A recurring scene in 2nd Chance serves as a potent metaphor for America’s obsession with firearms. Throughout Ramin Bahrani’s documentary, a man stands in front of a camera, points a gun toward his chest, and shoots himself at close range. He’s wearing a bulletproof vest, and while the footage serves as an ad for the vest that he’s invented, it’s clearly meant as a macho ritual. He’s trying to prove himself by risking himself, as he’s enamored with the right-wing American notion that Dirty Harry is real, that social problems can be solved with elaborate gunplay, namely the social problem of his own sense of inadequacy.
This man is Richard Davis, and at first glance it would be easy to write him off as a caricature of the sort of working-class, red-state Americans who vote for people like Donald Trump. Davis is white and chubby, with a taste for guns firing loudly, women parading around in bikinis, and extremely dangerous fireworks shows. He’s loud and desperate for you to see that he’s in charge of his life, and his gun-nut braggadocio comes from a familiar source of baggage for such a person: a father who served in World War II, “a good war,” setting an example that Davis, who tried but never served, clearly feels he can never match. But Davis also has a ferocious imagination, and his sense of invention can be admirable, even if it’s put to highly dubious uses.
Bahrani, maker of empathetic, small-scaled character dramas like Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, doesn’t utilize Davis as the target of a political sermon. The director is authentically curious about what makes this man, the founder of Second Chance Body Armor Company in the 1970s, tick. Bahrani’s curiosity, his willingness to look beyond his own beliefs, is reminiscent of Debra Granik’s Stray Dog and the warmer and less hectic documentaries of Errol Morris.
Bahrani films Davis, now in his 70s, in a cheesy yet comfortable-looking den that suggests that the man is seeking refuge from the fallout of his exploits. While building his business, Davis pulled some disgusting and hypocritical schemes, about which the man is elusive, but he’s also a good sport about Bahrani’s obvious skepticism. Which is to say that Davis enjoys being the star of a documentary even if its creator isn’t an acolyte. Either Davis welcomes the scrutiny or has an ego that’s insatiable even against the tides of common sense. One leans toward the latter.
2nd Chance is above all a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn. Across a trim 89 minutes, Bahrani sketches in Davis’s many associates, including a cop who was saved by a Second Chance vest and became a Judas figure to Davis, as well as a litany of wives, children, and acquaintances. A critique of capitalism arises here, complementing the film’s sharp scrutinizing of American gun fever. Davis rejuvenates a small Michigan town with Second Chance while becoming a corrupt baron (shades of Ben Gazzara’s villain in the rowdy camp classic Road House). Davis claims to be in the business to save lives, which he probably believes, but he’s a power addict who admires authoritarian impulses. We’re told that he offers to award a gun to any police officers who kill their assailant.
It’s easy to decry gun fantasies and right-wing notions of by-your-bootstraps autonomy and the rage that can lead to catchphrases like “fuck your feelings.” It’s harder, and more valuable, for an artist to understand the appeal of such neuroses. Trumpers aren’t the only people at the mercy of fantasies of unchecked wealth, power, and sex—in short, doing what you want, free of any tethers. Look at how the media industry, left and right alike, casually worships the rich and famous. Guns can suggest an evening of the ledgers for the proletariat who feel otherwise powerless. Davis, enthralled with the same fantasies, understood this need and profited from it, and Bahrani fashions a rise-and-fall-and-rise-again story that captures the danger as well as the thrill of lawlessness. Late in 2nd Chance, though, Bahrani also offers a stunning testament to tolerance and forgiveness, when a police officer and his assailant, a reformed criminal, reunite.
2nd Chance’s most notable images were shot by Davis, who made hundreds of short films, advertisements for his company, that show police withstanding gunshots with their vests and mowing down aggressors. The nonchalance of the staged murders is funny, suggesting parody, but the films cut to the heart of Davis’s posturing and to the frustrations that inform the kinetic aesthetic of films like Dirty Harry. That classic vigilante picture is so well made that it’s nearly possible to ignore its moral trespasses. Kinetic yet raw and amateurish, with a less polished sheen than Hollywood productions, Davis’s films force one to face or embrace the bitterness that can drive the action genre and the gun industry, which satiate an American death drive.
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