.

Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Screenwriters: Peter Bogdanovich, Samuel Fuller (uncredited)

By Roderick Heath

In memoriam: Peter Bogdanovich 1939-2022

From vantages in later life Peter Bogdanovich may well have looked back at Targets, his official emergence as a director, and given a grim smile. As well as looking directly into the darker fantasies hatching out of the American body politic in ways that have become all too familiar in the decades since its release, Targets is also a movie casting a caustic eye on the collapsing ground between fantasy and reality, celebrity and infamy. It’s both a young man’s spree and a promise of reckoning to everyone who enters a zone where subjects of cool artistic regard, personal meditation, sociological scrutiny, and raw tabloid frenzy all converge: Bogdanovich already saw and understood the forces that would define his life and career.  Bogdanovich’s journey in the first 35 years of his life seemed uniquely blessed and lucky, whilst so much of the rest of it, though he at least never seemed to succumb to temptations of self-pity and self-exile, might have felt like being trapped within the hall-of-mirrors angst of Targets. Bogdanovich, the son of Serbian and Austrian-Jewish parents, was born in New York just after they immigrated to the US, and was conscious until the end of his life of his peculiar status as product of two continental sensibilities.

Bogdanovich trained as an actor, but his adoration for cinema manifested early as he started keeping indexed reviews of every movie he saw from the age of twelve, and he emerged in his early twenties as a leading critic and scholar. He became a film programmer for the Museum of Modern Art, doing much to transform the reputation of directors like Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford amongst the American cognoscenti, whilst also befriending many such storied directors and writing about their careers and experiences. Along the way Bogdanovich began thinking of getting into movies himself like his French New Wave critics, and like other, young, budding filmmakers before and after, he soon found himself employed by the emperor of quickie cinema Roger Corman. Bogdanovich and his wife Poly Platt, a theatrical set designer and all-round imaginative talent, fled New York and unpaid rent for Hollywood, and within a few weeks Bogdanovich was deeply immersed in cobbling together a film for Corman, as Francis Ford Coppola had done before him utilising footage from a Soviet science fiction film Corman had bought and combining it with newly shots scenes to create a movie called Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), for which Bogdanovich was credited under the name Derek Thomas.

Oscars were mysteriously not forthcoming for that odd, silly, yet hazily poetic chimera, but Bogdanovich had proven he had the stuff of a filmmaker. For his second and proper debut as a director, Bogdanovich and Platt came up with a storyline that was as much a rumination on their own obsession with cinema and its meaning as it was a tale describing modern dread. Bogdanovich also credited Samuel Fuller with helping him write the script, and Fuller’s fingerprints are discernible throughout, in the lean and cunning dovetailing of journalistic forthrightness and aesthetic force. Not that many people saw Targets when it was first released, but it won Bogdanovich industry attention, allowing him to move on and make The Last Picture Show (1971), the movie that announced him as a major force in the emerging New Hollywood era. Targets is atypical for Bogdanovich in many respects, as a lean, patiently paced tale of death and dread, where the director would later devote the bulk of his career to screwball and romantic comedies, albeit laced with strange textures and lodes of anxiety, and tender human dramas. Bogdanovich found a way of sating the B-movie world’s needs whilst aiming far beyond it. At the same time many of Bogdanovich’s defining traits are already in evidence – an indulgent sense of character and humour, replete film buff flourishes, and a way with offering neglected stars a career-redefining part.

Targets takes as a jumping-off point a truism about the nature of horror, contrasting the almost comforting, moodily historical and psychological imagery of classic, Gothic-style Horror, and the films that had thrived on it, with the nature of horror as experienced as part of the everyday world of the late 1960s, drawing generally on the Vietnam War zeitgeist and in particular on the murderous rampage of former soldier Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in 1966. Bogdanovich articulates the contrast by using footage from Roger Corman’s The Terror (1963) to represent the latest movie by beloved Horror movie star Byron Orlok, played, in one of the greatest strokes of self-referential casting in the history of movies, by Boris Karloff in one of his last performances. The film commences with a long portion of The Terror playing out, with the aging, limping, bedraggled Karloff/Orlok playing out a semi-improvised fantasia in a waning subgenre on screen, until, in a manner that feels inspired by the opening newsreel and conference of Citizen Kane (1941), the movie ends and the lights come up in a screening room.

