Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever loved the latest HBO documentary on "gun carnage," as the Monday headline has it. Online, the headline was "A deep wallow in gun-related senselessness."
It was "remarkably good" and "notably free of a direct anti-gun harangue," Stuever wrote, but he was still depressed that HBO was only preaching to the liberal choir ("people already horrified by gun violence and gun culture") and the film "won't ever be seen by those who most need to see it."
Requiem for the Dead: American Spring 2014, yet another remarkably good documentary from HBO, left me emotionally drained, angry and briefly despondent over the matter of America and its 310 million (or so) guns. When I finished watching it, I wondered whether another major mass shooting would occur in the United States before I filed a review of the film, which premieres Monday night.
Sure enough, one came — and a particularly awful one at that.
The film explores eight shooting deaths that occurred between March and June of last year — “eight of approximately 8,000 who lost their lives in gun-related murders, suicides or accidents in the same three-month time period." There is breast-beating at our collective guilt:
In some new depth of disgust in ourselves and what we’ve become, can there be an awakening? The film is notably free of a direct anti-gun harangue, though I’m sure it will be dismissed by the gun lobby as just one more emotion-heavy attempt to threaten the right to bear arms.
Yet the film triumphs in making viewers feel the true loss of the lives of people we never knew...
It all comes at the viewer in coherent but inexorable flood of senselessness. Because there is no anti-gun lecture in the film, there is also no attempt at conclusion or catharsis. You’re just left with this awful, sick feeling. Something has to be done and nothing can be done.
Liberals also seem to feel that an emotional reaction about guns always should lead to legislation, and they never seem to ask the question whether a background check or other "solutions" would really make a dramatic impact on guns. This would seem especially true when they focus on gun accidents.
But there's only a wish that the emotional wallop would work:
The worst part? The only people who will watch Requiem for the Dead and talk about it and urge others to watch it are the people who are already horrified by gun violence and gun culture.
HBO Documentary Films has proved, over and over, that it can produce and acquire outstanding documentaries that ring true and meaningful with one particular audience. But isn’t the real trick to attract viewers who might not already belong to the choir? Let me put this another way: How do I get some of my relatives, who own so many firearms and have so many children and grandchildren in the house, to watch a movie like this without making it seem like an affront to what they believe is a God-given right?
As such, this is a film that will be watched by the same people on the same Facebook and Twitter feeds who have all posted Jon Stewart’s infuriated, joke-free monologue Thursday night on The Daily Show in the wake of the Charleston massacre — and the same people who all clicked “like” in stricken assent. I worry that Requiem for the Dead won’t ever be seen by those who most need to see it.
So the HBO film isn't an anti-gun harangue -- but the lovers of "gun violence and gun culture" desperately need to see it?
