From the Editor

The Guns of Narrative follow pretty much the same pattern as the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, directed by J. Lee Thompson, the maker of 49 other films such as: Cape Fear (1962), Death Wish 4: the Crackdown (1987), and Firewalker (1986).  The plot:  to take out the big German gun overlooking the Aegean Sea (which requires lots of little guns or at least one clever gun to do the trick).  In the film, a team of commando types -- Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, and a few more scale the mighty Navarone cliffs and undo the Big Gun of the Big Guy with the spicy help of Gia Scala.  Like J. Luc Godard said, "All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun."

True enough, it seems every film and tv drama show carries the same dopey trope.  "He's got a gun, she's got a gun, we've all got guns."  And that is the essence of contemporary drama.  A gun provides instant conflict without reason, without background.  Cut away from context, guns in films have become collector's items; see http://www.gunsinmovies.com/index.html (This is only a partial listing of all the films with guns and all the guns that appeared in them.)  Not only do guns advance the action, the filmmakers delude themselves to believe that guns reveal the real everyday world, raw and violent, that guns also serve as the logical outcome of supernova emotional conflicts that human beings constantly evoke, and that guns are the ultimate psycho-sexual symbols of deadly penetration, rape, homoerotic attraction -- the great hand-held uber gun in a Freudian frieze.  Yet, taken gun-sober, instead of gun-drunk, of the 6.5 billion people in the world, only a fraction are presently engaged in armed conflict, and most days, not everyday but most, a gun does not suddenly appear out of the nefarious nowhere to inflict insidious harm without much thought, a dozen school shootings notwithstanding.

If anything, the gun narrative in video-drama (enacted over and over again ad nauseum as if that is the only plot a person could think up) may contribute to a desperate person's sense of problem solving.  (See Anderson and Bushman in Science magazine, March 2002): "Evidence is steadily accumulating that prolonged exposure to violent TV programming during childhood is associated with subsequent aggression."

The first use of the word "gun" in English appeared in reference to a great gun, a cannon, in 1346, so the written record, imaginative and otherwise, is fairly recent and brief compared to the time it took for Dinosaur extinction some 65 million years ago.  The first reference of handgun or pistol penetrating the written corpus, according to the OED, occurred in 1744 as in -- "Then surely you had needs ride with guns" -- which, as it turns out, became unwitting but literal advice for 20th century filmmakers and TV story people.

Of the technological imperative behind the gun, like in "Have technology will use it," there have been instances of technology going extinct as in the 8 track tape and dust buster, but it seems the gun imperative (like all weapons) has some staying power.  Perhaps it is in the will and ease with which it can be used, projectiles over great distances, thus distancing the object of fear, but ironically becoming more fearful because of the distance.  For the storyteller, it may be the same -- the will and ease with which the gun can be used in a narrative, penetrating the great distance between audience and the screen.

Are we better for this kind for storytelling?  Once something comes into being, even in narrative, it's difficult not to use it.  Ask any 8 year-old boy to make a movie, and he might, and probably will, include a gun onscreen.  It is the first thing we reach for.  The diabolical phrase "When someone says Kultur, I reach for my gun," attributed to Nazi-types like Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering, sounds like the TV bumper-sticker of today.  The more accurate phrase has even a darker portent and sounds a little bit more subtle like what a filmmaker would do; "When I hear of culture … I release the safety-catch of my Browning" from Hanns Johst's 1933 play Schlageter (Act I, Sc 1), performed on the occasion of the Fuhrer's birthday. See Johst, depicted here, receiving a literary prize in 1935.

In these fearful days of war, of school shootings, blood-bath films, and forensic TV dramas, perhaps we can take a step into a new direction and lead the way with storytelling, instead of following the way.  Taking the advice of satirist Jimmy Sands, writing for The Blanket: a Journal of Protest and Dissent, I believe we can:  "When I hear the word 'gun,' I reach for my culture."