The use of The Terror in particular to represent the decaying Gothic style is particularly apt in the associations it trails. Corman and a cadre of young assistants, including Coppola, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, and costar Jack Nicholson, flung together portions of the movie to take advantage of some sets and remaining contracted days with Karloff, and later assembled it into something like a coherent film. It’s the kind of movie that represents low-budget and mercenary genre cinema of its time as at once absurd and endearing, touched with happenstance art and beauty. Targets presents it as a factotum labour by Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich himself), a young TV director who’s anxiously trying to make a movie career happen, made at the behest of pushy producer Marshall Smith (Monte Landis). But watching the movie proves to have left Orlok depressed and suddenly determined to retire, much to Smith’s chagrin, as he wants to next produce Sammy’s next, more ambitious script, one he describes as “a work of art,” with a part specially written for Orlok. Orlok is happy to aggravate and ignore Smith, but Sammy is left despondent at suddenly losing what he saw a great opportunity for the both, and fears it’s a commentary on his work, which Orlok denies. Orlok also decides to avoid a personal appearance he’s supposed to make at a preview of the movie, to be held at the Reseda Drive-In Theatre. He quarrels with his personal assistant, Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), who is also Sammy’s girlfriend, when she criticises his behaviour, and she leaves in a huff. Sammy turns up shortly after, drunk and insisting on telling Orlok off for turning down his great role, and the two men get hammered together whilst arguing out their different fears.

As Orlok departed Smith’s offices on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip earlier in the day, the completely unaware actor was viewed through the crosshairs of a sniper scope from across the street: young Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) buying a new hunting rifle, scopes out prey on the boulevards. Bogdanovich privileges the viewer with a glimpse inside Bobby’s car trunk as he places the rifle within, already containing as it does dozens of guns. Bobby returns home to his father (James Brown), mother (Charlotte Thompson), and wife Ilene (Tanya Morgan), who all seem to lead an ideal American suburban lifestyle as far from the saturated Technicolor mystique and morbidity of Orlok’s movies as it’s possible to get. Bobby family relate like they’ve been cast in a commercial, with son calling father “sir” with perfect reflexive deference, as the two bond over shooting cans, and they all sit around watching banal television: they’re likely the kind of people who wouldn’t watch one of Orlok’s films for being too silly and unhealthy. Bogdanovich’s camera, moving with Bobby, surveys Platt’s sets, moving between equally banal spaces, where the blue pastel interior walls and near-clinical sparseness of the furnishings make the house seem more like a dentist’s waiting room than a home. Nobody seems troubled or uptight, but there are subtle tensions in Leave It To Beaver-ville. The camera notes a photo of Bobby in military uniform, signalling he’s likely been in Vietnam. Ilene is a telephone operator currently working night shift, whilst Bobby works days in an insurance company, but there are hints he might have been sacked; both are stuck in the family house whilst it’s mentioned Bobby has a brother who’s started a family. Bogdanovich strains however to avoid psychologising Bobby. His oncoming actions are more the result of a vacuum of identity rather than pressure, his obsession with guns the product of a life lived in constant training for some event that may never come, so he must make it.

