Eternal Vigilance

New at Reason: Jesse Walker gives a terrific eulogy to a great film genre—vigilante pictures of the seventies. To which I can only add one piece of trivia: The Arizonan mentioned in the article who stiffens Charles Bronson's spine in Death Wish is played by the great Stuart Margolin—loved by all Americans as "Angel Martin" in The Rockford Files.

Comments

[Jayson Gilligan]

One day I will own a mint-condition beige mid-70's Camaro Berlinetta...it is still my favorite car from watching The Rockford Files as a youngster.

[Matt Welch]

Random French angle -- Rockford Files never made it to France (or if it did, no one remembers it). Starsky et Hutch, on the other hand, is simply enormous.

[Rex Stetson]

Kudos to Jesse Walker both for eulogizing Bronson, and for giving the subject of vigilantism in popular culture some of the attention it has long deserved. This subject matter not only reflects attitudes about crime and law, but also uniquely American ideas regarding the relationship of the individual to the community, to the state, and the the international community.
One can easily draw a through-line from pop culture unilateralism to foreign policy, from Reagan to George W. Bush. The "cowboy" mentality, the resurgence of the vigilante/superhero post-9/11.
Anyone interested in this subject matter is invited to visit my blog- this is one of its main themes. Click on name to visit the Blog.

[dhex]

i love a lot of the psycho cop/vigilante films. i'd always thought of them as will-to-power fables.

[patrick hughes]

"...Roger Ebert called it "quasi-fascist," which is entirely inaccurate: A fascist movie about crime would demand a powerful police force, while this one regards the government as practically useless-an ass-covering bureaucracy that couldn't control crime if it tried."

Actually, painting traditional law and order as ineffective, circumventing proper procedure and justifying it with vigilante logic was a key element in the Nazi rise to power.

[fyodor]

patrick hughes,

But would a Nazi screed replace the inept police force with an independent acting individualist?

[tim]

Patrick Hughes has a valid point, which I almost raised in my post. Add to that Death Wish's trip to Arizona, and Angel Martin's encomium to the great country life: This is all classic blood-and-soil stuff, coupled with contempt for urban cosmopolitans and reverence for a man of will and courage. All typical elements of the fascist critique of modernity--although Jesse's point, that the apolitical saga of an individualist's lone campaign would have had no place in the fascist template, is well taken.

The book version of Death Wish has a great scene where the hero (named "Paul Benjamin"--and you can make what you will of the Gentilification in the translation to film) reads some highfalutin slick magazine while taking a crap: The feature article, it turns out, is about himself, a profile of The Vigilante as an individualist response to massification and groupthink.

[joe]

"But would a Nazi screed replace the inept police force with an independent acting individualist?"

Yes, fyodor, it would. It would end with The People spontaneously marching through the streets to show their gratitude towards the vigilante, declaring that he represents their hopes and dreams, and making him their fuhrer.

[patrick]

yep. in fact, that's exactly what they did, symbolically imbuing various leaders of their movement (at all levels) with a highly romanticized primal power that was based in german mythology and spun as a "pure" alternative to the "corrupt" effects of law. these people committed and encouraged acts of violence that were nothing if not vigilante, even if accusations of guilt toward their victims were lies.

this isn't to say that charles bronson movies don't kick-ass, or that i personally don't get a lot of enjoyment from watching these types of action flicks. 'cause i do. my intent was just to point out that there are direct parallels, contrary to the article's assertion.

[patrick]

whoops - not fast enough on the draw.

"...the apolitical saga of an individualist's lone campaign would have had no place in the fascist template..." except as propaganda, of course. ergo joe's post.

[fyodor]

I would add for discussion of raped female vigilante as empowered avenger films the relatively more concurrent I Spit On Your Grave, made in 1997.

[joe]

"...the apolitical saga of an individualist's lone campaign would have had no place in the fascist template..."

You mean like "Mein Kampf?" Other than the debatable term "apolitical" (the movie looked pretty political to me) Bronson's character wasn't a philosphical individualist; he acted alone out of necessity. He would have very much liked to live in the comfort of traditional, conformist society. In fact, the people he killed were the reason he could not.

