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[essenceoffilm]

Being Towards Death in the Highest Gear

While Welles may have eulogized the genre with 1958's self-deprecating Touch of Evil, Lewis christened its rebirth a decade earlier with Gun Crazy, leading the genre's charge into a more chaotic and intensely introspective period. -- Christopher Justice [1] 

Wroom, wroom, bang, bang.

These onomatopoetic words, often associated with the infantile, always seem to come to me when thinking of the right words for discussing 1950′s pulp film-noir. It was François Truffaut’s decision to include such words in the beginning of his review of a film by Samuel Fuller, and it is my decision to do the same in this essay about Gun Crazy (1950) by Joseph H. Lewis, another king of the B. The wonderfully straight-forward title of Lewis’ film -- which is, one might add, the more popular title in comparison to the alternative but equally outrageous Deadly Is the Female -- seems to outline its central themes: guns and craze. In this case, the latter does not only indicate psychic disintegration but also social and existential rapidity, that is, the hurry within man and his society, the being in the highest gear. Departing from the film-noirs which transcend the story by obfuscating narrative and plot, while resembling the film-noirs which transcend the story by simplifying narrative and plot, Gun Crazy never feels difficult or ambiguous due to the craze which reaches from the story to the level of form. It is evident to any viewer of the film that Gun Crazy can be grasped quite quickly as a three-act story, and this fact only emphasizes the depth of its wroom-wroom-bang-bang craze.

It begins with the juvenile yet ominous theft as a young boy (played by the young Russ Tamblyn, the future Twin Peaks star!) breaks the glass of a showcase of a gun store. His crime leads him to court which sends him to a boarding school. The gist of the first act concerns the boy’s return as a young man who has spent some time at the army after getting out of the boarding school. Accompanied by his two childhood friends, whose passion for guns was never as intense but neither was their disapproval of violence, the young man, named Bart, played by John Dall, visits a carnival where he encounters an alluring gunfighter the like he has never seen: mainly because she’s a she. The gunslinger from the opposite sex turns out to be a femme fatale who goes by the androgynous name Laurie, played by Peggy Cummins. The second act begins with the couple’s serene co-existence whose harmony is soon -- abruptly to the spectator, one might add -- interrupted due to Laurie’s ever-growing, demanding taste for the luxurious life, leading the duo eventually to the life of crime as bandits. Their happy life ends with the fatal heist of a meat packing factory whose failure puts a stop to their short-lived success. The third and final act depicts their constant run from the law which culminates in their death in the misty fields of desolation and poignant serenity. 

Due to its obvious allusions to the strongly romanticized account of the criminal life of Bonnie and Clyde, Gun Crazy is easily associated with the great number of films taking inspiration from the legend, including Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974). Yet it seems to me that Lewis’ film is best understood in connection not only to these “public enemy” stories but also to cinematic stories of mad love in general, that is to say, films such as Sjöström’s The Outlaw and His Wife (1918, Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru), Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), and Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge (1991, Les amants du Pont-Neuf), which -- interestingly enough -- all revolve around lovers on the run.

These allusions capture something theme-wise, but the full understanding of the film’s context requires the appreciation of historical context. Gun Crazy is the first of the two films people usually have seen by Lewis, the second being The Big Combo (1955). Both are iconic film-noirs in the sense of developing and exploding archetypes. Both also include some of the most iconic shots associated with the genre: The Big Combo ends with the famous long shot of the female silhouette waiting for the man in fog, and Gun Crazy has the legendary sequence shot of the bank heist filmed entirely from the backseat of the couple’s getaway car. Both films also belong to the same period of the genre. If the classical era of film-noir ended with the final act of the Second World War after which the darker variation of the crime film turned into an even darker vision of a cynical world inhabited by disillusioned losers, representing the beginning of the new post-war era of the genre, then the final stage of film-noir is exemplified by the darkest variations of the dark crime film. It is the time when psychopaths, atom bombs, and hectically increasing hurry became emblematic of social and existential malaise. In this context, Gun Crazy finds its closest partners in crime in Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950), Maté’s D.O.A. (1949), and Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952).

