There’s more eccentricity among our celebrated artists than we can easily deal with, but this holiday season I’m giving it a go. After a piece on Tim Burton for Halloween, bringing out his combination of comedy and horror, and another on Woody Allen for Thanksgiving, about his mix of sophistication and longing for family life, let’s consider Shane Black for Christmas,
Back in 1987, Shane Black became a Hollywood celebrity after writing Lethal Weapon. The film was a hit even before it started a major franchise and quickly found its place among the variations on a major theme of ‘80s Hollywood. On the surface, that theme was simply friendship between men. But deeper issue in ‘80s “buddy movies” was camaraderie in a world that might be falling apart or might just be changing into something difficult to recognize for the kind of men who had been formed by the industrial economy and world wars of the mid-20th Century.
In Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson starred as Riggs, an erratic, suicidal policeman and former Green Beret. Instead of going through the prescribed “five stages of grief,” Riggs pulls off a heroic stunt in LA. The police psychologist thinks him psychopathic, but he might just need someone to blame for his unhappiness. At the end of the movie, having defeated the villain in a MMA fight, he is able to grieve for his dead wife and go to a Christmas dinner at his partner Murtaugh’s house (Danny Glover), successfully reintegrated into suburban middle class life.
Most of Black’s style is already visible in Lethal Weapon. The saying, almost a tagline, “there are no more heroes.” The Christmas setting. The male friendship and courting of deadly danger. The dark side of American life, where freedom turns into crime, as the deluded become prey to clever, ruthless people somehow connected to powerful institutions. Black’s left-wing criticism of American power is Oliver Stone-lite, but it merged well the blue-collar ethos of the action movie.
Black quickly became the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood on the back of his combination of comedy and violence, a boyish taste typical of the later Boomers perfected by Tarantino. But the studios always felt they had to get rid of some of the ugly touches in his stories in the interest of defending American audiences. So his scripts for Lethal Weapon and its sequel, as well as for The Last Boy Scout, all needed significant polishing, part of it coming from directors like Richard Donner and Tony Scott.
The Last Boy Scout stars Bruce Willis as a private investigator in LA whose life is falling apart, albeit in a somewhat humorous way. Everything gets much more exciting once he pairs up with a disgraced football player (Damon Wayans) to expose a criminal conspiracy involving a team owner, a Senator, and their murderous underlings. A flurry of action set pieces and witticisms later, the rejects of society get their revenge on corrupt elites. No cliché is spared—there’s even a “whore with a heart of gold” (Halle Berry). It’s as much fun as you can have in front of the living room screen.
Action movies are usually laughed at, but they’re earnest statements of what’s wrong with America. The comedy conceals it, but these are stories dedicated to justice penned by artists who cherish unfashionable American ideals. They’re also more timely, and even more prescient, than their fans suspect. The horror in Last Boy Scout, the elite conspiracy to corrupt American morality is sports gambling. Well, it’s happening right now? We, too, could ask, whether there are any more heroes among us. Our sports celebrities, wealthy beyond the dreams of Crassus, are lining up to advertise betting platforms!
Still, these movies are not just about America. They’re also about particular characters whom we recognize and are impressed by. Black’s protagonists aren’t invulnerable saviors of America—they are themselves in need of saving. They’re like George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life, last year’s Christmas reflection, but they’ve been living in Pottersville for too long. They’re about ready to give up hope, partly because they feel America has no use for them.
Why all this conflict? Why flirt with sordid things, as Black’s comedies do, or even show men living among the underclass that we avoid in our ordinary lives? Black reminds us that someone has to face these realities for the rest of us. Such men have to be strong enough to withstand things that might ruin ordinary people. We turn to such stories because they inspire—manliness is to an extent contagious—but also because they offer guidance about our difficulties. They help us judge what to prefer and what to avoid by encouraging us to be less squeamish and at the same time less fantastic in out ambitions.
Rather than glorifying the lone hero, the action genre that seems dedicated to elevating manliness in post-feminist, post-hippie society is really much more about encouraging a kind of reconciliation between men and society. That requires not only a great conflict and a satisfying, stupefying villain, but also a certain humbling of male pride in favor of women’s choices and priorities. Bruce Willis in Last Boy Scout seems to achieve a great reactionary victory, since his Christmas gift is that his wife finally backs him up and tells their daughter to behave. But this might be a greater victory for her than for him, since he has learned to sacrifice his stubbornness to their shared happiness. Violence, it’s true, replaces therapy, which was the wife’s suggestion, as a solution to their marital problems. But her acceptance of male authority is premised on him becoming the kind of husband that his wife will love and accepting that his daughter will grow up in the world of American freedom, with all its dangers, not as daddy’s innocent angel.
