No Country for Vigilantes

Just watched The Brave One and recently finished a review of The Searchers--two revenge films (athough, properly, one melodrama and one western). I've always loved The Searchers because it divides audiences right about the moment when "Look" (the "squaw") is kicked down the hill. It's also one of those films that uses visual irony pretty consistently: John Ford's signature long shot flattens the hunting party against the buttes and the desert, each element a complement of the other, as if these white guys actually belong there, as if they are "integrated"--while in other shots they stick out like sore thumbs. In real life, Ford was politically the opposite to John Wayne, too, which is interesting. The film is critique of the white man's genocidal impulse, but John Wayne's mere presence in the film is an obstacle for many viewers. I'm reminded of how Faulkner's critique of Southern orthodoxy is also overshadowed by his uncomfortably harsh depictions of racism.

The Brave One takes all the obstacles away and makes sure you don't miss a single message. In fact, there's no subtext to the film at all. If you even try to imagine the film as a "comment" on the death penalty, there's an elevator scene to assure you that it is indeed: two people argue over endorsing the vigilante--"So you are FOR lethal injection, too?" snaps one. Foster's, a talk radio DJ, answers calls from listeners who pretty much sound like they are reading an after-school play about smoking--only it's vigilantism, of course. And if you try to think of the film as a conflict between the head and the heart, too bad: a scene between the detective and Foster spells that out too. Cut to Foster "dancing" with the memory of her murdered boyfriend, who also somehow plays guitar, both diegetically and extradiegetically. The film screams the message at you: you can't "feel" one way and "think" another, not in the end. You've got to make a choice. You've got to be John Wayne or better yet, the John Wayne of our times: Jack Bauer from Fox's 24. Even if you are rooting for Foster and just want to see her kick butt, Lilith fair den mother Sarah Mclachlin de-adrenalizes all her screaming and shooting with soft ballads throughout, as if to say "this is the real woman here-the one with the gun was just 'acting'. She didn't want to be the monster."

So give me John Ford. Give me something interesting, like, how did he deal with not being able to show the massacre of the whites in the beginning of The Searchers? The film begins from within the cool and dark safety of the cabin and then moves outward into the bright sublime desert--Ford bars us from re-entry.

Or give me the Coen Brothers, give me Faulkner. Give me subtext. Otherwise, art is simply a political cartoon. Since there was no real complexity to the art (I mean c'mon, Neil Jordan--taking lessons from Ron Howard?), I'd image one could encapsulate its content with something similar to this:



Or give me no art and politically laughable messages. Give me Charles Bronson in Deathwish III. Make it exploitively hilarious. Give me so much lack of subtext that I, the viewer, must invent it. One good thing The Brave One had going for it--Bronson and Foster have the same haircut!