Lethal Weapon

Introduction Bill: HI! Welcome to week 6. This week we are talking about two 80’s action blockbusters: and . 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 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 . The formula that Donner puts into place here carries over 20 years after this film was first released. Let’s talk about some of those tropes. I can run through the list, but let’s start with high places and car chases.

Jon: It is actually a ma—I mean if you watch Hitchcock. I have taught Hitchcock classes. He ends half like of his movies in a high place. You know it’s like Mount Rushmore, it’s the British Museum, it’s the bell tower in Virtigo. Falling is something we are kind of all scared of. You go to high places and you risk falling, so I think that is big. Car chases, I think it is funny car chases are weird because the average American has never been in a car chase and never will be in a car chase. You either won’t chase anybody, or nobody will chase you. And yet movies they are ubiquitous. In fact the only car chase I have ever seen is the OJ car chase and he drove really slow if you remember. Bill: Chase is using the term loosely. Escort is more like it I think. Wheeler Winston Dixon has a frame by frame this week that you will see on the history of the car chase or the chase sequence in cinema so make sure to check that one out.

Jon: cinema is about motion, so you can sort of see the attraction. There are some great car chases. French connection has one of the great car chases of all time of films from the auteur era. Bullet also just before that era, has just a really absolutely brilliant car chase. Car chases are important because films are about motion and it is also the sort of fundamental thing you do in editing. It is parallel editing. You see one car go this way, then you see another car go this way, and they have a relationship. One is moving after the other. Then of course the inevitability of crashing, you know, this sort of vision that one simply drives to crash. These guys walk out of these horrendous car crashes and simply dust themselves off and move on. These are men, you know.

Bill: Right. They are not going to pull into a parking lot, and just get out. How about let’s do both of these together: games with life and death, and then the fact the hero and the villain seem to know and really respect each other to some degree.

Jon: Yeah. I think it is because you and I probably don’t have either. My job is not particularly dangerous. I can’t even think about.. . The most dangerous thing I do is I drive to work. I think that is true of most people. If you work in a bank, if you work in an attorney’s office, I don’t know if you work as a gardener. The chances of facing death day to day is just not part of what we do. I think that is why in some ways a lot of these movies gravitate towards police.

Bill: Right.

Jon: Both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon we are dealing with police because that is what they do. The films pull back and they say, well we live as contemporary modern American men these sort of very domesticated lives where expressing our masculinity becomes more and more problematic so…. I go to the store to get my food, I don’t have to go out and kill anything. I am thinking of all the things that would be sort of elementally masculine. Then in the absence of all of that in our lives we watch these movies where these games with death. Riggs is courting death the whole movie, he is looking for it. He is sorting asking somebody to kill him. In fact he is the worst torture victim at the end of the film. He is like hung up like a side of beef, and then the guy said he is going to torture him and he is like cool, you know great! It’s just like cool, torture me because that will prove. That is yet another moment where I can prove I am a man. Or when McLain in Die Hard ties the hose around his waist and jumps off the roof of the building. I mean he even says, “God this is a really stupid thing to do.” He says “I am never going to do it again.” I don’t know, in my job jumping off a roof with something tied around my waist has not come up yet and probably won’t. I think these films are showing that maybe this is the problematic of masculinity today, that we don’t have these moments that we prove ourselves, so we just we are less men than we should be. Here are these guys.

Bill: the real men are on screen we are finding ourselves…

Jon: yeah jumping off buildings. Bill: against that.

Jon: yeah exactly.

Bill: Tough.

Jon: it may be, maybe these films are more depressing than I thought when I think of it that way. What was the second one?

Bill: the hero and the villain knowing and respecting each other.

Jon: well yeah, because they travel in circles. I don’t know. I don’t have any enemies, villains. There are no villains in my life whereas obviously these guys have villains that they don’t even know they have. They are terrorists, or they are bank robbers, or they are drug runners from the secret military black ops.

Bill: but there is an underlying, respect seems to be the key word. Though they are on opposite sides of the law, they both have this sort of unspoken male comradery because they are both at what each other does.

Jon: yeah it is sort of like when Robin hood finally faces off against the Sherriff of Nottingham. The Sherriff of Nottingham has to be able to fight otherwise boy we have waited two hours for this and it sucks. I think it is maybe a necessary element of action films is that the hero and villain know each other and that the gun fight or the sword fight, or the fist fight at the end of Lethal Weapon has to have a significance.

Bill: That is a good transition to the final two tropes of the action film, that escalating violence, and that mono-a-mono climax that you just touched on.

Jon: You see this when you start getting into the sequels of these films, yet they become more and more ridiculous. It is not that they are bad. Most of the films are bad, but it is really that well we have already had a bus careening down the road and it spun upside down. We had the guy coming out with the gun strapped to his back. So the next one, what do you do next? It is like X-Men. I think X-Men is the most impossible, or terminator. It is like, how do you make sequels to terminator. We have already had one with this liquid, you know the guy who is liquid who keeps reassembling. It takes 40 minutes on screen to kill that guy, and you sort of half-expect him to show up in the sequel. The stunts require greater and greater…

Bill: it really is a roller coaster ride if you…

Jon: yeah, so they get bigger and bigger as the film progresses and what makes it worse is that they get bigger and bigger as the series progresses. If you are not blowing up 9 jet planes, if the scale and the scope of the villainy isn’t that outsized then what is the point of watching a movie?

Bill: And yet even with that it seems a lot of these films end with just this gladiatoresk one-on-one. Jon: Yeah because it always has. It always it—James Bond does this too. Eventually it is going to be him against the bad guy and they are going to look at each other in the eye and somebody is going to have to win. You sort of know that. It is sort of like the fate of the galaxy is in balance, but Luke has to kill his father. We got to watch. We wait three movies for Luke to finally kill Vader.

Bill: It always comes down to…

Jon: “Luke I am your father”, and we waited, you know 9 hours for that.

Bill: It always comes back to the individuals.

Jon: It does.

Bill: It seems to be a very American,

Jon: Right, a very American thing. And it is sort of western culture heroic parable that it is a complex world but in the end it comes down to lone heroes.

Bill: Right.