Rhetoric of Retribution

I’ve never been a fan of Quentin Tarantino. It’s perhaps a result of my preference for substance over style. I had to see Kill Bill though, because of the cast. I’d write a reaction piece, but MadPerc has written one that pretty much says all I would have cared to say regarding the film. But there’s a larger trope that is really starting to bug me—the rhetoric of retribution.

I started thinking about an older story. A guy is abused by a man at the crossroads. In anger, he kills him in retribution for the wrong. The reward for this retribution is a life of sorrow. Alas, poor Oedipus. Or there is always Titus, who under the influence of retribution creates a masterpiece of a massacre. Everybody dies. The audience cheers, but no one is left to stroll away in triumph. For a more modern version, New Jack City comes pretty close. That sort of tale is believable to me. Violence begets violence.

Maybe it’s just me, but in the post 9-11 world the master narrative seems to be changing. Retribution=good, or more pointedly, retribution=no consequences. I revisited another old film just for fun today, and it’s funny how much more you see in a film when you haven’t seen it in twenty years.

I was watching the 1969 film The Italian Job and thinking about the way it subtly undercuts blind nationalism. The film is very British, and is centered on a tongue-in-cheek solution for England’s balance of payments problem. Just as the Italian government is set to start trading with China, a patriotic gangster in a cell lined with pictures of the Queen Mother agrees to finance Michael Caine in a heist of the initial payment to China of fourteen million in gold. Caine is a wonderful Austin Powers style crook, with a typically hollow sixties girlfriend. The gender roles in this movie would be a different post entirely. What fascinated me most was the ending. The spoils end up in a rather precarious position—dangling in a bus over a precipice, with the crooks on one side and the gold on the other side. Each move towards the stolen loot threatens to hurl these (ahem) British nationalists over the cliff.

Then I watched the 2003 remake. The nationalistic theme is gone, and replaced with a motivation of retribution. The evil crook kills the good crook. The good crook’s partner and daughter plot (with lots of technology, rather than the smash-and-grab job in the original) to steal back the gold from the unexplained heist. Of course, inflation has brought the value of the gold up to 35 million, and we must have more high-tech goodies and their attendant specialists, instead of what really seemed like a group of football hooligans in the original. But the most shocking shift was in the ending. Everyone gets away and lives happily ever after—the good crook’s partner (Marky Mark) marries the good crook’s daughter. Give me a break.

The easy answer to “why remake this film?” is that the world needs more chases involving minis. However, the more pertinent cultural trend seems to be to knit up the ragged edges of retribution stories, to make them neat and tidy, and to make our culture comfortable with its idea that violence can solve the problem of violence. This makes me sad. The subtle irony of the original has been displaced by bald-faced moralizing and techno-flash. I just don’t get it.