I already liked Targets, but came away from watching the film again with even more admiration for the neat way in which it is structured. I think there is something really interesting going on with regards to feelings of purposelessness and finding a meaning to life that rather subversively equates Byron and Bobby together. We start with both characters safely ensconced within their respective worlds. Both are respected (or rather,
respectable, if rather pushed around) and have roles and duties within it that they are expected to fulfill (plus hangers-on in terms of entourage and/or families) to keep the status quo ticking along. But both Byron and Bobby seem to be chafing at the confines of their circumscribed, stultifying existences offering no chance of development or escape - Byron trapped in his ever more shonky-loooking and out of their time gothic period pieces being churned out in quick succession on a production line schedule; Bobby seemingly trapped with his young wife living in his parent's home (as compared to the brother that the mother briefly mentions when she says that she spoke to him and their new baby is doing well, which is not put across as an intentional jibe but which I could see unwittingly may have been a further nail in her coffin!). They both have obviously been considering their big move for a while before the film begins - Byron with his announcement of his retirement and refusal to brook any notion of deviating from his intentions; Bobby with the boot of his car full of guns seemingly built up over many trips to different weapons shops across the area.
Also whilst Byron is retiring from his job, despite mentions of Bobby (ironically) doing a job involving insurance we never see him at work. Which suggests to me that Bobby already either quit or stopped going to work before the film even began and has been keeping up a
Time Out facade of normalcy for a while. Or maybe he was made unemployed and this could have been the last straw that spurred his acts? I like that questions over motivation are left open to speculation, both because they are rather reductive and because they are the mundane 'explanations' for inexplicable behaviour that only come after the fact as the media tries to get their head around the carnage left in its wake. But that does lead to a really interesting sense of 'contempt for the worker drone' vibe that I could really strongly feel coming from both characters, actively from Byron in his contempt for the rubbish that he is being forced to do by producers and agents more interested in keeping their meal-ticket ticking over and ruining Orlok's reputation in the process rather than trying to give him anything more substantial to do; and passively smouldering from Bobby in the scenes with attempting to communicate with his wife (trapped in her own ritualistic cycle of working to work) who is busy getting ready to do her night shift and then too tired after getting home to notice that something is wrong with him (and that is even before we get to the second half involving factory workers and projectionists being shot for just working in what has become a makeshift shooting gallery!)
This is not just thematic counterpointing but because of the entire film taking place over two days it is a temporal one as well. That first night we get both characters, whilst surrounded by (arguably selfish, or at least solipsistic) oblivious other characters stuck in their own worlds, contemplating that this is the end of the way that they have been living to this point, and ready to take their leave of it. Byron gets drunk to 'celebrate' his freedom whilst rejecting everyone around him (but only ends up abusing his assistant for just being another cog in the machine); whilst Bobby stays terrifyingly stone-cold sober (despite a beer with the folks in front of the TV), the facade of 'normality' maintained more than in Byron's eventually trashed hotel room, but the cracks beneath the brittle surface far more deeper and dangerous. Its a 'long dark night of the soul' for both characters, where their lives are going to be entirely different from what they were up to this point. A 'liberation' in both a freeing and nihilistic sense, and in both cases the characters are doing the most collateral damage to those surrounding them by their, arguably selfish (but probably justifiable as the only possible course of action in their own mind), actions.
I think that the back and forth between the two storylines is at its strongest here, particularly that the morning killings in Bobby's home, to the point at which he has tidied everything up and left to drive off into the wider community, all takes place before Byron and Sammy wake up in their hotel room at noon! It is the difference between being drunk or sober again, I suppose, but it is also as if whilst Byron and Sammy have been unconscious a new world has begun and they have woken up into it, even if it takes them a while to recognise that fundamental, irreversible change has occurred. That for as much of a relic that Byron considers himself to be, at least he got out of bed to answer the door, whilst just a few blocks away in some anonymous suburbs there are a couple of people who will never get out of bed again.
And then we get more parallels as Byron has a change of heart about making the public appearance at the drive-in. He will put on the facade one last time (perhaps for Jenny's sake more than his), and for now has motivation and a purpose even if it is leading nowhere, much as Bobby now has a purpose and a goal, even if it is just one to kill as many people as possible before he is captured or killed. I love the 'Samara story' that Bryon has at this point, where the amusing theme about the impossibility of running from death because of never being able to escape the fate that has been dealt out for you is contrasted against that chillingly powerful scene of Bobby randomly shooting cars on the freeway (and that is why it is so impactful that this was a real location too rather than entirely staged, for that frisson of all of those hundreds of cars just narrowly avoiding the sights of Bobby's gun as they pass by in the background as he sets out his equipment and then has a break for a bite to eat. All of those insert shots of random cars suggesting Bobby's gaze briefly flicking to them but 'escaping' unscathed, until the moment he settles down to begin randomly picking out targets), and then running off when the police arrive on the scene as if he is trying to do what the person attempting to escape Death in Byron's story attempted!
We even arguably get parallels between the two cars, with Bobby driving his car (suggesting a dangerous freedom to go anywhere and do anything) contrasted against Byron being chauffeured from meeting to hotel to public engagement. It is a very car-centric film (the boot being the best place to hide the arsenal, though it means the wife will have to use the mother's car instead; the random death on the freeway; the eventual drive-in massacre), which may be suggesting something dangerous about the mid 20th century American psyche of car ownership that allows people to exist in their own private bubbles whilst simultaneously out and about in public. The radio and the speakers at the drive-in piping in the one way (and often aggravatingly tinny!) communication. But that may be reading
too much into things! Although an issue I may have with the film is that they have that extremely annoying radio announcer playing throughout during Bobby's many car driving sequences (perhaps to suggest how addled and harassed by the witless witterings of others he is even on his own?) and then in another parallel we see the (extremely groovy, man) announcer in Byron's hotel room in preparation for introducing Orlok's appearance at the drive-in that evening. But we never get the what would have seemed mandatory pay-off of this eminently annoying guy getting casually offed during the random killing spree that goes on there!
And then we get to the big climax at the drive-in, where the screen shoots back! The director is left running disconnected from everyone else through the panic and darkness (in abstract shots of Bogdanovich that I find strangely moving) whilst the actor, faced by being usurped in the middle of his own performance, improvises a better ending to his story (though one just as casual about whether he lives or dies) than the one he had been making painstaking plans for. The two 'stars' face off and we get an ending that again parallels the two characters whilst also implying a lot about the nature of celebrity. Bobby becomes childish, cowering in the corner after receiving the beatdown from Byron that he needed from his father but collects himself as he is being led away by the police enough to start cockily talking about how he "never missed a shot" (calling back to the scene out shooting cans with his father, and suggesting he is still trapped in wanting to make daddy proud, again thankfully just another implication added to the pile to ascribe his motivations to), as if he knows that he is going to become (in)famous for his actions. Bobby has a new persona now, a new existence that whatever it will be, will be different to waiting his life away in suburbia. Similarly Byron has survived and maybe confronting his fears of the young head on and being able to handle what they threw at him better than many others might prompt a change of heart about retiring. Maybe he will make that film that Sammy wants to do with him, about a very modern kind of horror, after all.
Either way, we get that great, pointed, shot of both celebrities (newly minted and reinvigorated) being led by their handlers to their separate vehicles before being driven away from the scene to a new phase in their lives which will presumably involve an endless roundelay of interviews inevitably entirely fixating on this one nexus of time where their paths briefly crossed each other. Only Bobby's car remains at the end, a rather poignant relic of an old way of life left behind in a forever empty drive-in lot with a marquee advertising a forgettable B-movie.