Violent Screen by Stephen Hunter

Author:Stephen Hunter [Stephen Hunter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Published: 2012-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

Article:

GUNS ARE GOLD ON TODAY’S SILVER SCREEN

June 8, 1986

“The two most successful creations of American movies,” wrote the film critic Robert Warshow in 1954, “are the gangster and the westerner: men with guns.” That is no longer true. Today, the equation, although it uses the same components, has been rearranged subtly: the most successful creations of American movies are guns with men.

Close attention to the gun as physical object is certainly one of the hallmarks of the modern action film, and it distinguishes the genre movies of the 1980s from the movies that came before. As never before in film history, directors are featuring guns, gun lore, gun love and even gun worship as the centerpiece in a certain kind of male-oriented action-adventure film.

Currently, two “gun movies” are blazing away on the screen. The first is Sylvester Stallone’s “Cobra,” which features numb performances by the actors and brilliant performances by a Finnish Jati-matic 9mm submachine gun with a laser sighting system, and by a .45 automatic with special etched ivory handgrips. Each displays considerably more personality than the man who carries it. The second is the just-opened “Raw Deal,” with Arnold Schwarzenegger as an unfrocked FBI agent who has taken on the Chicago Mob. Schwarzenegger wears designer clothes and the latest in firepower, chiefly the Heckler & Koch 9mm MP-5 machine pistol, which lately has supplanted the Uzi and Ingram MAC-10 as weapon of choice for Hollywood spray shooters, as well as the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum.

Other recent films that were principally built around the icongraphic usage of firearms have included “The Terminator,” probably the best gun movie ever made, and “Commando,” both Schwarzenegger vehicles; the two Rambo films, with Stallone, built around the American M-60 light machine gun; the Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” films, with their ever-present Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum; the “Death Wish” films, particularly the most recent, in which Charles Bronson sported a .44 Magnum Widely automatic; and several of the Chuck Norris films, which increasingly feature firearms over karate, such as “Invasion U.S.A.” and “Delta Force.”

By contrast, it’s interesting to watch a filmmaker with no interest in firearms whose imagination is not provoked by them. In “Hannah and Her Sisters,” Woody Allen features himself as a neurotic who, at one point, attempts suicide with a firearm. To Allen, the gun is meaningless, except as it extends the story: He features no close-ups of it and never even places it at the center of his frame.

On the other hand, a firearms fetish can be deployed in such a way that it actually subverts the narrative thrust of the movie. Such is the case in the high lunacy of “Cobra.” There’s a sequence in which Stallone’s character, police Lt. Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, is on the run with a model (Brigitte Nielsen), pursued by a vaguely defined gang of psychotic killers. Hiding in a motel room, Cobra opens a case he has been carrying and lovingly assembles his submachine gun. The camera studies this process to such

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