He may have been an individual, but he was not an individualist.

[Jesse Walker]

It would end with The People spontaneously marching through the streets to show their gratitude towards the vigilante, declaring that he represents their hopes and dreams, and making him their fuhrer.

In Death Wish, by contrast, they start imitating the vigilante and fighting crime themselves, and the vigilante himself is ordered out of town (in a scene that deliberately recalls the western clich? of the sheriff telling the outlaw to leave -- Bronson even asks if has to be gone "by sundown," his voice drenched with irony). The movie ends with him arriving in Chicago, ready to start the same process again.

[fyodor]

And hey (excuse me while I'm on a roll!), how about Last House on the Left (1972), in which the parents get to wreak revenge for their daughter's rape and murder, seemingly based on Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) with essentially the very same plot! Of course, I suppose the whole revenge motif actually goes rather far back.....

[joe]

Good point, Jesse. American reactionaries have always favored "You know what to do!" over "Fall in behind me!"

[Umbriel]

It's been a while since I saw Shame, but I think it can be distinguished from the other vigilante films, and even the female vigilante genre, by having a much greater degree of moral ambiguity. The cool, motorcycle-riding female attorney heroine beats up the bad guys, and encourages the townsfolk to stand up and fight back against their oppressors, but when they do so, the violence escalates, and innocents end up dying instead of just being abused. The film wasn't exactly anti-revenge/vigilantism, but it was much more realistic about the consequences of "standing and fighting" than most such films.

And as long as we've covered The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left, anyone want to deconstruct the underrated '80s horror/revenge allegory Pumpkinhead in this thread?

[Charles Oliver]

The movie didn't merely Gentileify the protagonist. If I remember correctly, in the book he's an accountant. In the movie, an architect.

[joe]

"So while contemporary efforts like Deliverance (1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) drew their power from the city dweller's anxieties about the primitive countryside, Death Wish inverted their approach, playing on the rural suspicion of the urban?and the urban dream that a more idyllic life still lurks out there on the frontier."

I disagree. The point of view in all cases is neither rural nor urban, but suburban. It is the same people who see the city as a crumbling nightmare, and the country as a spooky and primative, who are the target audience for these movies. Deathwish and Deliverance are not about the city and country thumbing their noses at each other, but about suburbia rolling up its windows in the faces of both.

[Ken]

Jayson,

It was a Firebird. I know, I used to drive a similar '77 Firebird as my first car. Learned how to do "Rockford turnarounds" in that car. Good thing the constabulary never found out.

[fyodor]

Patrick,

Point taken that there are overlaps (perhaps enough to justify the "quasi-fascist" tag), yet it seems there are still stark differences. For instance, in your own words, fascists "symbolically imbu[ed] various leaders of their movement..." But there was no "movement" as such in Death Wish and certainly no leaders. Maybe you could describe an example? There were certainly no lone wolfs in Triumph Of The Will!!

[fyodor]

joe,

Nice prose! And you may have a point. I thought even the pro-gun folks in Death Wish even had an uncomfortable edge to them, as if they weren't entirely sane, either. OTOH, I remember shortly after the crime, Bronson says to his son something like, "What do you call people who don't fight back?" And the nebbish son (a good candidate for suburban life) says, "Civilized?"

Of course, now I wonder if we overanalyze. The main point of the movie was to make money, and they would have no compunctions about switching meaning around midstream to exploit various demographics....

[Franklin Harris]

Deathwish and Deliverance are not about the city and country thumbing their noses at each other, but about suburbia rolling up its windows in the faces of both.

Excellent point.

And as long as we've covered The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left, anyone want to deconstruct the underrated '80s horror/revenge allegory Pumpkinhead in this thread?

Too long since I've seen it for me to comment. How about a discussion of "home invasion" films like "Bone" or "House on the Edge of the Park"? Or we could skip all the kiddie stuff and go straight to the ultimate rural revenge flick, "I Spit on Your Grave."

