The Duck Speaks

My more than belated entry in:

Paul Kersey is a nice man. He does his job well, cares about his family, and is kind to strangers. All of this doesn’t keep trouble from knocking on his door, in the form of three hoodlums who murder his wife and rape his daughter. Paul does his best to get over his grief, but no matter what he does, it seems his old life is gone forever…

SOURCE:
Death Wish, by Brian Garfield

I grew up in Lyman, Maine, which is a small town that no one’s ever head of. Even I forget it from time to time, like the name of a grandmother who died before I was born. Not like I’ll ever be able to impress anyone by coming from the same place as, er, my sister. People ask where I’m from, I usually say, “small town in Maine.” Even the small town part is fairly irrelevant; aside from Portland, there’s nothing in the state much bigger than a suburb.

So I didn’t have any real experience with an urban environment as a child. Sure, there were trips to the Boston Museum of Science, walks along the Revolutionary Trail, but those were school sponsored and highly supervised; you didn’t get much time to wander around on your own. In high school, I made my first trip to New York City, along with the rest of my Select Choir. It was a pretty big deal- there was fundraising involved, a day off from school, a rented bus, hotel rooms, all new to me. (Okay, to be honest, I’d been in a hotel room before on a couple of family vacations.)

Even more new was the city itself, and I gotta say, my first impression was crap. I dug the vertigo you got from trying to find the tops of skyscrapers, and F.A.O. Schwartz was cool, but I was nervous as hell most of the time, and there was that smell you couldn’t escape, like someone three blocks down was frying twenty of the most evil hot-dogs in the world, hot-dogs that, if you dared purchase them, would lay eggs in your stomach that would eventually dissolve you from the inside out, before forming perfect matches of your now defunct body and going on a murderous rampage. It seemed pretty clear that pretty life was for chumps.

Since then, I’ve mellowed a bit. There were more trips to NYC, plus my close proximity to Cambridge and Boston during my college years, and while I still get wigged out by strange people doing stranger things, visiting these gigantic social monstrosities can be fun. At the very least, it’s nice to know there’s a place where the stores are always open, even at the whacko hours I keep.

Still, now matter how accustomed I may grow to city life, I will always remain a country boy at heart. As such, in my mind muggings and gangs are things that happen on Law & Order episodes; the most shocking criminal activities in my town was the massage parlor two houses down, and the guy growing pot on the corner. If you’ve never watched the news in a place like Maine, you know what I mean; more often than not, the local spelling bee winner leads the half, along with the quilting circle that made a blanket out of a Bible story.

Death Wish is all about urban crime. While I’ve read novels and seen movies (mostly seen movies) where cities are presented as nightmare hotbeds of violence and drugs, there was something different about this book because the author was serious. I’m talking straight-faced, grim, William Peter Blatty-type serious, which served to make the story even more disturbing than it already was. I’ve proved (to a ridiculous degree) my lack of experience when it comes to cities, and reading this was like reading an account of some foreign country that I’d heard bad things were happening in. It seemed absurd that such things would happen here! in America! The land of oh never mind.

Which is, of course, sort of what Garfield was going for. He’s trying to shock his audience, and while I’m sure the readers of the seventies, when this novel was first published, would be a bit less shocked than I was at the horrors described here, I doubt anyone can take it seriously without being in some way bothered by it. Since Garfield is attempting to make a point here, it’s a sign in his favor that he’s starting on such emotionally dangerous footing; even more important, the point he ends up trying to make is in direct response to the carnage he describes- and he goes in a direction you might not expect.

Death Wish is in many ways a fascinating novel, primarily because of that unexpected direction; what could be viewed as yet another conventional revenge tale, of a peaceful man opening up some whupass in response to a personal tragedy, is instead a creepy piece of work that questions not just the nature of revenge, but even the nature of man himself. While it’s not perfect by any means, it’s worth a look, primarily for the author’s complete unwillingness to compromise on the issue. Both sides of an argument are presented here with equal gravitas, and though it’s clear which side Garfield is pulling towards, you can’t accuse him of stacking the deck.

The story is pretty basic, at least when you summarize it: Paul Kersey lives a life of moderate luxury with his wife in the Big Apple. An accountant, he’s a man whose quiet attention to detail is much suited to his job. His political views lean towards the liberal, and in the past, he has donated much time and effort to charitable causes; he also believes very strongly in the idea that criminals can and should be rehabilitated. He is bothered somewhat by the rampant crime in the city, but refuses to live in fear.

