A Lust Less Ordinary: Revisiting Bart Tare's Problem

Fig. 1. Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) and Bart Tare (John Dall) in Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy, 1950


'Bart Tare (John Dall), the protagonist of Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950), has a problem. He is afflicted - or so we are told - with a ‘dangerous mania for guns’. His once anodyne passion for firearms has mutated into a pathological lust. He must therefore be taught how to curb his aberrant desire, as well as his narcissistic insistence on gratification, in accordance with the rule of law. Consecutive stints in reform school and the army almost do the trick. After meeting Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), however, his tenuous rehabilitation comes fatally unstuck. Bart’s failure - the source not only of incessant angst, but also of escalating thrills - furnishes him, and the film, with their narrative and emotional trajectories. These, in turn, reveal Bart’s problem to be a toxic medley of ingrained psychosocial, affective, and existential ailments. More, though, needs to be said about the analogical relation between Bart’s acute moral incoherence (his real “disorder”) and the performative heterogeneity of Gun Crazy’s transgressively idiosyncratic form.'

Lucio Crispino (from A Lust Less Ordinary: Revisiting Bart Tare's Problem in Gun Crazy, 1950)

Before It Speaks, Every Body Has It Own Language

Fig. 1. Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) - Killer's Kiss (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1955)


' ... the body is like a sentence that can be broke down into separate parts so that its true contents can be put together in an endless series of anagrams ... '

Jacques Lacan

Only So Long As It Never Becomes An End In Itself

Fig. 1. Jacques-Louis David - The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789


'To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it.'

Cesare Pavese

Reality Is Not Always Probable - Or, Indeed, Likely*

Fig. 1. Isaac Layman - Sink, 2008


'Few people have the imagination for reality.'

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

* 'Reality is not always probable, or likely.' (Jorge Luis Borges)

Something Incredible Is Awaiting Your Full Attention*

Fig. 1. Vernon Fisher - Man Cutting Globe, 1992


'Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.'

Marcel Proust

* 'Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.' (Carl Sagan)

The Case Against Certitude Of A Certain Persuasion

Fig. 1. Erwin Olaf - Marie-Antoinette (1793), 2000

'It is with our judgments as with our watches: no two go just alike, yet each believes his own.'

Alexander Pope

Irony Is The First Resort Of The Sincerity Challenged

Fig. 1. Robert Longo - Untitled (Et In Arcadia Ego), 2009


'Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.'

Edwin P. Whipple