Men and Guns, Part One: "Shane"
In contemporary America we live with a fact so bizarre, so monstrous, so perplexing and enraging and incomprehensible that it seems to have annihilated our ability to face it. As a result, many people in this country have decided to accept this fact as the way things are.
This fact is that with astonishing frequency people murder each other with guns. It's an inescapable fact, but one that the mind shies away from; it's comprised of occurrences that should be inconceivable but are now, in this country at least, edging towards the banal. Teenagers bring guns to school and kill their peers. People fire machine guns from hotel rooms down into a crowd of concert-goers. They walk into nightclubs and open fire. They drive by parties attended by people they don't like and spray them with bullets. Thirteen-year-olds buy gun parts online and assemble them, only to accidentally kill their fourteen-year old sisters. Young men walk into elementary schools and kill first graders. Police shoot unarmed citizens. Armed citizens shoot police. Kids find guns in their houses and kill themselves and their friends while playing make-believe.
The list goes on and on. To turn away from it is to turn away from reality itself.
This is not a space in which I have any interest in trying to convince you of political solutions. I am not, dear reader, going to argue here that the government should come and take your guns and melt them down into plowshares. And I don't have any interest in trying to argue that it is media – movies or television or video games or popular music or whatever other bugaboo one can dream up – that somehow "causes" this situation.
What does interest me, however, is trying to think about the (particularly male) American relationship with the gun. This is a complex topic, as is any deep cultural one; exactly how deep can be suggested, I think, by a question I once posed in a somewhat different context: what is a gun?
Is it a tool, a totem, a symbol? Is it a weapon, a method of recreation, a cultural statement, a cultural heirloom, a mode of propping up a flagging sense of self-esteem, or of insisting that there is meaning in manhood? Is it a way of leveling the playing field against an assailant, real or imagined? A way of keeping your family safe? A prop that serves the purpose of fueling your fantasy that you live in a world filled with hostile people against whom you are heroically holding the line? Is it a mass-produced consumer good, replete with lobbying industry and proxy advertising campaigns, that turns massive profits every year for its manufacturers?
The answer to all of these questions, and more, seems to me to be yes. And the answer to the question of how to begin to come to terms with all of this cultural accretion, and perhaps begin to gain some wisdom regarding it, seems to me to be to try to think through it, feel though it, apply ourselves to engaging with it.
If I had to choose one movie that lies at the heart of what I've called in other contexts the cinema of American violence, it might be Shane, from 1953. This is not because of its influence, or even because of its greatness, but because of the way it seems to articulate and explore the very foundations of our (again, particularly male) relationship with violence, and with the avatar that violence in our country so frequently seems to take on: the gun.
The story of the film is as follows. Joey Starrett (Brandon de Wilde) is a kid growing up on a homestead in Wyoming sometime after the Civil War. His father Joe (Van Heflin) and his mother Marian (Jean Arthur) have worked hard to make their small property into a functioning farm; the problem is that they are confronted by a large landowner in the area named Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) who wants to drive them and some other homesteaders away from the area because he believes it belongs entirely to him.
Enter Shane (Alan Ladd), a gunfighter who is trying to put his violent ways behind him. He befriends the Starretts and goes to work for them; inevitably, he is drawn into the conflict between the homesteaders and Ryker. As things escalate, Ryker decides that he will kill if necessary, and to this end hires notorious gunfighter Jack Wilson (Jack Palance). After Wilson kills one of the homesteaders – a southerner named as Frank "Stonewall" Torrey (Elisha Cook Jr.) – by goading him into drawing his gun and then shooting him down, it's clear that lethal violence is the only available resolution to the conflict.
Although Joe initially decides he will take his seldom-used pistol and confront the Rykers, Shane takes it on himself to do the job, as he's the only one who can realistically stand up to Wilson. He rides into town, pursued by Joey, who has developed a deep affection for him. In the climactic scene, Joey watches as Shane kills Wilson, Ryker, and Ryker's brother Morgan. Shane is wounded in the battle, but tells Joey – either truly or falsely – that he'll be alright; he rides away in the end, thus ridding the valley of its guns and the men who use them, with Joey calling after him to come back.
