There is an old axiom in storytelling known as ‘Chekhov’s Gun.’ The name comes, of course, from Anton Chekhov who wrote, ‘if you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.’ Well, times have moved on since Chekhov, and I should like to identify a new principle. Let’s call it ‘Hollywood’s Gun.’ It goes like this: ‘If a (generally male) North American film-maker tells a story, he absolutely must include a gun.’
Am I exaggerating this? I don’t think I am. I offer you Exhibit A - Avatar: The Way of
Water. (Oh, and by the way I know James Cameron is Canadian, but the gun-mind-virus has clearly infected him too.) Now if ever there was a landscape with a richer potential
for stories than Cameron’s fictional planet Pandora, I don’t know what it would
be. The artists and designers have created an utterly sumptuous world full of
beauty and narrative potential; yet into this cinematic Eden, James Cameron has
dropped a lazy western-inspired revenge tale where a mad army colonel armed
with unlimited stocks of assault rifles, ammunition, and other assorted
weaponry chases down an innocent family armed with bows and arrows. Really? Is
that the best Hollywood could do? Sadly,
it seems it is. And I suspect that every dire review the film gets is on some
level due to the disappointment every reviewer has felt on being served up with
another gun-driven narrative.
Guns in films give birth to four lazy memes that crop up so frequently you will readily recognise every one. The first is the ‘deus
ex machina,’ hook where Good-Character A is about to be shot by Bad-Character
B but is saved by a shot from Unexpected-Offscreen-Character C. It is quite depressing
to see this meme show up in Avatar. (The
second meme - which Avatar thankfully avoids - is ‘gun-on-the-floor’ where
a gun is kicked around, and two fighting protagonists have to wrestle to reach
it first. Yawn.) The third meme is especially
heinous. This is the ‘good-guys-never-get-hit’ rule, where the hero and
his family can duck and weave through streams of machine gun fire, picking off
random bad guys, but never catching a bullet themselves. (Man but those
automatic weapons in Avatar must be so inaccurate!) Finally however, and most egregious
of all, is ‘the Bonanza injury.’ Cinema would have us believe that gun
shots don’t do that much damage. Bad guys topple over and die quietly. Good
guys take one to the shoulder but carry on bravely. A fatal gunshot on a good
guy is an ‘oh dear, I appear to be bleeding,’ situation. (Avatar is guilty of
this too.) In reality of course, assault weapons tear moon-sized chunks out of
people and leave gore and body parts everywhere.
Can I appeal to Hollywood to find a new generation of directors and
screenwriters who aren’t obsessed by guns. Even Titanic has a ‘gun chase’
sequence where (in surely the least believable scene of the film) Billy Zane’s Cal
steals a gun and tries to shoot Jack and Rose, firing reckless several times in a chase down the
stairway and through the lounge. Thankfully the ‘good-guys-never-get-hit’ rule
applies. But was it really necessary in the first place?
In the meantime, Avatar 2 is not an awful film. It should be shorter,
but it is perfectly watchable. And beautiful. And I wanted it to be better than it is. But with the biggest budget in
cinema history it is a missed opportunity for some real science fiction storytelling,
and yet another platform for dull NRA clichés.
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
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