My New Gun (1992)
Director: Stacy Cochran

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A Cloud That’s Surrounding You        The Ravishing and the Real

Debbie Bender (Diane Lane), a young housewife, lives with her radiologist husband Gerald (Stephen Collins) in a suburban New Jersey condo development that seems to nestle in safety in the groomed landscape. But what looks like a cocoon at the beginning of the movie comes to seem like a necropolis for the living by the end. The writer-director Stacy Cochran opens on a night shot of the exterior of their townhouse, as condos are called in New Jersey, and the back and forth of the lawn sprinkler’s harp-shaped spray sets the pulse of this comedy, which, though even and steady, depicts the reawakening of Debbie’s impulses.

Gerald is a controlling type, and when his partner in practice Irwin (Bruce Altman) buys a little gun for his young fiancée Myra (Maddie Corman) with her name inscribed on the handle, Gerald can’t feel safe about Debbie until she has one, too, and learns how to use it. Gerald is typical of suburbanites who have sensational crime stories from the news swirling in their heads and imagine threats pressing in on all sides--out in their gardens in the middle of nowhere. And he’s the kind of husband who feels that he has his wife in trust, that it’s his duty to guide her. The men in Jane Austen feel this, too, but they have the tact and kindness Gerald lacks, and their values, including a degree of paternalism, are shared by the heroines. Debbie, however, is less materialistic than Gerald; she can’t think of what in their upper-middle-class castle is worth protecting with a firearm.

And so Gerald’s buying the gun, though Debbie insists she doesn’t want it, and his announcement, "Well too late--you got it. Everyone’s armed--that’s final," is exactly the kind of misstep that the seeming front runner makes in a romantic comedy. Gerald’s mistake is intensified by the addition of a lethal weapon, and by the fact that this is a romantic comedy in which the wrong man is already the heroine’s husband. Like Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast’s marvelous 1930 picture Laughter, in which Nancy Carroll leaves the rigid, older banker played by Frank Morgan for the spontaneous, younger composer played by Fredric March, My New Gun is a romantic comedy descendent of A Doll’s House.

The right man lives across the street and goes by a child’s nickname: Skippy (James LeGros). He’s a quiet man of peculiarly suburban mystery: his job at a family diner called the Red Chimney doesn’t explain how he can afford the same model of condo as a radiologist; he claims to live with his mother, though the Benders have never seen her; and he comes and goes inexplicably. He may call out to Debbie in the middle of the day as she’s on her way to the supermarket and tag along for the ride or he may show up at the kitchen window to ask to borrow her gun.

James LeGros has a way of holding back while still applying pressure on his female co-star and it makes Skippy an unusually stirring fantasy lover. He has the long sideburns and goatee of a grunge kid and his sloppy clothes and bed hair makes him look like he’s just woken up from a nap. Plus the way he looks at Debbie makes his attraction to her seem like an adolescent crush. But his sleepy eyes and low, unexcitable voice are more ambiguous. They’re not just kiddie attributes, they’re bedroom eyes and a seducer’s purr. LeGros’s presence is so effective that he never has to make the "he doesn’t deserve you" speech about Gerald. His glance and his delivery send it out as a penetrating hum. As Skippy comes into increasing contact with Debbie, Cochran begins altering our view of him: we see him in just his T-shirt and then shirtless; he stuffs the gun he swipes from Debbie’s nightstand down the front of his pants; he takes command of a situation that seems to be getting out of control. And finally when he makes his move for Debbie--a first kiss that interrupts a scene of idle chat--it has startling impact; his meteorite lands on her planet in a syncopated heartbeat.

Debbie is caught in a dependent marriage because she’s a sympathizer, a listener, a mess cleaner-upper. Gerald wants her to be a certain way he can’t define, and then takes his frustration out on her when she doesn’t get it without prompting. But these scenes don’t come across as melodramatic or humorlessly feminist because Lane has the grace to make Debbie’s "failure" comic. There’s outright comedy in a scene such as the one of Gerald teaching an uncomfortable and reluctant Debbie to fire the gun, in which Lane gets laughs with the camera at her back by the S-curve her spine snakes into as her stance de-evolves into a crouch. And Lane’s face by itself has the aura of comic awakening to possibilities, when her raccoon-eyed weariness flashes suddenly into an encouraging connection with nervous Myra, for instance. More pervasively, as Debbie begins to return Skippy’s gazes, Lane and LeGros open up to each other, revealing layer on layer of sensuality, affection, and resourcefulness. With her leonine hairline framing her classically piquant glamour puss--Lane has the hungry-precocious face of the young Tuesday Weld or Michelle Phillips--it’s not surprising that Debbie, a sleepwalking beauty, responds to the boy-stud’s kiss. What is surprising, and then not surprising, is that it’s a boy rather than a man who wakes her up.