[fyodor]

Franklin,

I mentioned "I Spit On Your Grave" as deserving to be included in any raped-woman-vigilante-as-empowered-avenger genre discussion earlier in the thread. But since you bring it up, I'll add that I think it's interesting that my girlfriend who usually finds intense uncartoonish violence to be a thorough turnoff actually found this flick quite pleasing!

[patrick]

"Point taken that there are overlaps (perhaps enough to justify the 'quasi-fascist' tag), yet it seems there are still stark differences. For instance, in your own words, fascists 'symbolically imbu[ed] various leaders of their movement...' But there was no 'movement' as such in Death Wish and certainly no leaders."

i've been writing generally -- i'm no expert on nazis or charles bronson movies, and i (as well as, i suspect, ebert) didn't mean to imply 'death wish' modeled itself on the nazis (or, uh, vice versa, in case anyone's really confused). i just wanted to point out that certain things the nazis used to make their leaders attractive are the same things the movie used to make charles bronson a hero, and that the nazi rise to power was predicated on a disregard for the rule of law, not an excess of it, which is the essence of vigilantism. therefore ebert's comment was justified and walker's article was off-base in stating that it wasn't.

[patrick]

as for the raped-women-get-revenge genre, i'm suprised nobody's mentioned 'ms. 45.'

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0082776/

[Jesse Walker]

Umbriel: It's been 15 years since I saw Shame, but I definitely remember the audience identifying completely with the vigilante and cheering as her enemies were offed. It's possible, of course, that they/we were missing another level to the story, as with the viewers who identified completely with Dirty Harry and didn't notice what an unbalanced character he was.

Joe: I left out the suburbs because I had to simplify matters, but I'd agree that suburban audiences can join with city dwellers in being wary of the Deliverance countryside and join with rural folk in being wary of the Death Wish city. So they're ambidextrous. The point I'd add is that they're building on two pre-existing artistic currents, one rooted in urban suspicion of the country and one in rural suspicion of the city.

To me the most interesting film in terms of how it treats suburban paranoia is the recent picture Arlington Road, which plays both to suburbanite anxieties *and* to liberal anxieties about the suburbs. It's a fascinating artifact -- I only wish it were a better movie.

[Jesse Walker]

i just wanted to point out that certain things the nazis used to make their leaders attractive are the same things the movie used to make charles bronson a hero, and that the nazi rise to power was predicated on a disregard for the rule of law, not an excess of it, which is the essence of vigilantism. therefore ebert's comment was justified and walker's article was off-base in stating that it wasn't.

Come on, Patrick. Tyrannies and lone vigilantes disregard the rule of law in entirely different ways. You might as well call the Post Office quasi-fascist because its employees wear uniforms.

[patrick]

that's a blanket statement and a lame argument. do tyrannies always disregard the rule of law in the same way? do vigilantes? care to make a distinction between movie vigilantes and real-life vigilantes? between propaganda and action? that analogy is pretty shallow too, more useful for evincing chuckles than illustrating a cogent point.

[joe]

"It's a fascinating artifact -- I only wish it were a better movie." It's always that way. Good art transcends the time and place of its creation, while lousy art embeds itself within them.

I don't think rural suspicion of the city is the same as suburban suspicion. "Rubes" were afraid of getting outsmarted and scammed by the sophisticates. Suburbanites are afraid of getting their throats cut by barbarians.

Suburban and urban suspicion of the country are quite similar, however. This makes sense, since suburbs are actually part of the urban system, even though they don't want to admit it.

[patrick]

"I don't think rural suspicion of the city is the same as suburban suspicion. 'Rubes' were afraid of getting outsmarted and scammed by the sophisticates. Suburbanites are afraid of getting their throats cut by barbarians."

in my experience (i grew up and live in gainesville, fla., a place oddly balanced between rural, suburban and urban sensibilities) the rural suspiscion of city life is strongly based in a perceived potential for mindless violence. for an effective example, i refer you to the kick-ass tune 'a country boy can survive' by hank williams jr.

man, that's a good song.

