Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

[NOTE: Since this film was released in 1968, I'm not going to attempt to avoid spoilers. It's a great film, worth the time, so go watch it before you read this.]

In 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the clock tower at University of Texas Austin with a bevy of firearms. In the ninety-six minutes that followed, he killed sixteen people, wounding another thirty-one. It ended with members of the Austin Police Department killing Whitman.

At some point following, low budget, independent film maven Roger Corman told Peter Bogdanovich he could make any movie he wanted, as long as it included two days worth of shooting for Boris Karloff, who apparently owed Corman the time from a previous contract. Targets is the result, released in 1968. Bogdanovich would go on to a long, respected career, like so many others who got their start working for Corman in the sixties and seventies. Due to Bogdanovich's status among the filmmakers of his generation, Targets wasn't forgotten, so much as it was closeted. It's a low budget film. It's extremely simple in its story, and borders on exploitation. In the last few years though, it's been brought back for reappraisal, and it deserves it.

Bogdanovich and Karloff were each at crossroads in their careers. Karloff, of course, had been one of the eminent stars of horror cinema for decades. He's most well known as the man who brought Frankenstein's Monster to life, cementing James Whale's creation on the cultural consciousness and supplanting Mary Shelley's simultaneously urbane and profane creature, with Whale's more tragic and sympathetic version. Karloff had also appeared in hundreds of other films designed to frighten. Though it's likely no one knew it at the time, Targets would be his last film.

Bogdanovich was beginning his career by entering Roger Corman's system. That system? Find a hungry young filmmaker, and if they thought they could deliver a film on schedule, and on a low budget, they would get the opportunity to make their first feature film. Bogdanovich, like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and others, took Corman's devilish deal, as a way to prove they could make a feature film. The best description I've seen for it is that these were agreements of mutual exploitation. Corman exploited these young directors for their labor, they in turn exploited him for proof of experience. Bogdanovich and his fellow writers, Polly Platt and Samuel Fuller, even wrote a character into the script who was in a very similar position to Bogdanovich, which he also plays.

Targets weaves parallel storylines together. One follows Bobby Thompson (played by Tim O'Kelly), depicted as the equivalent of the All American Boy. He's not necessarily a boy, as he's already married, but in the early part of the film, everything we see of Bobby and his family could be pulled directly from Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver or any of the other sitcoms which treated post WWII white, suburban families as the picture of utopia.

The other follows Byron Orlok, played by screen legend Boris Karloff. Knowing one of the requirements to get the film made was to use Karloff, Bogdanovich and his writing partners wrote the part for specifically for Karloff. Orlock is an aging star of horror films, and we're introduced to him as he announces his retirement to the producer and director of his latest film, who are planning another film with Orlok as the star. As Targets progresses, we come to learn Orlock feels there's no place for him anymore, that his filmography, represented in part through clips from Karloff's own career, has no place in the modern day landscape. Monster masks and make-up can't compete with the horrors coming across the television screens and front pages of newspapers nationwide.

Bogdanovich and company take a serious risk in creating a kind of thematic connection between these storylines in the final minutes. When they finally intersect in the final scene of the film, the beauty and brilliance of Targets is revealed. It becomes a film about horror films, the LA of its time period, but also questioning the ideas the country had spend two decades had been trading on as the All American family and the All American Boy.

The film portrays Bobby as an adult, but a young adult. He's at least old enough to be married, working at an insurance agency. He and his wife live with his parents. What we see of Bobby and his family, are a near perfect encapsulation of what I've come to call Suburban Utopia Mythology, most easily recognized in the television sitcoms of the fifties and early sixties, but given an enormous level of support by advertising, new in print and on television, as well as film and other genres of television programming. It's a mythology that presents the picture of a "traditional" nuclear family, whose suburban life is a shield from everything other than simple eccentricities and absurdities. Bobby, as a adult, refers to his father as "Sir," and clearly defers to him as the ultimate authority. Both his mother and wife perform the roles of homemakers. The question Targets is asking is, "What is happening in this picture of this utopian America, that is creating someone who would do this?"

It's likely that at the time, the critical reception to the film was informed by how closely it hues the the real life mass shooting committed by Charles Whitman. It's this proximity that gives a veneer of exploitation to Targets, but the film isn't particularly interested in cheap thrills, as the word exploitation is too often associated with. It's attempting to use Bobby, as a stand in for Whitman, as the example to force a question on the audience, to force them to reckon with it. "Why is this happening?"

