James Wan’s Death Sentence is strict genre fair. The plot, setting, and general narrative borrow from the tough guy genre, specifically revenge narratives in that genre, that have been popularized first in American mass market literature and second in American film. Death Sentence’s gleaning is pretty straightforward at that, featuring an idealist white middle-class man who loses his morals when confronted with extremely unsettling circumstances. In these stories, the initial critique of American society is as generic as the characters. Any innovations an author makes usually derive from style or from character. In other words, the look of a film or its tone permits a director some room to innovate while a character and his or her settings permit an actor room to innovate.
From Death Sentence: After his journey from naive, middle-class, white guy to instinctive, outsider, angry white guy, Kevin Bacon's Nick Hume removes a bandage from his head revealing a large vaginal wound. He has been castrated, symbolically feminized through a systematic stripping of all the visible signs of his middle-class masculinity. He has been graphically beaten down. Hume has already decided that he must make the world right again on his own, thus transgressing Law and Order. He has become an outsider. He proceeds to haphazardly shave his scalp. We know he's going to kill people in cruel acts of amoral and primal revenge. In many ways, we are watching Death Sentence to see Kevin Bacon kick some ass. More significantly, we watch films like Death Sentence to witness characters immersed in the everyday safety of suburban living emerge from sensational circumstances as outsider anti-heroes who will do absolutely anything to return Home to Safety. The generic tales are journey narratives.
So, a few of the significant genre conventions in the tough guy genres are as follows:
- Justice: Retributive vs. Distributive Justice. Nick Hume like many Americans has a very naive understanding of how justice works in everyday life. Hume has invested his character and habit (ethos) in the apparently natural distributive justice of the utilitarian market that ideally rewards good behavior and hard work with profit and the potential to move upward along the vertically aligned social class scale. He takes few risks because that is an acceptable sign of mature and responsible living in middle-class culture. He talks the talk and walks the walk of middle-class American men. When confronted with extreme injustice, Nick Hume finds his unexamined lifestyle meaningless and discovers he is incapable of handling unfairness in a just society. Hume jettisons his middle-class values and finds comfort in more primal activity of retributive justice. Retribution makes sense to Hume because it satisfies his need for fairness and permits him to engage his utilitarian mathematics.
- Class: Middle Class. Nick Hume does not examine his own position in society because he is a member of the class that aspires to be the ruling class. He uncritically sees himself in everything that he experiences--he has a sense of destiny; he is fulfilling a plan that he believes he has designed yet believes is natural. From private life to social life, he finds justification for everything he does. Nick Hume, in as much as he is supposed to represent a bourgeois everyman, responds to each critique of his class with false consciousness. He does not think for himself. And his failure to think for himself permits his psychic and social break from his real conditions of existence when he is confronted with a terrifying and abrupt change in his everyday life. In addition, his bourgeois existence permits space for his falling down. When Nick Hume decides to act without regard of consequences, he must face a horizontal reality of everyman for himself. This is the fear of every upwardly mobile, middle-class individual. Their relative wealth offers them no power as individuals. They are entirely dependent on cultural, social, political, and economic conventions to maintain their status as citizens. The vertical realities of a culture vertically aligned through mechanisms of distributive justice permit relative wealth and power to as many citizens as is possible. Our culture is aristocratic in this sense. We depend upon others as long as they are neighborly. And if we step outside of society, then we may find ourselves cut out of the overall plan. This is the problem with Freedom.
- Whiteness, Masculinity, and Heterosexuality are also examined. Not thoroughly in Death Sentence. Unfortunately. Wan’s film seems to simply accept the conventions without intellect.
Death Sentence is littered with dated notions of American masculinity that many lower-budget films with worse technique have more intelligently handled. In this film a guy is bad-bad guy if he has a husky voice and a shaved head and tribal tattoos. As a result, John Goodman’s bad-daddy is a poorly developed foil to Bacon’s well-meaning and fallen good-daddy gone bad. I haven’t read the script, but I think it’s clear the screenwriter had used John Goodman--a grotesque desk man--as a foil for Kevin Bacon’s Nick Hume. Never mind, the missed opportunity to explore class consciousness. Never mind, the missed opportunity to observe how social class cultivates a very concrete geography in the American landscape. Genre films often offer viewers creative maps of the social landscape super-imposed on known locations.
