By Chloe Sproule
In fictionalizing the events leading to the assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1979—whose perpetrators and exact circumstances are still subject to suspicion—Year of The Gun1 asks itself political questions it can never completely resolve. This is an odd choice for a Hollywood spy thriller, and odder still are the blatant crimes it commits against genre convention and the basic principles of cinematic production. The film is incongruent with the conspiracy and travelogue genres to which it shakily belongs; falls well below industry standards of acting and editing; and is so thoroughly washed of hue that its director John Frankenheimer called it “a black-and-white movie in colour” (AFI). I argue that the film’s distinct style is a depressive one, indicative first of the unnavigable cognitive map on offer to Americans of their country’s global position at the end of the Cold War and, second, the film’s own troubled production history. I begin by outlining what characterizes this style, namely its drab colours, uninterested erotic and expository scenes backed by an unmotivated score, and endless sarcastic one-liners. These features undergird the film’s self-conscious inability to execute a cogent conspiracy plot. Formally stymied, this style analogizes the American media’s desire for order and its tortured but fundamentally self-centered obsession with political violence abroad. Finally, I suggest that all this aligns with, and perhaps is merely symptomatic of, the unfortunate economic events that brought production to a premature wrap and forced Frankenheimer to sign-off on a second-rate political thriller. Like the depressive person recounting a story with withering self-deprecation but betraying an underlying narcissism, Year of the Gun confesses to having lost its resolve in the face of narratively impenetrable systems of power and having blindly relied on an Italo-American relationship that can no longer support the Hollywood dreams of the fifties and sixties.
To begin, I posit that the film’s depressive style consists of a flattened emotional palette, the loss of all visual and erotic pleasure, a lack of sustained concentration, scathing self-blame, and blanket pessimism with respect to the possibility for change. The most obvious symptom is the pathetic fallacy of its setting. Year of the Gun presents Rome in its off-season autumnal gloom, opting for blues and greys over the sun-soaked lighting the city usually invites. The city is shrouded in perpetual rain, fog, or cloud cover; viewers quite literally never see a clear sky. The setting is also dreary on another level: since virtually no American would imagine Rome this way, it capitalizes on the disappointment of the city’s romanticized international image. The blanched colours also map onto the film’s limited emotional register. While viewers can easily access anxiety, confusion, suspicion, and possibly awe, there is no formal footing for their opposites—excitement, empathy, tenderness, or clarity—so that instead of a healthy relief of affect, viewers are given an unending plateau. This is best exemplified when David impulsively makes a move on Alison, whose sexual companionship he had previously declined, resulting in a highly uncomfortable and unerotic sex scene. Backed by the same conspiratorial music that accompanies the film’s political intrigue, this scene is shot with such mechanical detachment as if to imbue the act with a pre-emptive regret. Viewers take no more visual pleasure in this scene than they do in expository ones of the Colosseum; both are backed by sinister music, stripped of any ceremonious exposure (of skin, or of ruins), and rushed as if the camera cannot bear to linger. Just as the depressed person loses their appetite, sexual or otherwise, the film’s half-hearted attempts at travelogue exposition and romantic intrigue intimates that under the depressive style, Year of the Gun cannot sustain desire—visual nor erotic.
The film’s depressive style manifests in its dialogue as the overt cynicism of its characters. Scattered throughout the film’s runtime are bitter jokes about the erosion of navigable morals in the globalized world: “Americans in Rome don’t need politics,” David exclaims, “they need American Express cards!” (34:27-34:36). The film even pokes fun at the cheery copy of travelogue titles, as David derisively titles his book ‘How to be a Young and Impoverished American in Love with Rome,’ or ‘Rome on 10 Dollars a Day, If you Like Spaghetti.’ Significantly, the dialogue is at its most scathing when David is describing his own revolutionary past as a student radical. He refers to the ‘60s as “ten years of phoniness, a decade-long circle jerk,” in which he was “antiwar, pro-abortion, and a kneejerk liberal—so what?” (56:46-56:49; 39:36-39:40). David’s sneering jabs, which correlate to the neurotic’s excessively harsh negative self-talk, slowly accrue until finally the screen is punctured in the final scene. “I simply wanted to tell the truth,” he and televised image say in unison, “but then you start to write it down and it turns into something else, I’m not sure what, you just try to do the best you can and hope to live with it, have to live with it” (1:41:20-1:41:33; fig. 1). He has realized that his bestselling book is no more serious than the trashy travel guides he has been mocking. With this final change in tone from irreverently cynical to sombre, the film confesses to having given up on its own conceit. David gets no redemption for hovering haughtily above real political engagement—he and his book are still hopelessly caught in the lecherous and paradoxical cycles of American media. That he wrongly assumed that a scoffing contempt would exempt him from this fate is mirrored by the film’s awareness of its own limits. Yet by fixating on their impotence, both David and the film cannot see past themselves. Theirs is the exhausted conviction that, if endings like these are inevitable, what is the point in trying? Thus, just as the depressive believes themself to be uniquely worthless and, paradoxically, their own cynical speech to be uniquely true, Year of the Gun’s ultimate denigration of its original project is bitingly self-aware, but it does no real work to rescue itself from the ideological morass it chooses to represent.
