Speaking of Charles Bronson movies, and stuff:
In November of last year, Soft Skull Press initiated a series called “Deep Focus,” a series of sort-of monographs precisely not in the style of the much and justly revered BFI Classics series; editor Sean Howe is commissioning terrific writers to treat films that are not necessarily, let’s say, universally acknowledged as being great, or even good and good for ya. To wit, the first two books of the series look at John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live and Michael Winner’s 1974 Death Wish. I know, some of you are saying right now, “Why these are hardly controversial choices as far as noteworthy cinema is concerned,” and I’m with you, but we are not really in the mainstream on this. That said, both books are damn fine, provocative, revelatory and engaging “reads,” as they say. The one on They Live is by Jonathan Lethem, the novelist behind the likes of Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, who writes beautifully on film in any context and who was kind enough, a decade ago, to contribute a wonderful essay to a collection of pieces on the Star Wars films that I edited. The one on Death Wish is by Christopher Sorrentino, also a novelist (Sound on Sound, Trance) and recently the editor of his late father Gilbert Sorrentino’s last book, The Abyss of Human Illusion. Christopher doesn’t just examine the film itself in his book; he provides an acerbic view of the near-hysterical critical dismissals it received in its day (the reaction of then-New-York-Times film critic Vincent Canby gets close examination) and grapples with the notion of whether a fictional film can convey something of the reality of the place in which it’s set/shot.
Sean Howe very kindly put me in touch with Christopher, and we decided it would be perhaps instructive to conduct a brief interview via e‑mail. I asked four questions; those and Christopher’s answers are below.
Some Came Running: So when, precisely, did you begin developing that chip on your shoulder with respect to poor dead Vincent Canby?
Christopher Sorrentino: It’s not Canby, per se. But given that he was the chief critic at the Times, which with NPR is sort of ground zero for middle American cultural striving, one of his reviews can give you a really good view of the received wisdom that prevails at any given time. If you go back and look over his reviews, you can set your watch by them: a movie hyped as an “important” film gets respectful treatment, even if Canby has some mild reservations; most of the rest find Canby either enjoying them or not, usually for totally arbitrary reasons; and every now and then he sinks his teeth into a film coded as “trash” that he can savage with impunity, like Death Wish. And it may well be that Death Wish is trash, but that doesn’t necessarily make it less interesting than one of Hollywood’s prestige productions (I am guessing, for example, that Death Wish is a more enduring, and no more schlockily exploitative, movie than Lenny, which appeared the same year and was nominated for six Oscars, and was accorded a thoughtful, if ultimately negative, review by Canby). And the Death Wish review, and the follow-up feature article he wrote about it, really show you the symbiosis that took place as Canby and the choir to whom he was preaching regarded each other in a state of unanimity. He writes about it as if it’s an unearthed artifact used in some primitive ritual, totally unselfconsciously referring to its audience as if it’s something quite apart from his good Masterpiece Theater-loving readership. It’s a bad film, Bronson is a bad actor, its politics are right-wing, it has a bad effect on its audience, it’s “irresponsible.” There are a thousand ways that you can eviscerate a movie, but as soon as you say that it’s a threat to public morals my Geiger counter starts clicking.
Some Came Running: It seems you simultaneously embrace and reject the entire notion of the so-called “New York” movie, claiming that (and correct me if I misrepresent you) no location-shot picture, regardless of how accurate, can ever convey what the city was “really like” at the time it was shot. For all that, you have a pretty deep knowledge of New-York-shot pictures. I myself find that such ostensible grade‑Z pictures as Lustig’s Maniac pay off big time in terms of, for lack of a better phrase, Proustian rush, summoning my own private nostalgia for the mud and making the actual materials of such a film all the more resonant. For as much as you deny that…perhaps…as a component in Death Wish, do you truly believe yourself immune to such a response?
Christopher Sorrentino: I actually respond really viscerally to that stuff. I have a permanent soft spot for relatively obscure (and probably not so good) films like Jenny, The Hot Rock, and Queens Logic because of the madeleine effect they induce, each of them having been shot partly on location near where I grew up. And of course there are thousands of brilliant Hollywood films that are “New Yorkish” – i.e., The Thin Man. But what I was talking about, and what I probably wasn’t absolutely explicit about in the book, is the almost bullying “atmosphere” that passes for filmmaking in some movies. Friedkin is a master of that, and The French Connection is one example I use in the book. He keeps telling you that you can’t criticize the film, it’s “really like this.” But it isn’t, and even if it were (which it isn’t), I don’t think the viewer’s apprehension that “this is really like that” is the highest of aesthetic experiences. It ranks pretty low, for me. It’s like junior art. “Real” can’t be the point. We already have real.
Which brings me to a guy like Lustig, and by commodious vicus, to Death Wish. Lustig clearly couldn’t have cared less about either reality or about being criticized. Maniac has got to be among the most un-real movies ever made. I wonder if Manny Farber ever saw it, because that’s a termite film if ever there was one. For Lustig, New York was a cheap and expedient tool. If Lustig had been living in New Haven, Maniac would have been shot there. It’s the almost incidental look of the New York in a movie like that which intrigues me, and that’s what gets me about Death Wish, too. There are maybe a total of five exterior shots in that movie that scream, “Look! The New Babylon!” It’s very anonymous looking. Nothing in it has a social or economic “reason,” it just is. There are bad people and Charles Bronson kills them. We remember it as a movie that depicted New York as a hellhole, but that’s just our filling in a blank that Winner leaves for us. When that movie came out, we “knew,” mostly from a lot of other movies, how dirty, how sleazy, how crime ridden, how ethnic, how not white New York was. Winner didn’t have to do a thing. Where he does—the Times Square diner scene, with the prostitutes and the two black men who end up attacking Bronson—it’s awful and klutzy.
Some Came Running: I am largely in sympathy with you concerning your impatience, or seeming impatience, with forces that call for a certain kind of “social responsibility” in the arts. Not that I don’t think an artist ought to adopt such a perspective if he or she so wishes, but the notion that a sense of “social responsibility” is a necessary component to art strikes me as…dumb. As does, too, the liberal tsk-tsking that greets a picture such as Death Wish. I think your view of the material, or of such material, is a little different than my own. I have often championed what the critic Robert Benayoun calls “authentic sadistic” cinema, films that, in his words, partake in an “atmosphere of perdition.” I don’t know if you have any truck with this slightly Surrealist view, but in any event, if you did, would you slot Death Wish into this ostensible category? If so why, and if not, why not?
Christopher Sorrentino: It’s completely dumb. Especially since, of all the Eternal Verities of the Human Condition, “social responsibility” is the most protean. If we were to catalog the social responsibility of all existing works of art solely on the basis of the community standards existing at the time of their creation, Deep Throat would end up being a more socially responsible work than Jude the Obscure. So we can’t consider such things—I mean at all—when evaluating art; and if you try to make a work of art whose defining virtue is its virtuousness, then good luck: it’s not going to stick. About nine million Stanley Kramer movies have demonstrated that to my complete satisfaction. I have to admit that I’m not familiar with Benayoun’s work or the context he’s referring to, but I will take as a sort of distant analogue Jean Genet’s concept of the beauty of evil. In those terms I don’t think so. I might be inclined to say that the film’s relationship to both virtue and vice is a negative one; that in adapting Brian Garfield’s novel, Wendell Mayes and Michael Winner emptied it of its Stanley Kramer-ish, “vigilantism is bad,” content without quite substituting “vigilantism is good.” I do think that the film celebrates the idea of having a motivating force in one’s life, and that it doesn’t matter what that is. Everybody else in the film begins to look faintly stupid in comparison to Bronson, with their chatter, their armchair moralizing, their politicking, their bureaucratic hassles. Bronson still has to deal with all that, but it’s made clear that it’s not his real life any more. He’s become a man with a secret mission. The Eco epigraph I use [at the book’s opening] sort of sums it up: that we hope that “from the slough of [our] actual personality” some Superman can emerge to redeem our “mediocre existence.”
The film does screw it up; it introduces some smart cop into the scenario who catches Bronson and makes him stop, but I think the film is joyous, in a strange way. Bronson realizes that who and what he had been has become irrelevant, and he locates his relevance in something taboo. In a weird way, it’s a classic ’70s movie: it’s a portrayal of discovering one’s freedom in the aftermath of adversity.
Some Came Running: Are there any examples in contemporary cinema of work that contains the particular kind of charge that Death Wish did/does? If not, why do you think that’s the case?
