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the killing from a fire escape. His avid interest in the case arises less
from his agreement to testify on behalf of the plaintiff than from his
passionate avocation, making documentaries. He secretly stalks Herby
and Stacy the night before and the day of the smashup in order to
film them and tape them for his "Portrait of the Accused." In court
he calmly advances a theory of perception that destroys the value of
his testimony out of an apparently scrupulous concern for the truth.
His real purpose is self-dramatization and the exercise of creative con–
trol over what will be picked up by a tiny recorder in his pocket. He
fails Hattie, though not from animosity, and saves Herby, though not
from compassion. He remains indifferent to the others, except insofar as
they supply him with documentary subject matter.
The title,
Shoot It,
refers to Herby's pistol and to Lamont's
camera and recorder. The "it" shot is, first, a black victim depersonal–
ized by the gunning of a nervous police officer, and, secondly, that
officer and others as grist for the adolescent's cinematic mill. The
interplay between the two types of shooting gives the novel affinities
with
Blow Up,
wherein Antonioni too explores the connection implicit
in the pun, between "shooting" in photography and in a murder.
Lamont, his moral sense quenched by the necessities of making, is the
figure of the artist. The artist corresponds to the killer-cop in regard–
ing persons as objects to be willfully manipulated, or as if balls in a
game of pool. The play and the players' behavior, in a poolroom that
Herby frequents, add to the notion of shooting a third dimension with
varied analogical and metaphorical bearings on the other two.
Precocious and detached, Lamont catches in his audiovisual medium
a portion of the story linguistically recorded, and stands as a mocking
counterpart of the precocious, detached author. Tyner maintains a
cool, reportorial objectivity, ignoring such pertinent political and socio–
logical issues as those of police brutality and race relations. Phrased
imperatively, the title is an authorial command to the characters,
"Shoot your 'thing' so that I can shoot mine." The fact that Lamont
spares Herby simply out of aesthetic considerations can furnish the cue
to redeem the closing scene from sentimentality.
If
the narrator, to
further the parallel between Lamont and himself, gives Stacy to his
protagonist out of the same considerations, the conclusion assumes
ironic overtones as a comment on the arbitrary and manipulative
aspects of fictional fabrication.
Tyner writes clean, lucid, colloquial prose. He pitches the narra–
tive idiom, kept close to that of the characters, and the dialogue in
nearly flawless tones. Lean and transparent, his style expresses a dis-