The film weaves parallel patterns for hero and villain. Orlok retires whilst Bobby is fired. Bogdanovich cuts from the Thompson family having dinner in a fishbowl shot to Orlok, Jenny, and Smith’s press agent Ed Loughlin (Arthur Peterson) occupy a booth in a restaurant. Later, Bobby sits alone drinking up TV, whilst Orlok withers after watching his movie but then becomes rapt along with Sammy by the good work in The Criminal Code, before of course, the two men’s paths converge. The visual language emphasises this – jump cuts that lock the two characters in similar gesture, camera pans that begin in one scene and end in another. What makes the obvious duologue at the narrative’s heart interesting is the way Bogdanovich engages with it, both cinematically, and in the levels of irony he packs into his thesis. Orlok’s sense of crisis at the twilight of his career is reflected in a crisis of aesthetics: what was once scary is now fun, if not comical, artistic experience that once had a pleasant zing of risk now pleasant. Even Orlok comments to Sammy that “You know what they call my films today – camp – high camp…My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.” But what is horror now? Orlok shows Sammy a newspaper with the headline, “Youth Kills Six In Supermarket” as an example, and Bobby soon provides another. Horror now comes out of the antiseptic, ahistorical dream of the modern suburb, a place that is supposed to be the great pinnacle and dream of human history, borne not out of ancient evils and rotten, animate psyches, but the very opposite, spaces that seem to appease all need for fear, anger, lust, allowing everyone to lead the good clean wholesome lives they always wanted to. Bobby confesses to his wife that I don’t know what’s happening to me…I get funny ideas…you don’t think I can do anything do you,” statements that are so fuzzily expressed Ilene gives bromides in response: “I think you do anything you put your mind to, at least that’s what your mother says.” Which is of course one of the great existential curses: what, exactly, should one put one’s mind to?

Meanwhile Bogdanovich finds a way of dramatizing his own cineaste obsessiveness. Sammy’s relationship with Orlok, his old, withered muse and nemesis in taking movies seriously, channels Bogdanovich’s encounters with the grand old men of Hollywood, and even anticipates what would become Bogdanovich’s famous friendship with Orson Welles. That Bogdanovich himself plays the role exacerbates the metanarrative trickery still further. Bogdanovich’s reverence for the past is signalled when Sammy finds Orlok watching one of his old movies, represented by Howard Hawks’ prison flick The Criminal Code (1930) featuring the pre-Frankenstein (1931) Karloff as a murderer. Sammy notes the director and comments, “He really knows how to tell a story,” which Orlok affirms, remnant professional pride still lodged somewhere in his weary, self-doubting frame. Bogdanovich’s sympathy for actors as one himself, challenged as he inserts himself front and centre in his movie, is also vital here. Sammy and Orlok’s drinking-and-moping session culminates with the two men falling asleep on Orlok’s hotel room bed. Waking in the morning Sammy gave a frightened start on seeing his bed-mate, waking Orlok: “I was having a nightmare and the first thing I see as I open my eyes in Byron Orlok!” Bogdanovich makes these touches, which stray near to self-indulgent, matter in terms of the larger narrative. That’s in part because they present Orlok as a man of an industry with a history, and one who in many ways embodying the Gothic horror style, not just in that it’s his living and metier, but in that he represents memory, tradition, experience, and craft, things of value left by the tidal roll of the past, things Sammy tries to value whilst also embodying youth and potential.

“Marx Brothers make you laugh, Garbo makes you weep, Orlok makes you scream,” the star comments in recalling his glory days with a lilt of the old sinister persona easily called forth. “It’s not that the films are bad, I’ve gone bad.” The patent sarcasm of this is Karloff was always a terrific actor, able to deliver brilliantly layered performances like those in Isle of the Dead and The Body Snatcher (both 1945) alongside his gallery of grotesques, and Bogdanovich’s gift to him a year before he died was a role that ingeniously exploited both his talent and his persona. Adding to the game is the fact that Sammy’s script, the one he wants to get Orlok to act in, is very plainly Targets itself. The hall of mirrors gets a little longer. Orlok’s name, as well as presenting a readily legible echo of Karloff’s nom-de-theatre (Boris Karloff himself being a kind of character played by William Pratt, an Englishman with Indian heritage), refers to the name of the Dracula substitute in Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). “You don’t play some phoney Victorian heavy,” Sammy tells Orlok regarding his proposed role in his script, “You play a human being.” Bobby for his part could be said to embrace the role of poet of murder, supplanting Orlok’s make-believe with real flesh targets, but his is a dry, cold, alien poetry, associated with pale blue prefab walls and high white industrial structures, the eye of the camera becoming the lens of the sniper scope, seeking out targets to challenge his aim.