I think this ties in to the nature of the fantasy that holds Cochran’s intuitive, elliptical story together: there’s something about immaturity that Cochran absolutely wants to hang onto. (This became more explicit, perhaps too explicit, in Boys (1996), her second feature, in which Winona Ryder as the young married woman runs off with Lukas Haas as a high school senior who wants to escape from boarding school and an overbearing father who expects him to take over the family business. But Boys was taken away from Cochran by the studio and mangled so we’ll never know for sure how her version of the movie would have felt.) You can see the mismatching just by looking at the couples: the husbands played by Collins and Altman are a good head taller than their partners. (Myra is in fact too young to drink legally at her own wedding.) Gerald and Irwin seem built on a different scale and are tied together by their all-too-realistically boring patter about Goretex and how much they paid for things you can’t imagine anybody wanting.

Like the girls, Skippy is smaller than Gerald and Irwin, he could pass for twenty years younger, and Gerald treats him like a kid. When Skippy comes to the kitchen window to borrow Debbie’s new gun, Gerald walks in on them and calls him in. Skippy pretends to want a cup of sugar and while Debbie is measuring it out Gerald grills him, "So, do you have any ambition whatsoever--who pays for your town house, your mother?" to which Skippy replies both in and out of the role Gerald has assigned him, "Excuse me, but I’m not here to take your daughter to the prom."

The way Skippy straddles the line between boy and man is the solution to the trap of married life for a fundamentally accommodating girl like Debbie. (We see that the pitfalls with Gerald include TV-watching boredom, prescription drugs, and erasure of personality.) And Lane has such a way with lines and gestures when she knows the people she’s dealing with expect a certain kind of wifely response--for instance, patting Gerald’s hand and smiling when his doctor, who had previously witnessed Gerald screaming at her for nothing, says, "You’ve got a big day with the little man coming home"--that you see exactly how a woman can play out conventions so that they seem the right thing to do even when they don’t feel right.

Skippy breaks Debbie out of her rote performance as "wife" by the very erraticness that makes Gerald refer to him as a "Satan-worshiping junkie." He has the potency of a man (which LeGros suggests in his thick-muscled physique, his hint of a swagger, his calmness) but also the adventurousness, spontaneity, and easy companionability of an adolescent. Gerald, too, has a mixture of child in his nature. We see it in his tantrums, his selfishness, his need to have Debbie pick up the fragments of a glass pitcher he’s dropped while he goes out to the living room with the martinis and plays the perfect host. But Gerald clings to the wrong elements of boyishness and manliness: demands and commands, respectively, without gratitude or chivalry.

Cochran’s wish-fulfillment here is to evade the flatline of suburban domesticity, and so she makes Skippy’s borrowing of the gun lead Debbie into a crime plot, which Cochran manages to make threatening in a believable way. Cochran wisely keeps this plot obscure as long as possible. This makes Skippy seem dangerous, and then, once we find out what’s going on, it makes him seem capable, though in the purely reactive way of a kid. With respect to Debbie, the focus of Cochran’s identification, the plot results in structural oddities: the heroine starts out married and ends up separated; her marriage is pushed to crisis by a gun she doesn’t want, but she saves the day at the end by using one she’s filched; there’s a wedding at the end, but it’s not one we have high hopes for, seeing as young Myra doesn’t have even the repressed confidence that carries Debbie along. (Maddie Corman’s face telegraphs her insecurity a split second before she realizes she’s feeling it.) All these things can be interpreted as correlatives of female powerlessness and power, but Cochran’s skill at spinning fantasies is so pure, and her moviemaking style so unobtrusive and yet so right (I don’t think I’ve ever seen more effective long shots in a movie of such intimate scale) that you don’t feel any kind of ideological pull.

In an interview Cochran has quoted advice given her as a Columbia film student by Emir Kusturica: "Just make sure when you shoot it that the characters always have their feet floating a little bit off the ground." 1  And she herself has said of her screenwriting process, "When you’re actually writing something it’s not so much that you have an idea, it’s that you’re consumed with something that’s more than an idea--it’s kind of like a cloud that’s surrounding you." 2   In My New Gun this floaty-cloudy feeling that Cochran so successfully conveys works in tension with her feeling, adapting a comment of Tom Stoppard’s, that the goal in moviemaking is to "[k]eep it down to the barest minimum so the meaning expands as much as possible." 3   Cochran has what I think could be identified as a woman’s narrative style, or interests anyway, as seductive as Angela Carter’s in retelling fairy tales, but without giving us the all-too-common sense that feminist redress for sexual oppression is shading into Gothic prurience. Has there ever been a more level-headed romantic fantasist?

