GUN CULTURE

The Gun has been at the heart of American Culture since Independence was founded July 4, 1776. 235 years later it remains one of the most controversial and intractable issues in US Politics, reignited every time an incident like the recent shooting in Arizona occurs, the debate always rotating around the 2nd Amendment’s ambiguous and always de-contextualised ‘right to bare arms’.

In the wake of the recent Arizona shooting, much has been made of Sarah Palin’s prior use of gun scopes placed over US states she deemed ‘too Liberal’, along with her firearm-based rhetoric to ‘load up and shoot’. One of her targets? Tuscan, Arizona. By any measure, it was reckless, inflammatory language. Yet it would be a mistake to believe Palin’s recourse to gun-based imagery is solely the preserve of the gun-toting Right. Indeed, whilst Pro-Firearm lobbyists tend to be Right Wing, as a cultural image the Gun has been just as readily deployed by both the Left and by the political neutral to express an opinion. Why? Because the Gun is an abnormally potent symbol in American life with real cultural power.

Larry Clark 'Tulsa' (1971)

Andy Warhol 'Gun Print' (1981)

Imbued with subtexts that evoke power and violence, justice and revenge, male sexuality and impotency, the Gun is practically the de rigueur image in American cultural life, a signifier that transcends the Political debate to be an autonomous and loaded image in its own right. Consider for a moment how many visual artists have deployed the gun in their work. Larry Clarke’s ‘Tulsa’ series (1972), Warhol’s ‘Gun Prints’ (1981), Richard Kern’s ‘Girl With Gun’ (1982) Mapplethorpe’s ‘Gun Blast’ (1985), and, most recently, David Buckingham's ‘Travis Bickle III’ - to name just a few. Pop Art and the Counter Culture embraced the Gun as an Icon of struggle, both personal and public. Consider in particular Chris Burden’s ‘747’ (1973) - in which he shoots a handgun at a passenger plane in flight - and arguably the most extreme use of a gun in the history of art, Burden’s ‘Shoot’ (1971), in which the artist filmed himself actually being shot. Indeed, the Gun image is communicating so much in Burden’s work about American Culture it’s chilling - evoking the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Luther King, Charles Whitman’s Clock tower siege, Vietnam, the Kent State Massacre and Son Of Sam David Berkowitz’s 1977 NY killing spree and beyond. Indeed, Burden’s work strikes such an ominous chord it transcends its period and ultimately portends the Columbine Killings, 9/11 and now Arizona.

Chris Burden - Shoot (1971)

Robert Mapplethorpe 'Gun Blast' (1985)

It shouldn’t surprise us that the Gun found itself the go-to icon for the Post-60’s artist. The revolutionary imagery of the 60’s and 70’s Radical Left and Black Power movements practically demanded it, along with the looped news footage of political assassinations and Vietnam that haunted the era. But Popular Culture itself had actually appropriated the Gun as symbol long before the Counter Culture embraced it. Hollywood is the obvious starting point, from its mythologizing of the Wild West - in reality a relatively short Historical period actually short on glamour and gunslingers, high on homesteaders and ranchers, but now re-framed via cinema to be the dominant founding narrative - and gangster culture (most notably 40’s Film Noir, but beginning in the 1930’s with ’Scarface’). By the 1970’s revenge movies (Dirty Harry, Death Wish) had brought these outlaw myths into the heart of urban Civilisation, presenting the Gun as a possible answer to rising crime and social decline, this source of power escalated to ludicrous proportions by the testosterone-fuelled Action films of the 80’s and beyond. The scene in ‘Terminator‘ (1984) when Schwarzenegger visits an LA gun shop is pure satire, whilst simultaneously thrilling the audience.

But really the absurd, gun toting imagery of Schwarzenegger and Stallone’s in their 80’s heyday, when they brandished ever-larger arsenal, was simply a cartoonish crescendo to the iconic Clint Eastwood and John Wayne films that preceded them. Indeed, Eastwood has arguably done more than any other American to assert the status of the gun as an image that expresses justice and masculine power, specifically in his Westerns and the Dirty Harry franchise. Notoriously, ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan talked about his Magnum .44 with a pornographic zeal (“This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off”) before he shuns the bureaucrats and administers to administer some actual ‘justice’. Callaghan’s ethos can be located to this day in significant Right-leaning Politicians, most notably George ‘We’re gonna get them folks’ Bush. Maybe this is why, now in his senior years, Eastwood’s attempted to stress the limitations of his earlier work’s gung-ho violence in more reflective work such as ‘Unforgiven’ and ‘Gran Torino’?

