Trigger Happy

The great American baddie is on the prowl again. This time, like most times, it's a gunman on the rampage picking off strangers because somebody looked at him the wrong way, or cut in front at the shopping mall car park.

There's a lone sniper picking off Joe Public one by one in Washington DC right now - taunting the cops and laying down threats and generally whipping up the yank news hounds into a frenzy. The American Media are never happier than they are covering a good juicy domestic story. Live from a helicopter, coast to coast on eight channels a police cordon. Ambulance chasing - the US news specialty.

The amazing thing is the way your average American seems so shocked and bewildered when the gun totin' rootin' tootin' all-American fried chicken comes home to roost.

Here he comes again, right on time, living out the usual Hollywood bad guy fantasy. The revenge of the nerds, in a society where the good guy is so perfect and squeaky clean he's beyond identification. The American hero is a superman in the Nietzschean sense. Ubermensch who can do no wrong, take the law into his own hands, and make up his own rules.

A good looking, witty, wiseguy hero chasing down the street with a loaded gun is everywhere in American movies. Mel Gibson, Arnie, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford...The chase is always on, the shining gun always cocked, and street justice is always done.

Superman as a pretty uncomplicated unthinking kind of guy who seems to catch criminals almost by osmosis, who can shoot through a crowd of people and kill the baddie stone dead in one clean shot.

He's naturally good. He doesn't seem especially bright, just confident and full of it. Born to do it, like the old heroes America grew up with. George Washington. Davey Crockett. Abraham Lincoln. Dan Dare. Douglas Fairbanks. John Wayne. Keanu Reeves in' Speed'. Bruce Willis in 'Die Hard'. Steve McQueen in 'Bullitt'. Clint in 'Dirty Harry'. Guys with perfect teeth and perfect hair.

But where American mythmakers really shot themselves in the foot was the good guy gone bad.

It was an Italian, Sergio Leone, who first introduced this very modern character into the American psyche. He cast a young, blond James Dean clone straight out of Rawhide as The Man With No Name. The hero as villain. He appeared to be the perfect, attractive law abiding dude, yet it turned out he was the Angel of Death. It was a theme Leone returned to time and time again - Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda in 'Once Upon a Time In The West.' Terrence Hill in 'My Name Is Nobody'.

The avenging angel, the worm that turned.

Bad guys of old were easy to spot and naturally evil - just by virtue of their colour (Zulu warriors, untamed slaves, wild Red Indians) and funny accents. You could kill em all like flies and no-one would bat an eyelid. It was just the way things were.

The bad guy in the modern movie is mythologised to a much higher degree. They are bright, calculated, studious, and cunning. They are intense and complex, just like real people. They are not some lantern-jawed newsreader type, but someone with genuine character and panache. Dennis Hopper. John Malcovich. Steven Berkoff.

Scorcese's Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle, was the first homegrown hero-as-psychopath. The ordinary Joe who 'could not take it any more'. Any pretty soon there was Mark Chapman living the dream and stalking John Lennon.

Pretty soon all the good buys were ready to turn bad. Michael Douglas, in his prescription jam-jar bottoms specs, Robin Williams down at the One Hour Photo lab. The hero turns sour.

In a world where the law-abiding Joe Schmoe can work eighty hour weeks and still barely get by there's always a role model for going off the rails in style.

Now you can be an all-American hero by causing mayhem on the prime time news. You can be king shit of turd mountain on Jerry Springer, then weep crocodile tears of remorse on Rikki Lake or Oprah. You can go off the rails and have a darn good reason. Mitigating circumstance. I was an abused child - mom and dad refused to pay my cellphone bills.

The dude hidden in the DC bushes is clearly living out his movie fantasy. He's already acting as if he knows that the big corps are already commissioning the film script. It wouldn't surprise me if he turns up tomorrow morning with his hands up. "Here I am! Throw the book at me." America is getting so used to not getting it's hands on the perp the man will become instantly famous, and the televised trial the most watched show since OJ.

The guy is going to turn out to be the ultimate ordinary Joe, and he'll have the apologetic shrug of Scorcese's Rupert Pupkin. "Better to be King for a Night Than Schmuck for a lifetime..."

Blogga.