In Death Sentence, we have a good-daddy with a good son as well as a surplus son. Good daddy loses the good son and fails to recognize his dedicated second son. Good daddy fails to see his relative abundance in spite of horrific tragedy. If Wan had invested some minutes to developing the bad-daddy’s relationship with his good son, then we could have had some development and innovation in the revenge genre concerning how fathers transmit false consciousness to sons via real acts in society. Something along the lines of “It’s a family affair.” After all, bad-daddy and his son are the head of a roving gang of violent, petty thieves and drug dealers. These working class misfits had no choice but to steal according to the determinism of their class consciousness. Their fatalism is inherited while Nick Hume has a choice. As we know: Aisha Tyler’s cop character pleads with Nick to stop causing trouble. Or, Nick Hume and family could have struck out against Joe Darley and family.
How could Wan have let these opportunity pass him by? Wan is much more interested in the fetishes and window-dressing of genre film making, all its superficialities. So, Death Sentence has its moments. It certainly provides a popular actor with the ability to encase himself in the genre lore. Bacon is fun to watch. He had to enjoy the opportunity to play a fallen man seeking revenge. Wan spends much footage visualizing goth postures, tribal tattoos. The tattoos are ridiculous and unnecessary. The digital blood and blood-spatter scenes are unnecessary. The music, lighting, art direction, and photography attempt to recall the chiaroscuro and surreal qualities of Italian Giallo fare one moment and then borrow DIY innovations from Barry Sonnenfeld/Sam Raimi work the next. Even John Woo's The Killer receives an homage near the end. I am all for loading a genre film with references and quotations, but the homage is pointless and bankrupt if innovation is absent. (Maybe Wan is still a film student, not yet a filmmaker.)
Death Sentence is so very literal, at times taking itself far too seriously. At the end, the bad-bad guy looks at the good-bad guy and says, “Look what I made you.” Huh? Random gang violence leads to the death of a son whose father, a risk management man for an insurance corporation, instantly loses his fragile idealism in the utilitarian logic of capitalist society and forgetting his responsibility to his living family members, decides to become a violent vigilante, a loner. He loses everything because he actively give it all up. And the audience is supposed to buy that line tacked onto the end of the film?
The throw away line is supposed to carry weight. In other words, a question for the audience: Who is responsible for all this mess? Why ask that question? That question is a cop out. The genre itself is based on one man throwing it all away to serve an individual purpose by any means necessary; in other words, a grotesque version of American Individualism. The genre itself is based on a strict adherence to the presence of a chaotic natural element in society that is part of the social organizing force that we utilize everyday in the market; in other words, an accurate version of a real condition of existence regardless of our Ethics as a culture. The genre toys with themes of Destiny, Determinism, and Free Will. And the genre is firmly rooted in the critique of bourgeois culture. We all know that in narratives like Death Sentence the roving gangs out wilding and killing are a natural and necessary force the author will use to examine the behavior of the unsettled bourgeois protagonist.
Why sentimentalize the antagonist (a hollow character the audience doesn’t care about) when the protagonist is the man with the plan and, thus, the man we are examining and relating to?
Death Sentence, then, pays mere lip service to a rich genre in order to fetishize the violence and fashion of the genre. Death Sentence has the look of a film that we never get to see.
Neil Jordan’s The Brave One is an innovative entry in tough guy cinema. Where James Wan offers a one-dimensional narrative that pays lip service to a miscellany of his favorite genre films (he even cites himself,) Jordan takes advantage of the genre itself to examine its conventions and characters. In addition, Jordan resists using classic sociological conventions--race, class, and gender. Jordan, addressing theme and character, purposefully conflates tough guy, superhero, and serial killer genres. All three are focused on the acts of alienated individuals.
Jodie Foster’s character Erica Bain has to address several consequences of her behavior after she purchases a gun and uses it to exact retributive justice. After being beaten nearly to death and witnessing her lover’s violent death, Erica Bain awakes after three weeks in a hospital bed without her sense of safety. She copes with her post-traumatic stress by purchasing a gun.
Bain is a pseudo-journalist and cultural anthropologist. She is also a bit of a local celebrity in New York City who records the sounds of the city as she walks the city streets. As an author and radio personality, she shares her observations and recordings with her listeners.
Jordan’s first innovation to the genre is the obvious one: this tough guy is a tough woman. But it is much more complex than a simple alteration of a character’s gender. Bain copes with a complex sense of absence after her fiance is murdered. She copes with both the violence of his loss but also comes to terms with her dependence on him. She doesn’t want to be alone. In a very concrete manner, she needs a partner. This need does not make Bain weak. In Death Sentence, Nick Hume is undone by the loss of his wife and second son. He returns to his home at the end of the film, but it is vacant and destroyed and he is utterly transformed, unable to cope with his radical transformation the result of his violent transgressions.