Christopher Sorrentino: I would have to think really hard about what transgression means anymore. Maybe not “transgression,” because to the extent that Death Wish was a transgressive movie, its sins were interpreted politically. There was a bumper crop of transgression back then, but as long as the work could be interpreted as being consistent with the supercilious or paternalistic centrist liberalism that’s often characterized Hollywood’s prestigious films that deal with social issues, transgression was kind of OK. All in all, with Death Wish, a perfect set of conditions obtained: not only did it fly in the face of those centrist liberal conceits, but it was a basically shoddy movie, based on a pulp novel, directed by a journeyman, and starring second-rank actors. Plus it was funded with real money, and released to big first-run movie houses – so reviewers had to pay attention to it. If it had been a B movie or a grindhouse kind of feature, it would have vanished without a trace. You could even take it a step further and suggest that if the reviewing establishment had been at all serious about really, truly loathing Death Wish to the bottom of its collective heart, it would have ignored it. But it couldn’t. A certain algebra existed. Dave Hickey makes the point that “the raw investment of attention, positive or negative, qualifies certain works of art as ‘players’ in the discourse. So, even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons’s work, the critical point is that people take the time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons’s work with more importance than the work of those artists whose work we like, but not enough to get excited about.” I might suggest that there’s a sneaky quid pro quo here; that emphatically hating something for grandstanding reasons is a more personally profitable venture for a commentator than reasonably taking the measure of something. Now, I can’t really think of a recent movie that’s lit a fire under both the reviewers and a mass audience. I think everything’s too demographically and technologically atomized nowadays. There is no way you’ll ever have to see one of the Saw or Hostel films even if your kid is playing it on the computer across the room. If you’re willing to take an example from an industry that still just dumps its product indiscriminately into the marketplace, though, how about Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones?
Cool interview, Glenn– sounds like a really interesting book. And thanks for mentioning the series– I love those kinds of film monographs, but hadn’t heard of that particular series. And thanks for commissioning that wonderful STAR WARS piece from Lethem all those years ago– your reminder of it makes me want to put it on my class syllabus this semester (we’re starting with the first SW film).
Yeah, very cool. Any interview that convincingly compares DEATH WISH to Littell the younger’s Holocaust horror art novel THE KINDLY ONES has me at hello. This kind of thing is exactly why we all keep clicking on SCR.
Dear Mr. Sorrentino,
Here’s my problem with your thesis (at least, it should be said, as described in this interview; I haven’t read your book yet, and you could very well be glossing over points here that you cover in much more detail in the book); I have no problem whatsoever with revenge movies. POINT BLANK, the original GET CARTER, THE CROW (which is also arguably a ghost story), THE LIMEY, Tarantino’s KILL BILL movies, all of them are movies I love, and to varying degrees, all of them contain the brutishness you seem to like DEATH WISH for. But they all have one thing in common; the characters in all of those movies operate outside the law. So I judge the movies strictly on their merits (or, in the case of the remakes of POINT BLANK and GET CARTER, the lack thereof). But what DEATH WISH does is blame the whole mess on the “goddamn permissive liberals” that caused Bronson’s family to be killed, and explains his actions afterwards. Don’t you think that’s just as much pandering as the Stanley Kramer sensibilities you and the interviewer mock? (And just for the record, I agree many, if not all, of his movies were too preachy, and no, movies don’t have an obligation to be “socially responsible)
On the other hand, I do love QUEENS LOGIC.
Fantastic interview. Sorrentino’s point about DEATH WISH fitting in quite well with the tradition of transgressive/outsider filmmaking in the 70s, but running into trouble by deviating from the accepted political line, is an excellent one that I’d never even considered.
Unfortunately, lipranzer has a point, too. There’s stuff in DEATH WISH that is clearly calculated to prick the liberals in the audience in a way that might be considered preachy, or “shocking” (the line about black muggers springs to mind). Of course, I’m of the opinion that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and you can point to any number of widely accepted films from that era that aim to prick the other side, and do so just as clumsily or in a way just as knuckleheaded as DEATH WISH, but it’s still a fair point. DEATH WISH is not a subtle film, and had it walked a line closer to MANIAC, while maintaining the same, I don’t know, sensibilities, I guess, then I think it would have gotten under people’s skin in a much more effective way. Although I guess then it would almost be TAXI DRIVER, but maybe you get my point anyway.
Also, DEATH WISH does “screw it up” as Sorrentino says, though I don’t blame the introduction of the cop character (who’s played by Vincent Gardenia anyway, so it can’t possibly be a complete wash), but rather the folk hero status of Bronson’s character. Not that it’s not a logical road to go down, but it’s in that arena that DEATH WISH seems to preach.
And I really, really want to read THE KINDLY ONES, even moreso now.
Damn it, I meant to mention, just as an aside, and having watched DEATH WISH again recently, and coincidentally, that Bronson does some very good work in the early parts of the film. Particularly when he goes to the hospital after hearing about the assault on his wife and daughter. Look at him in that scene again: he does a great job of playing the panic just beneath his skin.
In DEATH WISH Bronson finds his purpose and gets his gun in Tucson, which should have been enough to launch a thousand thumbsuckers.
This contempt for any notion of social responsibility in film strikes me as a lazy piece of complacency, only possible because in our present society, people with values relatively close to the mainstream are the only ones with the financial wherewithal to make and distribute movies. DEATH WISH’s “you dumb liberals” preaching is obnoxious, but no one thinks the makers, or viewers, of DEATH WISH were about to bring back lynching. If you were watching the latest Hutu-directed epic about the perfidy of the Tutsis—or just a real, actual, non-Bronson-targeted black person watching BIRTH OF A NATION in a theater in Texas and pondering how the hell you were going to get your kids out of town before sunset—that comfy love of transgression would vanish real quick-like.
@ That Fuzzy Bastard: It’s always funny how the proponents of the “socially responsible” always cite negative examples, e.g., “Birth of a Nation,” and very rarely give a name of a work that might inspire more Films They’d Like To See. Now is it just me, or is that because most “socially responsible” films are so preachy and boring that they make you wanna shoot yourself, or puke blood, or what have you? I know I’m putting the question snarkily, but, um, tough; unless you can convince me otherwise, I’m going to believe that you’d prefer that every film made from hereon in be some combination of “Sounder” and “Half Nelson.” (Speaking of puking blood.) There’s also the fact that “socially responsible” really is in the eye of the maker/beholder, as in, for instance, “I Am Cuba.” Also, TFB, I’ll bet five dollars that you were entirely okay with Kalefa Sanneh’s championing of Toby Keith, who actually DOES, as far as I can tell, wanna bring back lynching.
“or just a real, actual, non-Bronson-targeted black person watching BIRTH OF A NATION in a theater in Texas and pondering how the hell you were going to get your kids out of town before sunset”
That seems like a very odd construction. What era are we talking about? Is this happening in 1915, or now?
And the point isn’t that films can’t be irresponsible, but that using social responsibility as an aesthetic measure is lazy, and blinkered. Which isn’t to say I’ve never done it myself, but it’s aiming pretty low.
I’ve always been surprised by Vincent Canby’s enduring reputation among critics (e.g. Amy Taubin), since he’s always struck me as the textbook definition of fuddy-duddy since I was a teenager, and not just because of his dismissals of George Romero (though he tended to refer to his films as “garbage,” not “trash” – inadvertant praise?). Perhaps I’ve missed some come-to-bury takedowns by others, and I’d love to read them. I mean, could you think of anything LESS descriptive of HEAVEN’S GATE than “a forced four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room”? I’m sure that I cannot.
That said, great Herbie Hancock soundtrack notwithstanding, my beef with the über-manipulative DEATH WISH (the film – haven’t read the book) is not its, >ahem, liberal-pricking than its lynch-mob enabling. The thieves/rapists are so loathsome and the deck so stacked against them and in favor of copycat hardhat “Joes” taking the law into their own hands, the resolution of Bronson’s liberal character into a retributive force right out of the Old Testament (albeit differently weaponized) becomes less a function of narrative than of form. Any sop to anti-vigilantism given by others in the script comes across like Alan Colmes on Fox News – “oh, Jesus, do we really have to let this pansy talk sense to us?” It is, pace Devo and conceivably others, a triumph of the will.
I feel like this is exactly what Sorrentino was talking about, though. DEATH WISH enabled no lynch mobs that I’m aware of, but because its stance, such as it is, is not in line with, as Sorrentino says, the centrist-liberal line of the era (and now), you guys find much more to pick at, on moral grounds, than you would for something like – not to bring this up again, but it’s an easy example – BONNIE & CLYDE.
I’ll take the low-hanging fruit first: Bill, my example was indeed intended to invoke the audience for BIRTH when it first came out, inspiring the return of the Klan and a whole lotta murder. Duh. My point being that relishing a film for its transgression of liberal values is only possible because those values are so completely triumphant that you can’t actually imagine them being transgressed. It’s complacency masquerading as daring.
@ Glenn: I’m quite happy to say that social responsibility is more a negative than a positive virtue. That is, no artist is obliged to deliver “a positive message”, but you are indeed obliged not to be actively evil. Y’know as if you were a person—you don’t actually have to do missionary work, but you should refrain from yelling “ching-chong-Chinaman” every time you see a Vietnamese person on the subway. I understand, you like the surrealists, transgression, Fleurs de mal, Lester Bangs, Huysmans, blah blah. But even Bangs eventually acknowledged that it’s not nearly as fun to talk up evil when you think evil might actually jump out of the screen.