[joe]

patrick, there's nothing rural about Gainesville. Pretending you're in the country, when you're not, is at the heart of the suburban sensibility. Look at all those split rail fences (or in New England, stacked field stone walls) in front of the McMansions.

In America in the latter half of the 20th century, there were very few places that were actually rural, culturally. Go back to the real country music of the early 20th century, and the big bad city was all about smooth operators ripping off simple country folk.

[Jesse Walker]

Patrick: I agree with you about the Bocephus song, but disagree (as you'd expect) about this:

that's a blanket statement and a lame argument

I was responding to your comment that "the nazi rise to power was predicated on a disregard for the rule of law, not an excess of it, which is the essence of vigilantism," which is itself a very blanket statement. If you'd like me to be more specific: the vigilantism in Death Wish violated "the rule of law" in an entirely different way than the Nazis did. They had entirely different concepts of justice and entirely different goals. I agree that you can find some parallels, but the differences are too substantial for the "quasi-fascist" charge to stick.

[Jesse Walker]

Speaking of Hank Williams Jr. and vigilantism, I'd be remiss not to mention the song "I Got Rights"...

[patrick]

well, if it's not rural, you're going to have to come up with some kind of name for it. a ten-minute drive past the subdivisions ringing gainesville, people talk, work and act - in other words, live - differently.

and though i haven't taken a scientific poll, i suspect many of them think (as i do) that hank williams jr. sings country music. though, unlike me, they will deliver to your ass a thorough, world-class whoopin' instead of bandying crap around the goddamned internet if you tell 'em any different.

if you know your country-music history (and if you don't, try reading the carter family bio 'will you miss me when i'm gone'), you know that the supposed 'real' country music of the early 20th century was often performed by savvy, sophisticated entertainers -- sometimes those good ol' country folk singin' about the big city were actually from the big city.

but i take your point. in the context of this thread, harkening back to doc boggs or whatever isn't too relevant -- that shit wasn't being recorded while 'death wish' was in the theaters, but hank jr. songs were.

[Anonymous]

"I was responding to your comment that 'the nazi rise to power was predicated on a disregard for the rule of law, not an excess of it, which is the essence of vigilantism,' which is itself a very blanket statement. If you'd like me to be more specific: the vigilantism in Death Wish violated 'the rule of law' in an entirely different way than the Nazis did. They had entirely different concepts of justice and entirely different goals. I agree that you can find some parallels, but the differences are too substantial for the 'quasi-fascist' charge to stick."

ah, but my point was that the propaganda utilized by the nazis mirrored the fundamentals of the vigilantism portrayed in death wish. i concur that the nazi rise to power did not mirror the events in the movie -- it's that the nazis played on many of the same urges, prejudices and emotions that made death wish so effective. the actual rise to power had general parallels, and made good use of that propaganda. i apologize if this wasn't made clear.

at this point, though, i'm real distracted by football, a few glasses of wine and impending bedtime, so if it ain't clear... well, tough titty. good night, y'all.

[nm156]

Apropos of nothing, except perhaps dead artists, I heard on the news coming into work tonight that Warren Zevon finally succumbed to cancer. Sigh.

[nm156]

Sorry about that. Hadn't scrolled down far enough.

[Umbriel]

Jesse: I saw Shame on video with just a few friends, We too found the ass-kicking delivered by the heroine to be highly satisfying, but that's what was so wonderfully manipulative about the movie. After the revenge fantasy part, further gussied up with all kinds of "feminist empowerment" overtones, everyone doesn't live happily ever after, and all the simplistic solutions have grim consequences.

[nm156]

Although I was never particularly fond of Death Wish (2,3,4, ad nauseum), I absolutely loved the flick Bronson did with Jan Michael Vincent, where he's training JVM to be a hit man. I just wish I could remember the title. Telefon was pretty good, too.

[Chris Puzak]

Umbriel:

It seems to me that Pumkinhead could be another one of those anti-vigilantism movies, as the father spends much of the movie trying to stop the monster he originally had unleashed on the teenagers who killed his son. Then again, the movie could just be saying that it's wrong for monsters to eat people, no matter what the circumstances, or that pissing off Lance Henricksen is always a bad move.

