Guy Lochhead, 08/09/10
American film director and activist. Laughlin began his career acting in Hollywood, before leaving the industry to set up a Montessori preschool with his wife Delores Taylor in 1959. This became the largest of its kind in the country before going bankrupt in 1965. In 1967, Laughlin wrote, directed and starred in ‘The Born Losers’, a motorbike gang exploitation film that featured a character called Billy Jack (played by Laughlin). This character was developed in ‘Billy Jack’ and its sequels, which were huge box office successes, despite their humble origins (funded, as Roger Ebert put, “in unorthodox ways and employing the kind of communal chance-taking that Hollywood finds terrifying”). Billy Jack is a half-Cherokee Vietnam veteran, hapkido master and gunslinger who fights against racial prejudice and capitalism. The films are violent (incorporating martial arts before the Bruce Lee fad), but with a message of peace. They also revolutionised film marketing and distribution – the first to be advertised on television and shown in 1,000 cinemas on the same day. Laughlin has more recently turned his attention to politics. He has run for president four times, and been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and the Bush administration. He also has been involved in psychology and domestic abuse counseling, writing several books on Jungian psychology and developing theories on the causes of cancer. Oh my god these are the funniest films. I think Laughlin is an exceptional character. Although I definitely don’t agree with all his views, I think his films use their exploitation guise to give political issues close to Laughlin’s heart a wider audience than if they were presented as cold preaching – using the immediacy of martial arts and simplistic righteousness to communicate more widely. It’s as heavy-handed as a punch to a forest-destroying capitalist’s face? Some critics have labelled the films as self-contradictory and confused, which they quite possibly are sometimes, but I think that they serve as an antidote to the normalised self-contradictory hate message of the average Blockbuster action film. They’re playing on the same field. Really I like this because it’s not all Laughlin does; his dabblings in education, psychology and medicine are admirable too. The Freedom School gave hope to hundreds of adopted children. His half-Cherokee role model did the same for kids of Native American heritage. And fuck cancer. The importance of Delores Taylor in all this shouldn’t be understated either, so I’ll write about her seperately too.