Family ended up playing less and less of a role in American cities and manliness almost entirely disappeared from contemporary storytelling at the turn of the century. By the time Black returned to fame with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), his preference for the noir, America’s last Romantic genre, had turned to farce. Instead of tough guys, we get the soft and self-deprecating Robert Downey, Jr. Comedy takes over from action, returning to the origins of Hollywood.
Downey’s smart-alecky performance adapts Chaplin remarkably well, even better than he had captured that persona in his Oscar-nominated performance in Chaplin (1992). A sentimental loser who starts as a small-time criminal in New York ends up in Los Angeles, in the world of glamour, pretending to be an actor, then a detective, and finally an all-American hero facing down a villain in true underdog style. It’s a story about the ordinary versus the glamorous, the ugly truth versus the cruel deception practiced in Hollywood, the manly desire to protect innocence versus the cynicism that bets on popular indifference to morality.
Still, Downey gets beaten up for his efforts and ends up losing a finger in a hilarious series of mishaps. His virtue is that he’s not as dumb as he looks and can roll with the punches better than people think. Underestimation and resilience are qualities left over from the action movies of the ‘80s. They’re even more needful in times when people are inclined to worship success.
Downey’s partner in Kiss Kiss is the even more unlikely Val Kilmer (Black is underrated for getting comic portrayals out of remarkable actors), who goes by Gay Perry. He’s a fixer for the studios, supposed to be the strong, silent type. But his silence is really just a matter of keeping a distance from the sordid stuff he has to do for a living, as well as a bit of wisdom. In a corrupt society, shutting up is usually the way to go. Because there’s not that much justice to go around, so indignation is wasted.
As for the gay part: that’s perhaps the best joke in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It’s a commentary on a pop culture that has no room left for friendship between men that a Hollywood character who likes being around other men must be sexually attracted to them. This Christmas story, however, suffers from Black’s tendency toward sentimentality and brutality. The plot involves too much murder and suicide to be a family movie and America didn’t love it. Yet the film has achieved a cult following for its cinematic invention and comedic revival of a century of movie history.
Kiss Kiss also revived Black’s career, as well as Downey’s. He repaid his old friend by getting him the job to direct Iron Man 3 (2013), a movie with real comedy in it, unlike the typical Marvel fare, which grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide. suggesting our era of blockbusters could have gone much better than it has. It, too, is a Christmas story about a man returning to wife and marriage, reminding us of the wisdom of leaving celebrity for a private life. Without escaping the limits of its genre, Iron Man 3 suggests that our era of blockbusters could have gone much better than it has.
By 2016, Hollywood was changing again. Rather than including stars in superhero movies, it was canceling the stars. Black made another comeback in this twilight moment with The Nice Guys, a comedy second that year only to the Coen Brothers’ classier Hail, Caesar!, but with the added advantage of action. This time, Black helped revive Russell Crowe’s fortunes and got a remarkable comic performance out of Ryan Gosling, the male model Buster Keaton of our generation, a modern knight of the sad countenance on whom directors practice their cruelties in rehearsal of the downfall of the male of the species.
The Nice Guys is again about men down on their luck who need a Christmas miracle. Once again, their misery is also America’s. This is LA in the ‘70s, the decade we have collectively chosen to forget and then reenact. Everything from smog and gas lines to dumb hippie protesters and an orgy of drugs and pornography features in this movie. Where will we find any heroes or innocence in that awful scene? What’s there to hope for in America?
Crowe plays an enforcer-for-hire who beats up criminals, a man too decent to be a success in his times, but also not quite smart enough to make it as a private detective. Gosling plays a private detective of rather low character, who sells fantasies to doddering people, taking their money for a new lease on their hope that whoever they lost will be found. He also gets beaten up a lot.
A fact of modern life, the private detective, is also here a last public resort. Every generation or so, we’re overrun by crime and the liberal authorities seem helpless. So we turn to misfits, outsiders, even outlaws for protection. We’re facing these problems in our society once again—more of that prescience of the action movie. But it’s more pleasant to face them in a farce.
Both the “nice guys” have lost their families in terrible, yet funny ways, so it’s not clear how they might move on with life after they’ve completed their mission. Gosling has a daughter, clever, daring, and angry that his self-loathing has led him to drink instead of taking care of her. She’s too young to understand that his failings as a father are almost an homage to the wife he lost, without whom he feels he’s no good. But she’s smart enough to know that her father needs a friend if he’s going to hold himself to any standard or achieve anything, and she helps along. Again, it’s this female wisdom that guides manly action.
Like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys is too ugly to be a family movie, but too much fun and too clever to disregard. It’s Christmas, we might say, for the people who most need it, or for us at our neediest. So give the action movies another chance this Christmas, and you’ll discover the warmth and sentimentality that reminds us of childhood and home, but also the harder-bought wisdom and disappointment of adult life. We’ll need as much forbearance and wit ourselves in years to come.
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