It gives us a few quick instances of a view into something being "off" about Bobby. When we're introduced to him, we're seeing his view through a scope, placing the crosshairs on Orlock's head, which we then see he has done in the process of buying the rifle. Bobby has no particular interest in Orlok. He just happened to be leaving an office building across the street, and though Bobby recognizes him, it's not much more than the standard curiosity of recognizing a celebrity at a distance. He's aware of who Orlock is, as a pop culture figure, and that seems to be the extent of his interest. The impression is that Bobby would have set those crosshairs in on anyone standing across the street from the gun shop. Even the most cursory understanding of the safe handling of a firearm comes with the understanding that rule number one is not to point them at people. This isn't even a matter of familiarity with guns or gun safety. It's ingrained in pop culture. The cliché scene of a novice being handed a gun, only to then cause everyone around them to duck when they wave the business end toward the assembled persons is embedded in film and television. It also becomes clear in the conversation between Bobby and the gun shop's clerk, Bobby and his father are regulars. The clerk knows them both well.

We get other scenes, using the gun as a way to signal something in Bobby is not quite right. One shows him staring in fascination at his father's considerable gun collection. Another involves him putting his hand on a handgun as his mother speaks to him from the doorway. We get an affirmation that Bobby has in fact been taught gun safety, when after losing their informal shooting competition, his father goes to reset the cans they're using for targets, and turns to find Bobby taking aim at him. He responds with an angry string of words to the effect that Bobby knows better. What we're shown through these scenes is that Bobby is itching to use some of those guns, and not just on tin cans.

The only other instances we get to give us any indication of what exactly is going on with Bobby, what is driving him, are two scenes involving his wife.

About midway through, we cut to a scene of the four members of the Thompson family gathered around the television. Bobby's wife, Ilene, stands and says she has to get ready for work, and heads out of the room. A second later, Bobby follows. As she's attempting to change for what we come to understand is her job at the phone company, Bobby is trying to convince her to call out. She doesn't give in, and in the course of the conversation, he alludes to not feeling like himself lately (another detail in keeping with the Charles Whitman murder spree). The combination of her need to leave on time, and his inability to bring himself to be more than vague, ends with her leaving and him looking dejected, folding and putting a sweater she'd left out.

We see later, when she returns from her shift late at night or in the predawn morning, Bobby is awake in bed. He sits fully clothed, smoking in the dark, and tells her pointedly not to turn the light on. When she asks if he'd like to continue the conversation they'd started before she left, he answers that he's sure she's tired and it's not necessary. Bobby, it seems, has been sitting in the dark, by himself for hours. He's also not inclined to attempt to express what he means by "not feeling like himself" when the opportunity presents, but was willing to use it as an attempt to prevent his wife from going to work.

We don't get much in the way of explanation for why Bobby decides to climb to the top of a large oil reservoir and begin his spree by randomly shoot at passing motorists. Like Charles Whitman though, he kills his wife and mother before doing so, with a grocery store delivery person getting caught up in this madness. The note he leaves, unlike Charles Whitman, leaves no clues as to why he's killed his wife and mother or why he has gone on a killing spree.

It is now 11:40 A.M. My wife is still asleep. But when she wakes up I am going to kill her. Then I am going to kill my mother.
I know they will get me, but there will be more killing before I die.

Whitman left notes to the effect that he believed he was saving his wife and mother from the misery of life and the world.

Throughout all of this, we've also been following Boris Karloff's character, Byron Orlok, as he announces his retirement from acting after screening his latest film (the footage being from The Terror, another Corman production starring Karloff), then cancelling public appearances, taking a rather demeaning tone with his secretary when she tries to express care for what he's going through, getting drunk with the director of his last film and the one he was expected to make next (played by Bodganovich). All of this is to give us time to understand why Orlock is retiring and how he's come to see himself in the world.

Orlock doesn't see a place for himself anymore. Like Karloff himself, Orlock has made his mark starring in horror films. Like so much of Karloff's films, they are in the gothic tradition, pulling from monsters, legends and stories of time's past. They aren't films dealing with the contemporary world, and in Orlock's perspective, there is no way continuing to make films with "painted monster masks" can provide anything for a world where real violence and horror have become so much at the forefront of daily life. At one point, he picks up a newspaper which the camera shows to be splashed with headlines of violence and depravity.

Orlock isn't a saint, as we see in the exchange with his secretary, he can be cutting to a point walking the edge of cruelty, but it's clear he's a decent man, floundering, hoping his barbs will result in her leaving him alone, as she astutely observes. He's enjoyed being one of the Kings of Horror in the world of the film, and all he wants is to do good work, but he feels there's no space in the this new world for him to do so. The inanity of the business and celebrity have him feeling like there's no purpose in it for him anymore.