Bobby’s emerging homicidal impulses are signalled from his first appearance, scoping Orlok across the street. And again when he points a shotgun at his father when he’s setting up cans for them to plug, a gesture that his father is infuriated by, violating everything he taught his son about using guns. Bobby hastily explains his faux pas – “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” and tellingly he remains unable to kill his father, avoiding unleashing his poetry until he’s away from the family home. There’s nothing identifiably bad about his father, who seems like a decent, solicitous, old-fashioned patriarch who insists on fastidious safety when handling guns, but it’s precisely that igneous aspect of strength he exudes that might fester in the mind. Ilene comes home from a night at work to find Bobby sitting on their bed smoking and asking her not to turn on the light: in the dark Bobby can dream dark dreams whilst still awake, and the stubbing out of a cigarette is the seal set on a private resolve.

The next morning, Bobby types out a letter, as much suicide note as statement of murderous intent, in which he says he knows he will go down eventually but others will die first. He shoots Ilene as she comes up to him for a morning kiss, and then his mother when she races in to see what happened. Realising she was just about to pay a delivery boy bringing groceries, he dashes into the kitchen and guns down the lad too. Bobby calmly and caringly picks up his wife and mother’s bodies and lays them on beds, as if hoping to lock them in permanent stasis, eternally and perfectly inhabiting the house and the roles they were in, in part because in his mania he feels this will release them from consequences of what comes next. He lays down handtowels over blood stains as if ashamed to have had to spoil the carpeting, and extends the solicitude to placing a jacket over the delivery boy’s head. Here Bogdanovich employs touches that betray careful study of Hitchcock, in the image of Ilene leaning into the camera for her kiss as Bobby shoots her and is then flung back, and repurposing Psycho’s (1960) post-murder clean-up, with the camera performing delicate Hitchcockian tracking shots that zero in on tell-tale totems. Psycho’s imprint is also plain on the conception of Bobby as a character, as a superficially nice young man who’s a killer, constantly chewing on candy.

At the same time Bogdanovich moves out beyond Hitchcock in portraying a killer whose activities have no plot motive and inspire virtually no traditional suspense, and by the finale Bogdanovich countenances the breakdown of movie narrative into warring images in a way Hitchcock always resisted: the Master’s consciousness that film was a reality created by juxtaposed imagery could not face blurring such lines. Most of the second half of Targets unfolds in a negative behavioural zone where tension is wrung more from forced identification with Bobby, obliged through the camera lens – agonising as Bobby lines up his shots, feeling the frustration of missing, the pricks of pain in failing to carry out the mission and frustration of the deadly synthesis of spectacle and homicide, the anxiety of trying to survive just a little longer to keep the nullifying rain falling. Bobby leaves his home, buys stacks more ammunition and charges them to his father – that he lacks any cash bolsters the hints of his joblessness – and waits with patient bravado whilst the manager rings his father to get permission for this, the kind of moment usually reserved for a spy hero trying to get past some enemy cordon. Success; Bobby heads out to a perfect vigil he spied driving around earlier, atop some oil tanks overlooking the freeway, a place to enact the idle fantasy of stopping the ants from moving.

Bobby goes about his apocalyptic mission nonetheless like the suburban sojourner he still is, settling down to munch on a home-made lunch and a bottle of pop whilst anticipating the day’s fun, whilst unpacking his sack crammed full of death, guns and bullets laid out with geometric precision atop the tank with its gleaming white paint and equally geometric forms of piping and railings. The cinematographer for Targets was Laszlo Kovacs, and he can be seen developing an argot here (as with the previous year’s Psych-Out), that visual lustre charged with raw on-the-road poetry and diffused yet immediate imagery he would later deploy on the likes of Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Movie (1971), and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), movies where Kovacs could pivot in an instant between a New Wave myth of Americana and textures of filmy, grainy psychology, and both are present to a degree in Targets – the urban landscapes in all their variegated shininess seem charged with a kind of putrescent glitter whilst the interiors are coded by colour into discrete zones of characterisation. The crucial early scene in the Thompson house where Bobby confesses having strange ideas is one, long shot tethering actors and environs in a systemic statement, bedroom, kitchen, hallway and living room folded about them all, not ending until Bobby goes outside to fetch a pistol from the car, because happiness is a warm gun.

