Targets: American Sniper

Essays—

May 16, 2023

“When I was younger, all my friends were older,” Peter Bogdanovich said in 2014, late in his life. Keeping company with one’s professional predecessors is not that uncommon, but the roll call of pals cited by the director is the stuff that dreams are made of: John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and Orson Welles, who famously took the younger man as a confidant and, later, a collaborator. If one major through line in American film history has been an almost worshipful reverence for the past—a result of artists’ desire to be part of something larger than themselves—Bogdanovich cuts a uniquely gallant, if also gadfly-ish, figure. As a precocious programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York–born filmmaker, who initially studied acting with Stella Adler, spent his early twenties as America’s most assiduous auteurist, non–Andrew Sarris division. He was a swashbuckling critic, a celebrant of exiled expressionists like Fritz Lang and pioneering homegrown showmen like Allan Dwan; he wrote early, influential monographs on Ford and Hawks, dubbing the latter “the most typically American director of all”—a compliment to his hard-driving eclecticism. Bogdanovich’s sweeping claims split the difference between authority and affection: his guiding principle was a respect for his elders. By the time he started making his own movies, he was already the old soul of the New Hollywood.

While Bogdanovich was about as immersed in cinema as is possible, a key inspiration for his 1968 debut, Targets—a thriller whose terse, nightmarish qualities would not be repeated across his wide-ranging and influential filmography—came not from the movies but from real life. Charles Whitman was an altar boy, an Eagle Scout, a marine, and a mass murderer: in 1966, between the last day of July and the first day of August, the twenty-five-year-old ex–bank teller killed sixteen people—including his wife and mother—and wounded more than thirty others, shooting the majority of his victims from the observation deck of the Main Building of the University of Texas at Austin. For the mass media, which made him a household name—“The Psychotic and Society,” declared a Time cover featuring his image—he was a cleaner-cut cousin to Lee Harvey Oswald, his sights trained not on political power or celebrity but on the everyday citizens whom he resembled at a distance, and maybe under the skin as well. “I don’t really understand myself these days,” the shooter himself observed in the half-typed, half-handwritten suicide note discovered at his residence. “I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.”

Targets is not a movie that tries to understand Whitman or his thoughts, but it does reckon with the fissures that his rampage opened up in America’s psychic armor; hard, jagged, and compact, it’s the cinematic equivalent of shrapnel in the cracks. Released in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the film was sold partially as a polemic. But Bogdanovich denied that his movie shed “a little light on a dark topic,” as one ad proclaimed, saying he just wanted to present the mechanics of a senseless crime. In this case, it’s possible to trust the tale as well as the teller: regardless of its message—or lack thereof—Bogdanovich’s debut stands in the company of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Brian De Palma’s Greetings (1968) as a film that serves less as an analysis than as a tissue sample of a decade defined by long-distance and increasingly high-profile gun violence.

Targets was famously commissioned on the fly by Roger Corman as a reward to the twenty-eight-year-old Bogdanovich for his help in shaping American International Pictures’ biker-themed hit The Wild Angels (1966). It was then engineered ad hoc by the director; his partner at the time, Polly Platt; and an uncredited Samuel Fuller around the presence of the octogenarian Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days’ work as part of a multipicture deal. Having long since become a global horror icon—and nursing debilitating health issues he tried to keep hidden—Karloff spent the sixties working steadily; his luxuriously sinister narration of CBS’s animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) won him a new generation of youthful fans. By falling in with Corman and his merry band of hipster hell-raisers, the actor risked placing his legacy in quotes, but the group had nothing but respect for his accomplishments, to the point that the script that became Targets would ultimately pivot on Karloff’s lion-in-winter dignity.

Buoyed by Corman’s promise to distribute the film via Paramount rather than AIP if it proved viable, Bogdanovich and his collaborators smartly gave Targets the outer shape of a ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation picture: a premise with rubbernecking potential. Their Whitman manqué was Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a young Vietnam War veteran whose all-American pedigree extends to his choice of snack: on several occasions, we see him chomping on a Baby Ruth, with its red-white-and-blue packaging. The character is introduced through a shot representing his point of view, a circular gun scope aimed at the head of a stranger standing across the street; the randomness of his glance anticipates the arbitrary nature of the carnage to come. But the identity of the older man in the crosshairs is nevertheless significant, as he’ll eventually wind up confronting the sniper at the height of his rampage. It’s a fateful meeting that represents the apotheosis of the script’s dramatic liberties with the Whitman case and also the beating, humane heart of Bogdanovich’s project: an affectionate, purposeful, and sociopoliticized revision of golden-age monster movies.

There is surely some satire in this equation, as well. By pitting O’Kelly’s apparent golden boy against Karloff’s aged, sullenly flamboyant horror-movie headliner Byron Orlok—the silver-haired gentleman seen through the barrel of Bobby’s gun—Targets mimics the trend by which Universal’s longest-tenured ghouls were maneuvered into chance meetings, whether with Abbott and Costello, Billy the Kid, or one another. Once established, though, the dialectic of the weary old actor and the nervy young marksman proved fertile ground for mining other fascinating contrasts: good and evil; reality and fiction; art and trash; and, crucially, Hollywoods old and new. If the damaged, self-deluding Bobby is a shooter in search of a target—a figure of pent-up, itchy-fingered potency—Karloff’s Orlok is, professionally speaking, a spent force and a sitting duck. Watching the dailies for his upcoming gothic knockoff (images taken directly from Corman’s 1963 film The Terror), he can barely veil his boredom, or his contempt for his own lumbering cinematic image. Bobby’s predatory, locked-in gaze could just as easily be Orlok’s psychological projection of himself as a marked man.

