From My Cold Dead Hands

When making the arrangements for his YouTube mash-up documentary to screen at Fantasia 2024, Javier Horcajada Fontecha could not have anticipated the twist that was about to develop in the story of the US’ relationship with guns: the very presidential candidate whom the gun lobby looked to for support being scuffed by a bullet at a rally. That incident has led to the usual pro-gun rhetoric around elections becoming unusually subdued – but Fontecha’s film reminds us just how bizarre some of it gets.

Edited together from material which people have mostly submitted themselves (though at least one accident was likely made public by the victim’s highly amused friends), the film provides a journey through US gun culture as experienced not by politicians or lobbyists but by ordinary people. It’s in its establishment of what they see as normal that it makes its own statement.

Running throughout is an advice video, made by two men in a room full of guns, addressing reasons why one ought to own one. They’re not particularly good at this, either in their presentation or their arguments, which they seem to be trying to formulate on the spot, but it creates an effective thread to hold the rest together. We get the original cold dead hands speech, as delivered by Charlton Heston to the National Rifle Association, and there are occasional snippets from adverts for gun-related paraphernalia, which mostly have to do with alcohol. The rest is strictly amateur.

Being a gun-lover doesn’t necessarily correspond with being a good shot. Nor, apparently, with having the first clue about gun safety. Firearms accidents in the US are so common that unless they result in death or hospitalisation – which many do not – then no agency bothers to track them. Here we get to see a number of people unintentionally shooting themselves, sometimes in ways that are no stupid that you’ll struggle not to laugh out loud even if you also feel concern for their well-being. There is arguably a genuine educational element to this.

There are also a number of films featuring people who have hit upon the concept that guns could be used as a percussion instrument. One of these is rather creative – and demonstrates some real skill – with a series of metal plates set up so that, when shot in the right order, they can sound out a sequence from the Ode To Joy. Another involves a guy putting a heavy metal track on, thrashing away at his drum kit, firing a couple of semi-automatics out of time and then completing the performance with a blast from his tank.

It gets stranger, and sometimes uncomfortable. A man in a cowboy hat reads a poem by the father of a girl killed at Columbine, and says that if we really want to stop violence then we need God in schools; others echo his point, keen to reinforce the peculiar belief that Americans didn’t shoot each other in the past. Some people put a big focus on their defensive use, with a particular focus on the idea that they can prevent rape, which is naïve to say the least. Then there’s a dating advice video in which one man talks to another about the importance of making a woman feel protected, confident that she’ll be more likely to fall for him if he takes her back to his place and she sees it’s full of weapons. be warned: the punchline here, delivered in all earnestness, may result in you finding it difficult to breathe.

Perhaps the creepiest scenes in the film are those involving children. Full disclosure: I learned to shoot when I was 12, but I did so in a range, with round paper targets, and spent more time getting lessons about safety than I did actually holding a gun. It feels a little different seeing a boy of a similar age, out in the desert with his father, encouraged to shoot at a human-shaped target and imagine that it’s a home invader who is a danger to his mother and sister. (Guns are responsible for more child deaths in the US than any other single cause.)

Toy guns make an appearance here, and first person shooter video games likewise – and who would you be if you couldn’t defend your home from zombies? Naturally there’s a lesson in how to do that, too. The conspiracy theorists get their shot (those who spread hate appropriately excluded), but their pitiable paranoia is balanced by the film’s camper moments, like the part when a woman dressed as a Disney princess sings an ode to her gun collection.

What does it all achieve? To be fair to the gun lobbyists, they are not represented here by their best and brightest, but at the same time, one might reasonably ask them why they think it’s a good idea to have some of these specific people running around heavily armed. The likelihood is that nobody who sees this film is going to find their opinions on gun ownership changing one way or another as a result. What it does provide is an interesting ethnographic snapshot, blending tragedy and comedy, well paced and often compelling whilst it plays, sad to think on thereafter.