The Tartan

Picture yourself in an elaborate office, the kind you’d expect to see in a movie with a fabulously wealthy character who spends most of their trust fund on odd curios and the pelts of endangered animals. It’s the turn of the century, give or take. The weather outside is miserable, and the slow pour of the rain drowns out the crackling fire.

There’s a fireplace, of course, though whether for keeping warm or burning evidence remains to be seen, and above that fireplace is a gun.

You do not know if that gun is loaded. 

And for a while, that will be the most interesting thing about it. A gun in that state is a superposition — it may be dangerous, it may be benign. It could be an art piece, or a subtle warning. It is, at its core, merely a tool for the narrator to convey some piece of the story.

In literature, the gun is a complex, powerful tool. It can be used to set up some payoff, give some indication as to a future plotpoint, or simply make small, mundane things of critical importance. There is something ever so satisfying about firing the gun, something so thrilling about a payoff to a mystery set up so, so, so much before. It’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s the thing we live to write about. You were told about a gun, and now, you get to use it.

It could be, with no historical accuracy nor historical research, that this sad, strange office belongs to one Anton Chekhov.

Now you see, Anton Chekhov decided at a very young age that when he grew up, he wanted to be the sort of macabre demon that terrorizes ninth grade English classes the world over, much like Moderately Sober Ernest Hemmingway or Any Amount of Drugs Oscar Wilde. His heinous goal was achieved, much to the agony of many, many students, via the medium of plays. In short, Chekhov was not content with only forcing you to read his work — he would much rather you devote a few hours to sit down and watch it.

So why not? Sit down and watch a play with me. We open with a young Simon Pegg getting reassigned to a small-town cop gig in the middle of nowhere in England and — hold the damn phone, this isn’t Russian literature, it’s “Hot Fuzz”!

While Film Forum this is not, “Hot Fuzz” does something very interesting — it sets up so much of the movie in its earliest scenes. You’ll hear a joke about farmer’s and their mums having guns, andlo and behold, the farmer’s mother comes out of the woodworks with a rifle to take out our heroes. The bumbling idiot sidekick (who is very much loved) does a silly party trick with a packet of ketchup that manages to be the same trick he uses to get his partner out of trouble an hour and change later. There are so many references and callbacks and every. Single. Element. Is brought up again. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright are masters of writing scripts that rely so much on self-reference and self-indication. Fundamentally, they’re hard to watch. There are so many aha moments that at some point you realize you’d just have to turn off the part of my brain that was trying to figure out the twists and just embrace that you’d know ‘em when you see ‘em.

There are examples of foreshadowing that serve more as a promise than a tool. Foreshadowing drops hints of mystery and strange ideas and the wild and the weird. But Edgar Wright movies? They’re something else. They operate on a contract. The joke will pay off, the idea will see merit, and the thing you half-noticed is absolutely integral to the plot.

The gun will go off. Or in the case of “Hot Fuzz,” the half-century old sea mine.

There’s a rather infamous scene in “Shaun of the Dead” where a character spells out the entire plot of the movie. It’s like spoilers except the flick spoils itself. “Shaun of the Dead” does this, however, by completely reversing the idea of what a spoiler is. The quote, in full:

“You know what we should do tomorrow? Keep drinking. We’ll have a Bloody Mary first thing, have a bite at the King’s Head, a couple at the Little Princess, we’ll stagger back here, Bang! We’re back at the bar for shots.”

This is not a day drinking checklist for Carnival. It is, however, a broad strokes description of every major scene in the movie, and that last line about shots pretty much accurately describes the shootout-ish thing that happens at the end of it all. “Shaun of the Dead” likes to make sure its guns go off too.

See, these things are tools that are just so immensely fun for people immersed in the movie. It’s not the traditional Chekhov’s gun (as so subtly brought up in the first meandering half of this article), but a more varied, interesting, alternative to Chekhov’s gun. It’s Chekhov’s forgotten bear-trap. It’s dozens and dozens of small messages that are doubled down and elaborated on as the writing progresses, a veritable cascade of events that can spread to unbelievable proportions and still leave a script that seems tighter than ever.

And so, you’re back in the office then, looking at that gun that’s over the fireplace. I’m no liar, you’ve seen the title. That gun has been introduced. It must go off. It cannot do anything but go off, and thus, it will, no questions asked.

Or does it? See, Chekhov didn’t follow his own cardinal rule quite perfectly either. Most notably, and bear with me, we must talk about classics for merely a moment. Chekhov introduces a gun in the first part of The Cherry Orchard, and then just doesn’t mention it ever again.

Ever. It’s gone, forgotten, ignored, written out like a bad side character or a two-bit cameo. Chekhov does not fire his gun every time. It’s a bloody waste of ammunition. 

But in movies, with 16 billion different editors and writers and opinion-havers and people-who-oughta-shut-up’s lining every studio on this side of Hollywood, an unfired gun is not a choice — it’s a mistake. The gun has not not gone off, it has misfired, or jammed, or some equivalent. The movie is not kind to unfired guns, it instead makes audiences demand we explain their existence to them. Who forgot? Who changed things? What scene demanded this?

But when it’s not fired, like in The Cherry Orchard, when it’s not used, it becomes a much different, stranger beast. And yet, that idea, that concept can only ever work in literature. 

The folded up unicorn in the original cut of “Blade Runner” was a gun that never got its chance to fire. When Ridley Scott tore it up and stitched it back together for his definitive cut, that same misfired gun went off — the unicorn had meaning again, and it was, instead of just an odd cutaway that a dime-store editor cut to for some godforsaken reason, a real, tangible part of the plot.

Oh, that’s right, we never did finish talking about that gun in that office that you were asked to picture. You don’t know if that gun is loaded. You could pull the trigger, and it may not even go off. And perhaps, if there was time enough, that could be justified. A few more loose ends, perhaps, and the article itself becomes a commentary on unfinished business. A few references to misfirings and the article suddenly gains a new axis of analysis. Chekhov’s Gun can be subverted in high literature, so why not here?

But this isn’t high literature. It’s an article, in a newspaper, written and edited at odd hours. It isn’t a screenplay either, but it is, at its heart, meant to be a tight story. There is no grand subversion, because there is no reason for it. There is a gun over the fireplace. You have seen it. Chekhov demands it be fired.

You still don’t know if that gun was ever loaded. You pick it up, and you pull the trigger.

Bang.