The night after the Tucson, Ariz., massacre I saw “The Green Hornet,” a film whose commercial fortunes will live or die on what audiences think about the relative coolness of its guns.
If I had seen the film two nights earlier, all the bullet-riddled action scenes — bloodless enough to get by with a PG-13 rating but numbingly relentless enough to make you wonder for whom the thing was intended — would’ve amounted to just another night at a superhero movie. We’re not meant to take the killing in “The Green Hornet” seriously. In its blase comic attitude, it’s the opposite of “The Dark Knight.”
Yet watching this picture with a growing sense of unease, it struck me: This is one unlucky insect in terms of timing. Like various films (notably the Arnold Schwarzenegger terrorism thriller “Collateral Damage”) released or postponed in the wake of 9/11, “The Green Hornet” has been stung by recent tragic events. Even without Tucson, though, I wonder: Has the constant gunplay we consume weekly, at home on the couch or out at the theater, reached some sort of tipping point, in the same way our divide-and-conquer political rhetoric has grown as deafening as a million hornets buzzing at once?
The film industry has long made hypocrites of even the most left-leaning, gun-control-advocating liberal. When a director as skillful as Michael Mann exploits the kinetic, cinematic possibilities of a shootout, whether modern (“Collateral”) or period (2009’s “Public Enemies”), the results can be exhilarating even to folks with a “One World” bumper sticker on their Prius. This medium is born for blood, speed and mayhem. It is meant to excite, sometimes irresponsibly, usually subrationally. I’m a hypocrite through and through. I believe America’s gun laws lack morality, sense and reason, yet I consume my fair share of gun violence, electronic division.
My son has discovered first-person shooter video games such as “Medal of Honor: Airborne.” Stupidly we allow T-rated (13 and up) games in the house, even though the consumer in question is not yet 11. What have we done? We’re under siege. The sound of fantasy sniper fire coming from the basement floods our tiny house, adding an aura of menace to even the most routine kitchen activities a few feet away.
In a riveting scene from the 1976 Martin Scorsese film “Taxi Driver,” Travis Bickle meets a fast-talking gun salesman, not long before Bickle prepares to assassinate a rising political star for scrambled, messed-up personal reasons. “Isn’t that a little honey?” says the salesman, showing off one of the most popular items.
We are all Travis Bickle to some extent. The movies have made us so. We’re taught to fetishize guns and what they can do, and we learn to love killing games at a very early age.
Scorsese, better than just about anyone, understands the allure and the cost of violence, and the movies’ ability to grab an audience with the threat and the fulfillment of same. The hideousness of what we see in the finale of “Taxi Driver” shakes us up, still. In the final seconds of the film we’re cued that Bickle, exonerated, will likely kill again. Many in the theaters back in 1976 took this accidental vigilante to be a hero. Others regarded him as crazy and vile and lucky. This is the genius of the picture, written by Paul Schrader; it’s as brilliantly unstable, as slyly apolitical, as the demons pulling the strings in Bickle’s brain.
Too many movies, though, settle for too much less. Their mission, depending on the intentions of the script, is simpler: to get us drooling over the weaponry and relishing the imminent carnage. Before long we start feeling like Robert de Niro getting the hard sell from someone who calls a gun a “honey.”
The Tucson tragedy has stoked the nation’s divisive rhetoric rather than cooled it. A week after the massacre, suspect Jared Loughner is either pure evil, unaffected by anything and everything floating in the culture, or a direct result of it all. No one’s staking out a middle ground. There’s no ratings gain, or political gain, to be found in the middle.
The tenor and honesty of our political and cultural discourse matter. How can they not? The images of fetishized weaponry we’re fed at the movies and at home matter. How can they not?
This week, outside the comforting Old West revenge killing at the heart of “True Grit” — a box office uniter, not a divider — it is a little harder to enjoy the usual killing games.
