Hollywood hates guns… they hate them a lot… and they can’t wait to tell you all about it.
They hate them so much that it may be time for us to add to that tried and true list of life’s inevitabilities… as sure as we will all die someday, and as certain as the tax man cometh every April 15th, the next time there is a shooting in America, every celebrity in Hollywood will stumble over each other like survivors escaping a burning plane in a mad dash to be the first to tweet out “screw your thoughts and prayers!!!” or that other political classic “BAN GUNS NOW!!!”
But here’s the dirty little secret behind all that outrage… Hollywood needs guns… Hollywood was built on guns… if it weren’t for guns, Hollywood would be in an economic spiral even more dire than the one it currently finds itself in.
And indeed you get the sense that guilt is what’s really behind a lot of Hollywood’s anti-gun militancy. By their own rules, every single Hollywood studio, as well as the vast majority of its craftsmen (writers, directors and actors) has, to use the language of the anti-gun Left… “blood on their hands.”
America’s first movie palaces were filled with movies about cowboys, gangsters and cops and robbers… stories in which everyone carried a gun and the shootouts and mayhem were included in the price of admission. Not much has changed in the roughly hundred years since. Today’s Hollywood is just as dependent on filmed depictions of guns and shootouts for its financial health as it was back in the days of the black-and-white western. We have only to look at their ubiquitous marketing campaigns to see the truth in this.
To use but a single example from our current entertainment marketing environment… I have no idea what Amazon’s new series CITADEL is about, but they sure managaed to get guns into the hands of every character on those billboard ads, didn’t they?
I first started thinking about this essay a few months ago when I was writing about the strange return of the vinyl LP. In that essay I included a shot of the movie poster for STAKEOUT, a fantastic and underrated 80’s action comedy.
As I looked at the poster, I was struck by something. On the poster we see Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez hiding underneath a feminine bed as, above them, a sexy pair of female legs is beginning the process of undressing. But look at Richard Dreyfuss’ left hand. There’s a gun there. One that looks like it was painted in after the fact, in a very unnatural way. It’s almost as if the marketing department took one look at the poster and said “it’s good, but we worry that people aren’t going to realize that it’s an action movie… can you add a gun?”
They need you to know that there are lots of guns in their movies or, they worry, you won’t pay to see them.
Curiously though, to hear the anti-gun Left tell the story, it’s not the Hollywood marketing machine that is to blame for the violence on America’s streets at all. Rather, it is the fault of the gun manufacturers. It is a popular refrain of the anti-gun Left that gun manufacturers must be censored, regulated and sued out of existence because, “they are marketing guns to kids.”
It’s their fault, you see.
This is demonstrably false. I’m a gun enthusiast… a “gun nut” you might even say… But I would be hard pressed to tell you the last time I saw an actual advertisement for a gun… anywhere. They don’t run on TV, the Internet or cable news. They’re not on social media. Nor do they advertise on any of the podcasts I listen to. They do appear in magazines targeted at gun owners, but I doubt that your average American teen has a copy of “American Rifleman” hidden under their bed where the Playboy used to be, before they started putting men on the cover. And Sean Hannity does occassionally read a radio ad for Henry Repeating Arms, but again, kids aren’t listening to Hannity. And in any case, no one is talking about banning lever action rifles… at least not yet.
But let’s stipulate, in the interests of a good faith debate, that guns are being marketed to kids. Before we can decide on a regulatory policy to counteract this problem, we must first answer a couple of questions. Where is this marketing actually happening and who is responsible?
Well…
Like just about everyone else in America I went to see THE MATRIX in a movie theater back in 1999. I sat in front of a young boy, maybe 12 or 13. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) jumps into the body of an anonymous rooftop soldier, only to find that Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) is standing behind him with a gun to his head. “Dodge this” she says, before executing him with a single shot to the head, filmed in glorious slow motion.
From behind me, I heard that kid say “coooooool.”
He was right of course, it was indeed “cool.” But it also raises a question. It is likely that in the two decades since THE MATRIX premeired, that boy never saw a single advertisement produced by a gun manufacturer.
Now ask yourself… to whom was THE MATRIX marketed, if not teenaged kids?
All of which is to say that Hollywood is now, and has been for decades, the best advertising partner that the gun industry could ever hope to find. The four movies of the JOHN WICK franchise alone are some of the greatest ads for guns I’ve ever seen, perhaps more effective than all the ads that have ever been produced by Glock, Remington Arms, Sig Sauer and Springfield Armory combined.
And they know it, too… which is where all that guilt comes in. Again, by Hollywood’s own standards, they have a lot to answer for.
Actor Tim Robbins is famously a political Progressive. He’s also a pacifist who has vocally opposed the use of American military power abroad and who is very anti-gun. And yet the first time any of us saw Tim Robbins in a Hollywood studio movie, he was sitting in the back seat of Tom Cruise’s F-14 in the original TOP GUN, a movie that did more to boost military recruitment than any other movie ever made.
