The times they were a-changin’ in the
1960s. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho did not feature a foreign monster (no
Dracula vampire with an Eastern European accent or Cold War alien creatures or
Japanese Godzilla.) The audience follows the main character (played by Janet
Leigh) to an American motel where the caretaker Norman Bates appears to be a
mild-mannered young man. Then he stabs the main character to death in a shower.
The camera slowly zooms out of the eye of the beautiful young woman’s corpse.
Norman Bates was inspired by the real-life serial killer Ed Gein, who committed
two ghastly and grisly crimes in Wisconsin in the 1950s. The assassination of
President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 traumatized the nation and the
race riots in 1964 and 1965 showed a conflict and crisis in American society
that could no longer be ignored. After midnight, on August 1, 1966 in Austin,, twenty-five
year old Charles Whitman stabbed his mother and wife and then shortly before
high noon he climbed the stairs of the clock tower at the University of Texas
campus and murdered multiple victims by firing at them with his sniper rifle
until he was shot by police officers.
Twenty-eight year old Peter Bogdanovich
had been obsessed with cinema his entire life. He wrote film criticism for
various magazines and had also been a movie programmer at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. He had left NYC for L.A. because he no longer wanted to
only write about films. He wanted to be a director. Yet it was his writing that
gave him his first directing job. Roger Corman had read an article Peter
Bogdanovich had written for Esquire, and the two of them discussed
filmmaking when they met at a screening. Corman gave Bogdanovich complete
creative control over his directorial debut, with one exception. He had to use
the actor Boris Karloff and footage from the film The Terror.
Bogdanovich had been deeply disturbed by Charles Whitman’s mass shooting and
felt compelled to write a screenplay based on the event. How would he
incorporate Boris Karloff into this story? Karloff had been the iconic face of
horror in Hollywood history. His foreign facial features and voice had
frightened American audiences. The 1930s - 1950s was an era when America’s
deepest fears were of foreign enemies. The 1960s altered audiences’ views. Lee
Harvey Oswald was American. Charles Whitman was American. The enemy was no
longer foreign. The enemy was within American society.
Bogdanovich named his directorial debut
with the stark title Targets. He co-wrote the screenplay with his wife
Polly Platt. He was against his directorial debut being released by American
International Pictures. Bogdanovich wanted it to be distributed by a company
with historical significance. He sold the movie to Paramount. They had Boris
Karloff for five days and a shooting schedule of twenty-three days. They juxtaposed
two plotlines. In the first plotline, Boris Karloff plays Byron Orlok (a nod to
Nosferatu), an aging horror movie star who wants to retire, which
outrages the company who want him to make more films. Karloff was seventy-nine
years old when production on Targets started in 1967. He felt
rejuvenated by the opportunity to play a character that was a deviation from his
usual appearances in the horror genre. This was a character that had nuances
and was realistic. Karloff’s performance is wistful and wry, which fits his
character who is reflecting on the course of his career. Bogdanovich’s
performance is appropriately anxious and nervous as he plays himself, a cinephile
who has suddenly been thrown into the management position of his first major
motion picture. Bogdanovich plays (Sammy Michaels), a young director who is
both optimistic about Orlok (he believes the script he has written will be
Orlok’s best and most complex character) and skeptical about the state of the
movie business (“All the good movies have been made.â€) Bogdanovich had a high
opinion of Karloff and was nostalgic for Old Hollywood. This becomes clear in
several scenes. Karloff and Bogdanovich watch a sinister scene together from The
Criminal Code and Bogdanovich praises his performance. Bogdanovich and the
hippie radio DJs (whom he satirizes as absolutely absurd in their lack of
serious questions for Karloff) gather around and listen to Karloff’s hypnotic, mesmerizing
voice as he recites the ancient fable of the Appointment in Samarra which symbolizes the inescapability of
death. This fable doubles as an epitaph for Karloff’s career (Targets was
his last major role in an American film) and as a commentary on the mass
shootings in American society. Bogdanovich also uses dialogue he wrote for
Karloff as a commentary on the changing attitude to the horror genre (“You know
what they call my films today? Camp! High camp!â€) and on Bogdanovich’s own
perspective of Hollywood and L.A. in the 1960s (“what an ugly town this has
become.â€)
In the second plot line, Bogdanovich
radically shifts the audience’s perception of fear from the old horror of Byron
Orlok to the new terror of Bobby Thompson. Tim O’Kelly plays Thompson. who is a
bland, clean-cut, young man who lives with his parents and wife in a
middle-class California suburb. He drives a sports car and eats candy bars
while listening to rock radio. He seems to have all the creature comforts that
American capitalism in the ‘60s can provide. Bogdanovich emphasizes a
disturbingly empty and hollow interior beneath Bobby’s seemingly normal
exterior in two scenes. He fires at targets with his father at a shooting range
and then aims the cross-hairs of the sniper scope at his father.
Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs shows a
close-up of Bobby’s finger hovering over the trigger. The father angrily
admonishes Bobby. The influence of Bobby’s father (an emotionally remote man
whom Bobby always refers to military-style as “Sirâ€) has an effect upon Bobby’s
own sense of willpower. Bobby’s wife arrives home late at night from her work
shift. Instead of an intimate moment shared by the couple, Bobby stays up alone
in the dark with his face ominously lit by his burning chain cigarettes. The
cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs utilizes the low key lighting of the film noir
genre in this scene.
In complete contrast, Bogdanovich and
Kovacs film the most shocking scenes of the movie in dull and drab grays. The
family’s house is presented to the viewer as ordinary and plain. Bogdanovich
emphasizes the clinical and detached demeanor of Bobby as he shoots his wife
and mother. There is no music in this film and the lack of it further
emphasizes the realistic tone. This becomes especially disturbing as Kovacs’
camera tracks around the quiet carpets and rooms of the family’s house in the
aftermath of Bobby’s killings. This tone continues in the scenes where he
climbs atop an oil storage tank and shoots at cars driving on the highway. He
has a brown paper bag with his lunch and neatly places each of his rifles in a
row. He drinks his soda and eats his sandwich while shooting strangers. Kovacs’
camera and Bogdanovich’s editing jarringly place the viewer’s point-of-view in
two simultaneous perspectives: the perspective of the shooter (through the
crosshairs of the sniper scope) and the perspectives of his victims (whose
deaths are abruptly shown through crash zoom-ins.)
The two plot lines finally converge at the
climax of the film: a drive-in movie theater where the old horror (scenes from
Roger Corman’s The Terror play onscreen while the audience waits for
actor Byron Orlok’s appearance) and the new terror (Bobby Thompson hides behind
the screen and shoots at the people trapped inside their cars) collide. Bobby’s
collecting of guns and shootings of random strangers is his attempt to overcome
his feelings of emasculation. He cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. This
point is emphasized when Bobby begins firing wildly in the air as Byron Orlok
on the film screen and the mirror image real life Byron Orlok both walk towards
him. Byron confronts Bobby by slapping him in the face and swinging his cane.
Despite Bobby holding a gun and Orlok holding a cane, Orlok appears to be the
more powerful of the two men. This is due to Karloff’s and O’Kelly’s
performances. Karloff draws upon his past performances as horror movie monsters
to present Orlok with a noble gravitas as he strides towards Bobby. O’Kelly’s
boy-next-door persona. Bobby’s childish crumpling into the fetal position
drives the point home that he lacks personal power and is only able to achieve
this with a gun. The final image is an overhead shot by Laszlo Kovacs of the
eerily empty drive-in parking lot. Bogdanovich leaves this lingering image with
the viewer to visualize his bleak conclusion: gun violence is far worse than
any horror movie.
Targets was released on August 15, 1968 and was especially relevant that
year in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert
Kennedy. The film was controversial at that time. Paramount initially balked at
releasing it but fifty years
later, its taut and tense tale of gun violence is still sadly relevant in 2018.