Doppelgang

Kill the Assassins!

If you follow streaming content or movies, after the endless formulaic detective shows (small town, damaged cop, dead or missing women or girls, etc.) come assassins in numbers.

John Wick Again & Again

Let me count, starting with the granddaddy of them all, Jason Bourne.  Then Killing Eve, The American, Hannah, Pulp Fiction, John Wick, In Bruges, The Mechanic, No Country For Old Men, Nikita, The Accountant, Kill Bill, Jack Reacher, Road to Perdition, Ghost Dog, Gross Pointe Blank, Columbiana, Prizzi’s Honor, Arya in GoT, Fargo’s Malvo, now Gunpowder Milkshake or Black Widow … one website has 152 movies about assassins and hitmen.  I only name the ones I’m familiar with here.  I’m sure there are far more than 152.

There are more movies and series about assassins than blue or white collar workers, farmworkers, the precariat, or anyone in the working-class. Some reject the job.  Jason Bourne threw heavy antagonism towards the CIA and their role in making him an efficient robot killer, but he’s a bit of an outlier.  Black Widow borrowed concepts from Bourne, Hannah and Killing Eve - only now sexy women can be killers too!  The middle-class feminists love this 'advancement.'

What does this say about capitalist culture?  In a recent book that compared East and West Germany (A Socialist Defector) the minute the Second World War was over, cowboy films and crime movies started playing in West Germany and West Berlin.  It was flooded by cheesy Hollywood productions.  In the East they rebuilt the opera and theater scenes, listened to classical music or world music and watched films about WWII.  There was a huge qualitative difference in culture, even if the East German one was also somewhat limited.   Maybe the fact that Nazis still saturated West Germany didn’t help.  Or maybe it was the Marshall Plan, which “Americanized” Europe.

In assassin and hitman films, the killers lead glamourous lives, are paid huge sums, drive nice cars, visit every city on the planet, bathe in champagne, have regular sex, mostly with beautiful women (and for the women, handsome men or other beautiful women) and always have the best guns, tech gear and hideouts.  They are lumpen petit-bourgeois because crime pays really well!  And they are ‘cool.'   Revenge is their credo.  Assassination seems to be the only thing they are good at. Really?  There are always regrets, but even the retired or retiring ones can’t help but pull off one last job.  This is like nearly all the bank-robber movies too.  Many times stoic, super-human, quick as cats, loners but sexy, revenge-minded, bullet-proof, never miss, we end up cheering them on.  Weird, huh?

Now what normal person would admire a hitman or woman?  No one. But in Hollywood and Netflix?  Heroes.          

In the films they are hired by national secret agencies, crime bosses, shadowy international bodies, political sects, corporations – a whole web of invisible and visible crime syndicates, mostly motivated by profit.  These crime organizations are doppelgangers for above-ground capitalism and sometimes they use the same methods.  They reflect the real assassins and hit-men that run amuck in the world, killing journalists, environmental activists, labor leaders, political enemies, peasant activists, socialists – anyone who stands in power’s way.  The recent killing of the president of Haiti was probably carried out by a far-right grouping, using thugs from the repressive right-wing government of Columbia.  Bolivia just had a failed coup and failed assassination plan coming from the Bolivian religious right.  Assassination is one of the main weapons in the arsenal of repressive governments and the Right.  This is because they have no raison d'etre except force. And yet on celluloid or pixels they are cool heroes.     

So I’m waiting for a movie that casts a really cool working-class assassin who guns down rich men, fascists, corporate leaders, military thugs and the like, working for peanuts with old Soviet or Chinese weapons.  But it will be a long wait, as that movie won’t get made.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews:  “The Story of My Assassins,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “All the King’s Men,” “Hannah,” “Redbreast,” “Game of Thrones,” “Fargo,” “The Devil’s Chessboard.”

The Kulture Kommissar

July 22, 2021