#553. Vigilante Movies

We live in a world where the printed word is fading in popularity. Visual stimulation through the medium of movies and video games has supplanted reading and led to a significant decline in readership throughout the country.

The National Endowment for the Arts has an incredibly somber analysis of the situation available to read here.

Video games generate more than $17 billion a year in sales (68 percent of American households play video games each year), and movies and DVD sales bring in more than $45 billion each year, and yet, remember:

"According to a fascinating, if frightening, report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts, more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year."

These movies and video games represent fiction and mere entertainment, an escape from reality. By spending countless hours watching movies and delving into the fictitious world of video games, people create a sense of cognitive dissonance that enables from living in world dominated by unpleasant hate facts about the real world.

Take the popular television show Law and Order and the false world it delivers each week:

"For years, Law & Order, which is filmed in Manhattan, advertised its episodes as being "ripped from the headlines," a claim Wolf and star Jerry Ohrbach still make in interviews. But instead of depicting reality, Wolf's scriptwriters take high-profile crimes committed by blacks, and replace the bad guys with whites, and invent white racist monsters that bear no relation to anything seen in New York during the past 100 years.

And so, while according to NYPD crime reports, over 89 percent of suspects in violent crimes are black or Hispanic, L&O presents a looking-glass world in the grips of a white crime wave."

One popular form of story-telling that has been with us throughout human history is the revenge-tale (from Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Dumas, etc.). A character wronged by a villain and then left for dead - who endures what Joseph Campbell called "a heroes journey" - ends up vanquishing his foe at the end of tale, exacting revenge.

These are the stories that stay with us, for they resonate deeply in our minds and hearts, painting an image of evil being defeated so that good cannot only survive, but endure.

Yet, shows like Law and Order, and American cinema depict something strange in movies, as all plots and stories center around a glaring falsehood: Pre-Obama America never ceased to exist and all criminality is performed by evil white people, at the expense of Black people.

In the real world, watching the nightly news brings the grim nature of Black people and their strong propensity to commit criminal acts to the surface, for in the world of entertainment the truth of Black people and crime is but a pernicious myth laying at the bottom of a murky ocean where only hate-fact wielding Nazi's dare swim.

However, despite the myths that permeate the entertainment industry, most people are cognizant of the reality of Black-on-white crime and the need for Whitopia's.

No movie has yet to be filmed that showcase the heinous murders that have taken place in every city where whites and Black people co-exist, that paint the unhappy - yet true - picture of Black-on-white crime.

Yet, hardly a month goes by when a movie isn't introduced that depicts evil white men attempting to subjugate Black people and permanently make them a second-class.

How many times has a movie been made that accurately shows Black people committing a crime against white people, and then shows said white person demanding justice (that is what happens in A Time to Kill, but it is reversed)?

Think about revenge movies for a moment - since so few people read anymore - and consider what every classic vigilante movie offers: husband and wife have a charmed life with perfect kids; some form of evil (always a white person) disrupts this equilibrium and inflicts great harm (possibly death) on a family member; distraught husband decides to take matters into his own hands when the justice system fails him.

This could be the plot of so many films, from Death Wish, Death Sentence, The Exterminator, The Punisher, Batman, The Boondock Saints, etc.

In Death Wish, Charles Bronson stars as a liberal whose paradigm is destroyed when white muggers rape his wife and daughter, killing the former and sending the latter into a state of psychological paralysis. He doesn't don a mask and scurry over rooftops in Gotham City, but he does confront muggers and potential murderers by engaging in vigilantism, turning New York City into a safer place in the process.

Bronson's character has a conversation with his son-in-law that is riveting:

Paul Kersey: Nothing to do but cut and run, huh? What else? What about the old American social custom of self-defense? If the police don't defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.

Jack Toby: We're not pioneers anymore, Dad.

Paul Kersey: What are we, Jack?

Jack Toby: What do you mean?

Paul Kersey: I mean, if we're not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people who, when they're faced with a condition or fear, do nothing about it, they just run and hide?

Jack Toby: Civilized?

Paul Kersey: No.

The vast majority of people killed by Bronson's character in the Death Wish series happen to be white people, thus conflicting with the reality of crime in major cities.

A 2007 Kevin Bacon film, Death Sentence, shows a perfect suburban family ruined by a multi-cultural gang (a Hollywood creation, for all gangs are racially united). Bacon's character realizes the law is inadequate and fights back against those who took away his idyllic life.

Remember, impressionable minds watch movies and our manipulated by what they see on film, and to show the truth of crime in America would create a serious amount of cognitive dissonance that would have far reaching effects on the amount of sports consumed in this country and could flicker some sort of brain activity among the individual indulging in countless hours of SportsCenter on ESPN.

Perhaps Hollywood's most interesting character that has been so poorly executed in three different films is the Marvel comic character, The Punisher:

"The Punisher is a vigilante who considers killing, kidnapping, extortion, coercion, threats of violence and torture to be acceptable crime-fighting tactics. Driven by the deaths of his family, who were killed by the mob when they witnessed a gangland execution in New York City's Central Park, the Punisher wages a one-man war on the mob and all criminals in general by using all manner of weaponry.

His family's killers were the first to be slain. A war veteran, Castle is a master of martial arts, stealth tactics, guerrilla warfare and a wide variety of weapons."

Strangely, Castle's enemies always seem to be Italians or other various white people, mobsters, etc. Never Black people, for you see, in movies, we still live in Pre-Obama America where 90 percent of the population is white.

Consider The Boondock Saints, and the infamous joke that film contains. The righteous brothers in that film decide to be God's agents of eradicating sinners on earth, and engage in a brutal war against - like the Punisher - white people.

Even though these movies, from Death Wish to The Punisher depict a white dude blowing away other white dudes, Black people get uneasy, for many Black people know the truth of crime in America.

These films offer mere escapism for all involved who view them, but Black people are well aware of the undertones of such films as Dirty Harry and Death Wish:

"Most irresponsible was the 1974 release of Death Wish which went on to repeat itself in 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1994. Death Wish featured the diminutive and fading actor Charles Bronson, impressive in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), but now reduced to the depraved Paul Kersey, a white everyman driven to take revenge against street scum when his family is wiped-out.

Playing to such paranoia, which continues to be manipulated by the National Rifle Association, made a raving gun-nut out of the actor Charleston Heston. Over-rated as an actor, Heston never hesitated to mention the Los Angeles Watts Riots of 1965 as chief among his reasons for owning a gun."

Roger Ebert decided to bestow upon Dirty Harry the title of fascist:

"But wait a minute. The movie clearly and unmistakably gives us a character who understands the Bill of Rights, understands his legal responsibility as a police officer, and nevertheless takes retribution into his own hands. Sure, Scorpio is portrayed as the most vicious, perverted, warped monster we can imagine -- but that's part of the same stacked deck. The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it."

Dirty Harry was but a movie, and crime has gotten much worse since 1970, no thanks to the film and fine police work of Officer Callahan in stopping all those real murderers.

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes vigilante movies, for even though Black are never the antagonists in these films, the unpleasant reality of nightly newscasts leaves most Black squeamish. Vigilante movies show normal reactions to melancholy experiences and the natural desire for self-preservation and revenge unfolding in celluloid beauty.

The real-life passivity of white people when confronted with criminality and the Black world that they live in now, is incredibly unnatural. Science can't explain it.

The United States will continue to descend into chaos, caused by massive inner-city crime and black-on-white as well as horrible black-on-black violence.

It is in the movies we will escape to find fictional solutions, and relax in the cheerful words of Travis Bickle:

"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."