Riggs's Suicide Scene Lethal Weapon (1987)
The scene at beat 4 in which Martin Riggs wakes alone in his beach trailer, sits on the unmade bed with a wedding photograph and his service revolver, puts the barrel in his mouth, weeps, and lowers the gun without firing — is the structural foundation of Lethal Weapon. It establishes the suicide approach as a fact about the protagonist before any character names it, before he meets his partner, before the audience knows his name. The hollow-point bullet that drives the rest of the film is not yet on screen. The act it is meant for is.b4
The setup is the dog and the trailer
Riggs lives in a single-axle beach trailer at a Los Angeles oceanfront RV park. The opening shot of his side of the picture is the trailer at sunrise, photographed by Stephen Goldblatt in the bluish dawn light through the windows. He wakes hungover; his German shepherd Sam is the only other living thing in the frame. He drinks a beer for breakfast — Donner's choice over Black's spec, which had Riggs taking pills. He watches morning cartoons. Bugs Bunny.
The film's introduction of the protagonist is the inverse of the introduction of his partner two beats earlier — Murtaugh in a master bath full of family, candles, cake, singing.b2 Riggs's frame contains a man, a dog, a beer, a TV. The contrast is the architecture.
The wedding photograph and the gun
Riggs sits on the unmade bed and pulls a framed wedding photograph from a drawer. Victoria Lynn — his wife, killed in a car accident the previous year — is in the photograph. The film does not state any of this in dialogue. The audience reads it from the photograph and the silence.
He picks up his service revolver. He puts the barrel in his mouth. He weeps. He lowers the gun.
"Gibson plays the scene without a line of dialogue. The crying isn't pretty crying, it's the kind that ruins a face. That's the moment the audience signs on." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1987)
The choice — to play the suicide attempt as a man who can't go through with it rather than as one who decides not to — is the foundation of the entire arc. Riggs is not a man who has chosen life; he is a man who has not yet been able to choose death. The hollow-point bullet at beat 13 will name this gap explicitly. The trailer scene establishes it without naming it.b13
"The first ten minutes of the film are an act of mercy from a director toward an audience. Donner is asking us to understand that the man we are about to spend two hours with is in real pain. He doesn't ask us to pity him. He asks us to register the pain as a fact. The dog is the only witness in the scene because the dog is the only being in Riggs's life that does not require him to perform." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1987)
What the scene's craft does
The setup is one master and one tight close-up — a deliberately simple coverage pattern in a film that elsewhere uses Steadicam and multi-camera setups. The cut from the master to the close-up at the moment Riggs raises the gun is the beat the audience registers. Goldblatt's camera holds on the close-up for the full duration of the suicide attempt — twenty-eight seconds in the finished film, an unusually long take for a 1987 studio action picture.
The trailer practical lights — a single bedside lamp, the open window admitting dawn light, the TV's blue glow — were designed by Goldblatt to put exactly enough light on Gibson's face to read the eyes and not enough to read the room. The dog Sam is intermittently in frame, on the bed, on the floor; the choreography of the dog's attention to the scene was supervised by trainer Karl Lewis Miller.
The Bugs Bunny choice
The morning cartoon playing on the TV in the background is Bugs Bunny — a deliberate choice on Donner's part. Bugs Bunny in 1987 was the most common American Saturday-morning programming, the cartoon a child of the 1950s would have watched. Donner has said in interviews that the cartoon is meant to position Riggs as a man who has been left in the morning routine of a child while everything else in his life has stopped.
"I picked Bugs because Bugs is the cartoon Riggs would have watched at six. He has not changed the channel since his wife died. The man is on autopilot. The cartoon is the audio of stasis." — Richard Donner, The Hollywood Reporter (2017)
What the scene structurally does
The trailer scene's job is to load the equipment for beat 13 — the trailer-confrontation scene where Riggs produces the hollow-point bullet, hands Murtaugh the gun, and dares him to do the job. Without beat 4, beat 13 would land as melodrama. With beat 4, beat 13 lands as the second movement of a fact the audience has already accepted. The hollow point is for the gun the audience has already seen the man try to use.
The post-midpoint payoff is the cemetery scene at beat 37 — Riggs at his wife's grave saying Merry Christmas, Victoria Lynn. I love you — and the doorstep scene at beat 39, where the bullet is handed away.b37 b39 The trailer scene at beat 4 is the planting; the cemetery and the doorstep are the harvest.
The scene that almost wasn't
Donner has said in multiple interviews that Warner Bros. executives asked the suicide scene be cut from the picture during principal photography on the grounds that it would put off audiences. Donner refused, citing the trailer scene as the structural foundation of the film. The studio agreed to keep the scene if the close-up of the gun in Riggs's mouth was reduced from a held shot to a quick cut. Donner shot both versions and used the held shot in the final cut. The studio did not flag the choice in the rough cut.
"If I had cut that scene the rest of the picture would not work. I told them: you bought a script with a man trying to kill himself in the first ten minutes. We are making the film that script is." — Richard Donner, Vulture oral history (2017)