“punk rock pub that plays a lot of cult films and classic films and sometimes trashy horror films on the TVs.”

why won’t you plug Casino El Camino by name?  Best burgers in Austin, best place to spend Christmas, best jukebox in town…  One of the things I miss the most of the ole ATX.

“Embittered gun nuts haven’t gone anywhere, you know?  They’re in positions of power, in fact—-even, like Clarence Thomas, in offices they’ll hold for life. “

Clarence Thomas an embittered gun nut?  Isn’t that going a little far?

I totally agree. It’s rather like (SPOILER ALERTS) the American-edited version of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where they don’t reveal that the entire “Hollywood action film ending” is a desperate fantasy created by Jonathan Pryce to escape the horrors of Michael Palin’s torture chamber, or a good deal of the ending of the film adaptation of American Psycho, where it becomes clear that Patrick Bateman has only imagined killing several people.(/SPOILERS).

First of all are the headlines about Iris’s joyous return to her family.  I never bought that even a mendacious media would go so far as to paint an idyllic home life for Iris.

I dunno.  Maybe things were different in the 70’s, but that’s exactly what I’ve thought of some of the stories that came out when everyone’s favorite media meme was pretty blond white girls getting “abducted”.  Especially the ones where the “abductee” was a teenager who went off with some older man it turned out she already knew at the time of her “abduction”, and willingly lived with her “abductor” for the duration of the time that she was missing.  Fifteen year old girls aren’t kidnapped.  They run away.  And when they run away, there’s usually a reason. 

I remember seeing a cover of People magazine with one of the above girls joyously reunited with her family, portrayed as some sort of triumph of Good Clean American Values, and thinking about how many levels of bullshit we were being sold.

I can’t say I agree about Death Wish.  Death Wish is a shitty movie on many different levels, but I don’t think it’s meant to be a right wing fantasy.  First, there’s the point that the filmmakers drive home that the film is supposed to harken back to the Old West (and it’s no coincidence that Charles Bronson was chosen to play that role).  Second, there was the out-of-control crime and violence in cities in the ‘70s.  People were understandably freaked out about it even to the point of making an undeniably shitty film successful.

Rick Perlstein link is broken.

Boy, keshmeshi, I totally disagree with that.

Sam Kreutzer: You know, decent people are going to have to work here and live somewhere else.
Paul Kersey: By “decent people,” you mean people who can afford to live somewhere else.
Sam Kreutzer: Oh Christ, you are such a bleeding-heart liberal, Paul.
Paul Kersey: My heart bleeds a little for the underprivileged, yes.
Sam Kreutzer: The underprivileged are beating our goddamned brains out. You know what I say? Stick them in concentration camps, that’s what I say.

Note that it’s Paul who ends up seeing the error of his ways (and paying a price), not Sam.

Remember, Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader later wrote & directed Hardcore, about a Calvinist, Midwestern father trying to track his runaway daughter through the porn netherworld. (SPOILER ALERT) The ultimate family reunion in Hardcore is wrenching, which supports your idea that maybe the notoriously serious (boardering on humorless) Schrader wrote a fantasy ending for Taxi Driver.

Not to mention that the romanticization of the lawless old West is a right wing fantasy in and of itself.  As is the “cities are decaying ratholes breeding crime and perversion and should be walled off as concentration camps so that their depraved inhabitants can do to each other what we’re not allowed to do to them” meme.  I love Escape from New York as much as the next girl, but that’s the underlying message of films like that.

Thinking about keshmeshi’s comment, I wandered over to the IMDB discussion board for Death Wish.

Big mistake.

If you can judge this film by the political philosophy of its fans, and I’m not saying you necessarily can, it goes:

Triumph of the Will
DEATH WISH
Birth of a Nation

(Fans of the other two aren’t necessarily right wing, it’s just - ah, it’s a mediocre analogy, I know.)

