When the filmmaker Ted Griswold was around nine or ten years old, his father took him to an outdoor shooting range in upstate New York. Griswold didn’t fire a gun that day, but he remembers standing next to his father and watching as he shot. “It was the first time I ever heard my ears ringing,” Griswold told me. The noise seemed to last for a long time, but Griswold now thinks it was probably no more than a minute. His father had hunted as a young man, and it remained important to him and his friends and siblings in adulthood. He had hoped to instill in his son a respect for guns, and, perhaps, to share the experience of hunting with him, but the trip to the shooting range had the opposite effect. “It kind of ended my interest in guns,” Griswold said.
Griswold’s documentary short “Father and Gun” takes place decades later and on the other side of the country, at Markley’s Indoor Range & Gun Shop, in Watsonville, California. But the fathers and sons whom he films—as they examine weapons, receive safety training, and fire guns—are navigating similar, fraught terrain. A little blond boy, seemingly kindergarten age, skips excitedly through the showroom. “I want to hold that!” he shouts, as his father examines a selection of guns on the wall. A slightly older boy, wearing goggles, looks nervously at the guns that his father is describing, and then looks up at his dad’s face, as if searching for something.
With the film, which he made while completing an M.F.A., at Stanford, Griswold was less interested in making a political point about guns than in exploring the ways that they connect to the performance of maleness. On camera, little boys are seen learning a set of skills and lessons. Some of these are practical—how to load, aim, and discharge a firearm—whereas others are more nebulous, about enacting a particular brand of masculinity, in which safety and strength are connected to a capacity for violence.
Over this footage, we hear a recorded phone call between Griswold and his father, Tom, in which they talk about their early experiences with guns. Griswold’s father recalls a childhood shooting experience of his own that, though it did not curb his interest in hunting, left him bruised and sore. In this discussion, they are picking through memory, circling around moments of hurt with openness and questioning, and allowing each other a touching level of vulnerability. It’s a wholly different language from the one spoken in the shooting lanes, and a different way of talking about what it means to be a father and a son.