This changes, however, when violence strikes his own family; one day at his apartment, while Paul is at work, his wife and adult daughter are brutally attacked and raped. Esther, his wife, dies; Carol survives, only to retreat into a state of near total catatonia, until her husband is forced to have her committed, with little hope of her regaining her health.

Paul is wrecked; the loss of his wife means the loss of the most reassuring, comforting parts of his life, and watching the gradual decline of his daughter’s mental health is even worse. But even more powerful than these losses is his growing terror of the city around him. He is increasingly more paranoid that he himself will be attacked, that he is unsafe from the moment he steps outdoors to the moment he comes back inside- and this fear, springing as it does from the horror inflicted on his wife and daughter, mixes with the anger he also understandably feels, increasing the potency of both. Eventually he constructs a weapon, wrapping a few rolls of quarters in a sock, and soon he is forced to to foil an attempted mugging outside his own home. This successful defense invigorates him, although no one was actually injured; but he realizes it isn’t enough.

So that’s when he buys the gun.

Stories like this are generally structured with a very specific goal in mind. When a peaceful man’s family is destroyed, we, as an audience, have certain expectations from there on in. While not all of us may be true eye for an eye believers, this is a story, and there are things in stories you can root for even if you don’t necessarily root for them in your real life. Perhaps you root for them even more strongly because you can’t root for them in life. The desire here is not just to see the soon to be not so peaceful man get some bloody recompense; there’s also the instinctual hope that his violence will somehow make sense of the initial attack. Justice, of some rough sort, will have been meted out, and the universe will return to order.

Garfield is having none of that. For one thing, the build up to Paul’s final snap is extremely slow; the novel is only 184 pages long, and Paul doesn’t buy a gun till page 124. More important is the ambiguity of Paul’s motives. Most revenge stories, the hero (or anti-hero, if you would) is driven completely by the desire for, well, revenge- the thing that defines such a character is that they are completely obsessed with the horror that has destroyed their lives. They can’t get past it, so this is the only action left to them to find some satisfaction.

Kersey is sort of like this; I don’t think you can argue that what happened to his wife and daughter isn’t the catalyst that eventually drove him to the point of hunting muggers on the streets of NYC. However, he seems more moved in the end by his own fear and ultimate impotence against the constant crime around him, then he is by any desire to seek justice for what he’s lost. After his first kill, Paul makes an effort to call the police the next day and ask if any advances have been made in the hunt for his wife’s killers. He doesn’t do this out of any real desire to know; for one thing, he gave up on the police a while ago, but for another, even more important, he doesn’t really care. All the muggers and psychos in the city have become his wife’s murderer and his daughter’s rapist- but even worse, they have become constant symbols of his incapacity to protect himself, so something must be done.

The inherent selfishness of his motives makes it more difficult to sympathize with him, and just about impossible to support his actions implicitly. With revenge movies, we can in some small way (as suggested by the Bride in Kill Bill Vol. 1) assume that the lead is carrying out God’s own judgment, so grim and single-minded are they in their purpose. But when that lead acts more because of his own failings than from any need for balance, it calls into question the whole idea of revenge. Clearly, Kersey isn’t in his right mind here- but he’s not crazy in that cool, Clint Eastwood kind of way. He’s crazy like someone who needs to get put away before he cracks completely and starts killing jaywalkers.

Even though Kersey’s motives may be suspect, Garfield makes no bones that he might have some justification, even apart from the violence visited on his own. The novel is riddled with crime statistics, and there’s hardly a chapter in which some character doesn’t go on about how dangerous it is to live in the city, how all the kids are psychos these days, how we’d all be better off if we just moved to the country. It’s hard for me to tell if this is exaggerated or not- like I said, I’m a small town boy, and I wasn’t born till ’79 anyway. The novel was published in 1972, and odds are crime was a little worse back then. Still, it feels slightly exaggerated. Perhaps it’s due to the prevalence of talking heads; it’s hard to take entirely serious a novel where every individual, it seems like, has a well-informed and well-researched view on crime, and is willing to go off on it at the slightest opportunity.

Regardless, the establishment of the crime in NYC as a credible threat forces you to think about Paul’s actions before condemning them completely. Garfield is still against what Kersey does, but he at least gives us a solid justification for why he does it, and I respect that. As with all message novels, Death Wish is fairly heavy-handed and downbeat. There is a dearth of well-drawn female characters: we never see Esther, Carol yells at everyone before going catatonic, and the woman who picks Paul up at a bar is seen too briefly to make much of an impression. And, while this might just be my own personal tastes kicking in, the prose got a bit too purple in some spots for my liking.

