“Violence is as American as apple pie,” Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown once said. It is still true as ever in these wartime zeitgeist, and in 2007, Hollywood took initiative to examine violence as a mechanism turning the wheels of history.
Among the year’s most memorable images: an unstoppable hitman with a cattle gun, an oil man beating a priest to death with a bowling pin, a fame-obsessed serial killer who sends clues to his pursuers, a legendary Western gunslinger shot dead as the price of his own fame, and a vengeful barber exacting his deranged justice through the edge of a razor blade.
Yet, while blood-ridden pictures like No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Eastern Promises, Sweeney Todd and 3:10 to Yuma have been lavished with praise, and in some cases, big earnings, bonafide war films failed miserably with critics and at the box office. With major stars like Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford as well as a $35 million budget, political thriller Lions for Lambs’ ticket sales didn’t even recoup its production costs. The Valley of Elah, an emotionally-scarred Iraq War vet’s difficult adjustment back to civilian life that was directed by critical fave Paul Haggis (Crash), grossed only $6.75 million.
Redacted, The Kingdom and Rendition, all films having to do either with the war in Iraq or the War on Terror, never gained traction with the public, and took meager ticket sales while getting panned by critics. All of these war films came off as being overly pedantic, with flaccid scripts that got mired in the desire to make a point that American audiences already know well – war is hell.
While America’s current conflicts may be tiresome themes to explore in film, however, the public still seemed ready this year to explore its wartime anxieties and not just in primetime news, current-events fashion. All of the violent films that burned up the festival circuit and generated awards attention are set in the past, even No Country for Old Men (ca. 1980) and Zodiac (1960s-70s). The Assassination of Jesse James addresses contemporary concerns from the distance of the past. Today’s tabloid culture of intense veneration for a celebrity followed by a desire for his or her demise is the film’s obvious reference point. Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), who at first idolizes the legendary Western gunslinger (Brad Pitt), shifts from veneration to jealousy, like today’s readers of celebrity tabloids, eventually reveling in James’ destruction.
But why choose the Western for this critique of contemporary celebrity culture and the violent frenzy surrounding it? Because the Western symbolizes nation-building, the domestication of the land, and the violent processes that are sometimes part of establishing civilization and cultural myths such as famous gunslingers. Professor Chuck Kleinhans of Northwestern’s Radio/TV/Film Deptartment recalls numerous late ’60s, early ’70s films with the same effect. “During the Vietnam War, films set in the past such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch became the occasion for considerable controversy about their use and depiction of violence and were seen by some as allegories for the war,” he says. “Popular cultural forms, such as film, present imaginative ways of handling collective anxieties.” And sometimes, that takes guts.
