By Efe Teksoy.
The silence, however, is theirs alone — something neither the camera nor the system could ever claim….”
Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) takes a man hostage — and wires a shotgun to his neck. But that isn’t the first thing he does that day. The first thing he does is make a phone call. Contact a radio station. Demand to be put in front of cameras. There’s a gun, a hostage, explosives — but these are tools. The real matter is something else: Tony wants to be heard. And in 1977, there is only one way to be heard: spectacle.
Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire tells this true story from Indianapolis, 1977 — but not as a crime film. Tony believes mortgage broker M.L. Hall cheated him out of years of work on a land investment. He went to court, he went to lawyers, he knocked on every door. Nobody listened. One morning he walked into Richard Hall’s office, wired a shotgun to his neck, and held a city, its police force, and a television audience hostage for three days. Van Sant organizes these three days around a single recurring question: was Tony right? And did the system ever want to ask?
Read the full article at Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon.
Efe Teksoy is a film critic and media writer based in Türkiye. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles–based Alaturka News, PopMatters, and Bright Lights Film Journal, along with Posta (one of Türkiye’s largest newspapers), Gazeteport, and Tezgah Magazine.