Feeding off the same symbolism, Popular Music has been equally entranced by the Gun. The Blues rotated on Old Testament mythology and that often veered towards the misogynistic, best embodied by the Murder Ballad Stagger Lee / Stack O’Lee, a tale of bloody folklore retold by everyone from John Lee Hooker to Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. This Gun-based violence, born of sexual jealousy, can be located in the evolution of Pop Music irrespective of which mutant strand you consider, from Country music’s Wild West persona, (Johnny Cash’s ‘Man In Black’ persona - is their a more violent song than ‘Delia’s Gone’? – and Tim Rose’s ‘Hey Joe’) to Hip Hop, where the deployment of gun iconography is used as both political weapon (Public Enemy’s logo evokes Palin’s scopes) to fetishized weapon of the street in Gangsta Rap (NWA ‘Ak-47 Is The Tool’).

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But Popular Music’s use of the gun isn’t simply about male aggression and bragging rights. Even Grunge, an often feministic, anti-alpha male music, was fixated with guns. The obvious example is Kurt Cobain, who repeatedly referenced guns in his lyrics and videos, before using a shotgun to end his life aged 27. But the gun was far from limited to Cobain, and would reoccur again and again (Soundgarden ‘Gun’ / Pearl Jam ‘Once’, ‘Glorified G’ and ‘Jeremy’). Perhaps Grunge had embraced Gonzo Counter Culture writers such as William Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson too literally (both Pro-gun)? Perhaps the Basketball Diaries / Columbine Culture was simply sound tracked by Grunge? Or perhaps, Like John Lennon in ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, Grunge had embraced a heroin connection in the Gun’s symbolic arsenal? Most likely, the Gun image was simply ubiquitous and offered multiple applications to the artist.

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But then why wouldn’t the gun keep reoccurring given its power as a symbol, and it’s ubiquity in everyday American life? Artists and Politician’s can only ever evoke and twist the world they inhabit, appropriating the images that colour reality, enhancing their prominence, embellishing their meaning. This problematic loop is perfectly illustrated by Martin Scorcese’s 'Taxi Driver' (1976) a film that is in part based upon the real life diaries of lone gunman Arthur Bremer, who shot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972. The real-life lone gunman is thus elevated by screenwriter Paul Schrader to a romantic and frustrated figure worthy of cinematic profiling - the ultimate anti-hero, part Ethan Edwards, part Raskolnikov. But then the film ‘Taxi Driver’ in turn inspires John Hinckley III to shoot President Reagan in 1981. Art imitates life just as life imitates art. ‘Taxi Driver’ itself remains a paradoxical piece of work, celebrated for its portrayal of Post-Vietnam male psychosis whilst failing to make the audience feel disgust towards Travis Bickle, rendering it oddly unsuccessful in its attempts to reject the Dirty Harry / Death Wish mythology (despite the chilling scene when Scorsese’s cab passenger evokes Harry Callaghan by telling Travis about the damage a Magnum .44 can ‘do to a woman’s pussy’.) Indeed, Scorsese to this day recalls his dismay when New York audiences applauded Travis’s last stand, as if he was the good guy.

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As such, given this long and protracted hold the Gun maintains on America’s Popular imagination, condemnation of Sarah Palin’s gun-based rhetoric, whilst legitimate, shouldn’t overshadow the greater narrative in which she is operating. Gun Laws alone can deal with the presence of the Gun in America society. The precedent for a legal solution is evident from a quick look at other Industrial nations, once gun-toting, now relatively gun free. From 18th and 19th Century Europe (when duelling pistols were considered a solution not a problem), to Japan’s prohibitive, ultra strict anti-Gun and Sword Laws, to Australia’s strong Political reaction to Michael Bryant’s killing spree in Tasmania in 1996, the Gun has been contained in most modern industrial states by Laws and Laws alone. And by being expunged from these Cultures in reality, the Gun is now no longer shorthand symbolism for artists and politicians alike. It is a far healthier dynamic between life and art than the one that currently has momentum in the United States.