Bogdanovich gives a first clue to how clever the dovetailing of his two storylines will be when, before Bobby arrives at the tanks, he portrays Orlok, with Sammy and a mollified Jenny, hanging his mind about attending the movie screening, and sitting down with a local DJ, the motor-mouthed hipster Kip Larkin (Sandy Baron), to go through the arrangements for the show: Orlok cringes at the various tired audience questions Larkin plans to lay on him, and instead relishes Sammy’s suggestion that he tell some stories. He settles down with casual displays of stagecraft tells a variation on the old fable “Appointment in Samarra,” in which a servant flees Baghdad for Samarra after encountering Death in a marketplace, only for the man’s employer to speak to Death who admits to having been surprised to see the servant when he’s expecting to meet him “tonight in Samarra.” This vignette is marvellous for a number of reasons. As a switchback towards a pre-modern world of fables and verbal storytelling. As a chance for Karloff to show his talents in that waning art. As a showcase for combining the verbal and visual for an anecdotal, character-defining effect Bogdanovich would use again notably and repeatedly in The Last Picture Show. As a clever narrative gag confirming Orlok’s still-guttering talent to grip an audience, even arresting the DJ’s attention. And as a thematic anticipation of Bobby’s sniping spree, as people riding along the highway have no idea they’re journeying to Samarra, the ultimate event of their lives the remote game of shooting moving cans for Bobby, who has, at least for one crucial moment, assumed the immortal mantle of Death, but in his detachment from his crimes he reveals a peculiar impotence. Whereas the artist can countenance and express awful things harmlessly, and gifts this on to others for their relief.

As varied and generally far lighter as most of Bogdanovich’s subsequent films would be, it’s entirely possible to see characters like the perturbing heroines of What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Daisy Miller (1974), the wandering con artists of Paper Moon (1973), the wayward romantics of At Long Last Love (1975) and They All Laughed (1981), and the filmmakers of Nickelodeon (1976), as very different expressions of the same will to anarchy Bobby also draws on, except for many of these that will is revivifying, an expression of creative need and survival will, rather than embarking on a death trip. But the vast majority of Bogdanovich’s oeuvre floats on a sea of sublimated anxiety about collapsing forms and protocols. The repressed and desolate world portrayed in The Last Picture Show meanwhile depicts a private hell for Bogdanovich characters, their acts of rebellion and dissent far more petty and human than Bobby’s but motivated by a similar eruption against the tyranny of normality. Bobby on top the oil tanks and later above a movie screen in the ultimate foldback of art and audience is an avatar of Bogdanovich himself, stirring the audience’s nerves to the same pitch of disquiet as his own with aesthetic bullets, setting stability into chaos, tapping the nervous systems of others in games of stimulus-response. Like just about any movie director, in truth, which is why the climax registers on so many levels.

Where Bogdanovich defines Bobby’s scenes with his family through their wooden good cheer, Orlok’s scenes with Jenny, who is Chinese-American and has been teaching him the language (a sign Orlok isn’t at all close off from new experiences and learning) and Sammy, who speaks fluent movie brat, are defined by their sinuous blend of familiarity, affection, irritation, and provocation – they have no bonds beyond business and yet act far more like a real family. Their scenes are flecked with moments of deft characterisation, like Orlok’s rueful pleasure in giving Smith pain, despite Loughlin warning Orlok Smith will sue and win, and telling Jenny to cancel the tickets she bought him on the Queen Elizabeth because “I told you I wanted to go home on the Queen Mary,” a ship with a place much deeper in the heart for an old-school transatlantic wayfarer. Orlok’s disappointment not to continue their Chinese lessons segues into an odd Hawksian stretch of dialogue where the idea of speaking Chinese stands in for a variety of home truths and sharp quips. Bogdanovich spares sympathy for Loughlin, who tries and fails to make peace between Orlok and Smith, and muses, in a register of defeated wistfulness, that he has a degree in English literature from Princeton, before resolving to go get drunk. Bobby’s shootings from the oil tanks represent a nervelessly constructed sequence as his bullets hit home and cars swerve and wobble on the road. One car crashes into the median ditch, a woman trying urgently to open the driver’s side door and get to the wounded driver: Bobby takes aim at her but the pin clicks on an empty chamber, and Bobby, frantic to reload, burns his hand on the hot barrel. He’s able to reload in time to shoot the woman as she tries waving down help, her distant body twitching and falling. A worker in the oil depot hears the shots and climbs up the tank, only for Bobby to snatch up a shotgun and blast him, sending his body spinning to earth.