The reason Shane seems to me so foundational is not because of its temporal place in film history: Westerns had been being made for some fifty years by the time it appeared, and movies as varied as Hell's Hinges (1916), Stagecoach (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy" (1948-50), Red River (1948), High Noon (1952), and many more had already mapped the territory of the genre.
But perhaps no other film brings together so many of the different vectors through which American cinema meditates (if that is the right word) on the relationship of men, guns, and violence. It is like a central hub to which an enormous number of other films are tethered, an eye around which a maelstrom rotates.
One reason for this is because of the centrality of Joey to the story. Both thematically and cinematically, he serves as at the same time a stand-in for the viewer and a locus through which the film poses its central questions about the reasons for, and justifications of, American violence.
The cinematic side of this is handled magnificently by director George Stevens. In narrative terms, Joey is the point of connection for the relationships that spring up between Shane and his new friends the Starretts.
Joey idolizes both his father and Shane, setting up a comparison between them; he is a conduit through which Shane and Marian establish a kind of tragic "What if...?" romantic connection (ie. when Marian tells Joey not to get too attached to Shane because he may not be staying long, we are clearly cued to understand that she is also speaking to herself); and he is also foundational to Joe and Marian's relationship, the reason they are working so hard to make a better life here on the high plains.
Joey is also central to the film in visual and thematic terms. It is not to much to say that, despite the title, Joey is the protagonist of the film, rather than Shane. The action opens with him stalking (with an unloaded gun) a young elk that has wandered in close to the homestead, and his plaintive cry is the last bit of dialogue we hear; throughout, the movie tends to shape its scenes around him. There are also more close-up shots of his face than any other character's: we watch him react to nearly everything Shane, his father, and his mother do.
Just as we are, that is, Joey is watching the action and trying to understand it. This becomes particularly clear in the scenes of violence in the film, which have a visceral air that still resonates today. In the scene when Shane and Joe brawl with some of Ryker's men, Joey watches, chewing excitedly on a piece of peppermint candy; similarly, he watches the final shootout from beneath the batwing doors of the bar.
In a way that the film academics love, Joey is thus a symbol or embodiment of the voyeuristic nature of cinema, the way it always necessarily involves people watching and people being watched. To my point here, though, he is the character through which the film engages with the issue of violence. He is a boy; he will grow up to be a man. But what kind of man will he be? And what kind of world will he live in?
He could end up as a bad wealthy man like Ryker, or a bad man of the gun like Wilson, or a good man of the gun like Shane, or a good man who is not a man of the gun, like his father. And in part because of the choices he makes – for he will eventually grow up to "leave his mark," Shane assures him – his world could also be dominated by men of any of these sorts.
As we watch the film with Joey, in other words, we're watching as he tries to understand what right and wrong is, as well as, crucially, the role of violence in this question. And here we have arrived at one of the central and most important tropes of the cinema of American violence. This is the notion that violence – here, explicitly, the killing violence of the gun as opposed to the non-lethal violence of the fists – has two key elements: regret and necessity.
Shane, in the classic mold of the American action and Western movie hero, is a violent man who does not like violence. He understands it from the inside, and knows what it does to the person who commits it. "There's no living with a killing," he tells Joey at the end. "There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks."
Violence, that is, defines the person who commits it, and it dooms them. It is because of violence that Shane is alone at the beginning, and it is because of violence that he rides off alone – and perhaps dying – at the end.
And yet at the same time, according to the narrative tropes of these films, violence is necessary. In order for the world to be safe for regular people, there must be protectors of those people who are willing to use violence; there are the sheep and the sheep dogs, in the terminology of Clint Eastwood's American Sniper from 2014, a far less intelligent if far more self-regarding film lying sixty years in Shane's wake.
The Rykers and Wilsons of this world (or the Soviets, or the terrorists, or the Afghanis, or the alien life-forms, or any of the other cinematic iterations in which the bad guy appears) cannot be reasoned with and will never voluntarily give up their evil plans. Therefore, tragic and regrettable as it may be, the man of violence must always be willing to step forward and kill them.