Oh, and you just lost that $5. Sanneh enjoyment of Keith was, imho, one more example of relishing the Bedlamites, condescending to Keith, his audiences, and the ever-present and always possible shadow that it can indeed happen here. . Paypal?
@TFB – Well, for a guy who often comes in here demanding civility from our host, you get no points for it yourself. And saying that a film is only able to transgress “completely triumphant” liberal values because you can’t imagine them being transgressed is nonsensical.
@ James: Well yeah, that’s how the structure works. It very enthusiastically wants you to regard the liberal anti-vigilantist as an Alan Colmes, and to feel in your heart that shooting the darkies what look at you funny is the only solution. Not, of course, that the makers of DEATH WISH actually want you to do that! No, heavens no. Like Glenn Beck—now there’s a guy who probably truly loves DEATH WISH, diner scene and all—it wants you to feel deeply that white power murder sprees are the best solution, but then only to sit in your room, grumbling that the damned liberals won’t do what has to be done to save this country. An unsatisfiable desire is evoked, so you’ll happily shell out for the sequels that provide the only outlet for the feelings that have been engendered. If someone was actually inspired to vigilantism by DEATH WISH, pace Bill’s recent comment, the makers would furiously deny that they intended to say anything at all.
When was the last time you even saw DEATH WISH? Do you remember the race of those who assault/murder Bronson’s wife and daughter? Or of the first mugger he kills? This “white power” bullshit betrays a deep ignorance of the film you’re arguing so vehemently against.
“If someone was actually inspired to vigilantism by DEATH WISH, pace Bill’s recent comment, the makers would furiously deny that they intended to say anything at all.”
If…that’s my favorite word in that whole sentence.
I won’t comment on Fuzz’ decorum here, since he’s all Rimbaud and transgressive and whatever…
I kid – these are interesting responses. Bill, I do get Mr. Fuzzy’s point in re: complacency vs. daring, though I think he overstates that here. This did come out in Nixon’s law-and-order, McGovern-trouncing, post-DIRTY HARRY America after all, and the paranoid style in “someone’s got to say it” knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) right-wing media sure didn’t start with Fox News. The film’s vibe, for me at least, comes off as far more as luxuriating in an atavistic, reactionary complacency than in anything as progressive as “daring”.
Also, BONNIE is a good parry, and I’d say it’s precisely because of the problematic morality at play in that film that makes it a richer work than DW. Better writing and acting, too (along that line, WEHT the Oscar-nominated Mr. Pollard?). There is the not-inconsiderable fact that Bonnie and Clyde were viewed as folk heroes in the depths of the Depression and that would have to be duly represented in any film about them. And yes, we regularly love our outlaws. Yet, as shocking as the dénouement remains, there is the implicit indictment of the state’s terror while at the same time a very Old Testament sense that these lovebirds lived by the tommy-gun, and thus…Briefly, BONNIE & CLYDE does nuance, whereas I’m racking my brain trying to think of any nuance whatsoever in any of Michael Winner’s films. Not THE NIGHTCOMERS, though Stephanie Beacham (speaking of WEHT) does gamely attempt to close the gap.
Well, I don’t remember a great deal of nuance in B&C, but I won’t rehash that whole thing again other than to say that “we love our outlaws” is a rather disturbing truth that I sure as hell got dissected more by those who love those outlaws. DEATH WISH is, quite simply, a film for people who do NOT love their outlaws, and if the filmmakers aren’t going to be held responsible for any (non-existent) killing sprees inspired by B&C (who murdered a good dozen or more civilians and cops before the state “terrorized” them), then why should we demand that Winner take the stand for the (non-existent) rampant vigilantism brought about by DEATH WISH? It’s a stacked deck.
Which is more TFB’s point than yours, James, but through your left-wing (emphasis on “bleeding-heart commie”) lens you’re still praising B&C for being a better made film than DEATH WISH, giving the aesthetics the prize of place, which is also, unless I’m misreading him, Sorrentino’s point.
@ James: Heavens—I’m arguing *against* Rimbaud and transgression! I think a love of transgression is a symptom of complacency! Is that not clear? As for decorum, well, are we really arguing for playing nice in our movie thoughts on Glenn Kenny’s comments board?
@ Bill: Actually, I think B&C is a dippy piece of piffle more or less for the same reasons you object to it—the contrast between B&C and BADLANDS is the difference between being a movie-mad dipshit and being an artist in the world. But in B&C’s (limited) defense, the extensive back-projection, silent-film gags, and other old-Hollywood references at least establish that this story is happening only and entirely in movieland, while DEATH WISH’s location photography and ripped-from-the-headlines chatter screams “you can’t handle this truth!” with every frame
As for my “if”—well, that’s sort of my whole point. DEATH WISH is a terribly preachy film that inspired no one to action, and it’s ineffectuality is pretty much its only virtue.
@ Bill: Ah, sorry, only now saw your other comment. I gave up on calling for civility at least a year ago, and have come to accept that it can be kinda fun to just let it rip. I suppose my “duh” was gratuitous, but my point seemed pretty obvious.
On the larger issue: I’m not saying a film can only transgress liberal values because one can’t imagine them being transgressed. That would indeed be nonsensical. I’m saying what I wrote—that the *enjoyment* one takes in watching a film transgress triumphant liberal values (i.e. “the government should have a more-or-less monopoly on violence”) is a product of the complete triumph of those values. Watching Tom Cruise in jewface in a contemporary Hollywood movie is funny precisely because no one thinks TROPIC THUNDER will inspire pogroms. This strikes me as lazy and complacent, especially as the Weberian ideal of people not gunning down those who bug them seems ever-more unstable.
Oh, and yes, there are indeed white crooks throughout DEATH WISH—the filmmakers are at least that savvy. But given the thick atmosphere of racial paranoia that hangs over every appearance by a black character, it strikes me as the same sort of cop-out that Scorcese (understandably) made when he altered Schrader’s script to make all Travis’ victims white.
Um, yes, Fuzz, it was clear, where one imagines my humor was not. Of course, I never want to offend Glenn, old ladies, bunnies or Lester Bangs, because, pace Lloyd Llewellyn, I’m a pussy. I do agree BADLANDS FTW, where BONNIE gets the prize of place. Or show. Or worse.
Bill, I guess you mean ““we love our outlaws” is a rather disturbing truth that I sure as hell WISH got dissected more by those who love those outlaws” (emphasis mine, and hopefully “WISH”, not “DEATH”). Isn’t that, to generalize indefensibly, 33% of the “research” coming out of media studies?
As for: “DEATH WISH is, quite simply, a film for people who do NOT love their outlaws” – is that so? You hate Kersey the outlaw? I’m suggesting that would not be a common response to the film. It’s also hard to know how else to assess these works without invoking aesthetics as something, well, prized. I prize socio-politics, but can’t imagine I feel much better about those invoked by DEATH WISH just because there was not a rash of mass, lynch-mob-fueled copycat vigilantism in resonse to its release.
This is nuance, maybe?
@TFB – Your “if” doesn’t really play like your whole point. That sentence very clearly states that Michael Winner would behave like a coward should anyone take him literally. I mean, that’s what you said.
And DEATH WISH does have its preachy moments. I said that before even you did. But you’re still hammering on the idea of social responsibility in films, and taking DEATH WISH to task for being “actively evil”, when all the film is about is the frustration law-abiding citizens, particularly those in big cities in the 70s, felt due to being victimized by violent criminals. Your stance is the same as those claiming TRUE GRIT is pro-death penalty, or that any revenge film is. You’re being extremely literal in your approach to these kinds of films.
As for why someone might enjoy a film like DEATH WISH, and that being tied to the triumph of the values being criticized in the film…er, so what? I might not want a rise in vigilantism, but I might understand the drive to blow off steam by seeing it in a movie. I don’t know, man, drink some tea, relax, do whatever.
And not all of Bickle’s victims are white. The ones at the end are, but they’re not his only victims. The armed robber in the convenience store, with Victor Argo, is black.
@James – Yes, I left out a “wish”. Well spotted. And even if the good folks at “media studies” are handling it, I don’t see them around here, so blithely tossing out “well, we love our outlaws” as a defense of BONNIE & CLYDE isn’t really enough.
And yes, Kersey is an outlaw in DEATH WISH. I think you see what I’m saying, linked to my response to TFB – Kersey is not threatening law-abiding citizens, but in the fiction of the movie serving as a bit of catharsis for those who live in the real world, which means “not in movies”.
Yep, socio-politics also occur “not in movies” – perhaps you see my point?
And with that in mind, I meant BOTH DW and B&C when I wrote “And yes, we regularly love our outlaws” – regularly, not always. And insofar as I was making a distinction between the perceived morality of two films, the second of which you brought, I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be defending BONNIE, or that, presumably with the other points I made, that one point in isolation wasn’t enough. Still, it’s nice to know those who live on the planet Earth could get the catharsis from DEATH WISH that eluded me, Fuzz and very possibly one or two others – since I only live in movies, evidently, I’ll defer to your (and, of course, Gurdjieff’s) expertise where the “real world” is concerned.