I'm surprised no one thus far has mentioned Straw Dogs. It's got rape, liberal intellectuals taking the law into their own hands, movie critics decrying it as fascist, and scary country dwellers. It's got it all.

[tim]

Although I was never particularly fond of Death Wish (2,3,4, ad nauseum), I absolutely loved the flick Bronson did with Jan Michael Vincent, where he's training JVM to be a hit man. I just wish I could remember the title. Telefon was pretty good, too.

You're thinking of The Mechanic, a terrific early 70s picture, with one of the great stoic tough guy movie endings. The Rube Goldberg assassination at the beginning is also wonderful. Really, a great picture that I'm glad to see is not totally forgotten.

Telefon was fun for the spectacle of Bronson as a KGB man and Donald Pleasance as a lone psycho, but it has one glaring defect: Remember what the super-secret code phrase was, that, if heard by any of the middle-American Manchurian candidates, would immediately turn them into mass destruction terrorists? It was, "The woods are silent, dark and deep; but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep..." etc. That makes a lot of sense: The Russians spend years developing, brainwashing and inserting deep cover sleeper agents throughout the US, taking every precaution against their being discovered or accidentally activated. But they make the password a passage from what has to be one of the top five most famous, widely anthologized and repeated poems in the English language? No chance at all that they might hear those lines just by chance sometime within the next 30 years?

[tim]

I'm surprised no one thus far has mentioned Straw Dogs. It's got rape, liberal intellectuals taking the law into their own hands, movie critics decrying it as fascist, and scary country dwellers. It's got it all.

The problem with Straw Dogs, as with all Sam Peckinpah movies, is that when you get past the neurosis and the frenetic visual style, you have a movie that basically sucks. Maybe I'm just biased by my feeling that Peckinpah is incredibly overrated, but the Dustin Hoffman character in Straw Dogs is so feeble that the movie doesn't even work as a vigilante fantasy. The thugs abuse him constantly, violate his home, humiliate him every chance they get, rape his wife (who of course enjoys it), but when they want to lynch the retard-who is in fact guilty of the crime they want him for-that's when he fights back. Maybe it would work if he were shown as some kind of super-ethical Mr. Miyagi figure, who will endure any insult to his own person but fights where principle is involved, it might have worked. But the movie gives you no reason to believe Hoffman is anything but a big fucking loser, which in my view makes it unwatchable-though I enjoy the scene where he clamps the guy in the bear trap.

[patrick]

tim, i don't want to belittle your opinion of peckinpah (even though it differs from mine), but i think you'd have a hard time convincing anybody that 'ride the high country,' 'major dundee,' 'junior bonner,' 'pat garrett and billy the kid' or the 'ballad of cable hogue' feature a frenetic visual style (though i could be wrong about 'hogue,' as i haven't seen it in years).

[bobo]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that apotheosis of vigilante cinema, the Home Alone series.
Discuss.

[joe]

patrick,

Yes, the people outside of Gainville are probably as close to rural as one can find in contemporary Florida. But they have television, probably internet, and are in no way unsophisticated or pre-modern, as the residents of farm communities were, compared to city-dwellers, in 1900. And I'll bet they (rightly) have no fear of city folk outsmarting them.

By the way, the best sushi I ever had was at Dragonfly in Gainsville.

[patrick]

"Yes, the people outside of Gainville are probably as close to rural as one can find in contemporary Florida. But they have television, probably internet, and are in no way unsophisticated or pre-modern, as the residents of farm communities were, compared to city-dwellers, in 1900."

right, but city dwellers in 1900 weren't as sophisticated as people living in modern rural areas for that matter. so what's the point? i'm still not sure what 1900 has to do with anything here (i don't have the stamina to revisit the thread) -- there were no vigilante movies in 1900, near as i can figure.

"And I'll bet they (rightly) have no fear of city folk outsmarting them."

no, but a lot of people in these areas do view the city as a den of mindless drug-fueled violence. i hear it all the time when i'm in these areas, and i read it all the time when i'm on fishing chat boards and the like.

and you should've gone to sushi matsuri.

