The Fantasy of Revenge

This morning I finished watching Django Unchained, the latest Tarantino film to grace movie theaters across the country. There were plenty of critics, but also plenty who loved the film, including myself. The movie follows Django, a freed slave, as he becomes a bounty hunter and seeks to find and free his wife, shooting a good number of Southern slaveholders in the process. The film is partly a revenge fantasy, as Django kills the overseers who whipped his wife, her current owner, and most of the slave master's hired guns and overseers. It seems that quite a number of stories that we enjoy center around the quest for revenge, whether it is The Count of Monte Cristo, the "Kill Bill" series of films or Charles Bronson's character in Death Wish. 

It must say something deeply about our culture, perhaps even us as a species, that we take such delight in witnessing characters take revenge on those who have wronged them, almost universally choosing means that are outside the law. These stories seem to express our frustration with a justice system that seems to operate in such a way that the criminal poor are sent to jail while the criminal rich and powerful flaunt the system and get away with any number of crimes, from white collar theft to murder and outright genocide. They encapsulate our desire for a simple solution to situations that are far from simple, our longing to see those who have wronged us personally pay for what they've done, to suffer in their turn. But revenge fantasies are just that--fantasies. As frustrating as it may be, wanting and seeking revenge in whatever form is itself a greater crime than the initial act.

Revenge, even when successful, doesn't wipe out the original wrong. As deeply satisfying as it was to see the evil British commander killed at the end of The Patriot, it didn't bring back those he had killed. In the same way getting back at those who have wronged us by setting loose a poisonous rumor, a purposeful slight, or any number of petty acts of revenge that we are capable of, doesn't undo what was done to us. It may give us a momentary feeling of satisfaction, but it doesn't balance out the moral universe; it only adds yet another wrong to a world that has so many wrongs in it already. To put it simply, we don't erase our scars by scarring someone else, even the one who hurt us. We make the world better when we eschew revenge, a toxin that wounds ourselves just as much as it does the one it is intended to hurt. 

Resorting to violence to solve a problem is itself a failure of humanity, a failure of intelligence and creativity. Using violence as a solution represents simplistic thinking, giving in to the notion, represented by revenge fantasies, that violence will solve our problems. Boondock Saints encapsulates this, in presenting as anti-heroes the brothers who take on crime the law can't touch by leaving a trail of dead mobsters in their wake. This applies just as much to nations and organizations as it does to individuals. U.S. foreign policy represents this in prioritizing the judicial murder of terrorist leaders. Our judicial system shows this in jailing individuals caught selling drugs while leaving untouched the underlying culture that leads to drug use and sale. Using violence or other kinds of punishment to "neutralize" specific individuals gives us the false idea that complicated problems can be addressed with quick and easy solutions, that removing individuals is a substitute for dealing with the ideologies and problems that made these individuals who they were in the very first place. It protects us from having to wrestle with situations whose solutions may not immediately be obvious and gives us the unwarranted feeling that we've done something to address a problem, when in fact next to nothing has been done. 

If we want to truly fix the problems of the world, we must give up the idea we cherish so much, that complex problems can be addressed with simple solutions--simple solutions, including the desire for revenge or giving in to violence, can in fact create even more problems than before. Once we begin to do this, we can work to find lasting solutions to the poverty, greed, and environmental degradation of our world.