This isn't just interesting because Karloff is playing a character based on himself. It's also interesting because the horror film as a genre, and Hollywood as a whole, were simultaneously undergoing a renaissance when Targets was released. Night of the Living Dead will be released in 1968, just two years later. Psycho had been released in 1963. The two films are most often cited as the signs posts on the road to what horror cinema was becoming. Being released in 1966, Targets sits right between the first signal, considered now as a warning something new was coming, and the second, which serves as a declaration that new sensibility had arrived. It mirrors what's happening in the genre itself, with Orlock and Bobby representing the change of the guard. The gothic horror film was being replaced with something new. The generation shaped by the experience of the Great Depression and World War II were being replaced by Bogdanovich and his generation, who were bringing a new sensibility, the generation driving the upheaval and discontent that shaped the sixties and seventies. Targets, in this way, can be taken as the signpost at the turning point.

It's not until the last few minutes it becomes clear Targets has something else on its mind though. After fleeing from the top of the oil reservoir, there's a short scene of Bobby in his Mustang, being chased by a police cruiser. He escapes the chase by pulling into a drive-in, the cruiser not seeing him as it passes. Orlok, meanwhile, has agreed to make the public appearance he'd declined earlier in the film, at a drive in. With Bogdanovich as the young director who convinces Orlok to attend his public appearance, and the way he talks about the film he intended to make next in comparison to Orlock's previous films, Bogdanovich's character might as well be describing Targets. It takes little experience with movies to intuit Bobby has taken refuge at the drive-in Orlok will be attending in just a few hours. We know the two storylines will now intersect, but it's the how and what that comes to, that help make Targets something special.

Bobby has climbed the structure holding the drive-in's screen to continue his killing spree. Orlock and company arrive after Bobby has already killed a few people, but no one has realized it yet because the sound of the shots is being covered by the sound from the film. The sequence is very well done, creating and heightening tension and suspense, mixing it with tragedy. There's one extended shot after the crowd realizes there is someone shooting at them, yelling to each other from car to car, "There's a sniper!" The entire sequence is effective and inventive in conceit and construction. At one point, as we're shown the ensuing chaos, we cut to a young boy's terrified face, then pan over to show his father has been killed by one of Bobby's bullets. The boy is trapped in the car with his father's corpse as mayhem reigns outside of it. It's clear there wasn't money in the budget for practical effects, but it puts a needed edge on the combination of horror and tragedy of the random nature of Bobby's killing.

In the course of the finale, Bobby ends up back down on the ground, trading shots with the police who have arrived. After his secretary is shot, Orlock, leaning on his cane as he goes, begins a determined walk directly toward where Bobby is taking cover. As he approaches, Bobby is confused by Orlock being both there in person, and up on the big screen, giving Orlock the chance to reach him. Bobby does barely skim Orlok's temple in taking a few shots at him, but he's too thrown off by the man appearing in the flesh. Using his cane, Orlock knocks the gun from Bobby's hand and slaps him repeatedly. Bobby falls to the ground in a corner, with his knees to his chest and his hands covering his head and face.

Seeing Bobby, cowering like a child, Orlock says, "Is this what I've been afraid of all this time?"

It's a serious risk to build the structure of a story to lean this hard on the effectiveness of the final scene. If that one moment doesn't work, everything that came before it can be tainted. The success of the parallel storylines, as a structure, depends on it. Targets is one of those cases where not only does it work, but it added to the timelessness of the film, and for it to be more effective because of the time that's passed.

This is a different film, from the standpoint of 2025, than it would have been to audiences in 1966. If nothing else, mass shootings weren't constant part of the environment and emotional landscape of the nation. Charles Whitman wasn't the first, but going back and looking at the details of his crimes, he is in many ways the blueprint for the mass shootings that plague us today. In writing the film so that Bobby's motivations are vague, and capping the film with the line, "Is this what I've been afraid of all this time?" Bogdanovich, Platt and Fuller cut to the quick, and end up exposing something bigger.

Bobby, though he's technically an adult, comes across as infantilized. There's no sense he is an individual separate from his family, especially his father. When we're introduced to Bobby, in the gun shop, the conversation is as much about his father, and the clerk's understanding of Bobby's relationship to his father as anything else. In his interactions with his mother, she's doting on him, the way a mother would a child. When we see scenes with Bobby and his father, he's still very much in the role of the obedient child.

