Bloodsimple The Band

Why we love guns in the movies

I tried to remember the first time I saw guns in the movies, but I couldn't do it. It's like guns have ALWAYS been there. Guns and shootouts were there as early as Edwin S. Porter's 1905 early classic film, "The Great Train Robbery”— a primitive, though brilliant precursor to the Western genre. The American Western subsequently rationalized the genocide of American Indians by elevating the image of technologically superior white men with guns — which made them such efficient killers — over the image of the so-called savages who used bows and arrows. One might as well ask, what is it exactly that the white defenders of the Empire are so actively defending in so many movies? What requires so much wholesale gun-induced bloodshed, usually of people who are NOT like the heroes in race, character, ethnicity, physical appearance, or political philosophy?

Did this inherent presence of guns in movies influence my attitude to violence? Perhaps - I hate gratuitous violence in film - and movie violence is very often gratuitous. I just don't want to watch it. I realize many others have the opposite reaction. Watching kids with their eyes -- and one assumes their minds -- glued to violent video games, I can only assume they've made the transition to an alternate universe where guns don't really hurt real people, and a gun shot is just an additional shot of adrenalin in the pulse of youthful excitement.

For me, the most memorable movie gun moments don't involve a strutting John Wayne or, for that matter, Gary Cooper poised in some dusty pseudo-Western courtyard with an itchy trigger finger. What impacts me are the moments when guns are most abstract, as in the strange demolition of scorpions that is the prequel of Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch," or in the Coen Brothers' first feature, "Blood Simple," in which gun violence is part of the cartoonish parade -- ironic at every turn and gesture. This applies, too, to the early Quentin Tarantino movies like "Pulp Fiction" and to some of the Hong Kong action films to which it owed its provenance, in which guns become instruments of a balletic fantasy in which they might as well be pencils. The Takeshi Kitano films like "Violent Cop" are in this genre, too, but knowingly or unknowingly, they owe a lot to Sam Peckinpah, who took film to violent extremes, but intelligently, with an underpin to the ironic in a very cynical spin. Peckinpah’s statement was that violence was an innate part of man's nature, and there wasn't much to rationalize about it — like in Hollywood Westerns, in their simplistic fairy tales of good versus evil.

Trailer For Zhang Yimou's 'Blood Simple' Remake, 'A Woman, a Gun ...

Synopsis: Wang is a miserable yet cunning noodle shop owner in a desert town in China. Feeling neglected, Wang’s wife secretly goes out with Li, one of his employees. A timid man, Li reluctantly keeps the gun the landlady bought for ‘killing her husband later’. However, not a single move they make escapes the boss’s notice, and he decides to bribe patrol officer Zhang to kill the illicit couple. It looks like a perfect plan: the affair will come to a cruel but satisfying end… or so he thinks, but the equally wicked Zhang has an agenda of his own that will lead to even more violence…

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