SHREDITORIAL

WHAT DOES THAT MACHO MOVIE STAR'S GUN REALLY STAND FOR?

How often have you asked yourself, why is my favorite movie star on that huge poster, pointing that big gun? Why can’t he be in a movie that actually has something to do with my life? Then the distressing idea sinks in. In the perverse mind of the action-adventure producer, that gun is probably intended to stand for nothing other than the big bad boy’s penis. And there it is, right up there on the billboard!

Why, when in any high-body-count action-adventure movie that is likely to swerve toward us these days, plenty of unreal sex is the inseparable compliment of unreal violence? Are they possibly laboring, in less coherent terms, under the jerky supposition, “No gun, no fun?”

Let’s think about how insightful they may be. In fact, how about unassailable proof that they’re dead wrong?

Stop a minute and think of all the curious feelings and thoughts you have and all the ways you could be touched, moved and involved if somebody only made allegorical contact with them. Then think how movies, as well as almost nobody in everyday life, ever talks frankly and perceptively about those fleeting phantoms of your inner life. Unhappy result: You live, thinking they’re largely private and bound to stay that way.

How wonderfully refreshing it would be if a movie came along that was actually about those deep, silent marauders of your inner being, so you could stop feeling that you’re the only one they inhabit and so you can share them, at least vicariously, with an entire audience of other people, thereby being enabled to feel some sense of community with them. who might be experiencing the same internal perturbations.

Since many of these usually dismissed phantoms are keyed off by the contemporary content that impinges on you, you’d actually be sharing them with people who have very likely been experiencing the same internal perturbations. Or, as the sentiment goes, you’d be sharing the internal life of the times. Wowser, Bowser! Cool, huh?

Now, compare that with how little you have in common with, or even like about, another cute, dumb guy with a big gun.

You begin to realize how remote the lunching establishment in Hollywood is from the kind of artists who could actually make a movie that would invite and genuinely delight you.

Come to think of it, what might constitute an artist in a time when the mass media present us with the text of the time in living color and exhaustive description, but the rare and invaluable sensitivity to feel the unspoken subtext of the time and the talent to express it, so we can all share it?

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