However, there are some great lines, and criticism aside, this is worth a look, especially for fans of the film. It’s a quick read, too.

SCREEN:

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Death Wish, directed by Michael Winner

Confession- I think this is the first Charles Bronson movie I’ve ever seen in its entirety. Can you believe that? Makes me feel sorta dirty and stuff; I imagine this is how Christians who’ve never read the Bible must feel.

Anyhoo, there’s nothing like a good strong opening to get your picture off on the right foot. Sometimes it’s an action sequence to set your heart pounding; sometimes it’s a mystery that’s established before you even know who the characters are, to grab your interest; sometimes, a bloody death, which serves much the same purpose as the action sequence, only with the added bonus of getting your girlfriend in your lap as quickly as possible. Sometimes, though, the filmmakers go with a sort of statement of intent- like a paper for your English Lit class, they open with a thesis, and then do their best to prove it in the ensuing paragraphs.

The opening of Death Wish is sorta like that. First thing we see is a shot of an attractive middle aged woman in a bathing suit; she’s posing while her husband takes pictures of her. Eventually she runs over to him, and the two say how great a vacation it’s been before they start noodling one another. The wife (Hope Lange) says, Let’s go back to the hotel and make it. The husband, (Charles Bronson) says, What’s wrong with here on the beach? Wifey response with- We’re too civilized.

Get it? Get it?

Okay, maybe I’m being a trifle more oblique than usual here. Allow me to explain. In the opening five minutes of the movie, we get the soon to be murdered for plot purposes wife, posing and showing how attractive she is, a perfect symbol of her husband’s virility. Then we have to see that they are still pretty hot for each other- no marital discord here! And then, to top it all off, the implication- oh, hell, it’s not an implication, it’s stated right out: both Paul (hubby) and the wife are “civilized,” but Paul isn’t really, cause he wants sex on the beach.

All that’s missing is a comment on how proud they are of their daughter, and you’d have hit “three days before retirement cop” on the ole cliché scale. It’s gone beyond cliché, almost; there’s something primal being established. It’s being established in bright, Day-Glo colors, obviously, and with brush strokes wider than most people’s arms, but there is something powerful in the execution. This is Modern Man, in all his glory, but what happens when that glory is ripped away?

Yeah. Powerful or not, it’s still kinda silly.

Often associated with Dirty Harry as an archetypal example of the seventies revenge flick, an action movie variant which featured strong-willed, single minded heroes pursuing criminals and exacting harsh justice upon them. While I don’t have any actual, y’know, facts in front of me, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that this sort of one bullet fits all type of story-telling came in direct response to the rising populations and resultant increase in street crime in most major urban environments. It doesn’t hurt that the Vietnam War was still raging, giving the country a shocking, repeated reminder of its own powerlessness with each evening’s death tolls. Often categorized as strictly right-wing, the genre is essentially just a call back to the Westerns of yore, where the bad guys were obvious and nobody gave a crap about civil rights. Not that Westerns hold some sort of monopoly over black and white storytelling; what they do have, however, is a very specific type of hero- a person who operates outside the law, on his own terms, and, almost invariably, by his own damn self.

What does that have to do with our story? Well, there’s a very clear case of urban crime blues here; most every city dweller in the film has come to accept that they live in a war zone with a sort of resigned pessimism. Before the attack on his wife and daughter, Paul himself is detached from the situation; it’s an annoyance, but crime is, as it is for most of us, something that happens to other people. Once the unthinkable happens (and the attack is fairly graphic in its pseudo-absurdity), Paul and his son-in-law Jack can no longer keep up that distance; but while Jack simply accepts each new level of impotency thrust upon him by his wife’s rapidly deteriorating condition, Paul is driven to act. He fashions a crude weapon with a sock and a few rolls of quarters; soon afterwards, he’s attacked and manages to scare his attacker off. There’s a great scene immediately following, when he comes back into his apartment and lets out this sort of adrenaline-filled whoop, a mixture of release, terror, and utter joy that drops him too his knees. It’s a surprisingly honest moment, and one wishes the movie had more like it.

Paul gets sent to the country- forget what state, it’s definitely Southern, though, and my Northern blood is screaming “Texas,” god only knows what that’s about- to oversee a possible land development deal, and in the process not only sees a staged Western shoot-out, thus getting in his inner ‘slinger heated up, but also does a bit of target shooting himself. We learn that Paul grew up with guns, and is an extremely good shot, something which impresses his contact to no end; impresses him so much that the contact gifts Paul with his very own gun when he leaves for home.