Identifying the depressive style also sheds light on the film’s awkward attempt at a conspiracy thriller. Though by many metrics a failure, its moral ambivalence actually better fulfills the social need that motivates that genre. In his chapter “Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema,” Alan O’Leary refers to conspiracy as a “bestselling mode of historical and political understanding” (48). O’Leary deploys Fredric Jameson’s term “cognitive mapping,” the “mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads,” to suggest that the genre’s purpose is to perform that epistemological work on behalf of its viewers (Jameson, qtd in O’Leary 48). Conspiracy is an easily navigable map—it offers viewers a mustachioed cabal that meets in a single smoke-filled room to which all social inequity and mass atrocities can be attributed (O’Leary 48). But crucially, conspiracy always fails this mission because it prioritizes closure over verisimilitude, resulting in a cheap parody of the complex relations between individuals and their socio-
political systems (48). In its failure to present a conceivably absolute conspiracy plot or singular political hegemon, Year of the Gun fails generic convention—its legend is unreadable, its morals are unparsable, and its roads lead nowhere—but actually ends up portraying a more accurately complex cognitive map than films like The Da Vinci Code (2006). Thus, the film’s moral terrain can be read as depressive in its ideological laziness, failing even to concentrate long enough on its chosen conflict to distinguish student protestors from radical militants. Comparing its opening and closing shots, the film proceeds from an x-ray vision of airport security to the television static of a newsroom (fig. 2). This transition represents the clear-cut black and white of the security state being ultimately scrambled into the immiscible information noise of the media. It invokes a literally grey amorality. That the film is critical of its protagonists, the leaders of the epistemological quest, adds to the case. Their last exchange is a shot-reverse-shot of David gazing at Alison’s image as she is broadcasted from Beirut, and Alison into the lens of the camera filming her, creating a trompe l’oeil that falsely implies they are looking at each other (fig. 3). The formal move equates David’s misgivings about his failed affair with Alison with her own reservations about the industry she is serving. Year of the Gun’s epistemic course is therefore entropic, ending in greater ideological disorder than it started, and reaffirming the film’s unspoken maxim that things only ever get worse. Thus, between its lack of sustained focus, moral skepticism, and the foreclosure of its protagonists’ futures, the film’s botched attempt at conspiracy feeds its depressive style.
Finally, its financial trouble and subsequently sloppy wrap-up invites the reading of Year of the Gun as being an allegory of its own production. The film’s depressive style can be attributed to the production team’s forced surrender; to their fatalist attitude infecting the plot, characters, and setting alike. Consider again David’s final confession that, despite his book not panning out the way he had hoped, he is resolved to “live with it,” in fact “[has] to live with it.” That his image is doubled, onscreen and within the talk show’s production set, suggests he is a mouthpiece for speech coming from outside the dietetic
world. His final lines carry an admission of insufficiency sent from the film’s creators. A closer examination of the film’s funding troubles only strengthens the case for the existence of a contagious pessimism: two-thirds of the film’s budget was to be spent in Italian currency, but the investors delivered only a small portion upfront. By the time the full sum was transferred, the American dollar had dropped in value, resulting in a budget deficit of approximately half a million dollars (AFI). The project’s depleted resources could not provide the material that a convincing performance demands. Giving up in the face of a task that requires orders of magnitude more energy than one has in store (though not without a few self-deprecating jabs at the shabbiness of the attempt) distinguishes the depressive style from, say, the melancholic one. Still more ironic, it was precisely the opposite situation that sparked the trend of Hollywood runaway productions in the first place: namely, the favourable exchange rate resulting from Italy’s economic devastation after the Second World War. Ultimately, the troubled production history of Year of the Gun proves that by the end of the Cold War, Italy was no longer the fertile ground it once had been for the hopeful fantasies of friendship between nations and life-altering romantic flings of the trend’s inaugural case, Roman Holiday.