Another film of note is “Falling Down” (1993). The character snaps after getting fired and goes on a rage while trying to get home to Santa Monica. It always struck me that perhaps many people are just one incident away from losing it, and lashing back at whatever it is that provides difficulties in their lives.

Scorsese’s King of Comedy, one of his most underrated films IMO, has an ending that is structurally very similar to Taxi Driver’s.  I’ve always taken both as representing reality, not just their protagonists’ fantasies, and as meditations on the ways in which the utterly unhinged fantasies of people like Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin can be transformed into (at least the simulacrum of) reality by the modern media.  But some film scholars suggest that both endings should be read as fantasies. I know that Scorsese himself has spoken of the influence of Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s films on his own work, and particularly the way they erase the lines between fantasy and reality.  So perhaps the endings of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy should be read as both.

The comments on Death Wish are well taken, but the film also embodies, underneath the fetish use of violence, a core element of a social contract that people on the left also adhere to: that the contract between the state and the public and large and the individual in particular cannot survive if the state insists that the individual fulfill their obligations (in the criminal law context to disarm, to be a good and law-abiding person, to seek and wait for help rather than lashing out) when the state is unable or unwilling to insist on completing its half of the bargain.

I’ve always felt that one can look at Death Wish and the character of Harry Callaghan as cautionary warnings to the state: Yes, you can abdicate your responsibilities to make sure that we are safe and secure, but that voids the contract and leaves us free to become independent actors in our own self-protection.  The state’s use of violence and its monopoly on violence are not inherent, they are delegated from the people and conditional upon the state fulfilling its protective function. 

Don’t kid yourself; the state and its actors don’t agree with that basic Lockian truth.  Most criminal lawyers can tick off on their fingers clients that they’ve had or known who were arrested for one of those highest of sins in police eyes: defending yourself when they weren’t there to do it, or, worse in their eyes, successfully defending yourself.  Getting beaten up isn’t a crime in cop eyes; being better at violence than the thug who wanted to beat you up and who got an unpleasant surprise is a crime for many blues.  You may be acquitted by an incredulous judge or jury,  but it takes some time to get there.

I’m not saying that Death Wish and Dirty Harry are Lockian tracts.  They ain’t.  In many ways they are very unpleasant movies, dripping with hatred of nuance and disdain for civil liberties, ones that leave you feeling a little dirty after you’ve watched them.  But at their core lies a recognition that The People are the ones who delegate the right to violence to the state, and the state should not be permitted to think that that is a permanent and unconditional transfer of that right.

[SPOILER ALERT on “Falling Down”]

I’m glad that Isopluvial mentioned “Falling Down”.  DFENS can be wrapped up in one brief scene: where he realizes to his shock, dismay, emptiness that he has become the bad guy, leading to his subsequent suicide-by-cop.

The movie, to its credit, does not lionize him, nor does it make him into a one-dimensional villain. He’s the embodiment of one type of classic GOP voter, the one who has always played by the rules and adhered to what is demanded of him, yet is screwed and destroyed by the end of it; the people who insisted on him playing by the rules don’t give a damn about him, and toss him aside “like a piece of fruit”.  He lashes out: not at the people who helped ruin him (and I say “helped” because the film makes it clear that there’s parts of DFENS that weren’t broken by others but screwed up in the first place; he’s a deeply flawed and in some ways frightening man before he breaks) but at anybody who comes close to hand or gets in his way.

I saw CSS last week with Ssion and Tilly and the Wall.  That was a good show.  Were you/audience a victim of getting completely covered head to toe in glitter like I was?  Did CSS end the show with their little dance/trample of the Britney Spears cardboard cutout?

As for “Taxi Driver” - I tend to agree with the idea that the ending is a sort fantasy.  Maybe there is some sort of parallel between him and John Brown.  At the end of the movie you have to ask yourself whether this guy is a hero or a villain, when in reality he’s somewhere in between.  What do you do with someone like that?  Laws aren’t made for people living in grey areas.

