Current Enthusiasms #4: TV shows about guns

Earnest recommendations.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Friar Pedro Wrests the Gun from El Maragato, 1801-1811. I hate guns. When the children were small we refused to buy them toy guns. Children the world over, however, transform sticks found in the park into guns. There is nothing parents can do about this. Children enjoy guns, I suppose as all humans have an instinct toward violence.

I vacillate between being a TV guy and not being a TV guy. Last fall, I took five weeks off of work and in that period I watched 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It might have been 14 seasons, I lost count. I cooked, wrote emails, and watched Detective Benson do her thing. It was great. I generally prefer stupid shows to prestige programming. If I’m watching TV I probably don’t want to think.

But I don’t need to watch TV. I can divert myself in other ways. However, this winter we have watched a lot of TV. Seems true for a lot of my friends. No one wants to think! My husband and I watched The Great British Bake Off, the season with the sexy pirate Dylan. Then we watched all these shows that I think of as related: The Diplomat, Black Doves, The Agency, Lioness, The Day of the Jackal, Slow Horses. They’re quite different from one another, but they are all TV shows about guns.

In a way, “guns” is a genre. There’s a lot of entertainment about guns. I get it. Guns are good for narrative purposes. Guns add a frisson to things. They are dangerous and seem serious. They are exciting. Here’s the gun—brace yourself! That wasn’t what Chekhov meant but it’s another, not wholly unrelated rule for storytelling.

Some of these shows aim for realism. Some are operatic, violence and intrigue as pure fantasy. Some are toxic, asserting that Arabs are evil and Mexicans are drug lords while white people (and Zoe Saldaña) are heroes. But they have Ben Wishaw, who is cute, or Nicole Kidman, who is Nicole Kidman, or Keri Russell, who is secretly one of the best actresses alive. (I have a theory that her detractors conflate her with Felicity Porter, one of the most unpleasant people ever depicted on television; that’s just how good an actress Russell is!) They have that moral ambiguity that is so tidy it is in fact lazy. Maybe the hero and the bad guy are, in fact, the same…. whoa.

The Day of the Jackal is the most about guns of all these TV shows about guns. The gun is basically the romantic lead. Eddie Redmayne is always lovingly assembling his guns. Redmayne is very handsome though curiously unsexy. If he were sexy, these gun scenes would be erotic, like that scene in Pynchon’s V where a woman has sex with a car. Instead they’re a bit like watching someone make a meal on Instagram.

Redmayne as the Jackal wears nice clothes: lots of turtlenecks and sharp jackets with stand collars. It’s oh so European; he looks like he buys his wardrobe at duty free. The show is about him trying to assassinate some stupid tech guru guy. The real fantasy Jackal trades in isn’t that you might be hot but unsexy like Eddie Redmayne, or hop from Cadiz to Tallinn with a weekend bag stuffed with Brioni; it’s that stupid tech guru guys will be dispensed with.

Embarrassing that guns, something I want nothing to do with in real life, are central to the fantasies I’m willing to indulge in while watching TV. It was a pleasure imagining American diplomacy run by sexy menopausal women like Nicole Kidman and Kerri Russell. It was a joy to imagine that crime is just camp, moppet Ben Wishaw facing off against Tracey Ullman (yes, Tracey Ullman). It was nice to leave New York and dart around London as Michael Fassbender romanced Jodie Turner-Smith, a woman far too beautiful to credibly play an academic.

I wasted a lot of hours, this winter, on all this rubbish. I shouldn’t have. I have things to do: write a novel, organize my taxes, be an adult. I am under the gun in terms of meeting a (self-imposed) writing deadline. Funny, that phrase. We really do live under the gun, all of us. They’re everywhere, it can drive you mad if you think about it. I think I might next rewatch The Golden Girls, but there are guns on that show, too.

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