In 1991 Lawrence Kasdan wrote and directed a movie called GRAND CANYON. It’s an ensemble drama for adults, of a kind Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and features Steve Martin as a movie producer who has gotten rich and powerful making violent action movies. But after experiencing real life violence on the streets of LA, he has a crisis of conscience and vows to stop perpetuating the cycle by making violent movies.
Supposedly this character was based on Producer Joel Silver, but it’s tempting to wonder if Kasdan (and others in Hollywood) identify with this character’s moral journey. After all, Kasdan wrote RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which contains a scene that is perhaps the greatest pure distilation of the old saying that “god made men, but Samuel Colt made them equal” you can find on film.
Kasdan himself also wrote the high-body-count cowboy action movie SILVERADO as well as THE BODYGUARD, a movie in which Kevin Costner is a very very good shot.
Regardless, to the extent that anyone in Hollywood identifies with Steve Martin’s action movie producer with a guilty conscience, I would note that very few of them have disavowed their previous movies. Let’s face it, a guilty conscience is one thing, but a man’s gotta eat… and bone-in Wagyu ribeye ain’t easy to come by… especially in this economy.
Talk, on the other hand, is still cheap.
Sometimes you see this guilt manifest within the movies themselves, in real time.
By the time Warner Bros greenlit a second sequel, LETHAL WEAPON was already a billion dollar franchise with a massive body count. And so, like a Medieval Lord buying indulgences, the villain plot of LETHAL WEAPON 3 had to be an anti-gun screed featuring a group of amoral gun runners selling automatic weapons to Los Angeles gangs. These weapons were loaded, hilariously, with “cop killer” bullets which can apparently penatrate the shovel of a bulldozer, but which can easily be stopped by wearing two bullet-proof vests simultaneously, whenever the script requires it.
The armorer on that movie must’ve strained his eyes rolling them.
Obviously there is no such thing as “cop killer” pistol rounds which can penetrate a bulldozer shovel, nor is there such a thing as an invisible porcelain gun called a Glock 7…
But no matter…
It’s only a movie, as they say…
Part of the problem with the debate over guns in America is that the gun control side doesn’t actually know very much about guns. It’s pretty tough to argue about gun control with people who don’t know the basics about how guns and ammunition function. And a lot of the blame for this ignorance has to be laid at the feet of action movie subplots like the Glock 7 from DIE HARD 2 and Sergeant Murtaugh’s “cop killer” rounds.
To some extent, these misunderstandings are a feature rather than a bug. The Anti-Gun movement is highly dependent on low info voters who can be made to believe that America’s streets are awash in exotic weaponry of a kind which no civilian should be allowed to possess… that the AR-15 is some kind of magical “weapon of war” that is infinitely more dangerous than any other kind of semi-automatic rifle. How this could be true is never explained, but it’s not hard to see how stories about magical “cop killer” bullets and mysterious “porcelain Glocks” that can be smuggled onto airplanes at will help to accomplish that mission.
But these mythologies serve another function as well. They offer relief for any cognitive dissonance the audience may be feeling as their on-screen heroes respond to mayhem with even more mayhem. It’s OK to cheer when Martin Riggs puts a couple dozen fully-automatic rounds into the villain’s chest, you see, because the villain is really bad… he was smuggling “cop killer bullets” to kids… so cheer away, young American moviegoer, cheer away… but don’t you even think about buying your very own gun so you can shoot the bad guys just like your heroes.
This pattern of sin followed by indulgence has played out so often and so regularly in Hollywood that it has led to some truly bizarre unintended consequences.
When allegations of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes first began to surface and he saw his media empire begin to crumble around him, his first thought was that he could oil his way out of trouble by promising to spend his life and fortune going after the NRA. It didn’t work, but that’s not the same thing as saying it wasn’t a good idea. By its own calculus, Hollywood has a lot to answer for as gun violence continues to plague our streets, and the idea that even Harvery Weinstein could buy enough gun control indulgences to dodge Ronan Farrow’s well-aimed bullet was not as far-fetched as we would all like to believe.
Now, please do not misunderstand me… I have zero interest in a Hollywod product from which all the gunfights have been excised. I grew up on a steady diet of DIE HARD, PREDATOR, RAMBO, and INDIANA JONES, and those are the movies to which I’ve returned again and again as an adult. I am simply trying to force Hollywood to live by the same standards they wish to impose on the rest of us… or else shut up about it.
There’s a lot of anxiety in Hollywood right now. The industry’s biggest franchises are all on the ropes, and no one seems to know how to save them. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but a little less time spent worrying about what law-abiding citizens are doing with their guns, and a lot more time spent figuring out how to make movies great again, seems like a fine place to start. Especially since, by Hollywood’s own rules, the industry is as responsible for gun violence as anyone else on Earth.
There’s an old business principle eroneously attributed to movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn that Hollywood desperatetly needs to relearn.
“If you want to send a message… use Western Union.”
Well said. I've thought about this often. Someone somewhere is writing a similar piece about video games. Our love for violence and guns is puzzling, and there are lots of pieces to the puzzle. Thanks for the article. You're up by 1 sub.