Souvenirs of the Apocalypse: Guns as Authenticating Props

Abstract

Souvenirs of the ApocalypseGuns as Authenticating Props Rachel Wagner (bio) Seventeen people died in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018. A week later Donald Trump blamed movies and video games for creating the violent culture that led to the shooting, saying: “I don’t know what this does to a young kid’s mind, somebody growing up and forming and looking at videos where people are just being blown away left and right ... the level of craziness and viciousness in the movies, I think we have to look at that too.”1 Trump’s remarks are in sync with the NRA’s take after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. As a means of explaining the killings, Wayne LaPierre called the movie business “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.” He pointed to “blood-soaked slasher films like American Psycho and Natural Born Killers that are aired like propaganda loops.”2 And yet, in 2013 the NRA’s magazine The American Rifleman ran a story about the top ten “coolest gun movies.”3 Some of these, like The Alamo (1960), draw on Western themes and celebrate the survivor who uses his gun for masculine adventure. Others, like Terminator (1984) and Red Dawn (1984), imagine an alternate dystopic future in which guns are the only means to survive against hostile foes. Zombieland (2009) and Tremors (1990) stray into fantasy, imagining monstrous enemies that threaten all of civilization. The Road Warrior (1981) celebrates the violent vigilante, scraping out an existence in a dismal post-apocalyptic future. All celebrate the manly pluck of the shooter who knows when to kill and doesn’t hesitate. [End Page 310] These are films about winning with guns. Clearly, there is some inconsistency in the NRA’s views about movies and guns. Part of the problem is definitional: The way that one understands broad terms like “violence” and “media” largely shapes the outcome of one’s analysis. As David Trend points out in his book The Myth of Media Violence, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the Bible is a form of media that is “violent.” War monuments are “violent.” Films like Schindler’s List (1993) and Hotel Rwanda (2004) are “violent.” Even Disney’s The Lion King (1994) is “violent.”4 Media violence, Trend proposes, is “one of the most widely discussed yet least understood issues of our time.”5 In the United States, there are about 37,000 deaths per year from guns, and mass shootings happen at the rate of one or more per day.6 Violent media are not irrelevant in this dangerous equation, but they can hardly be seen as directly causative—especially if we can’t agree on what makes media “violent” in the first place. The issue is far too complex to boil down to a simple cause-and-effect arrangement. However, if we shift from conversations about broad categories like “media” and “violence,” we can ask more nuanced questions about what guns and violent movies might have in common. That is, what broader culture might they both participate in? I argue here that the gun can be viewed as a deadly prop in a mythological construct that is bigger than individual gun-owners, bigger than the movies they watch, and even bigger than the guns themselves. After introducing the cowboy apocalypse myth, I will turn to a consideration of the gun as a kind of quasi-sacramental self-authenticating prop, the material instantiation of the repeated filmic portrayal of a violent post-apocalyptic future yearned for by those who embrace the myth. Indeed, the gun can be viewed as a mode of violent mediation all by itself. The Cowboy Apocalypse In its hybrid form, what I call the “cowboy apocalypse” is a complete mythic story arc. It is about America’s beginnings, but it is also about the whole world’s imminent ending. Those who survive the violent transformation of the world will do so by a combination of grit, individualism, and violence—and often with the liberal use of guns. The cowboy...