The Unitarian Universalist church shooting was in Nashville Tennessee.

When I watched “Taxi Driver” on TV with my mother, of all people, she pointed out something that I had totally missed the first time I saw it. Remember the close-up of De Niro dropping Alka-Selzer into a glass of water in the restaurant? She said, “Uh-oh. Insomnia and digestive trouble. That boy has psychological problems.”

...the American-edited version of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where they don’t reveal that the entire “Hollywood action film ending” is a desperate fantasy…

When I saw the movie in an American theater, the ending was intact. The only time I saw the editing you refer to was when it was shown on TV. I always assumed that some ham-witted doofus had hacked off the ending to accommodate one more commercial.

I don’t disagree, Cat Ion, but he also lashes out at the Nazi loving gun shop (?) owner.  He wants to think of himself as being a good guy in the traditional style, with enemies who it is noble to hate.  But he’s also the deep-down hater that you note.

I just wanted to say that now I really want an LA burger. Everything’s better with avocado.

Let us not forget that whatever we may think of the sort of crude, wish-fulfillment dark fantasies of DEATH WISH, Bronson ended up killing a very creepy and very young Jeff-Goldblum-as-laughing-hyena-gangster.

That’s something that I don’t think anyone, of any political or philosophical stripe can find too objectionable.

While it is true that we must place these movies in context of their times (New York WAS crime-ridden and *everyone* had a mugging-story), they do very much play to an ugly fantasy shared by timid people who long for the day they can unleash the righteous fury they’ve been sitting on for some time. It is the Charles Atlas comic strip impotent rage. (see THE INSULT THAT MADE A MAN OUT OF MAC)

It always comes, I think, from an essentially timid place, and one of self-loathing at that timidity.

F’risntance, Curtis Sliwa has severe pyschological issues, and sort of proves the point that yes, media fame and accolades COULD accompany such action. But that said, it is also very true that in the late 70s, if you were on a subway car and a group of red-jacketed “angels” came into the car, you breathed easier, and were thankful for their presence.

I think that there’s a fine line in our simple desire for simple, four-color press super-heroes and the actual, logistical reality of what one ACTUALLY existing might entail. I think this is the big theme that is spelled out in Moore’s WATCHMEN, which both decries and dissects that broken urge to put on a costume and fight crime and also celebrates the aching beauty of dreaming of the idea of it.

No, the Unitarian Church shootings were in KNOXVILLE, not Nashville and not in Kentucky.  Come on folks, use your Google.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/news/local/church-shooting/

The Unitarian Universalist church shooting was in Nashville Tennessee.
Thurston Howell the Third on 09/27 at 01:49 PM

It was in Knoxville. Please correct in the original text, Amanda.

Thanks

“Which part do you quarrel with, anony?  The embittered part of the gun nut part?  Both are well documented.”

How about the “gun nut” part.  I hope you are not just saying this because of Heller…

Bronson ended up killing a very creepy and very young Jeff-Goldblum-as-laughing-hyena-gangster.
...

That’s something that I don’t think anyone, of any political or philosophical stripe can find too objectionable.

Is it the laughing, or the Goldblum? 

I recently had the opportunity to meet Jeff Goldblum, and he is in fact a very likeable guy. 

I will also vouch that laughing is, in fact, good clean fun.

Fifteen year old girls aren’t kidnapped.  They run away.

Oh bullshit.  I was kidnapped at nineteen.  Yes, by a man I knew.  He even went to the trouble of taking me on a “date” so he could convince himself that we were a couple when he subsequently took me to a deserted area and sexually assaulted me.  It happens.  Going around the sun fifteen times and knowing the dude’s name doesn’t make you abduction proof, but reading shit like the above allows aforementioned dudes to believe that if a girl is over a certain age, it’s not really kidnapping - even though, last I checked, kidnapping requires moving someone from point a to point b against their will, regardless of age or sex.  My abductor - scarequotes not fucking required - asked me my age and then informed me that I was too old to be “afraid of sex.”  Please stop spreading this dangerous attitude that men don’t do violence to women they know, especially not here on a feminist website.

