Review: American Gun (Anti-Gun Hollywood Strikes Again)

"American Gun" tells three stories that are small, even quiet. The stories are not strident but sad, and one of them is open-ended. They are about people who find that guns in the hands of others have made their own lives almost impossible to live.

The first story involves a mother named Janet, played by Marcia Gay Harden, whose son shot and killed other students at his Oregon high school three years ago, and then was shot dead. She carries on with her remaining son, David (Chris Marquette), who attends a private school. She needs money. She agrees to a paid interview with a local television station, during which she seems inarticulate about her older son's rampage. Well, what can she say? Like other parents, she lost a child in the shooting. Perhaps it is harder to be the parent of a killer than the parent of a victim. Then David has to leave the private school and enroll in the very same school where his brother did the shooting.

Also interviewed is a cop (Tony Goldwyn) who some people feel should have been able to save lives that day. He knows he followed department procedures, but feels blamed for the deaths. Both the mother and the cop are at a loss for words when TV reporters ask them questions beginning with "How does it make you feel?" They're not glib and don't fall easily into the cliches of remorse and redemption.

The second story stars Forest Whitaker as Carter, the principal of an inner-city high school in Chicago. He moved to the big city from Ohio, thinking he could make a difference, but now his wife (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon) feels she is losing him to his job. He is discouraged, weary beyond belief, despairing. One of his honor students, Jay (Arlen Escarpeta), is found with a gun near the school, and faces expulsion. We follow Jay to his job inside a padlocked cashier's station at an all-night gas station, where any customer might confront him with a gun. He needs to carry a gun, he feels, for protection, even though it isn't loaded.

The third story, the open-ended one, involves a gentle old man named Carl (Donald Sutherland) who runs a gun shop in Charlottesville. His granddaughter Mary-Anne (Linda Cardellini) enrolls at the university and works part-time in the store. Carl is not a gun nut. He might as well be selling fishing tackle. Mary-Anne feels uneasy working in the story, however, and then one of her friends is assaulted.

All three stories ask the same question: How do you lead a reasonable life in a world where a lot of your fellow citizens can and do walk around armed? There seem to be two possible answers: They should be disarmed, or you should be armed. A third answer, implied by some gun owners, is that they should be armed but many other categories of people should not be. They never include themselves in those categories. I am reminded of my friend McHugh, who was shown a gun by a guy in a bar. "Why do you carry that?" McHugh asked him. "I live in a dangerous neighborhood," the guy said. "It would be safer," McHugh told him, "if you moved."

At one point in the movie, the neighbors of Janet, the mother, observe the third anniversary of the high school massacre by planting flags on their laws, including a black flag on hers. They are vindictive and revengeful. Did it occur to them to plant signs asking for a ban on handguns? No. Guns don't kill people. Janet's son does.

"American Gun" is a first feature by Aric Avelino, who co-wrote it with Steven Bagatourian. He shows an almost tender restraint in his story-telling, not pounding us with a message but simply looking steadily at how guns have made these lives difficult. The mother's real answer to the TV interviewer could have been: "My son killed his schoolmates because he had a gun and he could." The Columbine shooters without weapons would still have been antisocial psychopaths, but they would not have been killers.

As for the Chicago school principal, his despair is easy to understand. During the same week I saw "American Gun," two children were shot dead in Chicago just as a byproduct of guns. They were not targets, but accidental victims. The cost of guns is multiplied day after day, year after year, body after body, in our society. The rest of the world looks on in wonder. The right to bear arms is being defended by the sacrifice of the lives of their victims. That doesn't mean gun owners are all bad people. Donald Sutherland's gun dealer seems like one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet. On the door of his store there is a sign: "We buy used guns." Just a sign. No big deal. It's the final image in the movie.

The media hated it, and West Germany would not allow it to be shown. Although Wikepedia is negative on the movie, the following from Wikepedia should let you see why it is popular among freedom loving conservatives. "Wolverines"

Red Dawn is a 1984 movie by John Milius about an invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and the resulting guerrilla actions of a group of American high school students in the fictional town of Calumet, Colorado.

The movie featured Patrick Swayze (Jed Eckert), C. Thomas Howell (Robert Morris), Lea Thompson (Erica), Charlie Sheen (Matt Eckert), Darren Dalton (Daryl Bates), Jennifer Grey (Toni) and Powers Boothe (Colonel Andy Tanner).

Produced at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, "Red Dawn" has become something of a camp classic amongst film fans for its totally played straight, Cold War propaganda-esque take on the notion of the Soviet Union invading America and American teenagers forming a resistance cell to battle Cuban and Russian troops.

The film's plot involves a Soviet and Cuban/Latin American invasion of the United States in the year 1984 igniting a World War. The film is set in a small Colorado town where a bunch of teenagers flee to the hills first to escape, then later to fight against the occupation forces. While the film provides a large amount of alternate history material, it does little more than serve as a device to justify the story told in the film. The story itself is about young people on the ground resisting a military occupation and is, in many respects, timeless.