A decade before Targets, the wayward yet ever-inventive Edward D. Wood Jr. had recruited Karloff’s old friend and eternal rival Bela Lugosi for his cheapo sci-fi thriller Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), a small role made forcibly smaller by the actor’s unexpected death during production. This idea of a ceremonial cameo was especially well-suited to Bogdanovich’s cinephilia, and in Targets he balanced the scales by casting himself. Playing the up-and-coming helmer Sammy Michaels, a brainy movie brat who gradually ingratiates himself with Orlok while trying to get him to read his new script, Bogdanovich managed to spoof and sentimentalize his own coalescing persona. He plays Sammy as a wiseacre nonetheless capable of gallantry, as when he protects the old man from a clueless countercultural radio host’s inane line of questioning.

Sammy’s skepticism about the decade he has had the bad fortune to come of age within gives the showbiz-comedy side of Targets a mildly reactionary edge. “All the good movies have been made,” sighs Sammy while watching a television broadcast, marred by commercial interruption, of Hawks’s Karloff-starring 1931 thriller The Criminal Code. For all of his showily heroic cinephilia, Bodganovich doesn’t so much romanticize the filmmaking process as compartmentalize it. We’re cued to smile at Sammy’s good-natured communion with Orlok, which extends to the two of them drunkenly sharing a bed together, much to the amusement of the latter’s hard-edged assistant, Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), who is ostensibly Sammy’s girlfriend but flirts sweetly with her employer. But he’s really a secret sharer with Bobby, whose scenes unfold beneath carefully applied layers of meaning about staging, performance, and filmmaking. Even in the absence of an explicitly scopophilic subtext à la Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) or De Palma’s exactly contemporaneous Murder à la Mod, with its ice pick–wielding cinematographer, Targets draws clear and unsettling parallels between different forms of “shooting.” Bobby tells a gun-store owner that he recognized the actor as the star of his childhood nightmares, a fact that sets up a common denominator between Sammy and the sniper, and factors as well in the strained but poetic logic of the film’s finale. Further drawing out the theme of confused realities—or life as an ersatz imitation of art—Bogdanovich stylizes the Thompsons’ home so that it resembles a film set, all pale, color-coordinated pillows and linens. The horrifically distended sequence where Bobby carefully drags and repositions his newly dead spouse’s body suggests a man with mise-en-scène on his mind—to say nothing of the matters of location scouting, equipment management, and sight-line selection prefiguring his back-to-back shooting sprees.

The first of these, which sees Bobby take a position on a freeway-side water tower before firing in sequence at a half dozen moving vehicles, is simply terrifying: by keeping the violence at a remove, Bogdanovich evokes sociopathic depersonalization without slipping into gratuitousness. The second, set at the Los Angeles–area drive-in where Orlok has been coerced into making a personal appearance, is more unsettling, with Bobby effectively weaponizing both the projection booth and the screen itself as hunting blinds before the guest of honor spots him and walks over to deliver an unlikely—but hugely satisfying—physical beating in advance of his arrest. The backdrop plainly evokes the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was frog-marched out of a Dallas matinee of War Is Hell en route to his fifteen minutes of infamy. Avowed Targets fan Quentin Tarantino clearly drew on the film for the staging and subtext of his Inglourious Basterds finale, wherein a movie theater under fire serves as the locus for an act of history-changing heroism.

Charles Whitman wasn’t taken alive: he was shot and killed ninety minutes into his attack by two Austin Police Department officers. In sparing Bobby, Bogdanovich surely doesn’t sentimentalize his plight: instead, he shows him as a frightened, trapped animal trying to extend his stay in the shadows. The conceit of the nervous, exhausted gunman being cornered in a moment of confusion by two Orloks—one celluloid, in footage from The Terror; the other flesh and blood, striding as slowly and indestructibly as Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, in syncopation with his cane, even after being grazed by a bullet—is ingenious, even if it punctures the film’s otherwise tautly strung realism; similarly, Orlok’s sad, bewildered query after getting a good look at the handcuffed Bobby (“Is that what I was afraid of?”) risks hitting the rhetorical nail a bit too squarely on the head. But Karloff, who would appear in only one more feature released during his lifetime (Vernon Sewell’s 1968 romp Curse of the Crimson Altar), sells the line’s pathos, and there’s a lovely gesture where Sammy, flushed with concern for the aged star, gently dabs the blood from his forehead, finally neither a fan nor an ambitious director but what the old monster wanted all along: a friend.

From there, Byron and Sammy join the wounded but stable Jenny in the back seat of a hired car and drive off into the night toward safety and, perhaps, some future collaboration. In a way, their happy ending anticipates Bogdanovich’s impending triumph with The Last Picture Show (1971), which took the idea of nostalgia for older movies even further, equating the closing of a vintage local cinema with a loss of innocence, and also pointed the way toward the more comedic retro pleasures of What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). But the actual final shot of Targets is an anti–grace note. On what seems to be the morning after Bobby’s arrest, we see the vast and sprawling drive-in parking lot, empty of cars except for one, which remains in place as the credits scroll by. It’s Bobby Thompson’s white Ford Mustang, whose presence registers as a stubborn blemish on an otherwise clean slate, a lonely, modernist tableau of the elephant in the room—or the Psychotic and Society.

Targets: American Sniper

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