I made no claim to having expertise in the real world, or more than you, in any case. All I meant was that Sorrentino’s (remember him?) point about “real” being a pretty unambitious aim in art is one I agree with, and all the hand-wringing about morality in DEATH WISH seems to be a product of attributing realism as a primary goal of the film.
And before you say anything, yes, my arguments against B&C aren’t really any different. I’ve acknowledged that. I’m just trying to hold that film accountable on the same grounds as some are holding DEATH WISH.
If you’re not defending B&C, then fair enough, but your point about outlaw love struck me as something that one merely had to accept.
@TFB – And another thing. Aren’t you trying to have it both ways? On the one hand, you claim DEATH WISH either has or supports a “white power” agenda, then you only acknowledge the various white criminals in the film (including the three worst) when it’s pointed out to you, calling it a “savvy” move by the filmmakers. Then you call the inclusion of those characters as a cop-out (on par with the not-really cop-out in TAXI DRIVER). DEATH WISH could have never won with you, at least racially. The black criminals represent a racist attitude, and the white criminals represent a cop-out.
I think this “Deep Focus” series is a really cool idea. I read Jonathan Lethem’s book last year, and it totally made me want to go back and watch a film I never thought I’d ever see again, let alone reflect on.
I usually have this irrational skepticism about fiction writers who write about film. It just seems that in every interview I read where novelists are asked to list their favorite movies, they come up with really pedestrian, unadventurous choices. I remember Joyce Carol Oates said her favorite movies included “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Monster”. And, in this Time interview between the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy, (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1673269,00.html) CM extols the greatness of “Five Easy Pieces”, while declaiming against “exotic foreign films”. But I realize that’s not fair, and Lethem’s highly persuasive and knowledgable book proves that.
Anyway, thanks for this fantastic interview. Great, probing questions and extremely thoughtful answers. I’ll definitely check this book out. I find it really interesting that Sorrentino cites Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones” as a rare contemporary example (from another medium) of a work that contains the incendiary charge of something like “Death Wish”. I absolutely loathed that book, but it’s definitely one of the most transgressive novels to be released under the banner of pedigreed literary fiction in a long time.
@ Bill: I suppose I am having it both ways a bit with DW. But the atmosphere of racial animosity is so thick every time someone of another race is on screen, it’s hard to avoid. As for relieving the frustrations of law-abiding city dwellers—ah, well, see, that’s the problem! If the movie really does intend to have some real-world impact, albeit only cathartic, then we kinda have to engage with what that impact is, how it’s intended, and what it leaves out. Like I said before, part of what is so irritating about DW (as opposed to a more expressionist portrait of urban decay like THE WARRIORS) is the ways its grubby location-heavy realism and dueling-speeches dialogue demands to be engaged as the harsh truth, even as its admirers insist that it’s gauche to treat it as having any relation to reality.
@ TFB: Oh well. Paypal it is, then; send your info to the e‑mail address on the “About” page. How do I know you’re telling the truth? Well, I don’t, but that you manage to, um, both refudiate Sanneh AND imply a defense of Toby Keith (who, as far as I’m concerned, has earned a lot worse than condescension) constitutes a feat of sophistry well worth five bucks!
(Incidentally: transgressive, moi? That might reflect my taste in art, or something, but as far as “lifestyle” choices are concerned, I’m as bourgeois as they come, and proud of it. As we’re not likely to see the pansexual non-patriarchal socialist utopia of Robin Wood’s dreams in our lifetime, I’ll have more of that delicious Dalmatia fig spread, please.)
Interesting and potentially disquieting tidbits about “Taxi Driver,” gleaned from the long-disappeared Criterion laserdisc commentary, “Scorsese on Scorsese,” the supplements from the Sony DVD, or some combination thereof: one of Schrader’s drafts of the script had Travis Bickle ONLY killing blacks or Hispanics, and both the producers and Scorsese said, maybe that’s not such a great idea. Does this mean Schrader was/is racist, or that he was just crafting TOO CLOSE a homage to “The Searchers?” Also, when Harvey Keitel was “researching” Sport, he had a devil of a time finding a white pimp to follow around, and eventually just gave up.
@GK, off-topic, but this puts me in mind of other TAXI DRIVER supplements I’m half-remembering wherein it is disclosed that Keitel lobbied hard to play Sport because, well, obviously, “actors love to play pimps.” I’ve somehow merged this in my mind with an American Cinematheque Q&A with Millard Kaufman, writer of BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, who asserted that it was the producers’ idea to give the protagonist only one arm because “actors love to play cripples.” And it worked, as soon as they lopped that arm off Spencer Tracy signed on. So who’s going to be the first one to write the role no actor could resist: the crippled pimp. Bonus points if he’s mentally retarded too. Though, of course, he shouldn’t go full retard.
For what it’s worth, Winner is indeed a right-winger (supporter of Thatcher) and a law-and-order campaigner who’s paid for memorials to fallen police officers. Which sits oddly with Death Wish in some ways, and not in others. He’s described the films as “romps”, which isn’t quite the word I’d use, and his defense of violence in cinema is to cite Shakespeare and imply that Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear was a sop to those in the cheap seats.
From all that, my best guess is that Winner doesn’t intend us to take a serious message from his films, but that he does at least enjoy the fantasy of blowing people’s heads off when they annoy you. His final (to date) feature, Parting Shots, is a comic treatment of the same idea, where again the killer is the hero and no real criticism is voiced.
I think it’s interesting that more than one person here has said that, in DEATH WISH, people are being killed because they’re “annoying”, when in fact they’re being killed after threatening to kill/brandeshing a weapon at Kersey. As I say, interesting.
As always, a provocative post (in the best sense) and the books sound very worthwhile.
I’d argue the mirror image of this movie is not Bonnie and Clyde, and not Stanley Kramer, but The Ox-Bow Incident or Fury. But…I won’t do that, since we’re apparently blowing off any attempt to discuss the polemics of Death Wish. And it is *intensely* polemical, in fact it’s didactic as all hell. I got no cathartic charge from it; I felt every bit as lectured to as I ever did watching Inherit the Wind. So I am not exactly down with the notion that any inquiry into what Death Wish is teaching is out of bounds, lest one be lumped in with Vincent Canby (no favorite of mine). But so be it.
Instead, I’ll be the party-pooper who asks, how are we dealing with the aesthetics?
If we’re talking about They Live, the other movie you mention in this book series, Glenn, then we have a director, John Carpenter, who’s repeatedly shown a definable, at times exceptional style.
Michael Winner–well, my word would be “crude.” To say the least.
This is an interesting discussion, but I feel like 1915, the early 30s (the real Bonnie and Clyde), 1967 (BONNIE AND CLYDE), 1974, and 2011 are being rolled into one big ball that keeps growing in size, augmented by a lot of oppositions: liberal/reactionary, daring/complacent, Canby/Farber, big movie/small movie, social responsibility/irresponsibility, etc.
I do think that there’s a great attraction at this moment to movies from the past bearing certain qualities that set them apart from the digitally mediated present, actual and cinematic. The recipe of grainy images and rampant violence unchecked by moral propriety now seems irresistible to a lot of people, particularly when there’s a Proustian component involved.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen DEATH WISH, though maybe not quite long enough. I remember it as a completely crude film on every level. The idea that it’s either pro- or anti-evil seems beside the point. It was a piece of product, pure and simple, made by a major producer (Dino De Laurentiis, no less) with a major studio, and the spirit of the film was absolutely in keeping with the spirit of Nixon’s America as I remember it, as were ALL IN THE FAMILY on the one hand (despite the fact that it was intended as satire, Archie Bunker had a lot of fans) and THE WALTONS on the other, not to mention more complicated stuff like JOE, DIRTY HARRY and MAGNUM FORCE, LAW AND DISORDER, and a LOT of other stuff like REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER and MOTHER, JUGS AND SPEED. But none of them were as crude as DEATH WISH, a blunt instrument of a movie. If it didn’t inspire anyone to go out and do anything violent, that’s because it wasn’t made to. The film was not meant to arouse feelings but to confirm them. In this case, the feelings of older people who felt that the country had gone completely crazy, leaving them with no choice but to go it alone. Dirty Harry was lonely in one way, Travis Bickle was lonely in another way, but Bronson’s character was the loneliest of all, on every possible level, practically post-verbal. The racial question can be looked at from a number of angles, as I’m sure Mr. Sorrentino does in his book. The black urban marauder/drug dealer/pimp, sometimes good and sometimes not, was as much a staple of the time as the Middle Eastern malefactor and the lovably intelligent nerd are in our current moment.
I do think Mr. Sorrentino’s point about the threat to public morals as a critical standard is on the money. I also think that Canby was a very intelligent guy, who bore his responsibility, aptly described by Sorrentino, fairly well under the circumstances. “It’s not Canby per se” – quite true.