Finally cops arrive as the greater amount of carnage than usual on the freeway registers, and Bobby grabs up his arsenal, just panicky enough to drop guns and ammunition like a breadcrumb trail. Nonetheless he makes it to his white convertible roadster and speeds away, entering the Reseda Drive-In which is largely empty, parking his car, and taking up a new post atop the scaffolding behind the movie screen. Many friends and onlookers felt Bogdanovich was never really as good without Platt than he was with her, as invaluable production mastermind and creative sounding board: Platt did go on to become a major producer in her own right. It’s tempting to look at the similarly paralleled Ilene and Jenny as analogues of Platt herself, encoded into a story she had a hand in writing, if more in Jenny’s solicitous blend of aid and scepticism compared to Ilene’s what-me-worry dismissal of her husband’s furtive attempts to communicate, even as Ilene also seems to be a chipper player in making the great life project of marriage a going concern. One reasonably radical aspect of the film is the complete lack of a music score save sounds from diegetic sources, exacerbating the deadpan horror, culminating in eerie synthesis where the grating echo of The Terror’s dialogue rises up along with Bogdanovich’s camera through the scaffolding to find Bobby in his shooting blind, gun barrel poking through a hole, the protoplasmic forms of projected images surrounding the very real weapon. Fast zoom shots stand in for the act of shooting. A mischievous alliance of authorial need and Fate is needed to bring Bobby and Orlok together. Orlok himself and Jenny meanwhile are driven by a chauffeur through the LA twilight, with Orlok noting, as he surveys an unending stretch of car lots, “God, what an ugly town this has become.”

Targets only became really well known after Bogdanovich gained later fame, but as if by compensation it’s become a powerfully influential work, directly and indirectly. As a foundational text of the New Hollywood era, it presages many recurring concerns of the era’s filmmakers, like Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Taxi Driver’s (1976) preoccupation with the crossroads of ironic media fame and murder and The Conversation’s (1974) paranoid feel for the urban world. Its DNA can also be spotted in movies made by directors with a similar nostalgic passion for, and amused scepticism about, the old film industry, like Joe Dante’s Matinee (1993) and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), as well as a future time of meta genre cinema like the Scream series where characters are both within and aware of a Horror movie. Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind (1976/2019) suggests he might have watched it and came out similarly preoccupied with the hostile landscape of the period towards the grand old dinosaurs of Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino, an avowed fan of the film, virtually subsumed Targets into his aesthetic persona, taking up its feel for the LA landscape as a style guide and Bogdanovich’s tailor-made rescue of old timers as a basic career goal. Tarantino annexed the film-viewing-as-massacre motif for Inglourious Basterds (2009), whilst Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood (2019) is basically a remake of Targets writ large, with the same basic plot of a washed-up actor finding himself a real hero going about against a murderous force of modern sociopathy, whilst touching base with similar period details, like the popular DJ ‘The Real’ Don Steele heard on the radio (perhaps a double-layered reference on Tarantino’s part, as Bogdanovich often voiced DJs himself in his movies, and had recreated this for Tarantino’s Kill Bill diptych).