Bobby and his parents don't interact as two adults, connected but autonomous or as if his they see Bobby as an adult. It would be easy to reach for the fact that Bobby and his wife are living with his parents, but at the time, the multigenerational household had yet to become unusual. Newly married children often lived with their parents in the process of saving money to buy a home of their own. It was still a typical practice, into the eighties, though it's in the seventies and eighties when it transitions to being less so. In the sixties, unlike today, a young couple could save to buy a home of their own within a few years. The thirty or forty years where it became unusual to have a multigenerational household, with children moving out directly out of college or around eighteen, the expectations we have today, are the historical outlier. It's been a topic of focus in the news for the last decade or so, but more so because the cost of housing has outpaced wages. Even people with reliable jobs that have what we'd now consider an income that can support them, can't afford housing in many areas of the country, and it's not just people in their twenties. The cost of housing is squeezing everyone who isn't relatively wealthy, at this point.

By presenting it this way, Targets reveals one of the flawed contradictions of the Suburban Utopia Mythology. One of the pillars of that mythology is the patriarchal family structure. At no point do we get any sense Bobby's home has been abusive, so there's no reason to believe his actions are the result of the trauma of child abuse or domestic violence (which the US was rife with at the time). The one moment we see his father react in anger, it is a proportional, rational, healthy way to respond. Bobby is pointing a gun at his father. Yelling is not uncalled for, and he doesn't even demean Bobby in any way. He essentially says, "You know better." Yet Bobby is still infantilized because to not be would be an affront to the sense of values and respect of that patriarchal structure. He is the son, the child, and adult or not, he and his wife are living under his parents roof, making his father the ultimate authority. None of them have the room to expand into new, different roles, if that patriarchal structure is going to be preserved. The veneer of adulthood and autonomy is there, the job, the marriage, the new car, but there isn't any sense of autonomy in the most formative and important relationships in his life.

We see in Bobby's interaction with his wife, he attempts to find some control, asking her to take the night off from work, and he's rebuffed. She doesn't take the request at all seriously, in part because he is also incapable of expressing what it is he's really asking. He can't express what has him "not feeling like himself," what's been happening, the "crazy ideas" he's been having. He doesn't even have the capacity to express himself through passive aggressive sulking. When she returns home, there are pieces of it, sitting the dark, waiting for her to arrive, telling her not to turn on the light, but he can't even commit to expressing his need for something more substantial in that way.

The relationship between Bobby and his wife, as little of it as we see, has a sense of emotional immaturity to it, which makes sense given that they're living in a house where he's essentially treated like a teenager. it's a relationship today's audience would expect includes an emotional maturity that seems to be missing from both of them, but this is also a logical result of that kind of patriarchal family structure. The combination of required obedience to his father and constant doting from his mother, would render Bobby emotionally immature, ill equipped for an adults understanding of his own emotional life and how it interacts with the world around him.

Through this portrayal, we get a picture suggesting that even without the epidemic of spousal and child abuse, there's still something that impedes the maturation and autonomy of children raised the patriarchal structure of the Suburban Utopia Mythology.

At the conclusion, when Boris Karloff as Orlok says, "Is this what I've been afraid of all this time?" he's looking at a man child. Karloff was seventy-nine at the time of filming, and walked with a cane. There's a fragility to him which can't be masked. As he's approaching Bobby, we as the audience can't feel anything but dread. Tim O'Kelly, who plays Bobby, is the picture of a healthy young man in his twenties, and he's armed. Yet he's thrown into a fit of confusion by the man on the screen above him also existing in real life before him, he's rendered unable to shoot straight, the one thing he's been doing successfully in the film. There's an expectation Orlok is going to beat Bobby with his cane. He does use the cane to knock the gun from Bobby's hand, but it's not the cane that sends Bobby into a fetal position. It's Orlok slapping him in a way the cinematic language codes for children or characters who are in a "fit of hysteria," lost control of their faculties, in an attempt to release them from it (unfortunately, too often female characters).

Without the power of the gun, Bobby is revealed to be what he is, an emotionally stunted man child. From the standpoint of 2025, the lack of retributive violence from Orlok, not beating Bobby with his cane, is surprising. The expectation he is going to do this is formed from the history of the film and media we interact with. More of our storytelling than not, deals in retribution when it comes to harms caused, a proportional violence in response to violence especially. What Targets chooses instead, is revelation.

Charles Whitman still holds up as the template for mass shooters, in many, many ways and as a result, Bobby also easily slots into the characterization of many of the mass shooters we've seen since 1966. We are terrorized by this phenomenon, and Orlok's exclamation is in keeping with what we continually find in investigating who they are, trying to answer why they would do something so horrific. Time and again, the only real answer is that they're emotionally stunted children, often but not always, in adult bodies.

