sniping as a sex crime?
I just don't see how shooting women from hundreds of yards away could be considered a sex crime. Has it ever happened?
shareI think you’ve made a crucial point. Long-distance assassination is clearly not a sex crime. But, importantly, the film wants us to consider it as such.
Why? Well, my theory is this. Eddie is, to all intents and purposes, a rapist. Now, back in 1952, a Hollywood picture can mention rape. But can it explicitly depict it? Of course not. So the real subject is treated obliquely. Our rapist now becomes a marksman. In fact, the whole film is a riot of psychosexual imagery (pot of white paint hurled from the top of chimney, anyone?!?!). I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to consider that Eddie’s chosen method of violating women - as he positions himself at a high vantage point, peering through a telescopic lens, aiming the gun’s barrel - is decidedly phallic. Anyone with a passing knowledge of film theory will know that the male “gaze” is considered as such (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey). I also think it’s appropriate to regard Eddie’s burning of his right hand (the hand with which he pulls the trigger) as a symbolic self-castration. He is clearly unable to have, and probably never has had, normal sexual relations with women.
If you watch The Sniper and imagine the shootings to be a sort of codified rape, it makes much more sense in terms of what the movie is explicitly trying to say and, indeed, what a film theorist may interpret it to be about.
This is a great little movie that deserves to be better known. The scenes of the women being shot still have the power to be strange and disturbing, especially the one where the drunken lady tucks a large doll up in bed before raising a toast to it (!).
Thanks it makes more sense now.
shareLogical, but the police shrink monologues that the police won't find the sniper in line-up interviews, of which some of the interviewed were rapists and other sex deviants. The inference was that the sniper was something much different than a general run-of-the-mill sex offender, and the police would not find find the sniper with that method. The sniper was a much different sort. Watching the movie I thought that the sex-crime subject was simply a red herring. The sniper basically had a psychopathic loathing of his mother and a subsequent transference to women in general. The loathing could have been of his father, or father and mother; but then, the producers would not have been able to bring in the sex-offense subject so cavalierly. I think the producers wanted to say something with movie, but the result is a bit awkward. I liked the movie anyway. The war hero Franz was perfect for the part.
shareBefore even reading this thread, I picked up on the sexual subtext too -- although '50s audiences might not have noticed it, it seemed pretty blatant to me. My guess is that the plausible psychiatrist's monologues were included to deter the censors, but I'd have to re-watch the film to determine that for sure (and I'm kicking myself for not recording it). Upon further investigation, I found a great article about the film on TCM's website. Here's a related excerpt:
The Sniper also ran into trouble with the Production Code office, Hollywood's censorship bureau which was headed by Joseph Breen. According to an interview with screenwriter Edward Anhalt, "We got a letter saying this film cannot be made. It violated section 27 paragraph 4 of the Code, which actually said perversion cannot be the subject of a motion picture. So I was appointed to go to the board and fight for it. I said 'This doesn't violate the rule at all, because it's not about perversion.' So he [Breen], furious at me, said, 'What are you talkin' about it's not about perversion? It's about a man who gets an orgasm from shooting women! That's not perversion?' I said, 'No, perversion would be if he got an orgasm from shooting men.' [laughs] And for some incredible reason they bought it, and that's how we got the picture made."
The full article can be found right here: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/article.jsp?contentId=153096