It has become a somewhat common tactic for documentary filmmakers in the digital age to turn to the supercut as a way to sift through the massive amount of content and information available online on our behalf. This is the doc filmmaker as curator, exposing themselves to all of this so we don’t have to, and gathering it together in one place for us to, hopefully, find some meaning within. That meaning tends to come from the editing, whether through the arrangement of material, juxtapositions pregnant with resonance, or other techniques to add some authorial intention to what is otherwise merely a thematic collection of images and sounds.
Javier Horcajada’s From My Cold Dead Hands, running just over an hour, is the result of scouring hundreds of hours of YouTube videos about American gun culture, and it seems to want these images and sounds to speak for themselves, even if, ultimately, one gets the sense that the filmmaker has nothing but sheer contempt for his subjects. To be sure, much of what we see is funny, intentionally or not, as various Americans strut their stuff, shooting at targets or blowing shit up, or as they accidentally shoot themselves and/or fall over (or, in one case, lose their pants). I’m only human — I laughed. The overall cumulative effect, though, is not what any artist wants to hear: so what? The limitation of the approach taken here is that the only idea available to the audience is quite simple and unsatisfying, which is that it’s pretty crazy how much Americans love their guns and enjoy posting about them online, isn’t it? As a result, we are left with empty calories: a few chuckles and something of an upset stomach.
Still, the film, and particularly it being programmed at a festival like Fantasia, encourages one to think about cinema’s relationship to guns and violence, as many of us may laugh and cringe at this documentary and then go and watch countless John Wick clones in awe. We may view this documentary and think that we cannot imagine being one of them, toting insane killing machines in their backyards and training their young children how to fire them, yet at the same time we share a not-dissimilar fascination with guns and what they’re capable of in the action, horror, and crime films we love so dearly. That said, one should refuse the notion of hypocrisy this framing suggests, because it assumes the spectator’s identification with “gawking at the freaks” onscreen here. Gun culture in America is fascinating precisely because much of what animates it — government distrust, media-fueled fear-mongering, patriarchal machismo, racist ideology — are systemic issues that manifest themselves through consumerist cultural values located in the barrel of each and every gun they possess. I’m not gawking; I’m scared shitless.
If anything, the cluster of videos in Horcajada’s film emphasizes the power these symbols hold without offering any critique of how they’re manipulated or where they originate, or indeed what happens when they’re no longer symbolic. The takeaway seems to be that Americans are simply too stupid to own guns. This is not a compelling idea. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect something more from a documentary on the subject than one does from a slick action film with gun-wielding heroes and villains, but culling through endless real-life examples in an effort to comment on American gun culture ought to spur one to have something to offer beyond a sneer.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 2.