Erica Bain returns to her home and job and attempts to come to terms with the absence of her future husband. Her sense of self is not wholly tied to her partner. His loss encourages her to think about what she does and who she does it for. The what for and who for reflections lead Bain to address her sense of justice. She, like Nick Hume, will seek retribution, but unlike Nick Hume, Bain attempts to apply justice in a distributive manner. Bain functions as an outsider: she works on her sense of justice at night. Nevertheless, she returns to home in the morning, after work so to speak.
(Foster as)Bain resists action hero status in critical appraisals of her vigilante behavior. She insists that there are “plenty of ways to dies” and “you have to figure out a way to live.” Bain is aware that even though she acts as an outsider, she is still a part of her community in New York City. As a result, she admits that “it is horrible to fear the place you once loved.” Bain admits something complex: she fears New York and that fear prohibits her to love it. This loss of love permits her to transgress the law and to murder others as a vigilante. This loss of love is also a sign of hope’s frail presence. Bain may be capable of being saved. More significantly, Jordan’s direction and Foster’s performance seem to indicate that she is worth being saved.
Bain is troubled. She sits, stone-faced on the subway. She is armed. She is recording. She silently witness two acts of violent harassment. When she is finally confronted, after being left alone with the thugs, she kills both in a violent and covert rage and sneaks away. Jordan expertly insinuates scopophilia into Bain’s narrative. And Foster’s performance encourages this critique. The subway scene insinuates the audience in the transgressive acts of violence of both the thugs harassment of passengers and Bain’s killing the thugs. Bain is so skilled at observation even the thugs don’t take notice of her until the other passengers escape from the subway car. The audience is encouraged to associate with Bain. After all, we have experienced along with her the awful events that have led to her sitting in that subway car. We also know something the thugs do not know. She is armed and she is willing to kill. As Bain must come to terms with her behavior, we are encouraged to address our reaction to her behavior. This scene exploits our gender conventions--for example, women are nurturers and when confronted with stress, they are irrational--to address the pleasure we derive out of observing the pain of others.
Jordan earlier has set the stage for such a critique when after Bain and fiance are brutally beaten, he cuts into the medical examination of her bruised and battered naked body, as she is undressed for surgery, images of her lover examining her naked body as they make love. The comparison of the bedroom and the emergency room, bed and operating table, is unsettling.
Tough Guy films like Walking Tall, Death Wish, Rambo, and Die Hard involve men stepping outside of society to exact their own sense of justice on bad guys in a society that permits the bad guy to exist, sometimes with retribution. Viewers are always encouraged to address the contradictions that exist in the lives of such “heroes.” We are always encouraged to consider “Are they really good guys?” On the other hand, we are often encouraged to enjoy scenes of graphic violence without being asked to address where we derive such pleasure from. The genre exploits something we have repressed and exploits the tenuous nature we have with Social Contracts.
Jordan includes references to two other genres that cope with outsiders who operate in society: the Super Hero and Serial Killer genres. It’s worth consideration, I think, as an innovation for tough guy films. Bain narrates her nighttime journeys through New York explaining to the audience, her listeners, that she walks alone at night through the streets of her city. OK, Spidey. The Brave One offers an interesting contrast to the journey of such heroes as Peter Parker; after all, we have endured three Spiderman films recently. In addition, Bain is a killer who makes phone calls to the cop on her trail, dropping him clues to her identity. This is a citation (a sample, if you will,) from the serial killer genre.
If we are to consider the pleasure we derive watching Bain take out thugs and eventually enact retribution on the men who killed her fiance, and we accept that Bain is acting on a plane of existence that includes heroes and villains who both kill to achieve order in society, then we can confront Bain’s narrative of her fall from safety in bourgeois society as a cautionary tale that resists giving its audience a moral in an effort to invite participation in the journey. In the end, we are left to ponder just what Bain has achieved.
I haven’t addressed Terrence Howard’s detective. He sanctions the revenge in the end, of course. The cop is important. He is a member of Bain’s audience.
Worth Considering: Acts of vengeance in The Brave One are carried out in public places but out of sight of surveillance. The characters know what they are doing is wrong, yet are willing to transgress laws when they know they are not being observed. In addition, we have tough guys, called tough guys because they are neither good guys nor bad guys. And this explains part of the draw to the genre, I think, as tough guys are capable of transgressing our social order. They can exist outside of society while operating inside society. The are both inbetween and liminal. Interestingly, they operate like Emerson's Poets. (I think Jordan's vision of Erica Bain develops this sense of the wandering poet into her transgressive journey as a vigilante.)
