American Psychoses and Targets
“My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.”
So says Boris Karloff’s fictional counterpart, Byron Orlak, in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. It comes from an exhausted man, tired of the Gothic playacting and the exploitation of the Hollywood system. But Bogdanovich gives it a much harsher bite—for there is real horror to be found. Targets is a remarkable accomplishment of wildly distinct tones, laying out a meta satire of the movie industry coupled with a red-hot condemnation of America’s love of violence.
Karloff’s Orlak is a parallel stand-in for the actor, a man whose career was launched, sustained, and ultimately trapped by tales of Gothic horror. To the fright of his producers and director (played by none other than the young Bogdanovich, himself), Orlak suddenly declares that he’s retiring. He’ll no longer play the system’s game, not for a moment longer.
Across town a nice, young man is plotting a killing spree. Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) is an ideal American of the moment—clean-shaven, closely cropped hair, athletically built. White. As he purchases a gun, the store clerk tells him, “You have an honest face. Want me to throw in some ammunition?” Here’s where Bogdanovich complicates his film, stretching from the gimmicky terror of Universal horror films to the realized nightmare of gun violence.
Targets stands out from many of its paranoid counterparts (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) for how it makes a cohesive whole of these disparate faces. Where it focuses on Orlak, the film is funny and genuinely touching (and a wonderful ode to one of film history’s most unforgettable and most pigeonholed actors); when it switches to Bobby, it becomes a tense jeremiad. Bogdanovich handles both sides ably, fusing them into a raw, nervy work.
If all of this weren’t praise enough, this is Bogdanovich’s debut feature. Revisiting Targets, you’ll find notes of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, films made by directors already well-established and directed. I’d contend Targets is better than both. Bogdanovich—even while adding the challenge of being in front of the camera—shows sharp direction throughout. His pacing keeps both sides of the storyline moving cleanly, never quite letting either fall to the back of your mind. The camerawork and placement slowly boils the tension, long before violence is unleashed. There are so many shots of guns arrayed, ammunition scattered; the images emphasize how these objects of violence have become fetishized to the point of being cultic. Worshiped. Ritualized.
Even at a young age, Bogdanovich reveals himself to be sharply observant. He entered the system already skeptical. Meanwhile, the film also stabs at the midcentury fantasy of the perfect life. Bobby’s a man for whom radio and television voices drown out relationships. He’s a proto-Bickle by way of Leave It to Beaver. An All-American psychopath.
Targets welds America’s twin modern psychoses: media fixations and gun violence. The former have evolved from Beatlemania to toxic fandom and parasocial relationships. The latter, the more primeval urge, hasn’t seemed to change at all, merely to expand its hunger. (Is there a more fitting, unfortunate metaphor than a mass shooting at a movie debut? If only such an occurrence was contained to the realm of fiction.)
Death comes for us all. But in this violent world, sometimes the appointment gets moved up earlier. Bogdanovich broke onto the scene with a film that captures wistfulness, satire, and incipient rage and fuses them into a fractured whole: an act of reflection, and a harsh warning that has gone unheeded.