And though she’s on Debbie’s side, Cochran has a touch in dealing with marital discord that a clobberer like Jane Campion couldn’t even detect. By revealing that Gerald has been unhappy in the marriage Cochran’s script avoids the cheaterly melodrama of The Piano, in which the insensitive husband represents the nature of the white European imperialist patriarchy, and so commits atrocities at home against his symbolically mute wife. Toward the end, when Debbie laughs at the obviously rehearsed speech in which Gerald tells her he wants a separation, he slaps her and she slaps him right back--no mutilation masochism here. (Describing their relative sensitivity as artists in terms of "The Princess and the Pea," Cochran would be the Princess, Campion the stack of mattresses.) The Bender household thus isn’t a bad situation only for Debbie. All the same she’s unambiguously the protagonist because she has the more fluid personality and so can respond to the kind of fluke that rearranges everything to the greatest satisfaction of the most people, which it is romantic comedy’s oddly utilitarian specialty to provide.

My New Gun is a classic romantic comedy in that it entertains us with disorder that leads to a new, better order by the end. Cochran knows the formula instinctually but no romantic comedy ever felt less formulaic, not even Preston Sturges’s. She’s thus able to squiggle her storyline into higher stylization, for example, when Debbie comes to find Skippy at the Red Chimney. He’s standing in the back of the shot in front of the grill while his co-worker is standing in a closer plane by the register. In an andante progression of shots, Debbie enters, the grill flares up once, and then in a reverse shot she faints out of frame. Cochran can also dip into absurdism, for instance, when Debbie breaks an uncomfortable silence among herself, Skippy, and Gerald, by asking Skippy with out-of-place interest, "Who picked out your flooring--you or your mother?" Debbie is fishing for information about the mother, but it comes out almost like a line in Ionesco’s Bald Soprano, though there’s nothing the least bit programmatically anti-bourgeois here. Cochran knows that sometimes we sound as puppety, as deranged as people in TV commercials (or as the commentator of a televised jai alai game Skippy watches), but this feeds back into the realistic impetus of the movie which is to break this woman out of boxworld.

Cochran is a middle-class girl from New Jersey herself, but as an artist she’s able to aestheticize her distance from the suburban reality of condo life and crummy jobs and weddings held at country clubs. She does it with an exquisite restraint that is never boring, but never calls for admiration; the characters, story, and settings are completely absorbing. Perhaps because you sense in Cochran the irony of an artist with indie cred going home again to the suburbs (though without a trace of Susan Seidelman’s insistence in Desperately Seeking Susan that she’s too hip for the people and setting), there’s something about My New Gun’s beautifully composed and designed ordinariness that brings to mind the moments of old movies when the everyday felt most transformed: Ginger Rogers washing her hair while Fred Astaire sings "The Way You Look Tonight" in Swing Time; Alice Faye eating Dick Powell’s potato chips and sipping his coke while singing "This Year’s Kisses" in On the Avenue; Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea making out as they walk home in The More the Merrier. Working outside the mainstream industry, Cochran achieves that intense blend of the ravishing and the real that is one of the qualities we love about old Hollywood romantic comedies featuring characters meant to be ordinary men and women. So her hesitations about growing up and getting married and living in the suburbs have a basis in detached observation but can also be cast as a romantic comedy, a fairy tale, a placidly prankish dream version of reality--forms of artifice that make real-world conflicts and resolutions cast pastel shadows.

My New Gun isn’t absolutely inarguable. For example, Stephen Collins is overbearing in a way that fits with his character but which might be a mistake. In any case you definitely begin to think of other ways to have played it. And though Tess Harper has some believably creepy ways as Skippy’s lying, manipulative addict mother--we can see how intimate her hold on Skippy is--Harper misses the quality of rapture Cochran seems to be aiming for by making her a country-western singer whom people still come up to in public to adore. (Or maybe the timing of the story simply didn’t allow the mother enough scenes.) But the movie is so unified that these quibbles don’t obstruct the vernacular dream-flow. This is overwhelmingly a small miracle of a movie.

1. Emir Kusturica: Lippy 96. (return to text)
2. When you’re actually writing: Lippy 98. (return to text)
3. [k]eep it down: Lippy 98. (return to text)