Please stop spreading this dangerous attitude that men don’t do violence to women they know

I never did anything of the kind.

And my point still stands.  A teenager is about a zillion times more likely to run away (especially a teenager who has access to adult friends) than to be abducted in the sense that the media was using the term, i.e. “snatched out of the front yard and shoved into the back of a van by a stranger”.  What was being fetishized was violent kidnappings by strangers, and in a lot of cases it seemed like the media had to lie about the nature of what had happened in order to create their little frenzy. 

I’ll also say that, from what I remember, the case I’m thinking of involved an “abductee” who made absolutely no attempt to be found or rescued for the year or so that she was missing.  And she wasn’t locked in a closet or anything, just living with her older male friend who had supposedly ‘abducted’ her.  Which is why it occurred to me that the girl probably hadn’t really been abducted in the first place.

What also wasn’t really talked about during that whole media craze was that the vast majority of children who are abducted are abducted by a non-custodial parent or other close family member (let’s face it, often their father).  But of course those sorts of cases were not of interest to the media anymore than acquaintance rape is.

It always comes, I think, from an essentially timid place, and one of self-loathing at that timidity.

Read George Orwell’s essay “Revenge is Sour,” where he points out that vengeance is something that appeals to us when we’re helpless. If we finally do get to do it to a helpless enemy, we only feel dirty.

“I was referring to the fact that Thomas is personally a gun enthusiast.”

Why would you use that as a smear?  Would you feel the same way about Justice Stevens if he collected compound bows and was an archery enthusiast?  Being a “gun nut” (enthusiast) is different from being a dangerous person who wants to cause harm.

More to the point of the thread, I don’t think Justice Thomas collects guns because he wants to live some vigilante fantasy.

Just wanted to say that i love that commercial with Scorcese and Tina Fey. “This is my chance to be kicked to death in a movie!”

I’ve known several gun enthusiasts.  Every single one of them wanted an opportunity to use their guns in a socially acceptable way.  The thought being that noone will care if you blow away a few criminals if there’s good reason.  If you look at movies where the protagonist is a vigilante the scenes where he/she actually gets to unleash some righteous carnage are immediately preceded by scenes showing how the targets have it coming.  The most cliche of which is intimidation of a woman on the subway but closely followed by gangsters sitting around a table full of guns, drugs, and money while they laugh maniacly.

It’s like an amateur pilot on a commercial airplane, they are just waiting for the flight attendant to ask over the loudspeaker “Pardon me, is there anyone aboard that knows how to fly a plane?”

There seemed to be a while during the 80s (heck, even newsweek had had a cover story about abuse and incest) when the notion that some kind of deep sh*t at home made teenagers more likely to get the hell out of dodge with truly inappropriate help, and more vulnerable to abduction/seduction away from home. But all of that seems to have been backlashed right down the memory hole.

I think spiderman, btw, is the original oops, not everyone likes a superhero.

seeker6079:  But at their core lies a recognition that The People are the ones who delegate the right to violence to the state, and the state should not be permitted to think that that is a permanent and unconditional transfer of that right.

I remember friends of mine interpreting _Gangs of New York_ on a similar basis… but there as I recall the terms are reversed, and state violence makes all the gangland turf squabbles moot.  (I didn’t see it myself, so I can’t stick up for the idea properly, or even be sure that I’m even slightly correct.)  Does that help at all in talking about what’s going on with vigilantism in these other films?

Is it the laughing, or the Goldblum?

It is in the peanut-butter-meets-chocolate synergy of the combination of the “laughing” and the “Goldblum.” Seriously, re-watch DEATH WISH, sometime, with an eye toward his performance. It makes Shatner look like a master of nuance.

I recently had the opportunity to meet Jeff Goldblum, and he is in fact a very likeable guy.

