“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic — and a
killer.” At any rate, that’s what D.H. Lawrence, a spectacularly
ill-informed foreign observer, thought. What rubbish! What
nonsense! If there is any such article as “the essential American
soul” it is a sentimentalist. Not that that’s incompatible with
killing, of course, but it is the sentimentalism that is essential,
not the killing. Americans will be quite as happy — maybe even
happier — about not-killing as they are about killing, but they
just don’t seem to be able, at least in recent years, to do either
without a certain amount of self-romanticization. And part of it is
the enthusiastic assent they so often give to observations like
Lawrence’s, either in dark and shocking portrayals of violence and
atrocity or in victim fantasies like Easy Rider. For there
does seem to be something in the essential American soul that makes
it eager to believe that it is hard, isolate, stoic, and a
killer.
The latest foreigner thus to flatter our self-conceit as the
dangerous and romantic bad boy among nations is Neil Jordan, who
has been blessed in his new film, The Brave One, to get as
his lead actor the cosmopolitan, French-speaking American, Jodie
Foster. Jodie plays Erica Bain, the sensitive, caring hostess of a
late-night talk show, unfortunately named “Street Walks,” on NPR,
in which she laments the disappearance of much-loved landmarks of
old New York which have been destroyed by our eager, unstoppable
hustle for growth and change — and, of course, money. Erica goes
from being a mere sentimentalist to being a sentimentalist with a
gun after she is mugged in Central Park and her fiance (Naveen
Andrews) is killed by a vicious trio of youths who may be Hispanic
but whose ethnicity is left deliberately vague. It is she who
quotes D.H. Lawrence, one night on her radio show, after she starts
blowing people away with her illegally-obtained Glock 9 mm
handgun.
It’s Death Wish meets Girl Power with every bit of the
absurdity you might expect from such a conjunction, and it would
hardly be worth a second thought but for the reactions it has
inspired. Here’s what A.O. Scott said about it in the New York
Times: “The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly
directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be. And that,
the movie insists, is how, in your heart of hearts, you really do
want it to be. Its none-too-subtle governing idea is that even the
most effete, brownstone-dwelling public radio listener (or New
York Times reader) might feel the occasional urge to blow
someone’s head off.” Revealing word “someone” — as if blowing off
a head at random would satisfy the mere blood lust that Mr. Scott
imagines all violence to be, as if it had nothing to do with meting
out wild justice — Sir Francis Bacon’s definition of revenge — to
vicious killers and other miscellaneous evil-doers.
Note as well the underlying implication that New York
Times readers might be expected to be above all that kind of
thing. With detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) of the NYPD, writes
Mr. Scott, Erica has “a few desultory discussions about the rule of
law and the ethics of extrajudicial killing, arguments that are
resolved in a climax that manages to be at once preposterous,
sentimental and appalling. That it may also be viscerally
satisfying is a sign of just how cowardly The Brave One
really is. It’s a pro-lynching movie that even liberals can
love.”
The word “cowardly” is interesting too. I’m just guessing here,
but he seems to mean that if liberals love this movie — and to
that extent reveal themselves to be illiberal — it must be the
movie-maker’s fault in some way, for not playing fair, for cravenly
playing to the lower self that New York Times readers and
NPR listeners like to think they have transcended. That doesn’t
really account for “cowardly,” but it’s as near as I can
get to an explanation for it. The sense of not playing fair, of
making us sympathize with a vigilante, is exacerbated by the
casting of Jodie Foster in the role of the lyncher. She is so much
a part of the liberal’s iconography, her starting point as a wet
and self-consciously poetic NPR host so congenial to the liberal
idea, that the lib feels personally betrayed when she starts
blowing people away.
Likewise, Christopher Orr in the New Republic online
calls the movie “a pious little scrap of sleaze” — note the use of
a word normally associated with corruption or moral turpitude —
“that pretends to furrow its brow thoughtfully over the vengeful
violence in which it happily wallows….Erica is no methodical
meter-out of justice, but rather a sad and wounded soul, and the
fact that she feels so terrible about what she’s done and what’s
been done to her is not merely an explanation for her actions but a
kind of defense as well: How can she be a bad guy, the film seems
to ask, when she feels so very crummy?” But to be fair to the film,
it doesn’t really insist on Jodie’s agonizing about the deaths she
causes. There’s a certain amount of this, especially in the tedious
voiceovers about the stranger she has become to herself, which are
meant to put some distance between her and responsibility for her
actions. But this is overshadowed by the obvious rush it gives her
to be prowling the streets with the power in her purse to right
some of the wrongs that women and children suffer at the hands of
men.
For it’s predatory masculinity that Jodie’s on the prowl for,
the predator becoming the prey. This is made explicit when she
rescues a drugged-out prostitute from the car of a brute who is
holding her captive. Later, when — spoiler alert! — she shoots
down one of the thugs who assaulted her, she cries triumphantly:
“Who’s the bitch now?” That’s one for the girls’ team. Hurrah! In
other words, even when we’re glorying in being — or sympathizing
with the victims of — cold, hard killers, there is a moral
subtext. What’s interesting is the reluctance of the movies to
bring it out into the open, as if it were a shameful secret. And,
in a way it is. For more than a generation now the movies have been
deeply skeptical about any attempt to give a moral context to
violence, even a feminist one. The only way it is allowable is for
the emphasis to remain on victimization. Thus even when she becomes
a killer, Jodie is still the victim.
“It’s like a movie from the '70s in that it doesn’t really make
any judgment about her, even though she’s ashamed of who she is and
hates who she’s become,” Miss Foster told an interviewer for
L.A. Weekly. “She is wrong to be doing what she’s doing. I
mean, you know that, right? I hope you leave the movie theater
feeling disgusted by her path, and by what happens to her. The fact
that it’s not wrapped up in a bow might make it difficult for
people to understand, but this is a movie about people who are
wrong. I can’t say it any clearer than that.” Actually, she could
say it clearer than this. She could say it in the movie.
Instead, the movie validates her revenge-seeking, and even sees it
as romantic and moral, just so long as she feels bad about it
afterwards.
This, by the way, is exactly the view of Steven Spielberg’s
Munich in which the historical victimization of the Jews
is used in the same way that the victimization of women is used
here. This is, we remember, a woman who built her career on the
foundation of heroic victimhood in Taxi Driver and The
Accused. Now that she has got strong, now that she has got a
gun, now that no one messes with her without paying a big, big
price, are we to ask her to go back to being a pathetic victim
again? It would be like asking Israel to disarm. It’s all very well
saying she’s wrong, but everything about this movie tells us she’s
right, right, right — right down to the fact that she’s entitled
to hold on to a self-entitling victimhood in the form of her
feelings of remorse and self-estrangement after she kills people.
It’s a silly, even a preposterous wish-fulfilling fantasy, but at
least it gives me hope that, however circumscribed their moral
ambit, Hollywood still acknowledges the existence of heroes.
