Targets (1968)

Rated R because it's a horror drama about an active shooter.  It's incredibly upsetting, especially how casual the violence is shown.  There's a lot of death and all of it is horrifying.  It's one of those things that gets really upsetting, not because of how over the top the whole thing is, but because how understated the violence in this movie gets.  There might be some language in here.  The second place thing in this movie is the drinking.  There's also some 1968 racism happening, but it's pretty tame and almost a commentary on how casual racism gets.  This really is an upsetting film.

DIRECTOR:  Peter Bogdanovich

It's a little after 1:00 in the morning.  My right arm has been tingling all day and it's bugging me.  I should be going to bed because it was just a whirlwind of a day.  But I have had a productive evening and getting this blog out will really just be icing on the cake, especially if I have the wherewithal to knock out another blog tomorrow morning and read another 100 pages. (I have alluding to the fact that my hobbies are almost a profession in the summer.  It's the only time that I really have to put attention on the things that I enjoy.)

I wasn't prepped to like this movie. I had never really heard of it.  I think that I threw it on my Amazon Wish List because it was a Criterion Blu-Ray that starred Boris Karloff.  Targets might be one of the best surprise watches that I've had in a really long time.  Part of that comes from the fact that I never really respected Peter Bogdanovich.  I know.  I'm this guy who wants to give everyone a fair shake.  But my experience with Peter Bogdanovich has mostly come from the fact that, for a really long time, he was the guy who showed up on special feature documentaries as a talking head, often commenting on auteurs.  I also have an intense need to like The Last Picture Show, and honestly, that ain't happening.  Someone told me that the only really great thing that Bogdanovich made was The Last Picture Show, so that seemed to write off anything else that he created.  I need to learn to just like what I like and not care what other people have to say.

The thing that blew my mind is probably pretty obvious for people who have seen this movie.  I've always kind of hated that Boomers have always blamed all of the problems of the 21st Century on younger generations.  I always found it funny to pretend that Millennials and Gen Zers were responsible for all of the juvenile delinquency that happens out there.  There's this false memory of history as it being a better time, but the 1950s were loaded with genuine problems with kids.  There were JD squads stopping mass violence, yet current generations keep on being treated as immature and irresponsible.  But there's also this false narrative that is out there that guns have only been a problem post-Columbine.  Targets is one of the most loud voices against gun violence that I've ever seen in a movie.  Heck, this movie addresses the notion of the White active shooter way before I ever saw We Need to Talk about Kevin.

Part of the movie is Peter Bogdanovich just being Peter Bogdanovich.  He's literally in the movie as a director who is obsessed with Boris Karloff, who is doing the most meta performance of his life and in 1968.  Part of me really wanted to roll my eyes for this entire half of the movie, but Karloff is so good that I can't fault him at all. Honestly, I even liked Bogdanovich.  He gave himself such a sympathetic role that I just kept giggling at the pretense that these two were playing sympathetic characters. This stuff is great and you can just feel Bogdanovich being able to write this half of the movie in his sleep.  It's commentary on the studio system and what it is really like trying to make a movie.  It's coupled with the fact that it's a reminder of Old Hollywood and how it's losing ground to splashier, more vapid films --even though the movies that Orlok is in seem to be pretty trashy.

But the Bobby section of the film is the stuff of nightmares.  I give Bogdanovich so much credit.  I tried writing something like this and it's something that I'm going to have to work on without outright stealing elements from Targets.  Golly, there's so much of this section of the film that is so prescient.  It's not even that.  I'm getting all angry liberal here, but there's been this recontextualization of what gun violence in America is in America.  It's something that has been with us far longer than we care to admit and we keep thinking that the real scary things come from anything besides bored White men.  

It's like there's this separation between active shooters and psychopaths like John Wayne Gacy.  We're looking at 1968.  If Mindhunter gave me any insight into what the FBI was up to, there were so many active serial killers in this country and it's odd that we never really connected killers with guns to killers with knives.  Bobby is this guy who just had an overwhelming desire to kill his whole family and a bunch of strangers with a gun.  We really sit with Bobby for a long time before he starts killing people.  I mean, we know where the movie is going to go from the moment that we meet Bobby in the gun store.  Bogdanovich is no dummy.  His introduction to Bobby is him doing a practice shot on Byron Orlok from across the street in a gun store.  But it's not like we go right into Bobby going ham on the general public.  No, we see this long list of red flags that conservative America would list as healthy behavior.

Instead, we're exposed to all these telltale signs of megalomania (I may be using the wrong word.  It's almost 1:30 and I wasted time watching a wicked storm outside.) That trunk full of guns is what a healthy person would probably refer to as an arsenal.  (Also, I'd like to point out that the gun store owner coming into work with the flu probably wouldn't have respected Covid restrictions with that attitude.) But because Bobby looks the way he does, he can get away with all of it.  By the way, Bogdanovich, chef's kiss on the casting of Bobby and his family.  You couldn't make that dude look more Rockwellian and that's the absolute point.  This is a horror story not like Jason, who is deformed and almost supernatural in concept.  This is a guy who just felt like it.  Sure, we can talk mental health and we absolutely should.  But Bogdanovich isn't hiding that Bobby's entertainment of choice was cruising by the gun store and putting yet more stuff on his dad's account.

He asked for 300 rounds and said that he was going to kill pigs.  I don't know what it is like to work at a gun store.  I have been to one in high school because my friends worked at one.  But there has to be this intentional disconnect to say "What are people doing with these guns?"  Like, probably most of them are going hunting.  But this is a kid who owns oodles of handguns.  Then there's all of that ammuntion?  It's just something that I'll never understand.  If you haven't guessed already, I'm pretty anti-gun.  But Targets almost says the quiet part out loud and I applaud the movie for that.

There's one moment that I don't love and it's a really important one.  Bogdanovich has these amazing shots in the movie.  There was something Hitchcockian about the father going to set up the targets shot that I can tell that he loved the auteurs.  (If you really want to argue, it might have been more Powell and Pressburger, but it's also been a minute since I've seen Peeping Tom.) Most of the movie is just perfectly done.  I honestly love it.  But the two narratives are doomed to run into each other.  We have Byron Orlok slowly making his way into confronting Bobby.  These two disparate worlds need to collide and there's this cool idea that Bogdanovich really wants to try.  Bobby, in his skewed perspective, can't differentiate between the Byron Orlok of The Terror and the real Byron Orlok (who, for some reason, has larger-than-life Hollywood bravery).  He fires at the Orlok on screen.  No damage.  He fires at the Orlok in real life.  No damage.  Eventually, the real Orlok just slaps him around a bit and he cowers in the corner.  I really wanted to like this moment because I saw what he was trying to do. But my brain couldn't handle it.  On one hand, I'm really glad the movie wasn't resolved with a "good guy with a gun", which it almost was.  But also, no one really bought that Old Man Boris Karloff really took out an active shooter, especially with an old man shame slap.

Ed Wood really gains a couple of points knowing that Targets exists.  I don't write expletives on my blog, so I ask you to watch Ed Wood on your own.  There's a think that Bela Lugosi says about Boris Karloff repeatedly in that movie and that quote has so much more resonance knowing that Boris Karloff almost ended his career on Targets.  Bela Lugosi got Plan 9 from Outer Space, infamously known as one of the worst films ever made and Boris Karloff got Targets, an extremely poignant movie that tries to take down the NRA and has quite a lot to say about aging in Hollywood.

This might have been one of my favorite surprises this year.  While the one scene is done rather poorly, the movie as a whole is a knockout.  I even applaud the closing credits.  A single shot with anything gory or obvious is a haunting shot and I adore this movie.