Although this thematic and historical width of Lewis’ Gun Crazy opens the film up from its potential seclusion in eccentricity, it also challenges some genre conventions. According to film scholar Christopher Justice, Lewis’ film abandons narrative and visual conventions in using episodic structure, open spaces, and well-lit, daytime locations -- the antitheses for the iconic claustrophobic chambers of film-noir aesthetics [2]. While the story has the typical film-noir formula of a desperate, clueless man being driven into the lure of a femme fatale, the film does not reduce the woman into an embodiment of treacherousness (despite having the misogynistic alternative title), but rather uncovers the character as an archetype lost in authentic, even if utterly mad, love. Their love is mad because in the eternal symbiosis of Eros and Thanatos, their love engages with the lust for violence. Laurie might love Bart, but to her, love is always destructive and twisted. Nor does the film explain Bart’s desperate cluelessness by referring to any traditional situation of being cornered but rather to his existential strangeness and his desire to find a kindred spirit, a gun-loving soul lost in an unwelcoming world. In Spring Breakers (2012), they’d both be sucking guns.

From its title to its action, Gun Crazy is a film about guns which is why many contemporary spectators might find it hard to resist the temptation of locating Gun Crazy into the on-going debate about gun control which the rest of the world besides America is not having. Resisting the temptation or not, the way I see it, Gun Crazy is best understood when its gun theme is approached less concretely. In the era of sound film, guns seem to belong to the same category with cars and airplanes in that they are emblematic of a new age where transportation, violence, power, and social status are fundamentally changing. These technological inventions connote cultural pessimism, or the feeling that the new inventions have not improved our quality of life but rather have only accelerated our journey toward nothingness. With ironic thanks to modern medicine, we might be living longer, but we are also living faster and hence feeling like we are not living at all. We are “thrill crazy,” as the film’s poster describes itself. Guns carry a similar curse: "The film reminds us that guns are tools, instruments, and by-products of American democracy: they can build and destroy democratic states," as Justice sums up [3].

In addition to potential political meanings (bear in mind that one of the principal writers of Gun Crazy was the famous blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo), critical literature on the gun theme of Gun Crazy is rife with psychoanalytic interpretations [4] which, to my mind, should not be considered exhaustive but rather the other side of the film-noir coin: for the dark genre is always best understood as the bastard child of wartime anguish, postwar disillusionment, existentialism, and psychoanalysis, all of which were cutting through the western world in the 40′s and the 50′s. As a result, the full understanding of any film-noir seems to require a holistic perspective which looks at the films from different viewpoints. To me, these viewpoints are best united when put together under the rubric of the films’ style and narrative. 

In allusion to psychoanalysis, Gun Crazy begins with childhood and the lack of parental guidance. It begins with the young Bart’s obsession for guns which, despite eventually leading him to the life of crime, is not associated with violence. At court, Bart’s big sister a.k.a mother figure tells the story of Bart feeling deep remorse for once killing an innocent bird. Bart’s obsession for guns is different. Bart explains that shooting is the only thing he’s good at, and that upon shooting “it’s like I’m somebody.” Given the obvious phallic metaphors guns lend themselves to, it has become something of a standard interpretation to see Gun Crazy as an oedipal story. After all, Bart does not have a mother nor a father. Therefore, the entrance of Laurie into his life is phenomenal: Justice claims that “[p]sychosocially, she is Bart’s Oedipal mother and first love, but she is also the father figure he must compete with for approval” [5]. This seems most evident in the androgynous appearance of Laurie, who refuses to wear skirts to work and whose male outfit at the carnival is juxtaposed with her womanly figure emphasized by composition and lighting.

In true Lacanian expansion of Freudian ideas, the perennial oedipal complex which torments Bart’s existence manifests itself outside his relationship with Laurie in the society in general. It is clear to the spectator from very early on that the state has failed to help the boy without parents. The police officer in the beginning, the judge at the court, and the military forces all just pass him along. Without Laurie’s appearance, the capitalist carnival would have done the same. Unlike a Dickensian orphan, Bart does not end up in an abusive foster home or to an eccentric life of great expectations, however; rather he becomes a drifter who turns into a menace to society due to his rootlessness. To Justice, “Gun Crazy is fundamentally a visual and narrative rejection of the state, and Bart’s ‘fatherless state’ is a metaphor for America’s profound ineptness” [6]. Bart and Laurie are strangers to the mainstream; hence they abandon the state, they abandon bourgeois work, and they abandon traditional, “rational” love even at the expense of their life.

