Cynical Cinema

I am starting to think one of the reasons for the rise in gun violence in the world is the dumbing down of TV shows. When I was a kid, and the A-Team fired three thousand bullets at people, none of them hit anyone, and certainly didn’t kill them. Yet in the old days, guns killed people. And killing people came with consequences. Take Gunsmoke, the longest-running Western series of all time. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s a show where guns are a way of life and Western frontier justice is doled out one bullet at a time. And the thing is - this show was actually very good! Marshal Matt Dillon has become something of a pop cultural icon in the years since Gunsmoke.

Also iconic are Dodge City and the bizarrely detached attitude the marshal and others have toward human life. There is an episode in Season 2 where the “suits” from the big city come out to check on the practices of the cops in this town. They make an ordinance that forbids anyone from carrying a gun in Dodge. Of course, guns are not only essential to these people, they are the “air they breathe and the water they drink”. Dillon, of course, being a good, loyal NRA member, wants to show this suit that taking peoples’ guns is a bad idea, so he lets a bunch of people get killed to prove his point. Then there is the episode where a guy yells “I’m going to kill you” and then gets shot, and the man who shot him hangs. Two episodes later, a man yells “I’m going to kill you”, and gets shot by a woman, and the marshal escorts her out of town and says it was self-defense. Frontier justice is certainly not blind, like the kind we have today. Allegedly.

But frontier justice IS entertaining. And so is Gunsmoke. Considering how long this show ran, and how popular it was in it’s day, I was initially amazed that it doesn’t show up too often in reruns on TV. But then it occurred to me - perhaps that is because when the 80s rolled around, and censors and silly anti-violence monitors abounded, perhaps this show was kept off TV, what with the occasional killing and so forth. And what was left? MacGyver and the A-Team. Gunsmoke makes me happy, in that it hearkens back to a better day for television, the type of TV we are only recently beginning to get again. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th, and is worth it.