You know, name-dropping is a terribly unappealing thing to do. I was just talking to my friends Antonio Banderas and Bruce Boxlietner at Meryl Streep’s birthday party about that, and they all agree.

I will also vouch that laughing is, in fact, good clean fun.

Thank you, Robert Plant; in the future, I will try to be counted among those that remember laughter.

Excuse me, I’ve got to go; Vincent D’Onofrio just texted me about remembering our lunch date with Giovanni Ribisi.

I’m not so sure that’s name dropping. If she had said out of nowhere, “My best friend, famous actor Jeff Goldblum, and I feel that will also vouch that laughing is, in fact, good clean fun.”

But mentioning you just met the person people are currently talking about isn’t inappropriate.

You know, flea, it is funny that you mention that, because Anthony Keidas just made that same point to me, very heatedly. He kept on with it, and I was like, “Tony!  Toni—- TONE-” at which point 1990 pop sensation group Tony Toni Tone, who have been crashing on my couch were like, “What?”

We all shared a good laugh.

It was then that we realized, “Hey! This IS good clean fun after all.”

-aaaand scene.

“Wow, anony. Keep digging.”

I give up…

josh dobbin, Opoponax works on the technical side of the television industry.  It’s not name-dropping if you meet someone as a normal part of your job.

“It’s not name-dropping if you meet someone as a normal part of your job.”

Like John “Noun Verb and Petraeus” McCain?

Opoponax works on the technical side of the television industry. It’s not name-dropping if you meet someone as a normal part of your job.

Who do you think is in more prime a spot to be dropping names (like they were hot)?  That’s a name-dropper’s dream gig. It’d be like a shoe-fetishist working as a supervisor in a Manolo Blahnik factory.

Look, we’ve clearly gotten off topic quite a bit. The larger point I was making was that DEATH WISH, DIRTY HARRY, the Guardian Angels, etc. didn’t occur in a vacuum or just as a product of timid-rage, but rather as a response to a genuine feeling of a lack of safety in cities. A lack of safety is by definition an insecurity so when you have insecure people responding to a situation which is dangerous, you have an exponential reaction that eventually leads to a broken, damaged and ugly person like Bernie Goetz going out looking to kill.

But while we may rightly be leery of the kind of insecure timid-aggressive person who harbors dark fantasies of themselves as bold avengers, we need not discount the fact that there *was* a cauldron of low-level street crime at the time that “radicalized” those insecure people.

Opoponax hasn’t shown any tendencies to name-drop before, so I give her the benefit of the doubt.  She and I certainly aren’t palsy-walsy so there is no reason for me to go an extra bit for her; it’s simply a statement of fact.  (I don’t know what Jeff Goldblum is like offstage.  Perhaps he is the nicest person you would ever meet.  I do kinda agree, though, that it’s always nice when his characters get killed; he has such an annoying screen presence.)

If you look at movies where the protagonist is a vigilante the scenes where he/she actually gets to unleash some righteous carnage are immediately preceded by scenes showing how the targets have it coming.  The most cliche of which is intimidation of a woman on the subway but closely followed by gangsters sitting around a table full of guns, drugs, and money while they laugh maniacly.

Very true, and it’s interesting when even the films that fetishize vigilantism—such as Boondock Saints—allow moments to slip through where the unquestionable righteousness of the vigilante hero’s mission becomes questionable.

“Opoponax hasn’t shown any tendencies to name-drop before, so I give her the benefit of the doubt.  She and I certainly aren’t palsy-walsy so there is no reason for me to go an extra bit for her; it’s simply a statement of fact.  (I don’t know what Jeff Goldblum is like offstage.  Perhaps he is the nicest person you would ever meet.  I do kinda agree, though, that it’s always nice when his characters get killed; he has such an annoying screen presence.)”

For shame. My wife and I caught like 10 minutes of “Earth Girls Are Easy” before work this morning, (Those minutes included most of the Damon Wayans dance off) and this just ain’t so.