Hm. Now, I wonder where this could possible be going? I mean, given Paul’s growing sense of desperation, fury and paranoia with the world around him, inspired by the untimely death of his wife and rape of his daughter, and also given the police’s utter inability to find out the punks responsible for said death and rape, I can’t even imagine how Paul will respond when he opens his luggage and discovers he’s now the proud owner of a virtually untraceable hand-gun (and bullets). Perhaps he’ll turn the weapon over to someone in authority, to keep himself from doing anything incriminating, irresponsible or illegal.

Yeah, so, what happens is Paul starts hunting down muggers- and with amazing success, I might add. (This reminds of one of my big problems with the idea of superheroes in the “real” world; is crime really that easy to find? Or do we just edit out the many nights when Spidey can’t ferret out any discernible mischief no matter how far he swings?) Here’s where we get to one of the central problems of the movie, at least from a structural standpoint. The whole first half is a build-up to Paul’s eventual decision to start shooting people. Once he does, though, much of the tension disappears, because for the most part the muggers themselves are no match for Paul’s vengeance. There’s a bit of suspense when he gets injured, and a bit with the cops trying to hunt the vigilante; but the problem is that Paul remains the hero, and we never feel that he is in any real danger. There’s no one out there who can keep up with him and pose a real threat, so the last forty-five minutes are basically just him shooting unsuspecting thugs (and why they aren’t on their guard at all, even after the vigilante thing becomes national news, is anybody’s guess- perhaps lack of formalized education has allowed their cause and effect genes to atrophy).

In a normal action movie, the quality and difficulty of each subsequent conflict between the hero and villains should be constantly rising, until it reaches its acme at the story’s climax, generally when the hero and the villain duke it out for keeps. (It helps if someone says, “Let’s end this” at some point.) However, Death Wish has no overall “villain”: the only thing that could qualify are the thugs (which include a young Jeff Goldblum) who commit the initial atrocity, but we never see them again after the opening twenty minutes.

This makes sense- it would be stretching credibility to think that a forty-something architect could track down a group of anonymous psychos that the police were powerless to find. And the absence of a clear arch-nemesis makes sense if you want the story to stay ambiguous and realistic; once you create an equal foe for Paul, he becomes less a normal man driven to criminal violence by his own rage, and more a Hero whose existence is necessary in order to defeat the Evil only he can overcome.

Only thing is, the movie doesn’t really want to deal with the ambiguity of Paul’s actions. By the end of the movie he has become, quite literally, a gunslinger from the Old West, a nation-wide phenomenon that even the forces of law and government turn a blindly approving eye to. As such, Paul’s endless stream of easily offed hoodlum victims becomes less a statement on the disturbing ambiguity of his actions (ie, if they’re this easy to kill, then they can’t all be the demons that Paul thought they were) and more a group of lackies in desperate need of a boss to guide them around on his overwrought schemes. Dirty Harry had the Scorpio Killer- even if he didn’t his own posse, he at least was memorable and frightening enough to hold our attention. The last act of Death Wish is like the first level of a video game, only you never get to the final boss.

Still, structural and thematic issues aside, Death Wish is fun to watch. Charles Bronson does his usual Charles Bronson thing (more on that below) and the other supporting performances are strong. Hope Lange does a good job as Paul’s wife, managing to make a memorable impression in what amounts to less than fifteen minutes of screen time. I also enjoyed the cinematography and overall feel of the movie; it had that grimy seventies thing that gives the story a specific kick and authenticity that a modern, slicker remake wouldn’t pull off.

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
Authors are often unhappy with film versions of their works. All too easily, a screenwriter and a director (not to mention producers and actors and bad special effects) can ruin a novelist’s original vision in all sorts of wonderful, awful ways. So it’s not too surprising that Brian Garfield wasn’t entirely pleased with the movie Death Wish.

The changes range from subtle to major and begin right from the opening of both stories. Where the movie starts in the manner I described above, showing a snapshot of Paul and his wife on vacation, the novel starts on the day of the attack, describing the mundanity of Paul’s day and the normal tenor of his job. The movie version, in addition to establishing the nature of Paul’s marriage, also gives us the audience a moment with the wife, so when she dies, we’re losing her character along with everyone else. In the novel, the wife and her relationship with Paul are all presented to us through Paul’s eyes- we have no conception of the woman as an individual.

