Finally, a movie review instead of a drab and glib backstory about how much this guy loves movies! My dear friends, grace and peace be to you as you get back from your gallivanting adventures to Florida (unoriginal), home (not too bad), and beyond!
The film that we will be discussing this is, in my opinion, the first truly American postmodern movie that incorporates the French New Wave style of filmmaking, specifically the aspect of incorporating homage as essence. It is a telling of what is to come after the end of modernity in Hollywood storytelling. Interestingly enough, the person who brings this film to us likely knew that this would be the necessary outcome. Targets is a movie that was on my mind purely because of the fact that I want to be a weird completionist of all movies for a director. Also, the plot preview on Google grabbed my attention.
Targets, directed by the lothario of lotharios Peter Bogdanovich, was his premiere film after years of being a movie critic. Bogdanovich’s career is very similar to, in my opinion, the greatest living American artist, Paul Schrader. I digress. This is pre-The Last Picture Show, an ode to all of those towns that seemed to be lost in time. That movie tackles moralism in the abstract, but Targets does not tackle much of anything, which is what makes it the first postmodern film of its kind. There are other postmodern works, such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, which just subverts an entire genre rather than doing what Bogdanovich does in Targets.
Targets looks at two different storylines: a psychopathic insurance salesman who kills his mother and his wife, and a declining movie actor. That is why it is postmodern in the film sense. Easy—this movie has entire scenes where they discuss movies and pop culture, including a real-life movie, The Terror, that the actor in the film stars in. This is a harbinger of the doom of Tarantino to come—movies that comment on movies, a circular logic that leaves no room for actual pop culture growth. A snake that eats itself.
(Interestingly enough, Jack Nicholson has a cameo in the movie that the characters are watching, and Roger Corman produced this movie. This movie is like a New Hollywood all-star cast before anyone would care about any of these people.)
Tarantino is a great filmmaker, but in the end, he is the sign of the times—recycling old tales and being unoriginal. Tarantino is making copies of copies until you cannot decipher the details, which is where he comes in and becomes a “great talent.” Of course, the dialogue is original, but Tarantino does not create anything; he is simply tearing things down and recycling them. This is the critique of American Psycho, the book—it does not create anything, it simply makes fun of what is happening. A critique of something is no art; that is like saying blowing up a building is art. Sure, it is cool, but in the end, it leaves everything in shambles. I owe this point to David Foster Wallace who, through this conjecture about American Psycho, elicited Bret Easton Ellis to celebrate the suicide of David Foster Wallace. The lesson of this little tangent: creative people are some of the worst people that you will ever encounter.
Targets is also very similar to our good friend Tarantino because of its juxtaposition of stories with an inevitable crossing of the storylines, such as in the story of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. In concept, these movies are exactly the same thing. Let us look at the plot of Targets. Targets is about an old movie star who is calling it quits in the movie industry because he has played the same roles in B-list horror movies since the ’30s, and the other storyline is a madman who kills a bunch of people with a sniper rifle and also kills his beautiful wife and mother. At the end, the actor confronts the madman and beats him, physically and mentally, causing the madman to break down into tears. The actor realizes that he can still thrive and survive in the changing movie industry. A happy ending to a tragic movie. Now, let us look at the plot of Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. Rick Dalton is plunging into the despair of a post-Hollywood career peak, and Cliff Booth is running around with a hyper-sexual 17-year-old who is part of the Manson family. Rick burns alive the Satan servants (while Cliff does most of the work), keeping Sharon Tate alive and seeing that there is hope for his flailing Hollywood career. You see?
All of this to say, I think the love that Tarantino movies got for their “innovative genius” was a little short-sighted. Though movies like Targets are not as cool or as well-made as a typical Tarantino film, it goes to show that all of the movies that we like to this day are riding on the highway that New Hollywood and postmodern filmmaking paved. I was going to attach a screenshot of Quentin Tarantino liking and commenting on this theory, but I really have to start studying for my chemistry test. What a drag that I cannot brag!