The weapon hand

A reflection on a theme in movies.

In the Evil Dead movies, Ash lives in a world of literally monstrous violence.

When this costs him his hand, he learns to accept that he will never be able to escape the violence of his world, so he must embrace how this has transformed him into an someone capable of responding to the world he inhabits.

But this makes him incapable of returning to an ordinary life. His hero’s journey does not bring him home.

In Videodrome, Max Renn’s exposure to violent propaganda created by a corporation intent on brutal control makes him so obsessed with his gun that he experiences it becoming a part of him.

Eventually this destroys Renn — either by detaching him from reality or by driving him to literally destroy himself, we never get to be sure which.

To ensure that we do not misunderstand the horror of Videodrome as reflecting the intrusion of the mechanical into the organic, Cronenberg gives us a repulsively organic gun in eXistenZ.

The horror comes from holding a weapon, not from holding a machine.

Luke Skywalker confronts violence with violence and it costs him his weapon hand.

Palpatine urges Luke to embrace violence. But Luke sees how that has transformed Vader. Contemplating his weapon hand, seeing the same process happening to him, he chooses to renounce violence.

A much older Luke has stopped hiding his weapon hand under a glove. Maybe he needs the reminder of the corrupting power of violence in front of him. He has renounced the entire world.

In Luke’s final moments he returns to the world, having finally learned to serve it without violence, as his mentors taught him. Weapons cannot stop him.

The Iron Giant is not tempted to pick up a weapon in his hand; someone made him to be a weapon before he had any choice.

Then when the Iron Giant does have a choice, he knows it. He is not a gun.

He knows who he is.