Is Weapons Funny?

Before seeing Weapons, I heard a lot about how funny it is. It’s one of those summer films that captures the cultural conversation for a moment, just like it’s intended to. Rumblings of, “I don’t want to say too much” or “I can’t spoil anything for you” create a must-see-to-believe-and-then-to-discuss urgency which has become a hallmark of recent film marketing campaigns. I find this grating but less grating than some other points on the current marketing spectrum, including the obvious outrage fodder, identity centric social activism through movie ticket buying, or the hyper-exploitative documentary marketing that says hey we’ve all decided to collectively gawk at this person or group for three weeks hurry up and join in! But everyone did seem genuinely pretty excited about Weapons and the chance to say yeah I saw it, what did you think?

I think that Weapons was pretty bleak and a little warped and a little off kilter in ways that feel honest and appropriate to the film’s central theme of addiction. It offers up images that are disorienting and inexplicable, real enough to be familiar, but twisted enough to disturb. Children run out their front doors in stiff triangular poses, a colossal machine gun hovers like an omen above a suburban home, a red lipsticked smile crosses the face of a perverse version of your family’s weird aunt. This tone, banal but distorted, might be the film’s truest and strongest attribute. It mirrors the addiction experience by occupying dual spaces; there is a familiar, collective reality, and then there is a distorted, alternate world. What the film does well is telegraph the fact that not only do these realities overlap, but so much of life is actually about how those who occupy either or so often both sides of the line choose to deal with each other.

This tension is directly addressed by the film’s multi-perspective narrative structure. The story is intentionally fractured, told one perspective at a time, with each new viewpoint drawing the audience closer to the core of the plot. This offers the audience both an external and internal view of the film’s central characters, giving us a chance to judge or misjudge them before being let in to the broader context of their lives. This is effective in one very true and basic sense, which is that it reminds you of the fact that you often do not know who in your life is an alcoholic or which child goes home at night to a sadistic aunt. But there is also an unevenness to film’s treatment of its broad cast of characters. Some storylines are rendered with care and humanity, while others near parody. Justine and Paul’s alcoholism isn't particularly subtle, but the escalation of their relationship is nuanced. Their storylines feel grounded in comparison to the more heightened displays that characterize Marcus and his husband’s eating habits (jellybeans at work, fruity pebbles, so many hot dogs? I’m told the hot dogs are an in-joke for fans of the director’s early work) or Archer's macho obsession with being the only man capable of finding his son. I wonder why certain characters were chosen to be made human, and others to be comic relief.

The addiction allegory culminates in the revelation of Aunt Gladys, who is a perfect perversion of the kooky aunt archetype. Her conspicuously bizarre physicality makes her an ideal device to provoke a specific brand of small town politeness and cognitive dissonance. Gladys' intersection with Alex's storyline most closely models the experience of a child with an alcoholic parent; things are not "OK" at home but it is impossible for Alex to talk about it, even when help is offered. The "system" is easily thwarted through Gladys' misdirection, and even when she is defeated her effects remain.

Humor and horror connect in the realm of the unexpected. Whether something is surprising but scary or surprising but funny so often hinges on whether that surprise is threatening or harmless, and that all depends on the perspective of the viewer. I didn’t find Weapons to be particularly funny, but I also didn’t find it to be particularly scary. I’m not sure what exactly is so unexpected about small town characters with hidden demons, or people who appear wholesome but are quick to mistreat others in deeply selfish ways. I found the film and its reception this summer to simply reflect some things that I’ve come to accept.