Lethal Weapon
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Lethal Weapon Introduction Bill: HI! Welcome to week 6. This week we are talking about two 80’s action blockbusters: Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. We will jump right in to first Lethal Weapon. This is a film directed by Richard Donner who went on to direct Superman, or actually directed previously Superman. Jon: yeah about ten years earlier. Bill: Produced by Joel Silver who also produced the Die Hard films and the Matrix films. Can we talk a bit about auteurism as it relates to I guess this film and this producer Joel Silver? Jon: This is sort of when we move from auteurism to sort of blockbusters. My sense of what happens in Hollywood in the 80’s is this transition away from really directors with a signature style and to producers with a signature style. You have Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer on the one hand who are these action impresarios, but really the man who makes this happen the change happen is Joel Silver. And really Lethal Weapon is the film that sets the template. Action/Adventure this whole kind of mix of a kind of muddy comedy dynamic with action adventure films that rely heavily on special affects really begins with Silver, and with this film. Of course he perfects it through 2 series. I mean there was a Die Hard film in 2012. So these films have a lasting impact yeah. If you look at other action adventure films even to a certain extent superhero films that become popular in the 90’s and the 2000’s. They are taking a lot from the kind of formulas set in motion by these movies. Bill: There is a Vietnam subtext to this film that is arguably very hard to miss. Can you talk a bit about how this film deals with the problematic return for so many Vietnam vets. Jon: It is interesting because one of the things that when you look at this class in its entirety as this kind of statement on America from 1968 to the present. Really when you are talking about the generation of film makers we are looking at this is a generation of film makers that woke up with the JFK assassination, and at least had to make probably the most important decision of their lives to that point about Vietnam. Will I go or won’t I go, these are pretty fundamental decisions. Do I think we should be there, shouldn’t we be there? Are we being told the truth about this? I think that is playing into all of these films whether we like it or not. One of the dramas happens now we are talking films in the late 1980’s. Lethal Weapon is 1987, so the war is over 15 years ago almost by now. I think you really have the next drama of Vietnam was what about the guys who fought over there. Every war has a difficult transition. If we were teaching in the late forties and early fifties I would be talking about the difficult transition for WWII vets, so vets have always had trouble coming back. It is a very different world, world goes on without them, women in the workplace, changing gender roles, and you know also if you are in combat your relationship with other men is so profound and then you come back and you can’t reproduce that. There are a lot of fundamental things that make the return difficult. Then you add to that post-traumatic stress which wasn’t called that then but we know what it is now. These guys came back and they were just unable. They had bad dreams, they were tortured by things that they had seen. Riggs is very much an expression of this veteran who has come back and is just horribly damaged. He says at one point in the film.. You know on a certain level he is sort of heroic and if you can forget what we know about Mel Gibson now. I know a lot of students watching the film now go, “oh Mel Gibson, he is the guy who is drunk and yells anti-Semitic things at the policemen”, but that is not what people thought of him in 1970. He was a movie star. He has this moment. He was also a good actor which makes his fall from grace even more disappointing. He has this moment in the film when he says “this is all I can do”. He says it to Raj, his sidekick. He says I can shoot, I can shoot things at a ridiculously great distance. It is not a skill that is particularly valuable in the “real” world and he recognizes that. He is a cop because it is hard to imagine what other occupation he is even remotely trained to do. Bill: Right, he is not a people person. Jon: No, he is not a good cop either. He is a terrible cop. I often say to students in my classes “how would you like to get pulled over by him?” Forget Miranda rights, you have no idea what this unhinged guy is going to do. I think this was one of a number of post-war visions of the returning vet. Rambo is maybe the most famous, but Rambo if you look at the first. Most people think about Rambo as the second film. First blood is the second film. The first film he comes back and he is like hiding out in the woods and stuff. He is a wreck, he is a mental case. The second one he suddenly becomes a mental case who is heroic, but he can’t function either. He is like Riggs. He has these skills; these skills are uniquely valuable in war time and pointless Bill: in civilian life. Jon: I think it is easy to watch the movie and to miss that. I think that Lethal Weapon makes it maybe too obvious to miss because of the helicopter in the very beginning, and the fact that he is fighting against guys that are smuggling dope out of Indochina, and the guy he fights at the very end is special forces like him. So, it lays on the Vietnam stuff heavier than some, but Vietnam is just sort of sitting there waiting to be talked about in these movies. Bill:This weeks assigned reading was an essay by Fred File I want to get your take on this. He argues that the male comradery in this film and also in something like Die Hard verges on a homosociality, an erotically charged male relationship, male-male relationship. Obviously these characters don’t have a sexual relationship in the film. Jon: Not that we see. Bill: But, can you talk about how the film stylizes that masculine dynamic? Jon: Well one of the things that are profound about war time is male comradery. It is profound because you depend on your buddy so that you don’t get killed, and he depends on you so that he doesn’t get killed. You know it is deprivation, it is living in squalor, the situation, there are no women anyway so it creates a kind of profound relationship that most men out of war time don’t have. Most men go to work, and the people they know are the people they know from work. I think that these are men who desperately need other men, and have no idea how to express themselves. Like sports you know the pat on the behind, the embrace. You see an athlete after they win a big game crying. It is all these, it is sort of licensed expression of sadness, happiness, joy, whatever that men otherwise never express. These films give these men a kind of closeness that you don’t see otherwise. Bill: Right, the sanctified space where this sort of closeness is acceptable and even celebrated. Jon: It is where you can… you know. I think what File is also getting at is here are movies that are clearly made for young men. These are action adventure films about guys doing things. In Die Hard there are virtually no women to look at, and in Lethal Weapon only in the very beginning and she kills herself. And then the scene at the pool, and it’s about it. Those are about the only women, and I guess Raj’s daughter but she was kidnapped so it is not exactly how we want to look at her. But there is a lot of looking at men in these movies. It is a lot of looking at men without their clothes on. The opening introduction of Riggs, he is completely naked. We see a full shot from the back. Bill: Women aren’t going to these films. Jon: I know. Bill: At least they are not the demographic. Jon: No. Maybe they are going along with their boyfriends, but they are not the one choosing this movie. Bill: Right. Jon: And I don’t know. That is what File is sort of pointing out. He is saying wow you know. First of all that there is a profound relationship between these men, and second of all what is with all of this make nudity. Bill: Something we will return to when we get to fight club. Jon: oh my yes. Bill: Lethal Weapon is in many ways the prototypical action film. The formula that Donner puts into place here carries over 20 years after this film was first released.