ABSTRACT
Lethal Weapon 2 tells a slightly different story about race, nationalism, and masculinity. The South African consulate in Los Angeles is a front for all kinds of illegal activities; officers Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) must uncover the scheme and get the bad guys. The Eric Clapton cool jazz-rock sax-guitar score suggests a musical discourse that crosses racial lines. Unlike classical scores organized around one or more leitmotivs, but similar to the case of The Hunt for Red October, this score uses small varying figures of four notes to signify danger/suspense, as I discuss further below, and the seemingly unraced style of fusion-a combination of jazz and rock-for Riggs and Murtaugh. But over the course of the film-and, actually, over the course of the three films-it becomes clear that the Eric Clapton and David Sanborn licks are really Riggs’s and not Murtaugh’s. They enter with Riggs, they follow him around, they express what his character is experiencing, and so on. Even in the opening sequence, the music really belongs to Riggs. During the long chase sequence, there is no music until it enters on the cut to Gibson crawling out through the windshield of Murtaugh’s wife’s bashed-up car. As in Red October, the musical cues have the earmarks (and consequences) of a particular point-of-view, and it is Riggs’s.
