"Wanted": fun or fascism?

I've been watching the James McAvoy/Angelina Jolie movie Wanted, as a download to my iPhone over the last few days. Why this movie? Well, the guy who wrote the comic book on which it's based, Mark Miller, is an home-town acquaintance of mine, and I wanted to enjoy his big-screen moment (and for him, there's more of them to come). But it's been a slightly queasy experience. 

I know the neurotic boy outsider mentality that fuels much consumption of comics - I was that boy, embracing the dystopian extremisms of 2000AD, Warrior and Crisis, Frank Miller's Dark Knight, Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and Watchmen. And when I think about it, the years of my most avid comix consumption certainly coincide with the first two terms of Thatcherism - when this particular young man, fearing conscription, unemployment or worse, could take solace in future visions of social disaster and entropy. These comics were dark play, for dark times.

But you move on (or try to). Brilliant, amoral writers like Grant Morrison live in this place, and draw inspiration from the meltdown: "Ours is a country in magnificent decline, under almost total surveillance and brimful of bullshit. Sick, ironic humour is very cool here. People are poor, drunk and vibrant with twisted creative energy. Taboo-smashing is an artistic past-time that's become almost passe. We're an angry breed and we need outlets for our spit and spite..."

However much I dallied with that worldview - and the transdimensional satires that Morrison, and Mark Miller, have produced over the years are still ones that I seek out, always with some sense of taboo - I can't live there anymore. 

I haven't gotten psychological consolation from blaming vast, malevolent conspiracies of super-empowered elites (particularly as Chomsky always says, the actual crimes of state are mostly there on the record) for quite a while. Nowadays, I want light, openness, iteration; an incremental accumulation of value and progress; better, more responsive institutions and structures, rather than some exciting but formless chaos beyond them. I'm reformist, not revolutionary.

So watching the Hollywood version of Mark's comic - with a spindle-thin Angelina Jolie ('Fox') blasting chunks out of the world, alongside a fresh-faced-yet-buffed-up James MacAvoy ('Wesley Gibson'), both of them members of a mysterious association of redemptive assassins called The Fraternity - was part fun, part poignant, and part alarming. 

Yes, it's fun to see the latest CGI make the idle spatial fantasies of a comix artist a seeming reality (look at those cars bounce!). Yes, it was poignant to see how much the narrative of the powerless quotidian loser who craves and gets extreme potence (Clark Kent? Peter Parker?) is both a distant part of my adolescence...but also now, possibly, a cautionary warning - in terms of the sociology of those who actually put themselves up for acts of terrorism, from whatever ideological or ethno-religious angle. The phenomenon that Hans Magnus Ensenzberger called the "radical loser". 

But yes, Wanted was alarming for its intentions, as well as its symptomatic nature, too. The mousey office-worker who embraces the life of an assassin to revenge his father's death is about as shop-worn an action-adventure narrative as you could find. But the overtone to the movie is that violence is the highest, purest form of personal agency. And this is brought to a pitch at the very end of Wanted, as MacAvoy skillfully puts a bullet through the head of the Fraternity (a bullet - itself beautifully tooled - which on the way to its destination passes through the lives of bad bosses, shrewish girlfriends, treacherous workmates). 

Wesley turns to the camera as he nestles his telescopic rifle against his cheek, and addresses the shuddering, work-a-day audience. "This is me taking back control of my life... What the fuck have YOU done lately?" 

How far away from fascism - where acts of lethal violence clarify our messy, compromised life - is this? We could dignify it with Breton's definition of a surrealist act in his Manifesto of 1927 - "dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd" - but that might be far too generous. One of the film's reviewers - a clearly worried old hippie from the SF Gate - put it much more humanistically than I've been able to: 

What is this fantasy saying? I suppose few people who see "Wanted" will bother to think about it. The movie is, if anything, an invitation not to think. But the movie is saying something loud and clear all the same: There's nothing worse than being a loser. Nothing. Being a killer, being immoral, wreaking havoc on humanity - none of this is worse than having no money, a lousy job and a cheating girlfriend. The movie even goes out of its way to emphasize this point with its curtain line. "Wanted" is presented as the story of a nobody who becomes a somebody. Wesley is a success story.

To appreciate how weird this is, imagine Cinderella, the classic downtrodden protagonist, coming into her own by becoming a hundred times more evil, destructive and heedless than her wicked stepsisters. Imagine passing that off as a happy ending and a happy end point for the character. Explain that to a child, whose perception hasn't yet been mangled in the gears of life.

Or to put it another way, how powerless - how threatened, how desperate, how beat up, how angry, how precarious, how hungry for success and in despair of ever achieving it - do people have to be to invest emotionally in the story of a nobody who becomes a murderer? I'd say, "A lot," and that the sound of cheering you'll hear tonight in the multiplex is not good news.

A play ethic might well be about developing higher, more humane and capacious forms of play, as Gwen Gordon says - moving up a growth spiral that transcends and includes earlier, less developed forms. That is: we leave the gunplay behind, and get our mind around koans, holy fools, beautiful paradoxes, glass-bead games, intricate sex. But that's a whole other post...