If I
In fairness to both bill and Winner, I last saw DEATH WISH somewhere around 1989, and my recollection of it is fuzzy at best (I think I’m confusing parts of it with the Bernard Goetz incident, even more unfairly). I’m more reacting against Glenn’s blanket assumption that the ideology contained in a movie so determined to relate to reality, and said ideology’s relationship to its object—that is, the world outside the movie—is beneath discussion.
Long time listener, first time caller.
I’m surprised nobody’s yet brought up Winner’s previous film to DEATH WISH, THE STONE KILLER, also starring Bronson. It’s a bit funkier than usual, and even features Chuck being thoroughly creeped out by a hippie party in one of its more amusing scenes. The most telling bit comes at the tail end, however, with Bronson quietly lamenting the state of society these days before turning directly to the camera and intoning “You’ve got five minutes, Christians.” Credits.
Personally, as a “fan” of Winner, I find him to be an exceptional panderer and therefore perfectly suited for exploitation filmmaking. As Edgar Wright (I think) is fond of saying (and I’m paraphrasing): “You can accuse his films of being in poor taste, and you can accuse them of being poorly made, but you can rarely accuse them of being boring.”
That’s Ed, I think DEATH WISH is his most “thoughtful” film, even though, as has already been pointed out, it seems designed more to provoke than anything else. Winner indulged in his fair share of sleaze during his career; if you find DEATH WISH repellent and/or politically dubious, I suggest you check out one of Winner’s last features, DIRTY WEEKEND, which is a similar story with a “feminist” bent to it, and certainly one of the silliest and most hilariously unpleasant entries in the revenge subgenre.
I feel like novelist Brian Garfield is getting the short shrift being dismissed as (merely) a pulp writer. Among other projects, he’s also written the spy satire HOPSCOTCH (turned into a good movie by Ronald Neame) and collaborated on the script for THE STEPFATHER with Donald Westlake.
I grew up in a small town and was raised by liberal parents to think of films like DEATH WISH as reactionary fairy tales. But I have to say that my attitude has changed since I’ve lived in Los Angeles. Even the hip gentrifying area of Sliver Lake I reside in is not without its gang problems. My own house was tagged several times with the spray paint calling card of the local franchise of what the FBI say is the world’s most violent transnational street gang. And once or twice a year between here and Echo Park sometimes in broad daylight there will be a crazy shoot out.
So it’s very easy for me to identify with the Bronson character. DIRTY HARRY and TAXI DRIVER are better and more interesting films, but DEATH WISH has a simple truth to it. If you’ve ever been the victim of a violent crime it’s hard not to feel this way.
Though the local murder rate is at a record low, the perception is that the violent crimes that still do happen are more dangerous and unpredictable than ever.
Garfield was onto something and ahead of his time with DEATH WISH, a certain sea change in the way that America thinks of itself in relation to criminals. The old attitude of compliance in exchange for safety–“Just give them your wallet and everything will be fine.”–no longer applies. It was the same with terrorism then. “Just stay in your seat and the hijackers will eventually let us go.” We know that’s not true anymore.
[Come to think of it, HOPSCOTCH is ahead of its time too. See the not-so-funny current versions of this saga with respect to Valerie Plame and the pseudonymous Ishmael Jones.]
Death Wish, and its sequels, are hilariously insipid and entertaining right-wing fantasies. The third movie is an absolute riot. It’s like it was made by crusty, paranoid conservatives. The thumb nosing at the “liberal tsk-tsking” here is amusing.
The Kindly Ones is not like Death Wish at all: (http://this-space.blogspot.com/2009/03/kindly-ones-by-jonathan-littell.html)
“The film (DEATH WISH) was not meant to arouse feelings but to confirm them.”
Which is what I was trying to say, but you put it much more succinctly. Thank you, Mr. Jones.
Warren; afraid I’ll have to go you one better – about six years ago, I was the victim of a violent, and still unsolved, crime, and yes, it was as the hand of Latino teens (I’m guessing the age). Doesn’t make me identify with DEATH WISH – sorry.
As one of those who used the word “annoying” to describe those getting gunned down in Winner films – that applies more to Parting Shots, which is about killing rude people. Obviously, the hoodlums in Death Wish are more than annoying.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned, explicitly, the film’s use of sexual violence in what seems a crude attempt to titillate the viewer. Obviously, we’ve talked about how the film is exploitation. It does seem a rather hypocritical stance, however, to load the film with such imagery (the sequels are worse, what I’ve seen of them) while adding preaching and revenge to make that scene “justified”. Standard practice, I guess, but pretty obnoxious.
My own very minor experience of violent crime suggests that revenge fantasies are seductive, but the question should be, “What is the filmmaker doing with the fantasy that’s interesting?” In Winner’s case, I think he just wallows in it.
You know, whatever Canby’s failings, he replaced the appalling and insufferable Bosley Crowther, a thunderously clueless scribbler, as the NYT’s chief film critic. That gets him, like, 750 gold stars in my book.
@ liprazner, does coming within inches of getting shot in the head in a still unsolved drive-by shooting (on the supposedly safer Westside) give me any street cred?
Just sayin’ because I’m in many ways as latte-liberal as they come: Prius driving, Kucinich Dept. of Peace supporting, Buddhist meditating with a nonwhite spouse and mostly minority friends. And yet… And yet…
@ D Cairns, here’s the interesting thing that DEATH WISH does with its revenge fantasy: it offers a fairly realistic displacement of the vengeance. By which I mean that the vigilante doesn’t get to avenge the crime that creates him/her–unlike just about every other Hollywood fantasy I can think, like KILL BILL, say, or the latest BATMAN series or even THE BRAVE ONE (a.k.a. Jodie Foster’s I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE).
The criminals are random agents of chaos and the primal crime scene–like too many others–goes unsolved and forever unresolved.
@ Jake, I believe the point about THE KINDLY ONES was a comparison to the way it was released and covered in traditional mainstream media, not to artistic achievement or content. Nice blog post, btw, is that yours?
I’d concur with Cairns here. I find it hard to believe that anyone, of any life experience, doesn’t feel some identification with Bronson’s character. But weren’t we just talking the other day about how degree of identification with a protagonist is a lame way to judge a movie’s worth? Obviously, yes, the revenge fantasy is primal. But primal feeling are really easy to trigger in the viewer—as demonstrated by Winner’s crude success—and it’s no great trick to make an audience feel psyched when thugs get shot. What’s interesting is whether the revenge fantasy is complicated, contextualized, undermined, extended, or otherwise played with. Problematized revenge fantasy (or perhaps vigilante fantasy—the revenge aspect is arguably a superego justification for more basic impulses) is a solid genre, with many great examples—from Hamlet to Oldboy (and if you really wanted to get cute, one could make the case for including Do The Right Thing)—but I haven’t heard much of a case yet for including DEATH WISH in their number.
I give Canby credit for being one of the few American critics who liked TOPAZ, one of my favorite films (at least in the theatrical version and not the extended uncut version on the American DVD, which keeps all the really lousy business between Stafford and his family that Hitchcock wisely cut out of the film before it was actually released).
rcareaga, you’d better hold off on those gold stars. Crowther was replaced by Renata Adler, who was replaced one year later by Canby.
And a further thought about that “fuddy duddy” Vincent Canby. He may have written off Godard in 1990 with a pan of NOUVELLE VAGUE, but he characterized him as “the most committed, innovative director of his generation” only ten years earlier; wrote with real passion about Fassbinder during his heyday, when one of his most famous colleagues kissed him off after one early movie; composed very perceptive raves for THE HEARTBREAK KID, BADLANDS and MEAN STREETS; and left us this immortal description of the Oscars: “The solemnity of the annual Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm with the cheerful bad taste of the grand opening of a shopping center in Los Angeles.”
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I’m not sure why so many here are criticizing Canby for having a political objection to “Death Wish.” Lots of critics didn’t like “A Clockwork Orange,” or “Taxi Driver” and their reviews didn’t say “Bernard Herrmann-what a hack,” or “Gee, John Alcott has no imagination.”
Michael Winner is about as daring as the Daily Mail.
Recently Neil Jordan’s The Brave One seemed like an attempt to update Death Wish for the new millennium – the implied subtext in this one is that, now that white men have abdicated responsibility for patrolling the urban environment, white women and ‘domesticated’ black people have to mete out justice to black thugs and latinos in general, with asian americans supplying the weapons.
It’s a very muddled film, trying to appeal to both the pro and anti vigilante crowds (I call these kinds of films Mona Lisas, since they aim to appeal to every demographic without excluding any other group from the film. I see Hollywood going more and more this direction, mostly to be able to bring in the money from as large an audience as possible), and ends up managing to patronise all viewpoints and not really explore any of the issues raised in much depth.
But it does have similar qualities of ‘finding a calling’, and of the main character trying in some ways to ‘regain ownership’ of her city again after being thrown off balance by a violent encounter – an idea that could be a very interesting one, but which the film doesn’t really do anything with.
