Tough guys, tough guns

One of the suggested media for this week's unit was the documentary "Tough Guise."  The movie, which I've seen before, deals with the mostly-western culture of being tough and macho.  It is a look at how men behave in both real-life, and in the media.  Since it deals much with media, there were several references to movies.  Most notably were "Rambo," "James Bond," and "Indiana Jones," movies that all involve protagonists and antagonists firing bullets at each other.  In a sense, the movies are continually praising guns in a subliminal way.  The narrator of the documentary notes how the pistols that the actors use in the movie, and on the posters for the movie, have grown in size over the years, imputing to some sort of phallic undertone.  It's no wonder that there is so much acceptance of guns, when our media culture is perforated with them.  Even during the Superbowl, when there were children on the field at the beginning to honor the deaths of the kindergarten kids in Connecticut-- a tragedy made possible by guns-- there were still commercials in between the game showing previews of action shows.  These shows only continued to spout the praises of a gun-riddled culture, using such remarkable catch phrases as "It's bang-bang time."  As awful as they are, guns remain a central part of our culture in entertainment.  And based on the ever-growing popularity of shoot-'em-up movies, it doesn't look like it's going away any time soon.