Vividcon Premiere: Johnny Get Your Gun

[gwenfrankenstien]

"Johnny Get Your Gun" (Watch on Vimeo)

Johnny Get Your Gun from Gwen Frankenstein on Vimeo.

Vividcon Premiere: Johnny Get Your Gun

Fandom: Bruce McDonald films (Roadkill, Hard Core Logo, Trigger, Hard Core Logo 2, additional footage from Highway 61)

Music: Entertain, Sleater-Kinney

Summary: Reality is the new fiction, they say

Content Notes: Death, suicide, gun violence, brief shot of a dead animal


If you're one of the people who watched this at Vividcon and was like "There's a f/f Hard Core Logo sequel?! Why didn't anyone tell me?" -- the one you want is Trigger, which was originally drafted as a HCL sequel where Joe wasn't really dead, but then converted into an original story set in the same universe. Please watch it and then come back to me and we can talk about our feelings.

HCL2 is.... I don't dislike it as much as most people (clearly) but the working title "I Shot Joe Dick" is a much better summation of what that film was. It's not a sequel. And the themes it picks up on from the original are... Not the themes that fandom tends to focus on. It's about the Bruce McDonald character 15 years on, in denial about his role in Joe's death, making another film about a woman who claims to be possessed by Joe's ghost.

This vid has been living in my head since September 2011, when I skipped class to go to the HCL2 premiere and then wrote a paper about it for that class. I'm fascinated by how Bruce McDonald situates himself/the camera as an oblivious narcissistic antagonistic force in so many of his films and I wanted to make a vid about that, about the muses the director-character is chewing up and spitting out. I knew from the start that I was going to end the vid with the death of the Bruce character from Roadkill in a literal death-of-the-author thing and cross-cutting that with the stuff from HCL2, which (spoilers) ends with the reveal that Bruce has been narrating this whole film from the afterlife. The ultimate anti-auteurist stance-- if your director is controlling the narrative in a way you don't like just kill the fucker. Of course, that gets muddied by the fact that ultimately this vid is an auteurist piece!

Part of the reason it took me so long to actually get the vid down is that so many actors repeat as different characters throughout the films I wanted to use-- eventually I decided to get around that by just subsuming the ones I used less footage of into my major characters. There's three different Don McKellars here but shhhh they're all Russel The Serial Killer shhhh.