And it features the heroine eventually being stopped by a cop too, only for the officer to enable, and in some sense legitimise, the final act of violence.
In some ways The Brave One is more offensive than Death Wish as it is bringing up far more complex issues only to pussyfoot around them and eventually drop them altogether, while Death Wish might have a potentially offensive message but commits fully making sure that its simply message is straightforwardly conveyed
This probably also ties in with the way that ‘message movies’ or ‘everything is connected’ films like Babel seem patronisingly reductive in their attempts to link many disparate threads together in a single narrative, or cover every possible controversial issue of the day within one group of characters, when a more subtle approach of having the issues develop through the characters, rather than be imposed on them from above, would be a more fruitful approach.
I haven’t browsed here for a while, and it’s an interesting coincidence that I decided to do so today, as I watched Death Wish II for the first (and last, pretty much) time yesterday. Interesting article, first off. Now, for the opinions:
The original Death Wish is a murky film. If, according to Kael, Dirty Harry is a fascist masterpiece, Death Wish is that, without the masterpiece part. It has its moments – Hancock, Bronson, the tail end, and it’s interesting that it’s a revenge movie without actual revenge, but ultimately, it’s repetitive and not very interesting. I don’t really care about the film’s morals – as I said, I love Dirty Harry (and Taxi Driver, and The French Connection, for that matter), I just prefer my trash to be more entertaining.
Death Wish II is slightly weaker – despite “Do you believe in Jesus? You’re going to meet him”, again, there’s just not enough meat there for 1.5 hours (and unlike the original it does go down a stricter route, revenge plot-wise). Jimmy Page’s involvement is a wtf and one of the film’s redeeming factors.
Now, Death Wish 3 sounds awesome.
I personally don’t believe films should be morally responsible, though admittedly when I dislike a film, its morals often piss me off as well (I can’t stand A Clockwork Orange, for one, though undoubtedly it’s a better directed film than Death Wish). I mean, look at Strike, it’s one of the best films ever made.
BTW, aren’t Winner’s early films supposed to be genuinely good? I’ve heard very good things about The System, for one.
@Kent, to clarify–I don’t have the kind of feelings toward Canby I have toward Crowther, certainly, and I always preferred him to Maslin, it’s just that he’s never been someone whose perceptions I sought out.
In this case, though, I throw away caution, apologize to my well-loved host for arguing with him, and for disputing one of Kent’s points, and nonetheless say again, in my presumptuous cussedness: Death Wish is not pure exploitation. It’s a message movie, an in-your-face, here-comes-the-meaning-freighted-dialogue, oh-here-it-comes-again message movie. It’s one thing to discuss whether a movie is morally responsible when the movie is primarily trying to tell a story or convey an aesthetic experience. It’s another when the moviemakers took on the didactic mission from the first frame. At that point, I really don’t see what is so wrong about Canby (and I don’t know precisely what he said, but oh well) pointing out that hey, the message of this message movie is…questionable, shall we say for now.
A comparison with Dirty Harry is relevant, too, as that’s also a message movie, as shrill and deck-stacking as the Winner. But it’s at least fifty times better to watch, the most important difference between these two genre pieces being the difference between Don Siegel and Michael Winner (and the difference between Eastwood and Bronson). Everyone quotes Kael’s “fascist” line, but it’s a long review she wrote, and an excellent one in which she spends a lot of time trying to disentangle the movie’s exceptional skill from an agenda she found noxious. Here’s my personal favorite:
“It would be stupid to deny that Dirty Harry is a stunningly well-made genre piece, and it certainly turns an audience on. But turning on an audience is a function of motor excitation that is not identical with art (though there is an overlap); if it were, the greatest artists would be those who gave us heart attacks.”
I’m pretty sure Kael never reviewed Death Wish, which is a pity for me if not her. I do want to read Mr. Sorrentino’s book now, as I’m curious as to what he (and Glenn) get out of Death Wish, other than the New York atmosphere, which is on offer in a lot of other movies of the period, ones far less interested in selling a bill of goods. I’m also in agreement with David Cairns about the have-it-both-ways queasiness of the film’s opening, and the camerawork in general seemed a ramming exercise in wearing me out.
Or maybe I don’t need Glenn’s explanation; my husband just stopped by, saw the “Death Wish” title and said, “Good movie.” In a manner of speaking, I replied; and he said, like what manner? “Crudely effective,” I snapped. “YEAH!” he said, with a fist pump.
Sigh…
Siren, like you, I don’t look to Vincent Canby for inspiration. I think it was kind of hard to be inspiring within the parameters of the job in those days. My point was just that he was a far cry from Crowther, and far more literate than Maslin.
This is from Canby’s review of DEATH WISH: “…a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing, as well as the hearts of those who don’t think much about politics but just like to see people get zapped, without regard to color or creed. The movie, directed by Michael Winner and written by Wendell Mayes, seems to have been made for no reason except to exploit its audience’s urban paranoia and vestigial fascination with violence for its own sake. I have no doubt that muggers, especially, will find it a great deal of fun…a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.” I have to say that this does not exactly square with Sorrentino’s “threat to public morals.” The part about an audience that likes to see people get zapped seems less literal than rhetorical. Unlike DIRTY HARRY, DEATH WISH really is a piece of garbage. The fact that it can be re-described from a modern vantage point and savored for its precious glimpses of a bygone New York doesn’t make it any better.
DIRTY HARRY, as you suggest, is a more complicated case. My problem with Kael’s review is that it’s based on the supposition that the film has a “fascist” interior (I have to admit that I’m not comfortable with the word “fascist” in movie reviews, unless applied to movies by Veit Harlan and Leni Riefenstahl) and an artful exterior, and that its purpose is purely propagandistic. There are some severely contorted auteurist appreciations of the movie that strip it of its problematic aspects, but the way that the action is so consistently integrated into the texture of the city cuts through the crudity of, say, the scenes with John Vernon (pretty standard late 60s/early 70s stuff) or with Andy Robinson’s whiny “hippie” killer, not to mention the infamous hot dog munching/“I gots to know” scene. But local dramatic and character crudities aside, I’m more or less in agreement with David Thomson’s view of the film: “Few films suggested so subtly how a cop might turn into an outlaw.” The way the film played to audiences during isolated moments is one thing. The movement of the action toward the ending, which is “painful” as Thomson suggests rather than triumphant, is something else again.
Another lurker here. I’ve actually read Sorrentino’s book, if anyone’s interested, and watched Death Wish right after for the first time in maybe fifteen years. So it’s interesting to read all these comments from people who’re trying to remember a movie in order to express an opinion on it, which is pretty much what I would have had to do until about two weeks ago. First off, I’d recommend Sorrentino’s book. It’s pretty good and, while Lethem’s been getting most of the attention, I actually prefer the way Sorrentino took seriously the job of writing a book of film criticism and didn’t try to make a novelty/creative project out of the job. Second, it’s worth mentioning that Sorrentino doesn’t spend all his time punishing Canby. Canby stands for a critical establishment. Sorentino also rags on Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, David Denby and others. Also, reading some of you talking about the location-porn use of New York in the film, I was interested in what you’d think of Srrentino’s contention that Death Wish seems basically uninterested in an authentic New York and more interested in a mythical New York. The idea of myth is very important to his thesis, and he sees Death Wish as a movie that goes way beyond genre and reaches back to classical myth for its structure. The idea that some people are going to have the most trouble with is Sorrentino’s insistence that Death Wish has absolutely no politics. I’m not 100% convinced, but Sorrentino does advance some really tight arguments that are engaging if only on a kind of academic/rhetorical level (his best is Bronson=Hobbesian State of Nature=Pre-political State=zero politics). Third (I’m going by the TOC) Sorrentino has a really nice gloss on each of the major performances in the movie, probably the most purely entertaining part of the book. And finally there’s an actual (brief) analysis of the film, although Sorrentino says basically that he’s cutting it short because after all Winner often just put people on a set and aimed a camera at them. The best part of this is a (illustrated) comparison between the home invasion scenes in both Death Wish and Clockwork Orange, Sorrentino concludes that Winner’s lax filmmaking owes whatever style it has to Stanley Kubrick. Anyway, worth a read.
Was going to mention THE BRAVE ONE as well – another revenge fantasy/vigilante example from our time is (the pretty bad) Michael Caine film HARRY BROWN. Both flopped I believe at the box office so maybe tastes have changes – but then again TAKEN was a surprise winner at the box office.
@ The Siren: What a great Kael quote! Next time I’m tempted to dismiss her as a purveyor of mere sensations (I still haven’t quite gotten over her dismissal of MARIENBAD), I’ll remember that dead-on statement.
@ Andy: Now you do have me curious about the book! But I’ll note that assertion of a state of nature is generally a political act—Hobbes certainly thought so!