In part, of course, this is just the result of a difficult storytelling problem. Audiences tend not to like characters who are eagerly violent, and so in order to float a movie on the back of gunfights and explosions, it makes sense for the storytellers to make the hero initially loath to use violence; then, when that hero is backed into killing people because there's no other way to stop them, we can feel justified in cheering as blood is spilled and bodies are torn apart on screen.
But a part of what makes Shane so brilliant is that it uses this storytelling trope and at the same time tries to work through some of the the terrible problems the trope occasions. Because what the film understands so clearly is that this justification of first regret and then necessity also eventually tends to become a fetish.
Just beneath the surface of the film runs a simple question: what will all of this violence do to Joey? And, by extension, what will it do to the viewer?
One of the film's most striking scenes occurs when Joe decides that he is going to take his gun to confront the Rykers. Marian is terribly upset, because she knows that he will most likely be killed. And into the middle of their argument bursts Joey, excited by the prospect of violence, waving a toy gun and yelling "Bang! Bang! Bang!" over and over again.
Exactly as do the shots of Joey excitedly chewing his peppermint stick as he watches a fistfight, this sequence points out the great flaw in the regret/necessity story of violence: it is titillating. Which is to say that all the stories we tell ourselves about how much we regret having to engage in violence and yet how justified it is must also contend with – if not pale before – another inescapable fact: violence excites us.
Thus, one of the primary questions brought to the fore by Shane – and this is, I think partly intentional and partly unintentional, partly something the film meditates on and partly a meditation it forces the attentive viewer into – is the degree to which these stories we tell ourselves about the justifications for violence become simply excuses for doing what in some dark way thrills us. We tell ourselves that violence is regrettable and yet necessary, and perhaps it is...or perhaps we only wish it to be, because then we can give in to the frisson created by the idea of confronting that terrible something that we would like to imagine lurks just outside our door.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which it found in the Constitution the inalienable right for Americas to possess firearms. Among other things, this meant that a ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia became unconstitutional. In the wake of this ruling, the Washington Post conducted an investigation into a fascinating question: now that it was legal to own guns in D.C., who was buying them?
The answer will not surprise any astute observer of American culture. The majority of guns were purchased by affluent people in low-crime neighborhoods.
In my life, I have lived in two poor, high-crime neighborhoods, one in Baltimore and the other in New Haven. Anecdotally, I can tell you that folks living in these places do not hold the illusion that going out and buying a gun will either keep them safe or solve the problems of gun violence that ail their communities. When I taught at a community college in Baltimore, I once had a class in which over half of the students had either a family member or friend killed by a gun. If I would have suggested that what they really should be doing to stop this was going out and buying their own guns, they would have looked at me like I was insane.
Perhaps this was because they were young and unwise and did not yet understand that guns do not cause violence but instead prevent it; on the other hand, perhaps it was because they were less beholden to a fantasy that has long held sway in other parts of American life.
This is the fantasy both embodied by and undermined by Shane. It holds that out there somewhere are dark-hatted bad men with guns who are bound and determined to come and take everything from you, and although you really hate to do it, sooner or later you're probably going to have to kill them before they kill you. And killing them once and for all will stop the killing for good...except that it won't, because there will always be more bad men out there. And so you’re back to the start. And so, according to this fantasy, because that’s the way the world is, you might as well go buy a gun to prepare for it.
The answer to the question of why Americans seem to fetishize guns more than do the citizens of many other countries is not, as I said at the top, reducible to the effect of Hollywood narratives. But it is also a valid observation, I believe, that the stories a culture tells itself manage to tell us something in turn about that culture. And one of the most American of stories there is involves the ways that a view of violence as regrettable and yet necessary can sooner or later turn into a rationalization for indulging in the dark excitement of engaging in violence itself.
Like Joey, we are all in a sense kids faced with these conflicting stories and impulses. And the question that confronts Joey also confronts us: once we grow up, what kind of choice will we make?
Enjoy this piece? Subscribe for free to receive a new short essay on film in your inbox every Friday. And don’t forget to share, like, and comment!