The film’s diegetic and extradiegetic resignation to epistemic and technical imperfection is therefore the result of its aspiring to a narrative and visual coherence that it literally cannot afford. Thus, its depressive style reflects American attitudes to terrorism abroad: feeding fantasies of omnipotence, the film excuses inaction on the grounds that action would not do much good, anyhow. The film is peopled with jaded or soon-to-be jaded protagonists; coloured in the muted greys, browns, and blues of a dead future; half-invested in romance but desensitized to sex; fundamentally amoral; and compulsively self-critical. Its cognitive map is a labyrinthine mess, and the film’s ambivalent ending tells us it is not even worth reading at the end of the day. In contrast to the Italian neo-realist style’s commitment to accuracy in its depictions of social inequities and urban decay, the depressive style is not just dour but neurotically and egotistically so. Looking backward an entire decade from the purportedly ‘senseless violence’ of the 1991 Gulf War in search of an act of terrorism that constitutes a legible, narratable conspiracy, Year of the Gun and its protagonists suffer a double blow. It realizes that even the supposedly clear-cut Axis/Allied and Capitalist/Communist oppositions are no more successful cognitive maps of reality than the average blockbuster conspiracy thriller. Arriving at a conclusion it appears to already have known, the film ends by confessing that all its efforts have been a big waste of time and money.
Endnotes
- The years in and around 1978 are known in Italy as anni di piombo—the Years of Lead. A string of terrorist attacks by right- and left-wing extremists, coupled with student unrest and labour strikes, made it a singularly violent period in the country’s modern history. The crisis reached its climax in 1978 when a Marxist-Leninist guerilla group, the Red Brigades, kidnapped then-Prime Minister Aldo Morro and subjected him to a trial in the “people’s court” (Benraad). After holding him hostage for 54 days, they left his bullet-ridden body in the trunk of a Renault 4. Morro’s assassination, a lasting “national trauma,” is also the unlikely subject of John Frankenheimer’s 1991 political thriller Year of the Gun (Benraad).
The film follows David Raybourne (Andrew McCarthy), an American journalist living in Rome. David is secretly writing a book of commercial fiction loosely inspired by the militant group’s activities. However, the novel’s latest twist inadvertently aligns with real events: it unwittingly anticipates the Brigades’ ongoing plot to kidnap the prime minister.
David’s old friend Italo Bianchi (John Pankow), a left-leaning professor involved in the student protests, notices his interest in the Red Brigades and introduces him to American photojournalist Alison King (Sharon Stone). Alison is convinced that David knows more about the Brigades than he lets on. An uneasy sexual fling between them gives her access to his apartment where she discovers his half-written manuscript and mistakes it for a non-fiction research note. She mentions this to Italo, excited about the prospect of collaborating with David on a political expose. However, the professor, unbeknownst to either Alison or David, is an operative of the Red Brigades. He breaks into David’s apartment, steals the manuscript, and delivers it to the leaders. Upon reading the speculative episode recounting the plans to kidnap a high ranking government official, the Brigades believe their plans have been leaked. They scramble to ferret out the source and contain the threat posed by David and his impossibly accurate knowledge.
In a frightful confrontation, David realizes Italo’s identity and realizes that the assassination plot he had invented was actually occurring. He runs to alert Alison, and they telephone Lia, David’s mistress, for help. But it is revealed that she, too, is a member of the Brigades. After an exhausting and bloody chase scene through the streets of Rome, Alison and David are kidnapped and dragged to a country house for execution. Unexpectedly, the gunmen turn and shoot Lia first, blaming her for the alleged leak. They force Alison to photograph Lia’s body, and the two Americans are permitted to flee provided they publicize the story
.
The film ends with David appearing on a television talk show, to comment on the Gulf War. He is promoting his non-fiction book, “Year of the Gun,” recounting his experience with the Brigades, featuring photos by Alison King. Her image is cast in as she reports live from Beirut. They are asked if their work promotes or prolongs terrorism. David responds that he “simply wanted to tell the truth.” Alison admits that she thinks little of the role of reporters in political conflict. They’re both jaded, and each confess that they are merely trying to “live with it.” “Well,” the television host chimes in, cheerily, “what you have to live with has certainly turned into a huge bestseller!” ↩︎
Works Cited
“AFI Catalog.” American Film Institute. catalog.afi.com/Catalog/MovieDetails/59094. Accessed 5 July 2024.
O’Leary, Alan. “Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema.” Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969-2009, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary, Legenda, 2009, pp. 48-62.
Year of the Gun. Directed by John Frankenheimer, Initial/J&M, 1991.
Benraad, Myriam. “‘Esterno Notte’: Marco Bellochio’s Series Grapples with Ghost of Assassinated Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro.” The Conversation, 19 Apr. 2023, theconversation.com/esterno-notte-marco-bellochios-series-grapples-with-ghost-of-assassinated-italian-prime-minister-aldo-moro-204059.