Only one thing has multiplied like guns in film and that’s studies linking movies to violence. Is the parallel deceptive or just imagination?
HERE’S a tale of two revolvers. One is the Model 29 Smith & Wesson used to clean up the streets of ’70s San Francisco by “Dirty” Harry Callahan, the fictional police inspector played by Clint Eastwood. The other is a Smith & Wesson, too, a smaller Model 27, which the real US politician Robert Budd Dwyer used chillingly to blow his brains out in front of television cameras in 1987.
Start with Eastwood. In Dirty Harry’s most famous scene, our hero mows down two bank robbers with that Model 29 as they flee the scene, then levels it at a third, the camera looking back along its thick, glinting barrel towards its owner’s calm and lightly smirking face. Cue the famous line: “Being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off,” Harry says, “you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
Back to Dwyer. When he was convicted of receiving a bribe in office, the Pennsylvania state treasurer and father of two called a press conference, at which, after making a rambling half-hour statement, he pulled the gun out of a padded envelope, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Footage shows panic break out as the top of Dwyer’s head bursts, and his body drops to the floor.
One story is fictional, the other true. But between them, they tell us a lot about the popularity, status and function of gun violence in cinema today. First, though, let’s acknowledge that guns and films enjoy an unusually tight relationship, one that appears to be tightening by the year.
Statistics from the American Academy of Paediatrics in 2013 showed instances of gun violence in PG13-rated films, the usual blockbuster rating given to the Star Wars and Marvel films – have more than quadrupled since 1985, when the classification was introduced.
In R-rated films (think 15s and 18s here), levels have remained relatively static. But that’s possibly because more than twice as many films fall into that category today as 30 years ago, including plenty with no guns in them at all.
There are certainly some juicy examples of one-upmanship to be pointed at. Take the new John Wick: Chapter 2, scheduled to open in East London on March 17, in which a hitman played by Keanu Reeves, kills 112 people with five firearms (plus a further 16 with knives, rope, vehicles, his bare hands, and a pencil).
In the original John Wick film three years ago, Reeves gunned down a mere 59.
It’s worth noting that the gun violence in the Wick films is what makes them great: it’s crisply photographed, dramatically thrilling and as tightly choreographed as a dance number. Guns suit films, from the rapid build and release of tension produced by the ready-aim-fire structure of a kill, to their distinctive visual appeal: like cars and clothes, they’re expensive, fetish objects made from materials that look good on camera.
Their mere presence instantly raises the stakes of any given confrontation – see the Mexican standoffs in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, or any John Woo film.
The sound design can be exhilarating: think of the surgical cheep of James Bond’s silenced Walther PPK, or the dragon-roar of assault rifles during the bank robbery in Michael Mann’s Heat.
The breadth of aesthetic and dramatic choices made possible by guns make films such as Ben Wheatley’s forthcoming blackly comic crime thriller Free Fire possible. It’s people shooting at each other for 90 minutes – yet Wheatley turns that chaotic-sounding premise into gripping, wittily structured cinema.
So how on earth do fans of all of the above, including me, reconcile seeing guns on film with the more than 200 studies that have shown that screen violence can increase aggression in those who watch them?
The answer is: gingerly – but I think those scenes involving Eastwood and Dwyer get to the heart of it.
Whatever Harry does with a gun, our knowledge that it’s fictional means we process it in a completely different way to images of Dwyer’s suicide, which depict someone actually losing his life in sickening circumstances.
As long as you can tell fact from fiction, your reaction to Dirty Harry can never be the same as your reaction to the Dwyer footage, which I found confusing and sad. It was also horrible in a way that I haven’t been able to shake off. (It’s widely available to watch online, and I strongly suggest you don’t.)
In a brilliant 2009 essay called Screening Violence, the critic and historian Stephen Prince notes that the aggressive attitudes and behaviour stirred up by screen violence, are found in “susceptible individuals” – “generally those who already harbour violent fantasies or who have experienced abusive upbringings”.
Prince has a unique and horrific perspective on this: as a professor at Virginia Tech, he had first-hand experience of the aftermath of the campus shooting in 2007 in which 32 people were shot dead by a student who sent pictures of himself to the news channel NBC, seemingly mimicking specific poses from the Park Chan-wook revenge thriller Oldboy – it’s not a big gun film but a very violent one nonetheless.
Filmmakers, Prince writes, “are drawn to the mechanics of violence, less often to what violence leaves behind in the world after it is over. But in my community, that’s where the meaning and effects of the killer’s rampage were to be found.”
Prince is absolutely correct – yet it’s hard to see how a film could attempt to capture that. Even the very best films about school massacres, such as Elephant and We Need to Talk about Kevin, are more or less obliged out of logistical necessity to focus on those immediately affected.
Quentin Tarantino has been continually upbraided in interviews over the connection between real and movie-world violence, and has always stuck to the same line: that, when it comes to the regular mass shootings in the US, the issues are “obviously” gun control and mental health, not the depiction of firearms on screen.
Obviously his right. Given the choice of a gun-free society and a gun-film-free society, I know which I’d feel safer in. — The Daily Telegraph