Siren, I’m actually not that big a fan of “Death Wish.” I think Christopher wrote an interesting book about it, and that it would be interesting to engage him in some of the points he raises therein. I’m sorry if my first question to him creates the impression that the book is a long anti-Vincent-Canby screed—it’s not! And it really really is well worth reading, which was the whole point. And like Kent, I’m an avid appreciator of Canby’s writing, even if I don’t agree with all of his insights. His wit and his secure-but-never-really-smug urbane-ness are qualities that are much missed in contemporary film criticism. I could say that I grew up with Canby almost as much as I did with Sarris.
My favorite things in “Death Wish,” really, are Herbie Hancock’s score (the very existence of which goes against the grain of the film’s supposed politics!) and Christopher Guest’s turning up at the end, a bit part that, from the perspective of hindsight, is very nearly as odd as my cordial acquaintance Bob Balaban’s role in “Midnight Cowboy.”
Also, I take slight exception to TFB’s characterization of my “blanket assumption,” but by the same token it’s my own fault for soliciting such a response with my own flipness. I have some longer thoughts on the whole vexed “social responsibility” issue but they’re going to require fleshing out in what will probably be a separate post. Not that they’re so profound, just likely to be long…
The screenshot above from the poster is as subtle and brilliant as Winner is blatant and crude. It takes the best sequences from the movie where Bronson trolls Central Park at night in the dead of winter (kudos for dp Arthur J. Ornitz?—who also photographed the other NY vigilante comedy of that year LAW AND DISORDER).
THE STONE KILLER poster reworked the famous FRENCH CONNECTION one sheet of Doyle shooting the Frog in the back on the commuter train steps and the DEATH WISH one sheet takes the image to another level of body language and implication which I believe had alot to do with drawing audiences in at that time.
@Glenn – well, clearly it’s a *really* interesting book or it wouldn’t make for such an interesting thread. I’d LOVE to see you take on the social responsibility question, and here’s something I would love to see you address. I don’t see liberal movie critics, pace Big Hollywood, generally having much trouble calling out the earnest message-mongering of something like a Stanley Kramer movie or, more recently, Like Lions for Lambs etc. But when the subject turns to an obviously tendentious right-wing movie like Death Wish, it’s as though we’re afraid people will call us schoolmarms if we go all-out on the message, as Canby does above to what I’d say is pretty good effect. (Thanks, Kent.) Is this a recent post-Clinton development? “Oh please please don’t call me a liberal, mister”? Or is it as simple as the fact that Death Wish is fun for some people, like the one I married, and plays to fantasies of blowing away bad guys that are just a lot more exciting than fantasies of besting them in a court of law in Nuremberg or Dayton?
That’s why I like the Kael review of Dirty Harry; she has no problem discussing the skill of the movie, and no problem saying she finds the themes abhorrent. It’s gutsy. I share Kent’s discomfort with the word fascist but Kael doesn’t throw it up in a vacuum, she puts a structure around it. I guess my problem with Thomson’s take on Dirty Harry is that I don’t think Harry really becomes an outlaw; he’s the most heroic person in the picture, the one taking on all our sins as a gutless society. A good movie, however, one I can watch with pleasure even if I agree with Kael on its agenda. Can’t say the same for Death Wish.
@ Siren: Those are interesting points but they weren’t/aren’t what’s paramount to what I’m thinking about. However, I do think you’re onto something. I don’t think it’s “please don’t call me a liberal”—I mean, like I, or anybody in the universe, should give a rat’s ass if a fucktard like Greg Gutfeld thinks I’m a liberal—so much as not wanting to be schoolmarmish, yes. A slight rearview mirror, is-this-hip view, maybe. By the same token, apropos “Death Wish,” can we really say that its politics, such as they are, fit into the conservative mainstream? Roy Edroso’s blog has always been very good at detecting the sometimes not-so-subtextual bloodlust that provides much of the stimulation within right-wing rhetoric, but at the end of the day, do I actually believe that, given their druthers, Victor Davis Hanson and Jonah Goldberg would gad about putting a bullet in anyone they saw sporting jeans whose waistbands sat closer to their knees than their hips? Okay, Jonah Goldberg’s a bad example, because he likely wouldn’t be able to figure out what end of the gun to point, but you get the idea. Anyway, no, I don’t believe that, so there you are. But that leads us away from your larger point, which is why people who care about strangers, who care about evil and social injustice can be such pussies about it these days.
Do its politics fit into the conservative mainstream? Given that the conservative mainstream’s response to the most recent mass shooting (and every one previous) has been to urge more ordinary citizens to carry guns and be prepared to use ’em in the event of attack by punks, I’d say “Yeah, absolutely. It’s arguably the source of them!”
@Glenn–“I mean, like I, or anybody in the universe, should give a rat’s ass if a fucktard like Greg Gutfeld thinks I’m a liberal…”
In perfect honesty I can say that with regard to you, this thought never did, and never could, cross my mind.
I picture you with a battery on your shoulder, inscribed “liberal”, saying, go ahead Gutfeld, try to knock it off…
Since I went all in with the “fuddy-duddy” description of Canby, I can’t help but take the bait, though Siren puts it best when she suggests she doesn’t look to him for inspiration – daresay! Goodness knows Bosley Crowther was far, um, fuddier, and it’s certainly true Canby was in Fassbinder’s corner, plus Herzog’s, plus Woody’s (rather consistently/uncritically by the end), plus plus plus…And yet, when I discovered other film critics like Pauline Kael and J. Hoberman as a teenager, it was truly inspiring, like being able to see films in a new way with each review. They also conveyed their passion for what they saw, which well and truly trumped Canby’s sorta juiceless (if, yes, indisputably intelligent) urbanity. And, of course, Canby famously gave the thumbs down to GODFATHER PART II, CHINATOWN, CUCKOO’S NEST, was clearly resistant to Tarkovsky (on RUBLEV: “The film I saw was free in narrative form, all right, but almost DeMille-heavy in style.” – has anyone ever, before or since, made this dubious connection between Andrei and Cecil B.?), plus plus plus.…
Reckon I must own up to there being a bit of the kneejerk here, resulting from my inner hata’s dismay at any critic having the influence Canby had (Peter Sellars towards the end of VC’s career: “Right now, foreign films are distributed in the United States according to one thing-if Vincent Canby in the New York Times likes them. If Vincent Canby gives them a bad review, then nobody in the United States sees them. It’s an amazing distribution system.”). To take one example, Ivan Passer insists CUTTER & BONE died on the vine in its first week in theaters because of VC’s pan – I suspect there are other examples.
I know there are and have been so many worse film critics than Vincent Canby, and thank goodness I don’t have to read them, either.
Glenn, worth noting that Sarris and Canby were close friends.
“Bronson=Hobbesian State of Nature=Pre-political State=zero politics” – quite a construction. To quote Manny Farber: “The obvious fact about any movie image is that it can be read for any type of decisive, encapsulating judgment.”
Siren, I almost agree with you about DIRTY HARRY. But…while Eastwood may well be the most heroic person in the movie, that’s not saying much – the population of the movie is alternately callow, listless, psychotic, craven, pandering, and desperate. There’s no doubt that he’s the good guy, or that he’s the recipient of every scuzzy behavior society has to offer, but the white-hatted heroism is undercut and tamped down at crucial points during the movie. I mean, there’s something extremely odd about that helicopter move on the stadium encounter.
That’s why I can’t really go with Kael’s construction. What is often called “style” is, as I see it, a series of aesthetic choices that don’t just sit on top of an ideological core – they’re part of a constant interaction between ideas floating around the culture, impulses that occur during the writing and the actual making of the film, a thousand things that, when the guy behind the camera is as good as Don Siegel, makes the movie into a living, breathing organism. On the other hand, when someone like Michael Winner is making the movie, it’s a different story. But in the case of DEATH WISH, the central question behind every frame is: how can we squeeze as much money out of the paying public as possible? It’s one of the most pandering and dispiriting movies I’ve ever seen, lacking sufficient energy to qualify as even “right-wing.” I suppose it has some kind of edge on more recent pandering/dispiriting movies like INDEPENDENCE DAY because it has the virtue of being cheap, simple and straightforward. Faint praise.
Man, no one here – I mean NO ONE – is arguing that Vincent Canby was the world’s greatest film critic. And I must strenuously disagree with James’ reference to his “influence.” The influence belonged to the Times, and the job of anyone in that spot was to figure out how to deal with it. All things considering, he handled it pretty well. But the expression of passion is not an activity I associate with the Times. Manohla is a big exception.
As for missing the boat on Tarkovsky, CHINATOWN, GODFATHER II, etc., I refer you to James Agee’s reviews of THE BIG SLEEP and I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING, Manny Farber’s review of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, Bazin on Hitchcock, Godard on Stanley Kubrick, Truffaut on PATHER PANCHALI. Or, for that matter, Andrew Sarris on THE GODFATHER or Pauline Kael on RAGING BULL.
Points taken, Kent, and I should have more clearly emphasized the NYT’s influence over Canby’s, as I’d actually intended to do. There’s no accounting, moreover, for the tastes of countless great critics and/or artists.
And yet, it was Canby’s byline and I gather he did figure out how to deal with his sensibility writ large by the pervasive broadcasting the Times gave it. I still think the experiences of Passer and Sellars, among others, are more than a little worthy of taking into account when considering Canby.