Targets puts a fine point on this by not just revealing, all the way back in 1966, that these are just emotionally stunted man children, but the allure and consequence of the power of the gun in a society whose familial and institutional structures are designed to produce emotionally stunted man children. In this way, Targets is in thematic conversation with a number of films with some of the films that have most shaped what we understand as contemporary cinema. It's not the only way either.

Bobby drives a 1966 Ford Mustang convertible. The Mustang, these late sixties models especially, became a kind of avatar for the working class or middle class sports car. They are part of the evolution of the American relationship with the automobile. In this case, the sports car, the performance car as product for the working and middle class is a marriage of the previous era's understanding of the rebel/outlaw, and the desire of US corporations to get their hands on the large store of wealth which became the American middle class.

The forties and fifties gave us the Greaser as one of the symbols of youth and youth culture. The Greaser may come in a few different incarnations, but they came by their name because of the association with engines and speed. It was, in some ways, an evolution of the obsession with another counter culture, the bootlegger. The American institution we call NASCAR, delineated from other forms of auto racing by being "stock car" racing, began with bootleggers racing cars they'd customized, trying to get the most power and speed out of them, in their need to be able to outrun the police. American automakers recognized the culture around this "need for speed," and that those who'd grown up idolizing it were becoming adults, by producing models to speak to it. The Ford Mustang would become iconic as piece of Hollywood lore in Bullit, the Steve McQueen action thriller, but Chevy produced the Corvette and Camaro, Pontiac the Thunderbird and GTO and so on.

Whether it was Marlon Brando as the leader of a gang who rode motorcycles they'd customized to be personalized speed machines in The Wild One or the drag racing, hot rod building characters in B movies like Hot Rod Girl, Teenage Thunder, Hot Rod Gang, the association between the "juvenile delinquent" (a character which had entered American consciousness in the forties) and the need for speed was already cemented in the American consciousness by the time Targets was released. This symbol of the juvenile delinquent had already become, depending on the age of the person looking at them, either a symbol of a culture too permissive, out of control and losing its young people to a kind of low class, rebellious decadence or a symbol of self expression, rebelling against thoughtless conformity that deadened the soul and mind, with a willingness to embrace vitality in the thrill of flirting with danger.

Brando's character, in The Wild One, probably best embodied the nexus of this symbol when he's asked by an older character, "What are you rebelling against?" and with a condescending smirk bordering on a sneer, he says, "Whaddya got?" Older audiences at the time would have found Brando's character a combination of baffling and horrifying. On the other side it's impossible, in part because of Brando's prodigious talent (especially if you have any questions about conformity), not to find Brando imbued with that ever undefinable quality of cool.

Rebel Without A Cause, the title alone a statement of cultural fears about youth and that battle between a loss of structure and discipline and the freedom afforded the children of the then new middle class, featured drag racing as part of its storyline, and catapulted James Dean into matinee idol status. A year after Targets is released, Easy Rider premieres a year later and is the marriage of the mythical American biker as a symbol of independence to the Flower Power ethos, portraying the children of that marriage as hopelessly naive to be tragic, in a world as hard and cynical as the one it brings to life. Bonnie and Clyde, which premiered in 1967, is the marriage of the symbol of freedom that is the automobile, the desire to rebel against conformity, and the power of the gun. Terrence Malick's Badlands, takes these same ingredients and mixes in a lyrical romanticism.

You can also see these elements woven into Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver too, which installed Martin Scorsese as a filmmaker who couldn't be denied, despite so much of the nation's self appointed moral arbiters desire to do so. Bickle is as much a warning as Brando's Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, but Bickle's rebellion isn't against conformity, it's against the loss of it. He is rebelling against the perceived loss of the kind of hegemonic culture, which Brando's Johnny Strabler rebellion is trying to escape. Bickle's perception is eseentially that the bootleggers, greasers, hippies and their descendants have won the battle they were fighting against the order he exalts, corrupting something once pure. Bickle is unmoored and isolated by the liberalism of New York City. He has no interest in learning much about the world around him, and so remains locked in that sense of unmoored isolation. He is fixed, static, and his final attempt to have a piece of that world, in the form of Cybill Shepherd's Betsy, is humiliating. He then turns to telling himself he is attempting to "rescue" Jodie Foster's character, but the ending of the film is more about a combination of violent revenge for the fact of his isolation and the attempt to enforce the order he exalts, the one he believes he understands and had a place for him.

Targets is wrestling with some of the same questions and fears, but it's not using Bobby Thompson as a warning. Instead, he's a question. Just how long are we going to continue allowing these emotionally stunted individuals terrorize us because they can reach for the power of the gun?