Table of Contents
Christopher Sorrentino Death Wish
CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO is the author of three novels, including Trance, a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in Bomb, Bookforum, Esquire, Granta, Harpers Magazine, McSweeneys, The New York Times, Playboy, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
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They Live by Jonathan Lethem
For Sean Howe, Andrew Hultkrans, and Jonathan Lethem
[H]e commits himself to the forest primeval; there, so long as life shall be his, to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance. Ever on the noiseless trail; cool, collected, patient; less seen than felt; snuffing, smellinga Leather-stocking Nemesis. In the settlements he will not be seen again; in eyes of old companions tears may start at some chance thing that speaks of him; but they never look for him, nor call; they know he will not come. Suns and seasons fleet; the tiger-lily blows and falls; babes are born and leap in their mothers arms; but, the Indian-hater is good as gone to his long home, and Terror is his epitaph.
HERMAN MELVILLE, The Confidence-Man
[A]ny accountant in any American city secretly feeds the hope that one day, from the slough of his actual personality, there can spring forth a superman who is capable of redeeming years of mediocre existence.
UMBERTO ECO, The Myth of Superman
[The Western film] offers a serious orientation to the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else in our culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence. This refusal is a virtue, but like many virtues it involves a certain willful blindness and it encourages hypocrisy. We train ourselves to be shocked or bored by cultural images of violence, and our very concept of heroism tends to be a passive one: we are less drawn to the brave young men who kill large numbers of our enemies than to the heroic prisoners who endure torture without capitulating. In art, though we may still be able to understand and participate in the values of the Iliad, a modern writer like Ernest Hemingway we find somewhat embarrassing ... And in the criticism of popular culture, where the educated observer is usually under the illusion that he has nothing at stake, the presence of images of violence is often assumed to be in itself a sufficient ground for condemnation.
ROBERT WARSHOW, Movie Chronicle: The Westerner
[T]he sort of project that seems to have been developed without even the intention of being any good.
SEAN FRENCH, on The Terminator
PROLOGUE
Allowing Our Wits to Take Flight
Vincent Canby had to go back for seconds. The senior film critic of
The New York Times had reviewed
Death Wish on July 25, 1974, declaring it to be a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing, and despicable. Now, in the pages of the Sunday, August 4, 1974, edition of the
Times, Canby expanded upon his thoughts about the film. Headlined DEATH WISH EXPLOITS FEAR IRRESPONSIBLY, his piece said, in part:
From the early reports, Death Wish is on its way to becoming one of the big dumb hits of the summer season, which is depressing news but not terribly hard to understand. Its powers to arousethrough demonstrations of actionare not unlike those of a pornographic movie.
It cuts through all sorts of inhibitions, first by making us witnesses to the murder and rape of Pauls wife and daughter, graphically and agonizingly shown, thus to certify Pauls (and our) right for vengeance ... If you allow your wits to take flight, its difficult not to respond with the kind of lunatic cheers that rocked the Loews Astor Plaza when I was there the other evening. At one point a man behind me shouted with delight: Thatll teach the mothers!
Although what really is difficult is to dispel the impression of a self-styled highbrow slumming amidst the masses, Canbys complaint is informed only slightly by his bruised aesthetic sensibilities (the quoted passage actually makes an unwitting argument for the films effectiveness qua film); mostly he is motivated by moral outrage, a highly selective outrage that isolates the film from its antecedents (the only other movies Canby mentions are Alan Arkins film version of the Jules Feiffer play Little Murders and one of director Michael Winners three earlier films with Charles Bronson, The Mechanic), thereby isolating it from film itself, the better to condemn it on extra-cinematic grounds (an act, really, of critical misfeasance).
Stern charges of moral impropriety (and political turpitude) have always been leveled at individual filmsjust a few years earlier the Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry had been denounced as fascist medievalism by Pauline Kael, a critic of far more enduring persuasiveness than Vincent Canby (fascism was invoked also by Roger Ebert and others to characterize Siegels anti-determinist fable). Death Wish became a sitting duck for critics who saw in the film a political agenda that precisely matched what they found most objectionable. But even if Death Wish is easily picked off for its politicsor, rather, what we imagine its politics to beit continues to exist as film, as the sum of its performances, in the coherence of its script, its place in a larger context, the provocations it offers its viewers. But, other than the provocationswhich many reviewers wrote about as if they were immune to themcritics avoided discussing these subjects. Canby announcedglibly, for Canbys pronouncements on Death Wish are undercut by his insufferable superiority to the material he was treatingthat New York has its problems: bad bookkeeping, polluted air, rising costs, reduced services, high crime rates, a fleeing middle class. Now you might want to add a movie to the list, Michael Winners Death Wish. Really? If New Yorks problems are different today, is Death Wish itself still a problem? Does a films value mutate along with the reality to which we seek to compare it? Is that what we mean by a period piece? Death Wish is a frozen pose, a piece of popular art, one that reveals a bygone zeitgeist without in any true way reflecting the society that sustained it. Of course New York wasnt the way Death Wish depicts it. (Nor, for that matter, were Tucson and Hawaii, the movies two other locales: as John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett note in The Myth of the American Superhero, crime statistics in both places were roughly comparable to those of New York at the time.) Muggers didnt operate that way, the police didnt operate that way, psychosis doesnt occur that way, and the theme of revenge is simply too interesting for a film to turn it into a second job the way this one does.
But criticism begins to unravel as soon as it insists that the reflection a movie casts is distorted. Realism is never exactly that, and in the case of
