Targets

I love Targets with every fiber of my being. On a personal level, I think of this movie at least once a day. I watched this for the first time on 5 cups of coffee, at like 4 in the morning, hyped way up the whole time, and it was the only thing I thought about the whole day after. The movie isn’t scary by modern standards, but its cold, clinical view of a man murdering innocent people with no music whatsoever is certainly disturbing. It helps that his victims aren’t actually “dumb”, compared to the usual slasher fare; the civilians in the drive-in theater in the climax actually work together to minimize the deaths the sniper could have caused. On a more “academic” level, there’s a lot to unpack. For starters, this movie needs some prior knowledge of what the United States was going through during this time to fully appreciate it. When this movie was being made, Hollywood was going through a total shift; the Hays Code was pretty much gone, and a new generation of hip filmmakers were coming in to kick off New Hollywood. Movies now had the freedom to be gritty and violent, and freely comment on the direction America was headed without being forced to end it with “…but it’s okay! America is still #1!” What helped is that things like the Vietnam War, civil rights and rising crime rates were happening. America was boiling into a soup of violence, counterculture, and pessimism. Targets is a very very meta film. Boris Karloff is playing an avatar of himself: a classic film star who feels he’s irrelevant in the midst of a nation who pays more attention to “real” horror like serial killers instead of spooky, supernatural gothic castles he reveled in. In the meantime, we see a young man who goes on a killing spree, casually sniping random people around different parts of Los Angeles. How do these two stories intertwine? Well, Peter Bogdanovich, the director, plays a young director, who wants Boris’ character to act in a script he wrote. The script, in question, is actually for the movie we are watching now. So, on the surface, the sniper represents the shift from gothic horror to more realistic horror that films would dive into, like with Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left a few years later. If you wanna go deeper, the sniper also symbolizes the death of the concept of the American Dream. I see a lot of people calling this anti-gun propaganda. I don’t particularly agree with this. While Peter probably would allow an interpretation leading to some second amendment criticism, it’s missing the point of the film. As I mentioned earlier, the Vietnam War was happening. Young men were literally getting gambled away to fight in a pointless war that, for the first time in history, was being broadcasted to the masses, as it was happening, on television. The pristine, sanitized household the sniper lives in is archaic escapism from an age long gone; he is there to demonstrate it. It is heavily implied that he actually is a Vietnam vet. The sniper is the horror that Boris Karloff and his silver screen scares are being overshadowed by. This culminates in the climax, where the sniper does his final spree at a screening of one of Boris’ gothic horror films. The two generations finally get to have their showdown. Peter Bogdanovich, being a movie critic and film historian who kept in touch with a lot of the (surviving) figures of Hollywood’s “classic” era, was savvy enough to notice the potential movies had now with such a massive change(he’d carry this on with his next feature, The Last Picture Show, which was a perfect emulation of 1950’s teen dramas without the chains of censorship). Targets, along with Easy Rider, is the perfect mission statement to America’s cultural shift. It is American cinema finally showing that it is no longer bound by things like the Hays Code, by the romantic ideals of the Hollywood Golden Age. Quoth the Dewey: The future is now, old man.