As a revisionist Horror movie, Targets also retains a pure prognosticative streak, even if many of its lessons were only partly heeded, and audience tastes quietly chose a third path. Targets was released almost simultaneously with Night of the Living Dead (1968): the two share an evident, caustic perspective on American gun-happy lifestyles, and Bogdanovich was entirely right in seeing a transition away from quaint bygone representations of psychological unease to more modern ones nascent in the genre. But he didn’t anticipate the fusion of approaches as found in the subsequent slasher movie style, where often masked, monstrous killers deal out carnage in a modern fashion but retain an aspect of the primeval and the abstract to them: the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s (1974) Leatherface or Halloween’s (1978) Michael Myers are every bit as alien and boogeyman-ish as any character Karloff every played and indeed more so, although the terror they deal out is more realistic and believable. Bogdanovich by contrast completely avoids any signposting of monstrosity with Bobby, who comes across like any vaguely pleasant, stolid young man on the street right to the movie’s end. “The banality of evil” is today an excruciatingly overused phrase, but Bobby certainly embodies it.

The finale then sees the ritualised imagery of Orlok’s last movie transmuted into an act of aesthetic terrorism, whose deliverer is almost incidental, as the movie screen starts gunning the audience dead. Beat that, Godard. As with the freeway scene, awareness of the danger and chaos only slowly begins to take hold of the audience in their ranked cars and others around the theatre, like a man in a phone booth (Mike Farrell) who Bobby challenges himself to shoot despite not being able to see him properly, and who, badly wounded, slowly and agonisingly drags himself across the gravel compound, and the film’s projectionist who is instantly killed, the movie rolling on regardless. Lovers and families realising the danger crouch low, and those who can try to flee. Bogdanovich finally arrives at the most disturbing and tragic image of the movie, as a young boy weeps in stricken, frozen fear whilst staring at his dead father behind the car wheel. A theatre employee’s innocent act of turning on lighting endangers everyone as cowering in the dark behind the dashboard is the only protection for many. People in the crowd with guns start shooting back.

Sammy frantically tries to reach Orlok and Jenny near the screen after abandoning his car, as the flight of cars out of the drive-in becomes a choked dance of light and dark, the red glow of brake-lights ironically infusing the contemporary action with some of the surreal lustre of the Gothic drama on the screen. When Jenny is shot through the shoulder by Bobby, the infuriated Orlok starts a march up to where he can seen Bobby shooting it out with the yahoos from the crowd, and Bobby is momentarily startled and disorientated by the sight of two Byron Orloks on the move, one real, the other on the screen: Bobby hysterically shoots at both, a bullet clipping the Orlok’s brow but not stopping him, and before Bobby can recover and take up another gun, Orlok swats it from his hand with his cane and slaps Bobby into submission. If this moment was mishandled it could easily have slipped into comedy and anticlimax. Instead Bogdanovich makes it work as a nexus where genuine heroism on Orlok’s part and the general insanity of Bobby’s project each find the perfect moment of expression, each needing the other to find fruition.

Orlok’s disarming of Bobby coincides, through Bogdanovich’s hair-trigger editing, with the movie reel running out in the projector, the false imagery suddenly ceasing and replaced by neutral white. Life and art confront each-other, and at such a point of singularity an overwhelmingly sane man like Orlok has that one crucial defence over a lunatic like Bobby, as he can tell the difference between the two. “Is that what I was afraid of?” Orlok questions in disbelief as he looks down at Bobby who, disarmed and chastened and surrounded by quickly by cops, has been reduced to a pathetic boy given a good spanking by his grandfather, whilst Sammy solicitously wipes Orlok’s bloodied temple. This clarifies something of Orlok’s character as well as finding the last irony in Bobby’s, as Orlok’s own sense of fear and horror finally gains illustration, where he’s done it for others for decades. Bobby himself can only question of the cops who drag him away, “I hardly ever missed, did I?”, as a man proud at least of a job well done. Bogdanovich fades from the churn of chaos to the forlorn image of Bobby’s car, still parked where he left it, the only car left in the drive-in, as if Bobby vanished along with the Byron Orlok in his last Horror movie, all part of the same dark dream, no matter what guise it wears.