Movie Doubles

View From The Cheap Seats

There is absolutely no imperative to see these 2 films together in any kind of critical sense, but I did because they were both selling the DVD for less than 10.00 a pop. That's less than the price of admission and that about covers that. Even if I did see 'T3' at the movies when it was released, I've not seen it since. As for 'The Mexican', I avoided it because I was busy buying DVDs, and it never seemed like the sort of movie you wanted to see on the big screen anyway.

In fact the DVD is coming to a rapid end of its product life as HD TV and Blu-Ray hits the market en force. Since the arrival of DVDs in 1996 through to now, that's been about a 12 year span in which we've all been buying these discs. I can tell you I've bought a whole bunch of these things and I feel a little sad to see them go. Yes, the higher spec of HDTV and Blu-Ray just blow away what DVDs have to offer, but it seems to me seeing Underworld 2 in HDTV/Blu-Ray actually isn't a vast improvement in my actual viewing experience at all - even with a scrumptious Kate Beckinsale in a tight leather outfit, dealing death - a cruddy film is still a cruddy film. It's still the same old crappy story and there's nary a film that really deserves to be owned at $50.00 a piece.

Thus, I figure I'll keep cleaning up the el cheapo DVDs as the new thing comes to the fore. I'm going to watch a whole slew of films in the older mass-market format, good, bad and indifferent, in tandem just to see if I can squeeze out some extra critical meaning out of them by doing so. Not that it has much relevance, but with that in mind, I'm going to try and connect two most unlikely films as a Movie Double Experience.

The Mythology of Guns - 'The Mexican' and 'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines'


What have these two films got in common at all, you might ask. Here's the deal: both films are massive fetishistic odes to the gun. Most American films are to some degree a celebration of guns. If gun laws got stricter, the one industry sure to find it hard to cope would be Hollywood. The easy availability of weapons permeates American cinema to the point that the audience does not question how such arsenals come into play.

If the 1980s cinema was emblematic of anything, it was the carnival of the orgasmic violence. Somewhere along the way, we the audience got hooked on the massive explosion, the spray of machine gun fire, the tumbling of cars on freeways and shards of glass going everywhere as people smash through cheap architecture. The apotheosis of such films was the totally Freudian/Phallic joy of 'Terminator 2'.

'T2' as it was affectionately known completed the infra-psychic journey of recovering the castrated penis as it were. Here was the new generation of man, raised by a single mother full of hatred for men, given lessons in masculine violence by an emotion-less killing machine played by Arnold Schwarzenegger - an entity so powerful it could fire a mini-gun from the hip.

If anything, 'T3' as it was derisively known came as a big redundant statement, outstripped by the sensitive new age guy era. In what became his last big movie splash, the current Governor of California made one last appearance in the franchise. Once again, the main feature of the film is how often a gun is discharged with destructive power - and this time, how the feminine monster robot keeps coming back in spite of the shells fired into it.

In 'The Mexican', there is the legendary eponymous gun which centres the plot. All the machinations involve how the gun will be re-acquired. Which is interesting because the Terminator series of films seems to be an infra-psychic telling of the concern while 'The Mexican' is a rather dour telling of the concern. Where things go bombastic in 'T3', they tend to go like a Seinfeld plot in 'The Mexican'. Surely they are both metaphorically 'Raiders of the Lost Gun', just told differently.

Castration Anxiety

The gun, is clearly a Freudian object in both films. While the castration anxiety in both films runs deep, you get the feeling that if the makers of the Terminator series of movies insist on it long enough, the gun might eventually save their sense of self-importance. In other words, if they blow up enough stuff, they will regain confidence in their own penises. If T2 was an attempt to re-establish the power and validity of masculinity through the Arnie character, then T3 goes even further in making the villain a near-indestructible robot that appears as a beautiful blond woman.

So much of T3's action is spent on trying to stop the juggernaut that is this a rampant feminine monster. Arnie fires grenades into her, as well as big shotgun rounds. He drives her down with a truck and then flips a crane onto her. Nothing seems to stick. That she keeps on coming back with even more resolve than Robert Patrick's T-1000 in 'T2' indicates that the fantasy has moved on to an even more complicated terrain. Add in the fact that the Sarah Connor character is dead by the time the story begins, we get the feeling this story is even more convoluted in its attitudes about the feminine.

The Mexican is by contrast a film entirely concerned with the recovery of a certain, particular gun, and therefore the meaning is already over-invested before anybody even sees the thing. The gun then is the magic penis that is going to cure all impotence in post-feminist man. or so we are led to believe through most of the film. Put it this way, they're not looking for the sacred spear, but this is about as plaintive as it gets.

Brad Pitt plays a hen-pecked boyfriend who must go on one last journey to recover a mythic gun. If there ever was a film about castration anxiety of men in the contemporary era, there it is in all its glory. As such, Brad Pitt's Jerry bumbles from mishap to mishap while his lover played by Julia Roberts goes on a weird road trip with a gay hitman as they discus the ins and outs of relationships. The very set up of the film is like a parody of the 'Crisis of Masculinity' discourse.

As Jerry struggles to find meaning in the recovery of his metaphorical penis, he encounters a series of problems that hang almost as non-sequiteurs to the central issue. All the while, the legendary Mexican Gun gets 3 tellings which involves love, power, passion, honour and betrayal - qualities that are seemingly absent from the characters.

The structure of the story evokes 'The Maltese Falcon' but the ins and outs of the story are incredibly de-powered by the very fact that the entire population of characters live in an era of the 'Crisis of Masculinity'.

Eternal Return of the Repressed

Both films have characters who discuss their past in terms of their parents. Amazingly, and it is amazing because it is purely coincidental that I'm watching these two films in tandem, we are faced with archetypal case of the Return of the Repressed.

Just to quickly re-cap the theory, Freud had this notion that the thing that gets repressed, usually the mother comes back to haunt us. Jung of course said that it was more likely that the feminine was your anima, but the point is, for an average bloke, the thing most likely to return from the repressed is the objectified feminine thing.

In 'The Mexican', we are graced with the story of how the gun is dedicated to a man who would be the groom to the gunsmith's daughter. Yet, the daughter is in love with the apprentice. So as the story gets deeper into the mystery of just what the story is with the gun, we come to realise that the feminine has been somehow trapped into the essentially phallic gun. The gun can only be fired by a person who is true to its destiny - and in the climax, it is Julia Roberts' character Sam who fires the gun, dislodging a wedding ring hidden inside.

It is only when we come to the point in the story where Julia Roberts' Sam has expressed just about all the irrational rage she could express about Jerry played by Brad Pitt that the apparent curse can be extinguished. As intended, the bullet meant for the interloper finds the target of another interloper.

In both cases, it's pretty certain that the mother is a monster that gets repressed because America just can't deal with the larger-than-life importance of mom from 'mom and apple pie'.