Both Laurie and Bart have a thirst for shooting. It’s what they’re good at. The gun is the phallos which Bart obsesses over due to the absence of his parents; it is the phallos which Laurie obsesses over due to the absence of male genitalia. They transfer their lack to guns which come to embody the object petit a, the unreachable object of desire which is now within arm’s reach. Laurie the woman is not as good at shooting as Bart the man -- though just by an inch, or by a match -- but she is a much more powerful figure since her obsession is deeply tied to violence. Bart can stop this destructive force in Laurie, the force that is now within him as well, only by shooting her which also leads to his own demise by the bullets of the police. He had to die. The woman, the force, the violent craze had become his raison d’être, the very condition of possibility for his existence.

While it’s all fine and dandy to throw around Freudian and Lacanian ideas when discussing films which really lend themselves to such discourses, I find it necessary to locate the social and psychological interpretations of the film in a wider context of narratology and stylistics which are captured by a phenomenological interpretation of the film [7]. As such, Gun Crazy is an existentialist tale of being which discloses crazy being through a crazy tone. 

The crazy tone of Gun Crazy stems from Lewis’ narrative which is incredibly ardent, fast-paced, and economic. Take the first scene, for example. A boy and a showcase. The boy breaks the glass and takes a gun behind it. As he runs away, he slips in the rain and the stolen gun rolls to the feet of a police officer. Cluelessness and gun mania have been told to us about the protagonist. The next scene is the courtroom scene where we first hear witness accounts from other characters -- and see flashbacks focalized into their point of view (read: Bart’s perspective is conspicuous by its absence). Not until the very end of the scene do we hear what the boy himself has to say (”it’s like I’m somebody”) -- and with no focalized flashbacks. As the judge reads the sentence, Lewis’ camera slowly tracks toward the young Bart’s ear. By this subtle cinematic gesture, Lewis’ stark narrative emphasizes the strangeness of the boy, his state of being an outsider: he can hear, but he is not being heard. The external perspective prevails at the expense of the inner -- his strangeness cannot be understood. And it hurts because it is true. As the camera briefly lingers on Bart’s ear, the judge says from the off-screen space that the boy is to be put to a boarding school “until further notice.” What follows is a match cut from the ear to a telephone which Bart’s sister answers. The match cut, of course, cuts from Bart’s childhood to his adulthood. Nothing of his in-between adolescent years is told to us. Instead, narrative moves forward with a fervent speed. 

In congruence with the rapidity of the tone, there are many single shots in the film which contain a lot of diegetic information that has been packed up economically: a journalist speaks about the robberies to a radio microphone and newspaper headlines fly toward the camera. Narrative economy is also characteristic for the film’s many montage sequences which cover the couple’s honey moon, their first series of heists, the media coverage of the heists, and an ever-growing police chase. Considering the film lasts less than 90 minutes -- that’s a lot of montage sequences. A certain mood of rapidity, hectic, and hurry characterizes these scenes. The mood takes over the whole of the film. A single shot where Lewis uses framing to connote meanings and feelings can be found in the scene where Laurie convinces Bart to do the one last heist of the meat packing company: as Laurie makes her demand, Bart lifts his head momentarily out of the screen into the off-screen space as if his cluelessness reached a peak, a new limit of despair, went beyond it, out of the screen space, and thus anticipated his voyage to non-existence accelerated by bullets. Before the journey, however, his head returns to the screen space to be convinced by Laurie’s embrace. Like the lingering shot of Bart’s ear at the trial, this shot also enhances the feeling of strangeness, being an outsider, being under the power of someone else by framing the character’s face off. 