Not having seen the main film under discussion, I’m disappointed that I can’t contribute much to this discussion. For now, I’ll just have to join the Siren and urge Glenn to write and post something – and don’t hold back, G, on length or otherwise – about “social responsibility” in the movies. I agree with Sorrentino and others that it sucks as a metric for determining artistic value, but it’s also easily confused with a film (or art in general, if we really want to get sprawling) having an “ethics” or some underlying moral sensibility that it communicates, deliberately or not. This, for me, is a fascinating conundrum.
From an outside perspective, it seems like the problem with DW (not including it’s formal shoddiness) is that it only shows one half of the truth – namely, that in certain circumstances, rage can trump anything – politics, ethics, good taste, etc. But while it offers that as a vicarious thrill to an audience, it doesn’t acknowledge the danger or the tragedy or the ugliness of that truth. It doesn’t posit the limitations of liberal ideology (or any ideology, for that matter) as an unsettling or tragic facet of reality – it posits them as a problem to be overcome, with ease and enjoyment. As for social responsibility – the argument can be made (not that I would make it) that such a film is very responsible indeed, providing a necessarily repressed populace with an imaginative arena to vent their anger and insecurity. I don’t think that’s how art works, but I do think it’s an example of why a category such as “social responsibility” is so useless, at least in the cases in which it’s often deployed.
Let me just say, now that this seems to be winding down, what I should have said in answer to Glenn’s question to begin with: Canby wasn’t close to being the worst when I was growing up; the signal honor of being the figure of fun in my house went to none other than Frank Rich, writing in the Post (I believe he was second critic to Archer Winsten). My dad insisted on going to see pretty much any movie Rich panned, on the assumption that it was going to be terrific.
Wait, Zach, catharsis isn’t how art works? And, as others have asserted above, simply identifying with a protagonist–more or less the entire foundation of the history of dramatic storytelling–is somehow beside the point of a film’s effect and value? I thought that, along with, say, the Jim Emersonian “permission to stare” identifying with characters on screen was one of the most basic reasons we all go to the movies.
And multiple posts have even brought up revenge films/stories as varying in intent and aesthetic quality as OLDBOY, THE BRAVE ONE and even HAMLET. But no one has yet mentioned another revenge tale with the same trajectory: Guy loses family to thugs. Guy can not kill thugs who killed family–he never sees them again. Guy randomly kills random other thugs.
In just about every other revenge narrative of note, the protagonist gets a shot at the bad guy who started it all. DEATH WISH is much closer to the origin story of a slasher villain, like Jason or Michael Myers, out to avenge a more distant wrong with a horrific displacement of blame onto whoever is currently within striking distance.
“at the end of the day, do I actually believe that, given their druthers, Victor Davis Hanson and Jonah Goldberg would gad about putting a bullet in anyone they saw sporting jeans whose waistbands sat closer to their knees than their hips?”
Reading this, I can’t resist linking to a contemporary hardcore conservative review of DEATH WISH, which includes this passage: “If someone tried to mug me in New Hampshire, I’d shoot him. I’d maybe aim to wound, although who knows how good a shot I am under that kind of stress.”
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3587/102/
Actually, warren, catharsis wasn’t really what I was talking about. I was referring to the more modern idea of fiction as a social pressure valve – a way to safely release the pent-up fear and aggression produced through the repressive mechanisms of civilization. You know, the whole Freudian quandary. For the record, I don’t think civilization is always necessarily repressive; even if it is, I don’t think the participation in violent fantasies is an effective way to redress it. I was providing an example of the kind that some video-game enthusiasts use to justify the wanton viciousness of some games, the “if the lonely kid gets to eviscerate pedestrians in a virtual world, he won’t do it in the actual one” sort of stuff.
The catharsis that the Greeks talked about, as I understand it, was more than vicarious thrill-seeking. I won’t pretend to know exactly how or why it works, but it seems to be more complex (and at the same time, more elemental) than identifying with someone on a power trip for a couple of hours.
warren: It’s also not dissimilar to the origin story of certain superheroes, such as Batman, for what that’s worth.
James, if you or I had been the chief Times film critic during those years, Peter Sellars would have said the same thing about us. Long after Vincent Canby was gone, the power of Times reviews was overwhelming. The world of film culture has changed in the last ten years, so that is no longer the case. However, they still wield power, and I think that Manohla in particular handles it very well.
As to the question of whether or not this or that ordained classic was properly recognized at the time of its release, it’s a losing game to look for people who were more consistently “right” than others. Grappling with a movie in the present and looking back at it after the contingencies of the moment have dissolved into the historical ether are two very different activities.
Chris Sorrentino, didn’t Rich do a summer’s worth of film criticism at the Times in the mid-70s? I was thinking that he reviewed CALIFORNIA SPLIT, but that was Canby – and he wrote about it beautifully.
jbryant – it is a lot like a superhero origin story, which is something I talk about in the book, particularly its relevance to the film’s use of time.
zach & warren – catharsis is really Aristotle’s concept of one of the elements of tragic drama, not something Sophocles or Euripides or Aeschylus necessarily thought of when they were writing their plays. Euripides in particular thwarts this – Alcestis, for example, is one of the most anticlimactic plays in the canon. A wimp lets his wife die for him, his buddy Hercules goes and gets her back from Death, and then everybody walks around looking embarrassed.
Kent Jones – I don’t know if Rich wrote film criticism for the Times. The way the Times rotates its writers through various fields of “expertise,” I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up at the Auto Show one year. Canby, well, that review is pretty competent, but I wouldn’t buy two hundred of them bound in a paperback.
Warren, you’re right that Death Wish is distinguished from most revenge narratives by the fact that Kersey takes his revenge on criminals in general rather than the particular people who wronged him. Batman follows the same arc, although successive comics (and the first Tim Burton movie) do show him eventually getting vengeance on Joe Chill, the man who shot his parents.
Of course, this intriguing element is jettisoned in all the Death Wish sequels, which seem to take place in self-enclosed neighbourhoods where the bad guys can easily be tracked down. It makes sense that Garfield’s novel has a higher reputation than the film, since it at least offers this note of realism, hinting at a tragic truth: Kersey can never GET revenge, and his violence can only continue forever. He has a sense of purpose, but no achievable goal. Unfortunately, Kersey stops being a human character after his first successful kill, and just becomes Charles Bronson, action hero, so this cannot be explored.
Chris Sorrentino – I don’t think competence is really at issue when it comes to Canby. It’s not even an issue with Maslin. It doesn’t come into play until later, with confusions between Buñuel and Fellini and increasingly relaxed standards of copy editing (on the other hand, it was once rampant at the third and fourth string tier, where the lack of expertise was comical). Having said that, I wouldn’t want a collection of his film criticism either, but to be fair, he probably would have agreed. Of course, how much daily movie reviewing would you actually want to see collected?
I think that it was Canby’s infamous 1990 write-off of NOUVELLE VAGUE that really marked his end as a film critic. It was a generational thing, and he was not alone. Many, many film critics and festival habitués had been through the actual nouvelle vague and the outpouring of great movies from around the world in the early 60s, the New Hollywood and the New German Cinema and so on, and arrived at the 90s with palpable exhaustion – more “waves” of good films from Taiwan, Iran and Central Asia? More good films from France? Another Japanese guy named Kurosawa? Enough already. David Thomson represents the extreme version of this standpoint. But I think Canby really gave up the ghost by ending the review with “The party’s over.” In other words, it’s no fun anymore so let’s go home.
Any plans to edit another book Glenn? Been a long time since ‘Galaxy’. I’ve lost count of the times i’ve read the pieces by Lethem and Todd Hanson.
Off to pick up Lethem’s ‘They Live’ book right now.
markj: Thanks! I had this nifty idea to commission another collection of essays on “The Godfather” films, but seeing as “Galaxy” turned out to be pretty much the only “Star Wars”-themed book ever published to lose money, THAT followup never happened and isn’t likely to. One never knows, though…
“And multiple posts have even brought up revenge films/stories as varying in intent and aesthetic quality as OLDBOY, THE BRAVE ONE and even HAMLET. But no one has yet mentioned another revenge tale with the same trajectory: Guy loses family to thugs. Guy can not kill thugs who killed family–he never sees them again. Guy randomly kills random other thugs.”
It has been a while since I last saw it, but I think maybe that Robert Forster starring film Vigilante from 1983 has the hero’s wife and child murdered and then him just meting out gang justice to lowlifes in general.
Presumably it was a film highly influenced by Death Wish, and itself features some highly evocative (or grimy and grungy depending on your taste!) New York locations.
And it was directed by William Lustig which brings us full circle back to the earlier discussion of Maniac!
The reason THE BRAVE ONE didn’t click is that New York just isn’t the rough-and-tumble place it was back in the DEATH WISH era; the movie strained to make it look more dangerous than it is today. It should have taken place in some meth-scarred exurb.