The Vigilante in American Mythology (Brief Thoughts) #monthofjoy
(Note: due to an inordinate amount of spam comments, I’ve disabled comments on this post. If you really want to post a response, you can send me an email and I’ll figure something out. It’s irritating, but the other option is to have to deal with 100+ spam comments a day on this page alone…) While reading my Hugo Awards voting packet, I came across this post by Gilbert Colon on Person of Interest and Nolan’s Batman movies (somehow I missed this last year). After taking in the first couple of paragraphs, I had to stop and start writing a post in response to the following: To begin with, Person of Interest was created by Jonathan Nolan, who wrote The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with his brother Christopher (the Trilogy’s director) and veteran comic-book adapter David S. Goyer. The parallels between Person of Interest and the Trilogy run deeper than the surface fact that the heroes in both are vigilantes. “A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. But … if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.” Some of Person of Interest’s similarities may be due to the archetypal characters it seeks to depict. The series’ crimestoppers are altruistic protectors derived from the Old West, the private-eye genre, and modern television reinterpretations (The Equalizer, Stingray, and Hack come to mind) of which Batman, “the Dark Knight Detective,” is one. Nolan confessed that he’s “always liked characters who … operate on the edge of the law” and said he “was interested in writing something … dangerous. I’ve always been drawn to that aspect of Batman … maybe we are tapping into some of that.” One cast member (Michael Emerson) hypothesizes “that American audiences have a hunger for avengers … — the vigilante, the lone operators that will cut through the red tape and set things right … That’s such a strong theme in the States, and it’s part of what we are delivering. It goes back to cowboy movies and everything like that.” Why do Americans like these vigilante types so much? Why Batman and Superman and the X-Men and so on and so forth? What about these individuals who take matters into their own hands is so compelling to American audiences? I’ll admit that if there is a field of academic study on vigilantes, my knowledge about it amounts to nil. I, too, fell in love with vigilante types, from Tim Burton’s Batman movies to Nolan’s masterpieces. And as a reader of comics in my youth, these figures have been central to my life in a way I never noticed before. In fact, if you look at the sea of science fiction narratives that have dominated the screen in the last fifty years, it’s rife with examples of people going against the grain of society in some crucial way. Even Star Wars, commonly heralded as “that thing with which many of us grew up,” is a relative of the vigilante narrative, albeit with a far more revolutionary feel — vigilantes, in my mind, are far more isolated than the Rebels in Star Wars. Vigilantes are Batman, Riddick, half of Marvel’s superheroes (even Magneto), and on and on and on. In thinking about all of these characters and their narrative purposes, it dawned on me that American audiences are drawn to these figures because of some deep desire for a fantasy of action. So many of us live our lives trapped in a space we feel we cannot change, and most of us don’t have the willpower or ability to fulfill the role of the vigilante ourselves. And in the real world, the vigilante almost never wins: he or she almost always dies and the media campaign against the vigilante almost always succeeds. When you look at the political landscape of the United States, you can see the walls of the trap and how they function. Whatever you might think about America’s political parties, one can’t deny the fact that Congress appears incapable of any serious action. They say the system is gridlocked — trapped between two parties with drastically different political interests. The trap of American life extends from the directly political to the indirectly political. Young people have been faced with the stark reality that many of their futures have been forfeited, or at least put on indefinite hold. They can’t get jobs, or the careers they set out for have withered away or stopped growing. My mother faced this reality first hand: when she got her paralegal certification, the economy had tanked, flooding the paralegal jobs with applications from law school grads. There wasn’t anything she could do but find a job in another field. For a lot of Americans, there is a very real sense that nothing we do as individuals will matter in the long run. We feel stuck or lost. Some of us have lost hope (something with which I’ve battled over the years — largely from a political perspective), and day by day, we hear about criminals getting away with horrible crimes, the police failing to do their jobs, governments cutting funding to programs that actually save lives (firefighters, for example), and on and on and on. In my mind, the vigilante becomes a cathartic release, a way of living out the inner “us” that longs for change.* All the things that are wrong with our world — albeit, within a particular perspective of “wrong” — seem beyond our control. It feels good to watch Batman take matters into his own hands.** When you look in American film, the list of “true American” vigilante-type heroes is a mile long. In that list, I would include people like John McClane, Rambo, Erica Bain (from The Brave One), Hit Girl / Big Daddy / Kick-Ass, Batman, Punisher, Jack Burton, Dirty Harry, Foxy Brown, and so on and so forth. None of these figures are political neutral, of