The ultimate moment of economic narrative is, of course, the film’s bravura shot, the robbery scene which is executed with one long sequence shot. At first glance, this Bazinian shot, which emphasizes duration, depth, and continuity, might seem contradictory to the aesthetics of hurry and craze I have been attributing to Gun Crazy. After all, Lewis’ decision to rely on such stylistic realism might remind one more of Italian neorealism and the quasi-documentary film-noir it inspired (The Naked City, 1948; Call Northside 777, 1948; The Set-Up, 1949) and, as such, the sequence shot might seem to stick out like a sore thumb -- given that there are no other shots like it in the entire film. On the other hand, this famous shot feels so modern that it could have been made convincingly in some nouvelle vague film. Godard’s Bande à part (1964) is the first which comes to mind since it makes homage to many film-noirs, Gun Crazy included. Taking this association into consideration, the shot does not seem to stick out so strongly. In Justice’s words, “Lewis’s contradictory, inconsistent style may be the most distinguishing characteristic of his directorial ethos, which reveals a radical departure from his contemporaries’ predictable technical and thematic approaches to genre, particularly film-noir” [8]. At best, the shot might be representative of Lewis’ aesthetic transgression anticipating the Godardian combination of Bazin and Eisenstein. In the end, maybe the enigma of the shot draws the spectator’s attention to time and movement, the fleeting Heraclitean flux of moments in the stream of which the modern man is about to burst into pieces, exploding in the intensity of a car crash and a gun bang.  

Rapid narrative, which provides diegetic information in a concise, economic fashion, is not necessarily a virtue on its own, but the way Lewis uses it in Gun Crazy certainly is. The crazy narrative reflects the mode of the characters’ being in the world. When Bart is telling Laurie about the fear he felt as he was shooting at the police car chasing them (Bart’s moment of guilt which the spectator associates with the earlier witness accounts of the dead bird and Bart’s subsequent reluctance to shoot a mountain lion because of that), he describes his feelings in a desperate tone: “It’s like everything was in high gear.” When Bart says these words, he is driving a car. He is driving the metaphor of the modern world, the vehicle partner of the gun, the wroom of the bang. It’s the only thing present in the surrounding environment that he can identify with. The car -- like the gun -- is an essential part of his being. The hectic and tormenting hurry which characterizes his existence to its core, but also feels strange and unhomely. He is in a way which he would not want to be, but he can’t help it. His being is in the highest gear toward nothingness. Recalling Godard’s Pierrot le fou -- and Godard was, of course, an admirer of Lewis --, Ferdinand, the protagonist of the film, looks into the mirror of his car and says that he sees nothing but “the face of a man who is driving towards a cliff at 100 km/h.” Ferdinand’s lover, Marianne, comforts him by saying that she sees “a woman who is in love with the man.” Similarly, Laurie tries to comfort Bart by saying that “at least we have each other” which is followed by Bart’s laconic reply: “but the rest is torture.” 

It seems obvious that Bart is talking about the criminal life the couple is having (he would not have made the comment during their honey moon), but the fact of the matter is that this modern life of carelessness, enabled by their gun crazy ways, is the only life they could live. Thus Bart is speaking nothing but experienced truths about his mode of being in general, the being in the highest gear, which is exemplified by Lewis’ cinematic narrative. 

If the rapidity, the cars, and the guns indicate the modern world, the breakdown of the couple’s getaway car in the middle of a forest road, while being chased by the police, and the following departure into the woods where they get lost indicate their final aberration from the modern world, the only life they knew, and the life they could not continue. Their aberration into nature denotes the approaching arrival of death, the burnout of their existential battery. As the day begins to dawn, they wake up on the misty fields where they are to die self-destructively -- in the rapid blink of an eye. There are no more sounds. There is no onomatopoeia for death. 

Notes:

[1] Justice 2012, p. 228. 

[2] Ibid. p. 237.

[3] Ibid. p. 231

[4] See Justice 2012; see also Lee 2012.

[5] Justice 2012, p. 229.

[6] Ibid. p. 233.

[7] What often lacks in political and psychoanalytic interpretations of films is an attentive discussion on style and narrative. Though this is hardly the case in every situation, I find it better to enrich those interpretations with a wider context of a phenomenological approach which appreciates the relations between the film’s topic, theme, narrative, and style. 

[8] Justice 2012, 225. 

References:

Justice, Christopher. 2012. "Rejecting Everything: Gun Crazy and the Radical Noir of Joseph H. Lewis". In Gary D. Rhodes (ed.) The Films of Joseph H. Lewis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, p. 223-241.

Lee, Michael. 2012. “Music, Masculinity, and Masochism in Gun Crazy”. In Gary D. Rhodes (ed.) The Films of Joseph H. Lewis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, p. 242-254.