In Alec Baldwin, a Dark Metaphor Becomes a Reality
Between owning the production and pulling the trigger, he opens the box on Schrodinger’s responsibility.
Alec Baldwin has had a rough week. I’m utterly confident that when he pulled the trigger, he had no intention in that moment of actually hurting anyone, much less killing a promising member of his film production crew. I can’t imagine how gut wrenching it must have felt to see director of photography Halyna Hutchins fall to the ground, and to realize what had happened. I‘m sure his four decades of working on film sets conditioned him to feel supremely confident that the moment was perfectly safe, the danger as ersatz as a guy in a rubber Godzilla suit.
It appears that what happened did so during a close up shot, the cameras fairly near the actor as his character aimed towards them. In the story, he clearly fired towards one of the film’s antagonists. Audiences were meant to experience the expression on his face as he pulled the trigger, so it was likely the imaginary bullet was meant for someone more important to the plot than a mere henchman. Baldwin will have been focussed on his performance, remembering his lines and the flow of the narrative, injecting the right notes of grim or hammy that the scene called for as the fictional person he represented blew…
