 western The Searchers.
‘‘Sometimes, someone will say to me, ‘You know, I hate guns. I want guns banned. But I love your books’,’’ Hunter says. ‘‘That’s because what I’m selling more than the guns is the code. And even if we acknowledge that we’re incapable of living up to it – and I certainly am – we understand it as an ideal.’’
Swagger loves his many guns, there’s no doubt about that. ‘‘Guns change everything. And a bullet is forever,’’ viewers are told in the pilot’s opening.
But the attraction of this character is that he lives by a code of honour and ethical behaviour tied to his history with the Marines, no matter how much the government might mistreat or betray him.
Shooter is steeped in Swagger’s connection to the military even though the former Marine sergeant is back in civilian life after taking a bullet in the hip from an enemy marksman.
He now lives a rural life with his wife and daughter, and in the pilot the little girl begs for a bedtime story by calling out the names of places her dad has served overseas.
‘‘Kandahar,’’ she says excitedly, referencing a combat tale he’s told before about a mission in Afghanistan.
‘‘Oh, honey, Kandahar takes too long,’’ he says.
‘‘Tikrit?’’ she asks, naming a battle in Iraq.
She reads the sideways look he gives her as no.
‘‘OK, fine, Basra,’’ she says, pouting just a little as she names another Iraqi combat site.
‘‘Semper Fi,’’ she says proudly as he starts into the tale, sounding the Marine motto that translates as ‘‘always faithful’’.
‘‘Semper Fi,’’ he says lovingly to her.
The values of family and military honour should speak to a large audience of veterans and families of those who have served.
But the betrayal Swagger suffers as his patriotism is exploited by a former commanding officer (Epps) who is now with the Secret Service should resonate at an even deeper level with every veteran who feels the government is not honouring its side of the bargain in postservice benefits and medical treatment. In that sense, Shooter is very much of the moment for at least one large demographic. Once the betrayal goes down at the end of the pilot and Swagger is on the run, Shooter has the kind of action-adventure energy seen in such long-running TV series as 24 or The Fugitive.
Hunter is not involved in writing or producing the series but says he feels good about the way his work was adapted for the small screen.
‘‘I am very optimistic about it. Watching the two-hour movie version and having talked to the people who did it, I learned that it’s very difficult to cram a 400-page novel into 120 minutes,’’ he says.
The 70-year-old author does have a financial interest in seeing Shooter succeed.
‘‘They have bought another book,’’ he says of the producers.
‘‘They bought the book assuming the possibility that the series will be a hit and they’ll be all set to go.
‘‘If it’s not, I still get a nice little sum that I will spend on beer and ammunition and maybe a week at the beach.’’ – TNS
Shooter is now screening on Netflix.