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Hollywood star Baldwin: icon of liberal America
Photo: Mark Sagliocco / Getty Images for National Geographic
In the blockbuster movie »The Hunt for Red October«, with which Alec Baldwin seemed to make his breakthrough as an action star in 1990, he plays the secret service analyst Jack Ryan, who ends up on a Russian nuclear submarine. When a mutiny broke out there, he wanted to fight his way near the missiles with a weapon. He should just be careful what he shoots at, advises the captain, played by Sean Connery. There are a few parts that "don't respond well" to bullets. A few moments later, Ryan has to take cover in the hail of bullets. "I," he says to himself, "don't respond well to bullets."
Although the submarine thriller was a hit, Baldwin no longer starred in the sequel films. Harrison Ford took over the role from him. Why his rapid career did not go on, why he went from star to popular supporting actor is still unclear and controversial. Some say he was bullied out of the Jack Ryan franchise. Others claim that it was more important to him to be on the stage in the play "Endstation Sehnsucht" than to impersonate Ryan a second time. But maybe he was just better suited to play characters who use verbal violence instead of gun violence.
Men like manager Blake in David Mamets and James Foley's film "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992), who tries to get some of his salespeople to do more deals by all means.
Baldwin's portrayal is the seldom strong portrait of American capitalism in its most ruthless form.
He emphasizes every single word and likes to repeat it from time to time so that simple wisdom appears as if it were set in stone.
In a striking way, this occasionally anticipates the rhetoric of Donald Trump as US President, which Baldwin so often parodied on the TV show "Saturday Night Live" during Trump's tenure.
Fighters against the US gun lobby
Baldwin did so after the Parkland massacre, in which a 19-year-old man shot and killed 17 people at a high school on February 14, 2018. After the rampage, President Trump had turned off calls for stricter gun laws. "The NRA gave me 30 million reasons not to change anything," said Baldwin as Trump on "Saturday Night Live." The NRA, the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby, is one of Baldwin's archenemies. With Hollywood star Charlton Heston, who had fronted the NRA for years, he had already been in a clinch earlier. After the Parkland massacre, Baldwin, along with other stars like Amy Schumer, demanded more state control over American gun ownership.
At the moment one has to assume that the shots he fired from a gun loaded with blank cartridges while filming the western "Rust" near Santa Fe turned into life-threatening projectiles due to a technical defect. They killed the cameraman Halyna Hutchins and injured the director Joel Souza. This incident is tragic, especially since there are film guns that only work with air pressure. With each shot, however, the muzzle flash has to be added through digital post-processing, which is not cheap.
In the deeply divided United States, which so often fall apart over gun ownership, there are likely to be people who are happy that this misfortune happened to Baldwin of all people, this icon of liberal America.
This supposedly so upright star, who doesn't always have his emotions and his fists under control and has also been arrested for beating.
So the actor, who instead of beaming heroes repeatedly played killers, unscrupulous military men or dodgy secret service bosses, may become a sad symbolic figure of a torn nation.