The nature of Paul and his wife’s marriage also changes a great deal. In the novel, Paul is not so much in love with his wife as he is supremely comfortable with her. His life before the crime is defined by its complacency- he’s not so much happy as he is not unhappy, and his marriage is a large part of that. When he loses her, he’s grieving more for the loss his routine than he is for a person. Not so in the movie, where we are shown in no uncertain terms that Paul and his wife very much in love. It’s a shift that limits the complexity of his eventual response; movie Paul is getting revenge for the loss of his own, while book Paul is trying to get over a bad case of social impotency. The split isn’t totally exact, but it’s very clear which interpretation each version is most concerned with.

In fact, once you start looking at it that way, the reasoning behind many of the other changes becomes clear. In the movie, Paul’s daughter becomes catatonic almost immediately following the attack; the few times we see her, she’s more zombie than alive. In the book, though, the daughter’s eventual withdrawal from reality occurs more gradually, and we get at least a scene or two of her yelling at her husband and acting difficult. Again, not a huge deal, but the movie version is more streamlined- it’s easier over all if we just consider the daughter another casualty of the accident, and having her less a person and more a walking victim makes everything that much more efficient.

It’s a small change, and perhaps not really deserving that much attention; but that’s not the case with the attack itself. In the novel, the only information we ever get about it are its after-effects and the various theories the police and others can come up with to explain it. In the movie, we see the attack from start to finish; we watch the thugs notice Mrs. Kersey and her daughter at the grocery store, watch ‘em follow the two home, watch ‘em gain access into the apartment- then watch them rape and brutalize the two woman in a sequence that lasts maybe five minutes overall. On an emotional level, this has a much more visceral impact than the novel’s version, which lends itself to the movie’s tendency to hitting the gut response rather than exploring its premise in any way that requires a brain. The novel feels more real, though- since the story’s about Paul, why should we ever know exactly what happened? Plus, it shifts the focus more to Paul’s response to the attack, and allows us to judge it more objectively.

And Paul’s response is something that needs to be viewed objectively in order to be able to judge it in any way that matters. Paul in the novel is someone who begins essentially content; politically he’s the epitome of the bleeding heart liberal, a pacifist who feels confident in his complacency. Then his wife dies, and while he mourns her loss, he’s more affected by the sudden invasion into his own life, and his ensuing fear of the city he’s always loved. When he starts shooting muggers, he does it to lose that sense of disenfranchisement with the world he believed his- the shootings become like a high that he can’t let go of, and he spends his nights roaming the streets and subways trying to deny his own cowardice. The death wish of the title is his; he can no longer control himself, and will keep going till somebody, anybody puts him down.

In the movie, though, things are much simpler. Paul’s upset when his wife gets killed and his daughter’s mind is broken, but it seems more like his eventual violence is a return to form than a break down in character. Movie Paul is a man with gunslinger in his blood, who went into “retirement” for his wife and family; but now they’re gone, and he’s back to dole out justice on those who wrong the innocent. The only ones with a death wish are the ones who try to stop him.

Nowhere is this change in intent more evident than in the huge miscasting of Charles Bronson as the lead. Yeah, that’s right- miscasting. Bronson’s a good actor, and a strong screen presence, but if the filmmakers had wanted to make anything like a faithful adaptation of the novel, they would never have put him in the movie. Bronson’s Paul never for a second looks comfortable as a “civilized” architect, in those business suits and soft voices. From the moment you see him on screen, you know violence is inevitable; even worse, you root for it, and when it does happen, it seems perfectly and utterly right. While Bronson was a large part in making the movie, and the franchise that followed it, into a minor cultural icon, he also serves the dubious purpose of completely defeating Garfield’s point. Not that anyone involved in the movie worried about that, I’m sure- after all, there’s no way in hell you could’ve made four sequels if you’d followed the source material faithfully.

Anyway. I’ve nattered on for almost ten pages, and three months, and it’s time to get this thing on its legs. Death Wish the novel is a decent read; the prose isn’t the greatest, but it’s short, moves fast, and raises some interesting questions. (The fact that it doesn’t provide easy answers is, for once, totally to its benefit.) The movie is fun, and worth a rental- as revenge pictures go, it’s quite a bit better than the recent screen incarnation of The Punisher

Source: QQQ
Screen: QQ.5
Watch for a Christopher Guest cameo near the end. At least, I think that was him…