The burden of bearing arms – A film review

# 61

   This piece began as a film review. We had been to our local Odeon to see ‘Seven Psychopaths’, the new film written and directed by Martin McDonagh – he of In Bruges fame. I had written a review and was about to post it online when I heard about the shooting of twenty infants and seven teachers at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, USA. There is nothing about that news that doesn’t make you weep. President Obama did a lot better than I in controlling his emotions. He had to, I don’t. I just wanted to let rip at the awfulness, the horror, the utter pointless, inhuman, heartless evil of it all. Even now, just to think for even one moment about what happened in that school returns me to the edge of darkness. And there I was, about to offer my review of an intentionally graphic, intentionally comic movie about psychopaths using guns…

   ‘Seven Psychopaths’ – what does the title even mean? I’d come close to sharing the assumed joke; was it meant to be like Disney’s Snow White, but with Colin Farrell as the dozy innocent and seven psychos instead of seven dwarves? Was it an esoteric homage to Hollywood via a reprise of Sunset Boulevard? Was it a witty subversion of the classic Western genre - another fantasia on the frontier myth of ‘good people’ with guns versus ‘bad people’ with guns? If so, in which category – I must ask - would Hollywood put the mother of the Newtown gunman? She was, we are being told, shot by her own son using guns from her own collection. According to the ruthless logic of the gun lobby should she, perhaps, have shot him before he shot her?

   My abiding memory of the movie Seven Psychopaths will be that it opens with the giant letters of the ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign, standing pristine white against their brown hillside, and ends with a scorched remnant of the Stars and Stripes flapping pitifully against the Los Angeles skyline. Between those two images, McDonagh conducts us through a series of bloody executions and shoot-outs which all take place in the unreality of a moral vacuum. The only creature Hollywood requires should be kept safe from harm is Bonny, a kidnapped Shih Tzu dog, whose collar-tag reads “Return to Charles Costello or you will fucking die”. Nice.

   A story about multiple psychopaths, gathered at random, was never going to be easy, was it? It soon becomes clear that Marty (Colin Farrell) and his associate Billy (Sam Rockwell) know little or nothing about psychopathology other than what they’ve absorbed from the movies of Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah. To gain a well-rounded introduction to the subject, these are plainly not the most reliable of sources. Zachariah (Tom Waits) turns up in response to Billy’s advert for psychopaths to come forward and tell their stories. Zac looks seriously disturbed by any normal standards, standing outside Billy’s house, fondling a white rabbit. Billy eyes him up and quickly concludes: “Okay, you seem normal. Come on in. I gotta get this dog off the street because it’s kidnapped from a maniac.”

   “Dandy,” replies Zac – who turns out to be a serial killer of serial killers. Does that make him one of the ‘good guys’? It is hard to say.

    Hollywood exports many versions of America to the world as entertainment and Seven Psychopaths is now among them. We are not encouraged to question whether the graphic portrayal of violence in movies (and in computer games) has any effect upon individual behaviour in real life. The advertising industry spends untold billions to put in front of our eyes fleeting movies entirely devised to influence our decisions and manipulate our behaviour. In the cinema, we happily watch major movies confident in the belief that what happens on the screen, stays on the screen. Actors pull their triggers, people are ‘blown away’, and we persist in the belief that our collective values and our everyday behaviour are immune to all this.

   Because of the economic and military power of the USA and also because of our shared history and common language, we in Britain follow events in the United States as closely as if they were happening here. The massacre at Newtown, like similar outrages of recent times, has revived the issue of gun control for America. Those who oppose controls on gun ownership build their case on the second amendment to The Constitution of the United States (1787). The first ten amendments are known collectively as The Bill of Rights. They date from 1791. The first amendment guarantees freedom of religion, of speech, of the press and of peaceable assembly. The second guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. The authors of the Bill considered the right to gun ownership was that important, second only to religious freedom, free speech and a free press. It is worth asking why this was so. Was it because they enjoyed some totemic devotion to the ‘Brown Bess’ 0.75 calibre flintlock musket[1] or was there a broader political reason behind the drafting of the second amendment? Looking at this as an outsider, it appears to me that the gun lobby has always wanted America to overlook the first thirteen words of the second amendment. These – crucially - established the context for the right to bear arms. In its entirety, Article II reads:

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

   Anti-federalists among ‘the founding fathers’ feared the possibility of a military take-over of the federal government. For that reason they opposed allowing the federal government to maintain a standing army. In the eighteenth century, military power lay in having large numbers of foot-soldiers, each one armed with a musket. If the citizens could form themselves into a ‘well-regulated’ militia at short notice – like the famous ‘minutemen’ of Massachusetts – the federal government would have no excuse for maintaining a regular army. The militia – the citizens in arms – would suffice. You could argue that the Bill of Rights entitles every citizen to keep (and carry openly) a Brown Bess musket. It was never intended to include concealed weapons, semi-automatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns or bazookas.

   Now, two hundred years later, the United States government controls the largest, most expensive and most destructively powerful military establishment the world has ever seen. It also still maintains a constitutional right for all citizens to keep unlimited numbers of firearms in their own homes. The voters of America spend, annually, $2,141 per capita (4.7% of their Gross Domestic Product) on the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and National Guard[2]. They do so in the belief that these are essential for the defence of the homeland. If Americans have any confidence whatsoever in the effectiveness of their armed forces, why oh why does the civilian population also need to be armed to the teeth?

   The origin of the ‘right to bear arms’ in both the United Kingdom and the United States stems from the (British) ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689 when a Catholic king (James II) sought to disarm the more militant of his Protestant subjects. Over four hundred years later, in the twenty-first century, for anyone in the United States to continue to maintain that individual gun ownership is a ‘human right’ - on a par with freedom of speech and habeas corpus - is complete and utter nonsense. Psychotic, I’d call it; not unlike the parallel psychosis[3] that we call Hollywood.

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[1] The ‘Brown Bess’ British Land Pattern Musket was used by both sides in the War of Independence. It was the standard infantry weapon in Britain and America from 1722 until the 1830s. It was muzzle-loaded, had a 42 inch barrel and an effective range of less than 100 yards. With practice, it could be made to fire three or four rounds per minute.

[2] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: Yearbook 2012.

[3] Psychosis, noun. A serious mental disorder characterised by eg illusions, delusions, hallucinations, mental confusion and a lack of insight on the part of the patient into his or her mental condition.