The film's plot relies on several alternate history political precursors. They include the collapse of NATO (which leaves the U.S. without any major allies except the UK and later China) and the spread of Communism to all of Central America and Mexico. The latter condition not only gives the Soviets a neighboring country to stage an invasion from but also large allied armies to help invade and occupy the U.S.

It starts with Russia suffering its worst wheat harvest in 55 years. Apparently desperate for food to feed its people, the Soviet Union and its Latin American allies launch a full scale invasion of the United States in September 1984, igniting World War III. The Soviets destroy several major U.S. cities with ICBM strikes, especially key points of communication (Omaha, Kansas City and Washington, D.C. are specifically cited). Simultaneously Soviet troops and their Latin American Communist allies invade the U.S. on three fronts. First, Russian transport aircraft slip through U.S. radar disguised as commercial airlines. These planes contain crack Spetsnaz troops and Cuban Special Forces who parachute and occupy strategic towns and transportation hubs. The second force is composed of Mexican, Nicaraguan, and other Central American Communist armies who pour across the U.S.-Mexico border into the Great Plains of the United States. The Russians themselves invade Alaska from Siberia. They cross into Canada, cut the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, but are decisively stopped at the border by the U.S. Military. (Much of the progress and politics of the war is left to the viewers' speculation in the film's first half, but specific facts are later provided by a downed USAF F-15 Pilot, played by Powers Boothe.) Among them is that China has suffered the loss of at least 400 million people in a Russian nuclear attack, apparently retribution for opposing the invasion. The film treats nuclear war as unimportant and is shown to have no effect on the world beyond those directly killed.

The Communist forces manage to occupy and control western half of the United States, extending from the Rocky Mountains to the California coast. Once the lines are stabilized, it quickly becomes a conventional war with both sides ceasing their use of nuclear weapons. The USAF pilot explains that the Soviets are reluctant to use any more nuclear weapons as they want to conquer the United States, not destroy it utterly, and the US government is unwilling to use tactical nukes on their own soil against the invading armies. The Soviets establish puppet governments at the local level to help them maintain order.

The plot revolves around several Colorado high school students who hide in the mountains and eventually begin a guerrilla campaign against Communist troops. They call themselves the Wolverines after their school's mascot. Some have commented the film is instructional in how to wage partisan resistance but the methods used are so futile as to not give that claim much credibility. The American youths launch raids, set ambushes, use sniper attacks, plant terrorist bombs and even execute a prisoner of war and one of their own American members who tried to betray them to the Soviets during their campaign. There is a grim atmosphere to much of the acting despite the popular view this is simply a cartoonish, Gung-Ho, patriotic Cold War-era action film. Some critics have also suggested that the film's cold-war political baggage and heavy-handed ideology take away from what is actually a well-made/acted film.

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Themes
The movie played on American audiences’ Cold War fears, perhaps intentionally. At the time it was made, supporters of the Domino Theory were promoting the notion that first Central America and then Mexico would fall to Communism. After enough of the world had fallen to communism, the forces of the Communist world would finally invade America itself. The idea that a world war could largely be fought in a conventional manner also played to the ideology of anti-communists. The grim and futile ending, in which the resistance cell is effectively wiped out having accomplished almost nothing useful, was also typical of patriotic Cold War era action films.

Red Dawn also depicts collaboration by the local mayor. In every occupied country there is usually an opportunist who gains or maintains power by collaborating with the foreigner invaders. Actor Lane Smith plays the role of the "Vichyite" mayor who tries to appease the Communist officers. He watches as several of the residents of his town are executed as resistors and later gives up his own son to the KGB to win more favor.

The private ownership of firearms is also presented as part of the film's anti-communist agenda. Early in the film a bumper sticker seen on a pickup truck states a classic gun owner's creed, "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers." The shot moves down to a dead hand clutching a pistol being removed by an enemy soldier. As our group of heroes flees the initial invasion of Calumet, they stop at a local sporting goods store owned by one of their fathers. He tells them to gather supplies and gives them several rifles and pistols along with boxes of ammunition. (The father and his wife are later executed because of the guns missing from the store's inventory.) In a later scene a Cuban officer orders one of his men to report to the local office of records and obtain the paperwork of local citizens who own firearms. These scenes speak to the long-standing issues of government gun control and the notion that mandatory registration of privately owned guns will make it that much easier for invading forces to track down those who may form insurgencies.

One of the Cuban officers (Ron O'Neal) is portrayed in a sympathetic light. While he was very enthusiastic at the start of the invasion, eventually he grows disillusioned with the futile and costly war of occupation and refuses to gun down the Eckert brothers at the end of the film.

Although most of the high school partisans are killed by the end of the movie, a voice-over appears at the end of the movie by Erica (Lea Thompson, one of the two survivors) showing a World War III memorial, and the American flag flying implies the United States had won the war. It was not part of the original script, but was added to soften its otherwise grim and defeatist ending.

Spoilers end here.

Taglines
In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now.
The invading armies planned for everything - except for eight kids called "The Wolverines."
8:44 A.M. A full scale military invasion by foreign troops begins. Total surprise. Almost total success. A gang of high school kids become the last line of defense.

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