Subversive politics and the post-action movie

This post by John (and the Guardian op-ed to which it links) has been on my mind quite awhile, and it is very troubling to my mind as a fan of action movies that part of the culture I am supporting in such patronage is, to borrow the terminology of Methodist theologian Walter Wink, a myth of redemptive violence. Such a myth certainly colours very much of our popular culture, particularly in the wake of 11 September when it very effectively and conveniently simplified for popular consumption a complex problem in international relations which led to the suffering of thousands of innocents – now inflated to millions worldwide as a result of the shifts in our foreign policy (‘cryptofascist’, as it may very well be, or otherwise). America loves the vision of a black-and-white world in which problems are easily whisked away with a twirl of a pistol and a roguish grin, and the Hollywood action movie has traditionally been the way in which the average American could indulge this fantasy. This fantasy is something which I have been rightly trained since childhood (spent in a Radical Reformed community) to resist.

… And yet, in spite of all this, I still love action movies. And the action movies I love most all tend to go against the grain in some fairly fundamental ways: Peter Weir’s Witness. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (thank you, Andreas Modinos!). David Fincher’s Fight Club. Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Whether they subvert the action film’s fundamental premises, mythic elements or plot arc in order to explore nonviolent alternatives (as Witness does) or whether they deliberately crank the archetypal action plot arc up to 11 in order to poke fun at the pretensions of the genre (as all of Verhoeven’s action movies do), these – I suppose post-action movies is as good a term as any – are certainly worthy of a second and a third glance. Though they are still characterised by explosions and gunfire and special effects, they fulfill the same function vis-à-vis the Hollywood culture critiqued by Rick Moody that the Gospels did to Imperial Roman ‘evangelical’ literature, or that Shrek did vis-à-vis Disney and the traditional fairy-tale: a retelling of a mythic story which seeks to undermine the basic premises of the myth.

Witness is an incredibly powerful film (to which I was introduced by my parents) which explores the nature of violence in ways which it is very rare for a mainstream American movie to do. The hero John Book, played by Harrison Ford, is an investigator on a murder case in which the only witness is a young boy from an Amish community; ultimately, he is shot and forced to go into hiding in the very same community this boy comes from. Without giving away too much of the plot, one of the ironies of the movie is that the lifestyle of violence which has come as second nature to Book only serves to betray him to his enemies, and in the ending of the movie, the primary villain is shamed by Book before the Amish community into giving up his gun and answering for his crimes. Witness is still very much a cop thriller, but it is one which so adroitly handles its own thematic schema that it manages to present a worldview which is very much along Gandhian or Radical Reformed lines – itself a witness against the myth of redemptive violence in which Book (and, by extension, the audience) had been raised scripture and verse.

The Paul Verhoeven movies take exactly the opposite approach. Rather than subverting plot elements, they take these same elements (and the violence which inevitably accompanies them) to harlequin extremes to make their points. RoboCop is a prime example. Bookended by in-universe news reports and advertising for prosthetic hearts (‘And remember, we care!’) and family games such as ‘Nukem’, the primary fear of the film is that human beings themselves have become products; expendable commodities and replaceable cogs in a neoliberalised cyberpunk universe. The all-pervasive power in the movie, and all of its villains, are under the aegis of OCP (Omni Consumer Products), a defence contractor which has taken control of Detroit’s police force and plans to rebuild Detroit along high-modernist lines, allowing gangster Clarence Boddicker (played by Kurtwood Smith) first dibs in keeping the working class quiet and pliable with drugs, gambling and prostitution. This same Clarence Boddicker put to death Alex Murphy, a newbie cop whose remains and resemblance were used in the construction of the OCP’s prototype RoboCop, and whose memories remain in RoboCop’s programming only to resurface as ‘dreams’. The violence in the movie is so over-the-top that it becomes a form of black comedy in its own right, a parody of the very genre of which it is routinely held as an exemplar. The same is true of Starship Troopers, which takes the latent fascist elements of the novel it was based upon and turns them into the basic theme of the film.

Fight Club is something of a different beast entirely. It’s an action movie, but rather than being about explosions or even fistfights, it’s fundamentally about relationships instead. It may toy on occasion with political ideas, but always in ways which are psychological and painfully personal. It is a critique of capitalism and late modernity, and the ways it spells spiritual doom for the exploiting class as well as the exploited, but it goes out of its way to avoid presenting any kind of viable or desirable alternative, leaving the audience to ‘make up their own minds’ (cop-out? perhaps, but then this is also one). Violence is, very deliberately, the mythic escape (but, rather than being a solution to anything or being endowed with any salvific mythic qualities, it exists only for its own sake), and a form of authoritarian personality cult (Project Mayhem) the end result – but it’s one which is rejected by the narrator at the end.

The subversive currents in all of these movies do not, in themselves, add up to an effective countermyth to redemptive violence – but they do elevate these movies effortlessly above the mass of mindless garbage put out by the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer, Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, adding that extra edge that allows someone like me to provide an intellectual defence of the action movie, even if that defence is one which shows how the action movie genre has, at its best, ample room to parody and subvert itself.