[Phil]

One of the great underrated vigilante movies is 187, starring Samuel L. Jackson. It's about a teacher pushed to the breaking point by hostile, thuggish students. In the end, he challenges the worst one to a game of Russian Roulette in his kitchen! Fantastically bitter movie.

[patrick]

i'm sleepy and even slower on the uptake than usual, so forgive me for the fractured posting, but i feel like i should address tim's take on 'straw dogs.' i don't think the flick is intended as a simplistic vigilante/revenge fantasy; it's about how the propensity for savage violence exists in all men, even nebbishy big fucking loser men. the tension between this kind of violence and the demands of civilized society is a running concern in peckinpah's films. i think if the intention was to make 'straw dogs' a revenge/vigilante movie, hoffman's character would've been an ex-special forces guy or something, not a milquetoast.

[fyodor]

bobo,

Is Home Alone vigilantism or self-defense? There IS a difference, after all!

[dhex]

187 is surprisingly good.

steven segal's first four films are cartoonish and distilled versions of this genre, especially out for justice where he manages to go rogue in the first 3 minutes of the film.

"hey...whose hot dog is this?"

[joe]

"right, but city dwellers in 1900 weren't as sophisticated as people living in modern rural areas for that matter. so what's the point?"

The point is, there was a big difference in sophistication between people in big cities and people in small towns in 1900's America. There is little or no such difference today.

Dragonfly was next to Hooters.

[patrick]

but there are cultural and perceptual differences between modern-rural and modern-urban people, and one of those is that modern-rural people view the city as a mindlessly dangerous place to live.

hence, my earlier post:
"I don't think rural suspicion of the city is the same as suburban suspicion. 'Rubes' were afraid of getting outsmarted and scammed by the sophisticates. Suburbanites are afraid of getting their throats cut by barbarians."

in my experience (i grew up and live in gainesville, fla., a place oddly balanced between rural, suburban and urban sensibilities) the rural suspiscion of city life is strongly based in a perceived potential for mindless violence. for an effective example, i refer you to the kick-ass tune 'a country boy can survive' by hank williams jr.
--------------

you had written that rural life doesn't exist today. okay, maybe not by 1900's standards, but 1900's standards are different across the board, and i still don't see how they apply to the discussion of vigilante films.

yep, i know where dragonfly is... it's still there, too. i've dined there a few times -- it's good, but too pretentious and pricey. someone i know once described it as being "like a gainesville person's idea of what a new york restaurant is supposed to be like," which i foudn to be pretty accurate.

[joe]

I'm not arguing that "rural" people's perceptions are the same as those of city-dwellers. I'm saying that they're more or less the same as suburbanites, because most "rural" areas are culturally very similar to the suburbs. This did not used to be true. In the early 20th century, people living in the country had significantly less educational and cultural opportunties than those living in the green neighborhoods around central cities, to the point that they could be said to be culturally distinct. Today, this is largely not so, as exemplified by the fact that "country boys" and suburbanites have roughly the same opinion of the Big City.

[joe]

Seriously, "sushi matsuri" has better sushi than Dragonfly? And they're cheaper? Where are they?

[patrick]

next to the blockbuster video on archer road, in a little strip mall. best sushi i've ever had, next to just slicing the fish open myself right after i've caught it.

there's also a place a little ways down archer, i think next to a navy recruiting station, called miya sushi. it's good as well, and real inexpensive. it has a very no-fuss atmosphere. i'd say the quality is comparable to dragonfly, but with the lack of pretension you're also losing a little innovation and creativity. it's also the least expensive of the different sushi places in town.

[sarah]

what happened to the poetry (e.g. robert frost)?

[sarah]

what happened to the poetry (e.g. robert frost)?

[sarah]

what happened to the poetry (e.g. robert frost)?

[sarah]

what happened to the poetry (e.g. robert frost)?

[sarah]

what happened to the poetry (e.g. robert frost)?

[sarah]

what happened to the poetry (e.g. robert frost)?