When you look at the news events of the 2012, the mass-shootings in Sandy Hook and Aurora were two of the biggest and saddest. We have witnessed too many events such as these, and smarter people than I am are currently looking at how we can prevent them from happening. I wish I had some ideas myself, but I have to admit… I don’t. The safest place, I learned from a wise man many many years ago, is a prison cell… and the price of living in freedom is that our lives are sometimes at risk, when and where you least expect it.
A lot of pundits have linked on-screen violence in TV shows and movies to real-world violence, saying that films like The Dark Knight influence behavior. I disagree. We are a violent species, and humans have harmed each other long before mass media existed… if violent murder hadn’t existed for eons, Shakespeare wouldn’t have had much to write about. But the cries and criticisms against violent content are made every time a mass murder takes place… and sometimes the artists who create such work respond, and agree, with the critics.
Artists like Peter Bogdanovich.
After the massacre that took place in a Colorado movie theatre this summer, Bogdonovich was interviewed about his first movie Targets… A film with a finale featuring a sniper killing viewers at a Drive-In Theatre.
“People go to movies to have a good time, and get killed. I’m sick that I made a movie about it,” he said to The Hollywood Reporter, and expressed his general disgust with both the increased level of film violence and society’s increased desensitivity to violence. He seemed to dismiss and distance himself from Targets… and that’s his prerogative. It’s been over four decades since he made the film, and time changes people and their perceptions.
But Targets is nothing to be dismissed or ashamed of. Bogdonovich envisioned it as a cautionary tale, and it is… and an incredibly bold piece of filmmaking.
It starred Boris Karloff, in his last film, and Karloff played… well, himself, basically. On screen, he’s called Orlock, a fading horror movie store who can’t get serious work and can only do personal appearances at revivals of his classic films… which is basically what he was doing at this point in his life. Clips of his performance in The Terror (borrowed from Roger Corman) is used as backhground in many scenes, a cost-saving and brilliant idea. When we first meet Kar… err, I mean, Orlock, he is being interviewed by a film fan and aspiring filmmaker… played by Peter Bogdonovich.
As you can see, the line between “film” and reality is very blurred in Targets, and that thin line is made thinner still by the end of the film, at the aforementioned drive-in theatre sniper scene. Targets basically tells two stories, both involving horror-creators… only one of them is creating true horror as he goes on a killing spree. The killer, played by Tim O’Kelly, is cold and calculating as he guns down people without a hint of emotion… Kelly’s performance is very naturalistic and “real”, and the lack of empathy he shows is, unfortunately, very true to life.
When the stories intersect at the end, the payoff is brilliant and very powerful. Real life can be, and often is, more horrific than anything that Hollywood can come up with, even today.
Bogdonovich went on to make many films… some good, some not so good. But Targets was an auspicious debut effort that put him on the map and is worth revisiting and celebrating.
No matter what Peter Bogdonovich thinks.