American Assassin (2017)

 In the never-ending self-imposed task of trying to find and watch the worst films ever made, a friend and I lingered the other night over an entry in the Netflix library that the platform's algorithm knew to recommend to us, based no doubt on our viewing of Jason Statham movies and similar atrocities. 2017's American Assassin caught our eye, because it seemed such a late date for a film to appear that was seemingly so lacking in self-awareness or any higher aspirations. In this day and age, after all—despite the heckling Hollywood receives from people who rarely go to the movies—it is actually verging on rare to find a movie that relies exclusively on the most tired tropes imaginable, that does not in any way attempt to subvert expectations or stereotypes, that makes no move whatsoever to reverse conventional roles, make a larger point, or at least put its tongue mercifully in its cheek. American Assassin, therefore, in its very utter conventionality, was sui generis. 

Observe: our film opens on a stretch of indifferent beach, where sunbathers loll on the sands and attractive young couples sport in the waves. A generic white guy approaches his blonde girlfriend with a camera. He pulls out a ring. "Will you marry me?" he asks. She smiles and sighs amidst happy tears, "Yes, yes I will marry you—" and then addresses him by both first and last name, because films have instructed us that this is how all people accept marriage proposals. Then, he leaves to go get drinks. Then, a bunch of terrorists storm the beach and slaughter various people for no reason, including his now-fiancée. Our main character is tormented by lifelong rage and a hunger for vengeance as a result. He trains in all the dark arts of espionage, combat, stealth, and murder. He is recruited by the U.S. government, who apparently long to work with a person of this description. We have our premise. 

The rest of the movie follows the course set by this inauspicious beginning. The assassin of the title is trained by a grizzled old intelligence agent/mentor figure (Michael Keaton), who teaches him to channel and control his rage, to let his thirst for vengeance be his impetus rather than his master. The CIA/NSA, or whatever agency of government Keaton is supposed to represent, finds our protagonist by watching his movements surreptitiously through his laptop's webcam (maybe they bothered to get a FISA warrant, but then again, maybe not). Later on, the Michael Keaton character tortures a man in the trunk of a car. And our protagonist (the hero) will, upon discovering a female colleague may be a double agent, beat her viciously and attempt to drown her in a bathtub. After this (I'm hazy on the details, my friend and I were talking over most of the film), she rejoins the good side. 

These instances of torture and brutalization are depicted as effective intelligence strategies for extracting valuable information and as—I don't know how to put it—badass? Desirable? Macho? Par for the course? Somehow all of these. (Perhaps when we see the routine infliction of police brutality against criminal suspects around the country or recall the torture of U.S. captives at the hands of the CIA, and wonder how such things could be possible in our country, we should reflect that our popular culture has been extolling such behavior unremittingly for decades.) But all of this is familiar enough from the dreck of action flicks, which my friend and I did, after all, deliberately set out to sample. So far, the lesson is nothing more than what Orwell already wrote about in his "Raffles and Miss Blandish." We can detect in all this the familiar creeping signs of fascism, moral nihilism, and the worship of power for its own sake.

But that opening sequence stuck in my mind more than all the obscenity and brutality that came after it. Because it occurred to me to ask, watching that premise—so utterly generic, so lazy, so contrived, copied so wholesale from the tropes of a thousand other terrible revenge movies before it—why is this the go-to fantasy? Why is this the stuff of macho movie lore—what Faulkner would perhaps call the "primary blind and mindless foundation of all young male living dream and hope"? My friend put words to it before I could, as soon as I had formulated the question. "Why is it that movies love this opening premise?" I asked. "Because," he replied, "the guy gets to feel like he's a devoted family man; but at the same time he's totally unencumbered." That's right! The vengeful ninja on a mission of payback, so beloved by this genre of shlock, has it all. He is loyal husband and father; but also sexually-available, single, globetrotting free agent in one—without facing any contradiction between the roles!

Perhaps no work of art has ever more ingenuously catered to this male fantasy than André Malraux's 1933 novel Man's Fate (another work dealing with assassins, though not one I suspect has ever previously been compared to our 2017 Hollywood film). As with so many of the productions of the naïvely-Marxist intelligentsia of the twentieth century, Malraux's novel is able to breathe sincerity into innumerable tropes about and justifications of male violence that would no doubt have seemed abhorrent to the conscientious left-wing author if they had occurred in a boy's adventure novel, or otherwise pressed into the service of some conventional jingoism or imperialism. Here, because the violence is revolutionary, it takes on a wholly different moral cast, and the author feels no qualms about availing himself (and quite effectively too—it's a gripping novel!) of some classic testosterone-laced illusions. 

As soon as my friend offered his diagnosis of the psychological basis of the appeal of the "revenge" fantasy, after all, I thought of a passage in Malraux. He is speaking of the character Hemmelrich, who has long desired to join the revolutionary movement in Shanghai, and to take personal risks for its sake; but he has been held back hitherto by the fact he is married and the father of a small child. Time and again, he is unable to offer his comrades the aid and succor they seek in their moment of peril, must decline to hide bombs or personnel in his place of business, because he knows he is not willing to put his young family at risk. In the course of the fighting in Shanghai, however, as the abortive Communist uprising fails, the agents of state repression descend upon his shop, and murder his wife and child. Hemmelrich, albeit grieving, is simultaneously exalted by this fact. As Malraux tells it (Chevalier trans.): 

"[H]e could not banish from his mind the atrocious, weighty, profound joy of liberation. [...] It came to him suddenly that life was not the only mode of contact between human beings, that it was not even the best; that he could know them, love them, possess them more completely in vengeance than in life." It should be obvious now why this has appeal to the testosterone-ridden; why this is indeed the ultimate male fantasy that lies behind the opening premise of American Assassin and so many films like it. It is the idea of total individualistic freedom, unencumbered by civilized restraint, and able to kill and destroy without check and with the sanction of conscience, without having to worry about the consequences for one's loved ones... and at the same time to make of that very "freedom" and wantonness an act of loyalty and devotion—even of love—to those from whom one has at the same time been freed. 

It should also be obvious at once this is a fantasy (i.e., not real); and a fundamentally misogynistic one at that. It is not real because the violence of revenge in fact does nothing for the dead. It is neither love nor loyalty; nor can it mean anything to them. It cannot restore them to life, cannot even enter their awareness. It is futile and is, in a realistic work at art, a subject only for tragedy rather than myth-making. And the myth is misogynistic in that it participates imaginatively in the violence it claims to abhor; it takes the part of the murderer as much as of the vengeance-seeker; it welcomes the murder as a kind of liberation, and understands women and family to be something to be possessed, and somehow at the same time as an imposition to be shed, and thus death and conscious annihilation—the literal transformation of the human body into a "thing," a corpse—becomes the only way to square that circle, to bring to logical resolution an apparent contradiction of impulses. 

It is, in short, a dangerous and ugly myth that makes violence out to be something it is not; an illusion about violence that is as dangerous in its own way as the endless film portrayals of torture and surveillance and police brutality as justified, legitimate, even "cool" ways of doing the business of government and national security. And by giving it our views on the Netflix algorithm, my friend and I were perhaps doing our humble part to keep all these odious ideas in more widespread circulation. But I tried to console us with the thought that our contribution was limited. "At least," I told my friend, "we did not specifically give this movie any money." He hastened to reassure me in turn: pointing out that it did poorly at the box office. American Assassin II, should such a monstrosity be planned or in production, has yet to grace our screens even four years later.