Hearing of charred American bodies dragged through the streets of Iraq is one way of experiencing the rawest and most honest of human emotions: the desire for revenge.
It is not our job, here in the peanut gallery, to avenge such losses. But we feel the chemical machinery of vengeance all the same. Our teeth grind at the sight of the evening news.
How to deal with the pent-up hostility? Visit your local cineplex this weekend.
There, you’ll find the warm embrace of the proverbial cold dish. “Walking Tall,” the Rock’s redo of the club-wielding Buford Pusser legend, is still in theaters. And the second volume of Quentin Tarantino’s samurai orgy, “Kill Bill,” opens today alongside “The Punisher,” a feature based on Marvel Comics vigilante hero Frank Castle.
Each movie’s protagonist is out for blood, and blood is what they get. Dripping down walls. Pooled on floors. Gushing from artery-geysers.
The highly stylized “Kill Bill” is essentially an amoral revenge yarn. Mr. Tarantino’s heroine, the Bride (played by Uma Thurman), is no innocent. She’s an assassin. Bride (played by Uma Thurman), is no innocent. She’s an assassin. And her unborn daughter, whom she presumed dead in “Vol. 1,” may actually be alive, thereby clouding her motives.
“The Punisher,” meanwhile, is a more conventional tale of blood grudge. It has a white hat — retiring special agent Castle (Baltimore native Thomas Jane) — and a black hat — John Travolta’s bad guy Howard Saint.
Castle’s family is slaughtered by Saint. Castle survives. Castle wants blood.
Any questions?
Revenge is a thematic staple of American movies, and the Western was its early playground. It migrated to the city with 1971’s watershed “Dirty Harry,” which reached an audience hung over from political turbulence and escalating urban crime.
Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan was impatient with bureaucracy and mystified by constitutional limits on his ability to fight crime. The title of the third “Dirty Harry” dispensed with nuance: “The Enforcer.”
By the time of 1983’s “Sudden Impact,” Callahan’s loose-cannon irascibility had become the stuff of San Francisco legend. He was a deserved headache for the paper pushers and the defendants’-rights lobby.
Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” which came out the same year as “Dirty Harry,” was set in rural England but tapped into the same vein — frustration with the appeasement of senseless violence.
Then there was the late Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” series, which started in 1974. Mr. Bronson’s Paul Kersey was an architect and a soft political liberal. His wife and daughter are attacked in his home, the former dying and the latter slipping into catatonia.
Irving Kristol’s “mugged by reality” line doesn’t quite do “Death Wish” justice. The Manhattan of “Death Wish” was a place where government had completely lost the monopoly on violence.
Paul Kersey was mugged by chaos.
Mr. Bronson dragged the carcass of the franchise into the ’90s with “Death Wish V: The Face of Death.” But vigilantism in the ’90s didn’t pack quite as righteous a punch. It was beyond gratuitous; it was silly.
Crime rates plunged to 30-year lows, with the last of the baby boom generation — which political scientist James Q. Wilson likened to an invasion of barbarians — reaching adulthood. Mayors such as New York’s Rudolph W. Giuliani got smart about crime. We built more prisons and put more cops on the beat.
The self-appointed Paul Kerseys became obsolete. Mr. Eastwood retired Harry Callahan and began questioning the cycle of violence with such movies as “Unforgiven,” “A Perfect World” and “Mystic River.”
Now we have a new threat of chaos.
It could be 10,000 miles away or sitting next to you on your morning flight to Los Angeles, doing something funny with its shoes.
I’m not saying we need a Dirty Harry of Homeland Security, but something like him — something more than just High Tarantino Style and comic-book heroes — would be useful, and healthy.
But Hollywood dares not speak the name of radical Islamism. The 2002 feature made from Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears,” for example, scrubbed all traces of fundamentalist Muslims and replaced them, limply, with neo-Nazis.
Asking Hollywood to reflect our current troubles is problematic. The Somalis of “Black Hawk Down,” with their comical aviator sunglasses and night-black skin, bordered on stupidity. The snaggletoothed Vietnamese of 1985’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II” were another cartoon job.
That Hollywood fears offending Muslims is a curious case of restraint. Why start now?
Whoever their enemies are, revenge movies from “Dirty Harry” to “The Punisher” have a sensible appeal. There are good guys, and there are bad guys — and the bad guys must lose.
In this, “Kill Bill” fails as a revenge movie. Its violence is divorced from any moral context; it is simple nihilism.
The point here is that vengeance, properly understood and proportionately dispensed, has its place. I’m reminded of a comment that ex-Talking Heads singer David Byrne makes in the liner notes of his new CD, “Grown Backwards.”
During its recording, he said, two wars were fought: one for revenge (Afghanistan, obviously) and one to “consolidate oil interests” (Iraq, equally obviously).
He’s wrong on both counts, as it turns out. But let’s just say he’s right about the first war.
What’s so wrong with that?
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