The “Mexican” Standoff: A Meditation
by J. Hamilton
“Bang.” “Bang.” “Tap, tap, tap.”
As far as I can tell, that’s what a real “Mexican Standoff” would sound like — the sound of two guys dying and one walking away.
Let’s look at the mechanics: The classic standoff requires three individuals who are physically near one another and armed. In perfect unison, each must draw his weapon and point it at someone else — but not the person pointing at him — so, each shooter has a pistol covering him while his pistol covers the third person in the triad. No one shoots.
The scene has a certain logic when you are sitting at Starbucks with your laptop: Whoever shoots first dies second, ceding victory to the third man, so no one wants to shoot first.
Dramatists love it. Who wants to stage another mano-a-mano showdown on the main street of Dodge? It’s been done too many times. “Let’s mano a woman,” a creative type suggests, and so Sharon Stone steps onto the street — several times, many close-ups — in The Quick and the Dead. But a stunt is a stunt, and that stunt hasn’t been repeated.
Not so with the Mexican Standoff. It’s a stunt too, but directors can’t resist: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Natural Born Killers, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matrix Revolution, and many others. Some love the motif enough to repeat it in more than one movie: John Woo — The Killer, Hard Boiled, Face/Off; Michael Bay — The Rock, Transformers, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon; Quentin Tarantino — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Inglourious Basterds. The allure for directors rises in part from the complications that result from three shooters pointing pistols at each other in a kind of daisy chain of potential violence. Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs carries it one step further, because Joe’s pistol points at Mr. Orange (a wounded man on the floor who doesn’t have a pistol), Mr. White’s pistol points at Joe, and Nice Guy’s pistol points at Mr. White — not a true Mexican Standoff, but close.
But, I can’t see any of this really happening, at least not in the world where I grew up.
I am a Texan by birth and training, though I didn’t live my life there. The old men I met as a child, early in the fourth decade of the 20th century — the old men in charge — were still of the 19th century, the century of their birth. Their familiarity with the Civil War came from their own fathers, who served in that war. They had been raised before a great divide in civilization, and I had been born after the divide. I learned a great deal from these grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, including the nature and purpose of hand weapons. They taught me, no matter how young I was when they did — you never draw or point a weapon unless you intend to use it immediately.
My Uncle Dewitt would whip a child if he even made his hand into an imitation pistol and pretended to shoot, and Uncle Dewitt kept loaded pistols and rifles in every part of the house. They were serious tools of death (not meant for fondling or worship), and used only to that end. My great-grandfather, Martin, carried with him a double-barreled, ten-gauged shotgun (his weapon from the Texas cavalry during the Civil War) for serious interviews. He never would have pointed his shotgun without pulling the trigger. (His opponents believed him, so he never had to point it).
The problem in the imagined Mexican Standoff is shooting too late or not shooting at all; the problem in a real gunfight is shooting too soon. I once knew a man nick-named Dumb-de-Dumb by his associates (a road-bike gang). They named him thus, because during two gang shootouts he had shot himself in the leg — both times pulling the trigger as he drew his pistol from his pocket — but even Dumb-de-Dumb lived in a more real universe than the imagined world of Tarantino. In genuine combat, no one doubts the importance of getting off the first shot — bullets travel too fast. You’re still thinking about what to do, and you already have a hole through you.
I am afraid the present generation gorges on fantasy in all its forms, and the generation’s most basic goal or purpose is to produce more fantasy. I don’t mind fantasy, and I enjoy engaging in it to a certain extent, as long as it is a thin patina over a real universe. If it is fantasy all the way down, we might as well join the woman who believes the universe rides on the back of a turtle — and “It’s turtles all the way down.” It might be that I, too, was born and raised before a cultural divide, and now I am the old man from a previous epoch, but in Tarantino’s world Mr. White must shoot Joe, and then shoot Mr. Nice Guy after Mr. Nice Guy has already killed him with a large caliber handgun. The total improbability beggars belief, no matter how many 14-year-old boys wet their pants when the scene played out on the screen before them. The old men of my childhood would have laughed it to scorn.
As to the name “Mexican Standoff” — strictly racist. According to the old men, only a Mexican would be stupid enough to pull and point a weapon without immediately shooting.
I don’t know about their real life experiences, because they didn’t tell me — just as I don’t tell my real life experiences to my grandchildren. (My youngest granddaughter asked during Christmas: “Granddad, did you kill anyone in Vietnam?” I answered her by asking: “Now why would you want to know that?”)
All I know is that the old men lived to be old men.
SNL has some fun taking the concept to even further extremes:
