The Greater Good: An Analysis of Vigilantism and (Implied) Allostatic Load
The Greater Good: An Analysis of Vigilantism and (Implied) Allostatic Load
Chapter One: You See What Vigilantism Does?
(spoilers for Hot Fuzz, Zootopia, Irreversible, Stranger Things, and The 'Burbs below)
TW: discussion of sexual assault, rape, violence, toxic masculinity, police brutality, vigilante justice, and a lot of problematic people (including Woody Allen and John McCain).
The thing that society implicitly lives by, the Greater Good drives some to be kind to their fellow men and, in certain cases, others to be calloused and cruel. The idea is that if society as a whole sees some sort of ill towards somebody, be it a minority (racial, sexual, gender-based, disabled, or religious) or an individual, people will do anything to right the wrong. In most cases, people work within the confines of the law in order to achieve some form of justice - in other cases, people will resort to vigilante justice in order to set an example to others who might enact these injustices. Either way, whether it's somebody critiquing the recently deceased and embarrassingly problematic John McCain and how he conducted himself on the public stage while also getting some respect for fighting for the Affordable Care Act (long after he whined about it in 2008-11) or killing pedophiles in an attempt to curb the rise in pedophilia, the Greater Good guides somebody to do what they consider to be the right thing.
And in most cases, the Greater Good works peacefully, if with a bit of a fight. Ronan Farrow's excellent exposé of Harvey Weinstein single-handedly kicked off a strong discussion regarding sexual abuse towards women and minorities in the creative industries - a discussion we should've let continue 20 years prior rather than let it go to the wayside - leading to the revelations that figures like Ameer Vann (that dude on all the SATURATION album covers by Brockhampton), John "Fantastic Mr. Fox looks like furry porn" Kricfalusi, Louis "I'm so much of a neurotic wreck that I jerk off in front of comediennes and, when they complain, I get them fired from everything because I wrote for The Dana Carvey Show and Chris Rock is my best friend" CK, and Kevin Spacey all engaged in this sort of thing before. I've heard rumblings, especially regarding Spacey's attraction to teenage boys (from several anonymous production assistants who worked on Baby Driver) and Kricfalusi's own flirtations with pedophilia (Sody Pop is a sexpot who happens to be underage) and his legendary misogyny (mostly from my viewings of his work), but most cases took me by surprise.
Of course, there were cases like George Takei's that were disproven or heavily changed after the initial heat regarding #MeToo died down. And of course, given Moses Farrow's recent blog post regarding his take on the Woody Allen sex scandal and he being a victim of Mia Farrow's abuse and Woody's increasingly depressing and naive statements despite #MeToo going full-force, the Woody Allen sex scandal is at its most convoluted and confusing since the news broke in 1992. However, most people have been victims, so in that case, whatever the case with Allen may be and what has been stated about the Takei case, victims should at least be believed on that front. More often than not, they're telling the truth. In this sense, the Greater Good is good.
However, in other cases, mostly regarding Internet mob mentalities and how people react to news of some of the world's biggest assholes dying or being denied parole, the Greater Good can easily be exploited to get away with some really monstrous actions. Demanding that Hollywood clean itself up of people like Weinstein, Polanski, and Spacey is one thing - and should happen due to the current stagnation in the industry - but okaying vigilante justice towards other people or going all big-damn-heroes just to "save the city" only to destroy everything around you is another. The Greater Good is still good - pedophiles, especially those who view themselves as another minority group, are not really that good - but the praxis is all messed up. This is where vigilante justice sits.
Simply being excited that McCain is dead, especially for leftists and the Vietnamese people, doesn't count as this perversion of the Greater Good - by all accounts, Maverick was not a good man and only became good when he realized that he was dying and wanted to make himself look good as a last-minute repair to his image - but justifying him being tortured to near-death by the Viet Cong due to his utterly monstrous and dumb-ass decision to bomb a light bulb factory (since the My Lai Massacre was the cool thing to reproduce apparently) isn't exactly the way to go about critique. However, that's not vigilante justice - hell, I don't even know if the light bulb factory bombing even took place. I can't find any source on the incident - the closest one I could find stated that he broke both his arms when his plane was shot down, thus sparing the Viet Cong that route and going relatively easy on him (though still rough). Either way, we shouldn't have gotten involved in Vietnam, we shouldn't have tried to turn it into America: Vietnamese Edition, we shouldn't have drafted all our teenagers in there, and we shouldn't have okayed a whole bunch of war crimes because "at least it whooped Charlie's ass." The Vietnam War was not only a mistake - it was us being bullies for the sake of making us look like the good guys if we got our way. Kinda like the Unkle Adams of wars.
No, vigilante justice is like that dude who went around killing pedophiles like he were Dexter Morgan or Jack the Ripper but without the intense misogyny. We see it quite a bit in stories about how pedophiles are treated, especially in jail - and we tend to revel in them because, well, why not live vicariously through what we don't want to do? It's the side effect to the 24-hour news cycle - not only do we get all these sick stories about all these sick people, we also get stories about sick people doing sick things to sick people. It's like Dirty Harry or Death Wish, but without the moral ambiguity and without realizing that Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey are fictional.
A lot of my favorite movies and TV episodes tend to be deconstructions of vigilante justice being used to ensure the Greater Good. Some of these movies and episodes aren't really well-liked - Irreversible can be seen as an ultra-exploitational film that put in an uncut rape scene that lasts for nine minutes just to make it even more extreme; Stranger Things' "The Lost Sister" is mostly seen as relatively weak for an Eleven-centric episode, focusing mostly on new characters who aren't developed in the same ways the friendly folks in Hawkins are AND mostly trying to get Eleven to better control her psionic abilities while also on that wild goose chase regarding who she actually is; The 'Burbs is a bit weak, depending on how you view Rick Ducommon's performance as Art Weingartner; and as mentioned earlier, Black Mirror's "White Bear" successfully brought "what if phones but too much" into critique regarding the show because of how phones are somewhat lazily integrated into the episode - but to me, whatever shortcomings they have they make up for them with their themes.
Irreversible is exploitational - par for the course in New French Extremity and pretty much every Gaspar Noé film ever - but for an exploitation film, it sure says a lot about how people view vigilante justice and taking matters into your own hands. By letting the increasingly violent actions of the film run in reverse, we analyze the effects and see the cause - the aforementioned rape scene; the somewhat shaky relationship between Alex, Marcus and Pierre - and we quickly realize that all of those violent and problematic actions we saw at the beginning (the fire extinguisher beating; the assault of a trans woman sex worker just to get her to identify La Tenia; Marcus beating up a taxi driver because he's not driving to The Rectum fast enough) are Marcus trying to play judge, jury and executioner and be the guy who delivers La Tenia to justice. Why let him be tried by people who are impartial when he could easily be killed? Turns out he's not - La Tenia lives another day. And now that Marcus and Pierre have outed themselves as ultra-violent men who broke into a gay nightclub and beat a random dude to death with a fire extinguisher, any case against La Tenia (if there is one, depending on whether or not Alex wakes up from her coma AND if she has enough cognition to identity the man who raped her) is a lost cause. Rather than let law enforcement do their damn job, Marcus and Pierre play big damn heroes, murder the wrong guy (even if he did try to assault Marcus), and get themselves criminal records in the process.
You see what vigilantism does?
"The Lost Sister" is one of the weirdest episodes in Stranger Things and, I admit, I can see why not a lot of people care much for it. It's such a shift in direction - the rest of the show is this pulpy '80s adventure that plays everything relatively straight, save for a few character subversions (mostly regarding Steve, the kind and loving Chad who turns into a father of four, and Billy, the toxic Chad who's revealed to be a queer man who's relentlessly bullied by his homophobic father and thus turns to bullying and racism because those are the only things he knows at this point), whereas "The Lost Sister" is effectively this treatise on how Eleven not only figures out that there are other psionics out there, she can't bring herself to be a vigilante for what's effectively a personal cause. Eleven reconnects with her old play buddy/sister at the Lab, Eight (hereby referred to as Kali), who's seen as a religious figure by her group of friends since her ability to create illusions has given them peace in their otherwise tumultuous lives. In exchange, Kali and the gang go to various places and kill seemingly random people (who barely recognize Kali) using a mix of the gang's expertise at weaponry and Kali's illusions. At first the viewer assumes that Kali is just another hooligan who escaped Hawkins Lab as well - wrist tattoo; psychic abilities; the nosebleed - but in "The Lost Sister" proper, Eleven finds out from Kali herself that those people that the latter was killing were all employees, former and current, of Hawkins Lab during the time she was held there against her will. And, after quickly training Eleven to use her memories to efficiently drive her powers without needing downtime to eat subpar frozen waffles to restore her health (and giving her a "bitchin'" wardrobe), Kali invites her on their next mission: to kill the man who was responsible for delivering the electric shocks that sent her mom into a catatonic state.
Just one problem: Eleven notices the small details, such as how the man has a family. Not only are they in photos lying around the house, they're also in the house and they're wondering who these people are and why they're demanding that the short-haired girl who doesn't say much shoot this dude in the head. Eleven even tries to justify potentially killing this man - "you hurt Mama" - but she just can't. She can't kill somebody with a family. Otherwise, the vicious cycle continues - if Eleven shoots him or breaks his neck, the kids observing this will grow up to hate the psionics. And since Hawkins Lab is pretty close to being exposed, whether it's by Eleven finding more psionics or Murray publishing the real story behind what happened to Barb Holland, this will only cause more trouble. If there are psionics going around killing people associated with the Lab in some way, aren't they as bad as Dr. Brenner says they are? And wouldn't that fulfill Dr. Brenner's belief and dream that the psionics be merely rage-driven weapons for governments to use and abuse? Eleven can see this - she may not have the greatest understanding of how the outside world works, but she knows what's right and what's wrong. She understands how to actually fight for the Greater Good.
Not so much Kali, who's pissed that her sister let this guy off. She even tries to torment Eleven with an illusion of Dr. Brenner telling her that she's nothing more than a weapon, a freak of nature. But even as Eleven is tormented, she's still resilient in her belief that there's a better way to fight the injustices done against them without turning into spineless wimps that uphold the status quo or become murderous vigilantes who kill for the Greater Good. So, while Kali is pissed, she lets Eleven go to help the town of Hawkins. But wait - if Kali's illusion of Dr. Brenner is saying all of that stuff to Eleven, hasn't she effectively internalized what he's saying? She was also a victim. But whereas Eleven found friends who not only made her a better person, but openly embraced how unique she was, Kali more or less had to force people into being her friends while keeping that same self-loathing that Dr. Brenner placed inside her. She still sees herself as a mere weapon - she hasn't had the experience Eleven had with Benny, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Hopper, Joyce, and Will. Eleven knows she's more than just a biological spy - she is Jane. And Jane is a human being.
Kali's vigilantism has not only created a dangerous cult, but has turned her into the very person she says she isn't. Jane, on the other hand, sees through this lie and refuses to a kill a man who about killed her mother and was compliant with the abuses Dr. Brenner laid upon her.
You see what vigilantism does?
Chapter Two: The One Where I Get Around to Talking About the Human Cop Movie
Hot Fuzz is Edgar Wright's greatest statement as a filmmaker. Technically, it would be his love letter to music and the city of Atlanta Baby Driver, but Hot Fuzz felt like a thematically complete film. Despite being part two of three of the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy (or Cornetto Trilogy, depending on where you came in), Hot Fuzz feels like the film that really perfects the mix between full-on genre pastiche, parody, and pathos. Taking the form of a balls-to-the-wall Monster Energy Drink-fueled police action film, Hot Fuzz explores how the police can easily be corrupted by institutions that were always there and thus okay all of these exponentially evil actions because "it's for the Greater Good."
The Greater Good.
The Greater Good.
It's not really apparent - after all, on most viewings, the comic timing between Simon Pegg and about everybody else in the film creates non-stop laughs AND the increasingly brutal murders over what are revealed to be the pettiest reasons that anybody can be killed (like drinking underage or reporting your age incorrectly in the local newspaper nobody reads) pretty much distract you. In a way, it's like all that dancing in Childish Gambino's "We Live in a Society This is America" and how it distracts you from what exactly he's wearing, all the violence behind him, and what exactly that guy on the horse is supposed to be. But like "This is an Okay Song with a Really Good Music Video America," Hot Fuzz's little details and themes are loud enough to the point where if you notice them, you pretty much notice them for life. Kinda like that FedEx logo - at first it's just really close typography, but when you notice the arrow created with the E and the x, you can't unsee it.
About halfway through the film, after Sgt. Nicolas Angel gets attacked by Lurch the bagboy/assassin, he intercepts a call on a walkie telling Lurch to go to the church courtyard. Of course Angel follows the trail, thinking that he's found evidence that his arch-enemy Simon Skinner (proprietor of the local chain grocery store and may or may not be involved in a land grab) is knocking off everybody in the town. Of course Angel's already realized that there are multiple killers, but at most, it's just Skinner and Lurch who are involved. But with whom? Turns out it's the Neighborhood Watch Alliance, all of the local business owners who've come together and not only talk about local town news, but also carry out all these murder for, as I mentioned earlier, petty and insignificant reasons. Angel, at first, views this as just business owners just being business owners - punishing people for no good reason other than to feel powerful - only to be confronted with Sgt. Frank Butterman, his boss and his good friend Danny's father. Sgt. Buttterman admits to turning the N.W.A. into a murderous lot - but why?
Thankfully, we get a backstory: the Buttermans were always heavily involved with town affairs. Frank's wife (and Danny's mom) Irene was big into beautifying the town of Sandford, whereas Frank saw himself as an upstanding man who saw the law as a pure concept that can only be used to protect everyone, especially the less fortunate. This all came to head with a newly-formed contest: The Village of the Year Contest. Suddenly, as Frank infamously put it:
"On the evening of the judicator's arrival some travels moved in around the park and before you could say 'gypsy scum,' we were knee-deep in dog muck, thieving kids, and crusty jugglers."
The village of Sandford lost the title that year. Because of this, according to Frank, Irene "lost her mind" and drove her car into a gorge outside town. Since then, Frank has used the N.W.A. as a de facto law enforcement agency, cleaning up any impurity in his eyes, just to ensure that his village gets some stupid award. So, after telling Angel of all of this, he decides to try to kill the guy himself. Angel runs off and ends up crashing head-first into a series of catacombs full of skeletons and all the people he's arrested throughout the film.
And who are the first of the dead he notices? The people in the caravan that, according to Frank, doomed the village of Sandford into being a less-than-perfect town, complete with their dogs and their kids.
And why a caravan? Well, based on that quote and the fact that the reader might've watched Snatch at least one time in their life AND the fact that there's a certain group of people known for their nomadism that are seen as literally the worst thing ever in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, AND the fact that these people are still referred to by their slur as opposed by their actual ethnic name AND the fact that people still harbor a lot of prejudice against these people for no good reason because "I knew so-and-so who was a [insert slur here] he was gonna remodel my friend's house but he got his friends to do a half-assed job and stole the money."
Frank started a vigilantism crusade because of his racism towards the Romani people.
Need I repeat: Sgt. Frank Butterman, who until this point in the film had been seen as a way-too-kind father who designates every obviously gruesome murder as an "accident" to further coddle his already-desensitized son due to his wife's death, has linked his racism with his wife's suicide and created a backstory in which she was wronged by the Romani people (who are constantly mistreated in Europe and the Americas - and still referred to as "g*psy" because nobody wants to humanize them) who had the gall to move into his village during the final round of judging for some stupid meaningless competition because they found a perfect home for once, thus ensuring that they had to die because he didn't understand NOR DID HE CARE TO KNOW WHAT HIS WIFE WAS GOING THROUGH TO LEAD HER TO COMMIT SUICIDE.
Granted that caravan culture also has its association with Irish Travellers, themselves another ethnic group long discriminated over their nomadic lifestyle and their disconnection from the mainstream (which of course is a byproduct of discrimination - a culture in relative isolation despite being so close to us) and a good candidate for the first victims of Sgt. Butterman's reign of terror, but reminder that Sgt. Butterman specifically uses "g*psy" to refer to this specific caravan and the people that came with them. He uses stereotypes associated mostly with the Romani people - their artistic proclivities ("crusty jugglers"), their apparent-if-mostly-anecdotal-at-best penchant for thievery ("thieving kids"), and their love of wild animals ("dog muck") - in order to paint a convenient enough portrait to pin Irene's death on. Why depict the Romani caravan as people finding a good home in Sandford when you could easily mold them to fit your narrative?
And they're the first skeletons in the catacombs Angel notices - and unlike most of the bodies he finds, like the annoying living statue mugging his death and his predecessor with the "GREAT BIG BUSHY BEARD," their deaths are not played for morbid laughs. The discovery of the Romani family's caravan in the catacombs is designed to be disturbing - not only does the discovery come shortly after Angel discovers that Frank is a madman with way too much power, it helps accentuate how utterly racist and bigoted he is. Why is this man running the police force? Why is he coddling them and his son Danny? Why is he making everybody blind to all of these murders?
Because, to him, the Romani people needed to die for the Greater Good. Racism had to continue for the Greater Good.
The Greater Good.
Sgt. Frank Butterman is probably the greatest villain in anything. All of our villains and all of the wrongs that we've been witness to over the past three millennia, from iternant carpenters being killed by mob rule to entire groups of people either sent out in wars or locked up in big death camps to expedite their extinction to people who are murdered over believing in a genuinely better world where everybody can live safely without resorting to ultra-nationalism and fascism, have been building up to what Edgar Wright probably saw as just a really bigoted sergeant who pretended to be a nice family man just so he could deliver those jokes with Timothy Dalton begging for ice cream after being stabbed in the chin. Great villains can come out of nowhere.
Don't get me wrong: villains like Naked "Big Punished Venom Boss" Snake, Adrian Veidt, the angry purple guy who genocided half an entire universe just so he could be in the right mood to get his stupid Mai Tai and watch the sunset, and Hans "Hans Gruber" Gruber are all amazing for different reasons. Their motivations range from selfish to charitable-but-in-a-really-messed-up-way. And not only that, they're also excellently written and have these tragic backstories that make us feel for them. Ozymandias is in a crapsack world that seems hellbent on destroying itself just to give America or Russia a lot of BDE. Big Boss is in a world that mistreats its soldiers and forces them to go on suicide missions and commit hundreds of war crimes just so America can get a lot of money from some old dudes who secretly control the world. Infinity War's Thanos came from a dying world and felt like he was ignored by stubborn people who refused to listen to what he thought was the only way to save the ones he loved. Hans just wants to be rich and wants to spite that cop who thinks he's John Wayne v2.0 with added profanity abilities. They're all great. The best.
But Sgt. Butterman is the villain who's closest to the ones we love. Okay, we've all met people like Hans Gruber - they're annoying, but we undo our watches and they often fall down Nakatomi Plaza so their brothers can get pissed off and make Bruce Willis wear signs spelling out the N-word over in Harlem. But Sgt. Frank Butterman - we've all experienced people like him. People who believe they're doing the right thing and yet they're merely upholding institutions we should've done away with from the beginning because it allows them to recontextualize the things that hurt them the most. It's pretty much par for the course in police departments and governments the world over - people who do all of the bad things, but only because they think they're fixing even worse things, only for us to clean up their mess and have to come to terms with the fact that maybe, just maybe, our presidents did more to make other countries terrified of us, thus ensuring the vicious cycle continues. It's like if Kali made an illusion of Dr. Brenner and told all of our government officials and law enforcement agencies that they were nothing more than thugs to make whatever country great again. And we bought in hook, line and sinker.
You see what vigilantism does?
The funny thing is that Angel, by being a person who believes the law should help everybody and not those with fat bank accounts or skin paler than a Neanderthal who's been using the Monolith as shade or people that happen to have beards and penises, ends up fighting back against Sgt. Butterman. Not only does Danny wake up to how monstrous his dad's actions are - he's utterly horrified (his zombified look at the church courtyard when he's pretending to be part of the N.W.A. so he can get Angel out safely - he's just realizing that his dad is the one ordering all of the deaths of all these people, rendering him emotionally numb), not to mention ready to go full Johnny Utah on his dad's ass, Angel manages to convince the police (who aren't part of the N.W.A. but have been misled into doing their dirty work) to take the blinders off and actually fight for a fair law rather than glorified thuggery for the rich. And all while they get all the cool action scenes. They don't need to beat up people within an inch of their life, nor do they wantonly kill people - the only death is the last remaining N.W.A. member (the civilian liaison between the police and the N.W.A.) and that's entirely accidental/coincidental (a sea mine the police thought was defunct was actually live this entire time). They use teamwork and planning to sufficiently capture the people who've been destroying the town with their hidden bigotry while showing people that they can actually be better. Policing can be better than beating up a trans woman because she looks weird or pulling over a black dude fifteen times in the same day because he has a Fred Durst baseball cap on. Policing can help those in legitimate need. It can be better. Policing can be for the comrade by comrades.
But first we have to abolish our current way of policing. We need to redraft the whole thing.
"On the evening of the judicator's arrival some travels moved in around the park and before you could say 'gypsy scum,' we were knee-deep in dog muck, thieving kids, and crusty jugglers."
The village of Sandford lost the title that year. Because of this, according to Frank, Irene "lost her mind" and drove her car into a gorge outside town. Since then, Frank has used the N.W.A. as a de facto law enforcement agency, cleaning up any impurity in his eyes, just to ensure that his village gets some stupid award. So, after telling Angel of all of this, he decides to try to kill the guy himself. Angel runs off and ends up crashing head-first into a series of catacombs full of skeletons and all the people he's arrested throughout the film.
And who are the first of the dead he notices? The people in the caravan that, according to Frank, doomed the village of Sandford into being a less-than-perfect town, complete with their dogs and their kids.
And why a caravan? Well, based on that quote and the fact that the reader might've watched Snatch at least one time in their life AND the fact that there's a certain group of people known for their nomadism that are seen as literally the worst thing ever in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, AND the fact that these people are still referred to by their slur as opposed by their actual ethnic name AND the fact that people still harbor a lot of prejudice against these people for no good reason because "I knew so-and-so who was a [insert slur here] he was gonna remodel my friend's house but he got his friends to do a half-assed job and stole the money."
Frank started a vigilantism crusade because of his racism towards the Romani people.
Need I repeat: Sgt. Frank Butterman, who until this point in the film had been seen as a way-too-kind father who designates every obviously gruesome murder as an "accident" to further coddle his already-desensitized son due to his wife's death, has linked his racism with his wife's suicide and created a backstory in which she was wronged by the Romani people (who are constantly mistreated in Europe and the Americas - and still referred to as "g*psy" because nobody wants to humanize them) who had the gall to move into his village during the final round of judging for some stupid meaningless competition because they found a perfect home for once, thus ensuring that they had to die because he didn't understand NOR DID HE CARE TO KNOW WHAT HIS WIFE WAS GOING THROUGH TO LEAD HER TO COMMIT SUICIDE.
Granted that caravan culture also has its association with Irish Travellers, themselves another ethnic group long discriminated over their nomadic lifestyle and their disconnection from the mainstream (which of course is a byproduct of discrimination - a culture in relative isolation despite being so close to us) and a good candidate for the first victims of Sgt. Butterman's reign of terror, but reminder that Sgt. Butterman specifically uses "g*psy" to refer to this specific caravan and the people that came with them. He uses stereotypes associated mostly with the Romani people - their artistic proclivities ("crusty jugglers"), their apparent-if-mostly-anecdotal-at-best penchant for thievery ("thieving kids"), and their love of wild animals ("dog muck") - in order to paint a convenient enough portrait to pin Irene's death on. Why depict the Romani caravan as people finding a good home in Sandford when you could easily mold them to fit your narrative?
And they're the first skeletons in the catacombs Angel notices - and unlike most of the bodies he finds, like the annoying living statue mugging his death and his predecessor with the "GREAT BIG BUSHY BEARD," their deaths are not played for morbid laughs. The discovery of the Romani family's caravan in the catacombs is designed to be disturbing - not only does the discovery come shortly after Angel discovers that Frank is a madman with way too much power, it helps accentuate how utterly racist and bigoted he is. Why is this man running the police force? Why is he coddling them and his son Danny? Why is he making everybody blind to all of these murders?
Because, to him, the Romani people needed to die for the Greater Good. Racism had to continue for the Greater Good.
The Greater Good.
Sgt. Frank Butterman is probably the greatest villain in anything. All of our villains and all of the wrongs that we've been witness to over the past three millennia, from iternant carpenters being killed by mob rule to entire groups of people either sent out in wars or locked up in big death camps to expedite their extinction to people who are murdered over believing in a genuinely better world where everybody can live safely without resorting to ultra-nationalism and fascism, have been building up to what Edgar Wright probably saw as just a really bigoted sergeant who pretended to be a nice family man just so he could deliver those jokes with Timothy Dalton begging for ice cream after being stabbed in the chin. Great villains can come out of nowhere.
Don't get me wrong: villains like Naked "Big Punished Venom Boss" Snake, Adrian Veidt, the angry purple guy who genocided half an entire universe just so he could be in the right mood to get his stupid Mai Tai and watch the sunset, and Hans "Hans Gruber" Gruber are all amazing for different reasons. Their motivations range from selfish to charitable-but-in-a-really-messed-up-way. And not only that, they're also excellently written and have these tragic backstories that make us feel for them. Ozymandias is in a crapsack world that seems hellbent on destroying itself just to give America or Russia a lot of BDE. Big Boss is in a world that mistreats its soldiers and forces them to go on suicide missions and commit hundreds of war crimes just so America can get a lot of money from some old dudes who secretly control the world. Infinity War's Thanos came from a dying world and felt like he was ignored by stubborn people who refused to listen to what he thought was the only way to save the ones he loved. Hans just wants to be rich and wants to spite that cop who thinks he's John Wayne v2.0 with added profanity abilities. They're all great. The best.
But Sgt. Butterman is the villain who's closest to the ones we love. Okay, we've all met people like Hans Gruber - they're annoying, but we undo our watches and they often fall down Nakatomi Plaza so their brothers can get pissed off and make Bruce Willis wear signs spelling out the N-word over in Harlem. But Sgt. Frank Butterman - we've all experienced people like him. People who believe they're doing the right thing and yet they're merely upholding institutions we should've done away with from the beginning because it allows them to recontextualize the things that hurt them the most. It's pretty much par for the course in police departments and governments the world over - people who do all of the bad things, but only because they think they're fixing even worse things, only for us to clean up their mess and have to come to terms with the fact that maybe, just maybe, our presidents did more to make other countries terrified of us, thus ensuring the vicious cycle continues. It's like if Kali made an illusion of Dr. Brenner and told all of our government officials and law enforcement agencies that they were nothing more than thugs to make whatever country great again. And we bought in hook, line and sinker.
You see what vigilantism does?
The funny thing is that Angel, by being a person who believes the law should help everybody and not those with fat bank accounts or skin paler than a Neanderthal who's been using the Monolith as shade or people that happen to have beards and penises, ends up fighting back against Sgt. Butterman. Not only does Danny wake up to how monstrous his dad's actions are - he's utterly horrified (his zombified look at the church courtyard when he's pretending to be part of the N.W.A. so he can get Angel out safely - he's just realizing that his dad is the one ordering all of the deaths of all these people, rendering him emotionally numb), not to mention ready to go full Johnny Utah on his dad's ass, Angel manages to convince the police (who aren't part of the N.W.A. but have been misled into doing their dirty work) to take the blinders off and actually fight for a fair law rather than glorified thuggery for the rich. And all while they get all the cool action scenes. They don't need to beat up people within an inch of their life, nor do they wantonly kill people - the only death is the last remaining N.W.A. member (the civilian liaison between the police and the N.W.A.) and that's entirely accidental/coincidental (a sea mine the police thought was defunct was actually live this entire time). They use teamwork and planning to sufficiently capture the people who've been destroying the town with their hidden bigotry while showing people that they can actually be better. Policing can be better than beating up a trans woman because she looks weird or pulling over a black dude fifteen times in the same day because he has a Fred Durst baseball cap on. Policing can help those in legitimate need. It can be better. Policing can be for the comrade by comrades.
But first we have to abolish our current way of policing. We need to redraft the whole thing.
Chapter Three: The One Where I Discuss the Furry Version of 48 Hrs But With That Shakira Song and Accidental Cop Apologetics
Zootopia, on the other hand, doesn't exactly know what message it wants to communicate. One minute, it wants to talk about the imperfections of police precincts (and how they okay a lot of really toxic beliefs by way of people with a lot of power who've aligned their bigotry with their motivations) - kinda like Hot Fuzz, but without the ultraviolence and the bad language words. The next minute, especially after the ousting of Mayor Lionheart and the appointment of Dawn Bellwether, the harried and overworked secretary, as replacement mayor, it wants to talk about the institutions that give bigoted people the power to enact on their own biases, making them popular and commonplace. Even furry Shakira can't get people to get along because of what Bellwether's ideologically feeding them.
Granted you could (and should) connect these themes together - after all, Hot Fuzz did the exact same thing with the funny over-sheltering father who's not funny once you realize he committed a plethora of hate crimes because his wife killed herself and rightfully gets beaten up by a swan he keeps making his son and that hotshot perfectionist cop from London chase so he can kill more people and buy more Ben & Jerry's for the entire precinct - but thanks to Zootopia wanting to get the kids in and out while also instilling within them the important things in life (you too can fall in love with the dumb bunny cop), its 108-minute runtime gets rid of that connection while its heavily-reworked story (which initially would've gone more in detail regarding how Zootopia treats "predators" and connected that not only with ZPD going along with Bellwether's Night Howler poisoning escapade, but also make Bellwether into that more of a malevolent being) keeps things a bit too much on the KISS principle. This gives the film the impression that all that's needed to reform law enforcement is to get rid of the really bad guy AND put more minorities in charge of precincts.
Remember: all Judy did was prove that Bellwether was the one poisoning random predators with Night Howler serum, thus making them act all feral and wild and therefore "unstable." She didn't prove anything regarding the powers that be - as far as the viewer is concerned, the only thing wrong with Zootopia (the reason why Judy's initially unaccepted by ZPD and relegated to playing Lovely Rita; the reason why Nick was bullied relentlessly by his fellow peers and thus saw crime as his only way out; the reason why predators are constantly mistreated in Zootopia despite prey being even worse and more calloused) is that sheep with the crack cocaine berries. Sure, she's mayor and sure, her biases are pretty clear (she's wary of Nick in scenes where she, Judy and Nick are together; she states to Judy that Zootopia is "90% prey" and thus needs protection against the 10% of predators despite predation being unnecessary due to everybody having omnivoric diets that consist of fish, bugs, and fruit; she doesn't see Judy's press conference as a gaffe but rather her doing everything correctly), but Zootopia makes the mistake of pinning the blame on Bellwether and her Machiavellian machinations. Not Bogo and his unwillingness to accept Judy as a legitimate officer, much less cooperate with the Night Howler cases at first until things start going really south. Not the internalized biases of people in Zootopia - though Judy's is pretty much elaborated on at all times (the fact that Stu implicitly taught Judy to be a bigot towards foxes, thus making her carry the fox spray at all times, thus not trusting Nick even after he's proved time and time again that he's trustworthy after the initial "it's called a hustle, sweetheart" thing) and she becomes a much better and caring person after checking her privilege and bigotry and actively trying to be better (i.e. not immediately coming back to the ZPD even after realizing she was wrong to Nick AND that the Night Howlers are merely just berries with psychoactive effects that Stu plants to keep people away from his crops AND that if Gideon, her childhood bully, can not only be a better person but actually own up to his mistakes, Judy can too).
That's what you get when you have only two major conflicts to really work from in the second and third acts: Judy vs. self and Judy vs. Bellwether, focusing mostly on the former. Also, that's what you get when you don't give Bellwether a backstory outside of what's kind of implied - similar position as Judy (underutilized person with lots of potential and raw talent who gets shafted despite going to the nth degree), but whereas Judy's experiences with Nick and Gideon made her see predators as people, Bellwether's experiences with the comically abusive (and that's pretty much all) Mayor Lionheart left her with the impression that predators are just really powerful people who don't deserve that power. How did she internalize her bigotry initially?
I had to create a headcanon just to give Bellwether more motivation. Because I wanted a better understanding on how to approach specific characters in media without turning them into "I'm crazy because I'm the minority" or leaving them as flat and generalized as possible so that the most amount of people can be insulted at said character, combined with the fact that "bellwether" originally referred to a castrated male sheep that was made leader of the flock ("bell" referring to the bell the leader would wear to designate them in a crowd; "wether" being an older term for a neutered sheep), I came up with this dumb story that Bellwether is a trans woman who, thanks to lots of childhood bullying and lack of acceptance regarding her being, was in the closet until her early to mid-20s before socially transitioning right before she moves to Zootopia and becomes a government employee in order to better the lives of people like her. Soon after, Mayor Lionheart comes into power and finds out by some means that Bellwether is not, in his eyes, a "real woman," thus always trying to refer to her being "different" either by relegating her to a converted janitor's closet despite being a secretary to him AND using the term "Smellwether" to exclusively refer to her as if she doesn't "smell like a real woman sheep." Because of Lionheart's now recontextualized bullying (to add in themes of transmisogyny), Bellwether is driven into a dark depression by how the government won't let her prove herself, not to mention Lionheart making her feel incredibly dysphoric at all times to the point of it being a mental health hazard. This leads her to snap one day and believe that if she can't be happy, neither can the minorities in Zootopia, so she devotes her life to destroying their chance at being accepted into society. Even after taking power, she finds herself addicted to her own cause - she's become a vigilante to prove a point about something - and ends up trying to kill both Judy and Nick. When she states that "fear always works" in my headcanon, she's not stating that because it's the thing we know all government officials are thinking, but because she's speaking from experience. She was turned into a self-loathing vigilante by fear and she will use fear in order to scare Zootopia into understanding how she feels.
You see what vigilantism does?
But Bellwether is not that in the movie. I had to create an unnecessarily complex headcanon that was my first time coming up with a backstory for a trans villain that isn't just Lt. Einhorn from Ace Ventura: Why Do People Think These Films Are Funny? just to give some weight to the twist villain sheep. Of course that backstory itself is problematic - one: it doesn't exactly pass the Vito Russo test (Bellwether's villainy is somewhat linked to her headcanon status as an LGBT person) and two: it's about as bare-bones as I'd prefer my villains to be, which isn't exactly a good thing in the age of increased representation. I feel like I could've done better.
Otherwise, she's just a pretty weak villain. She's not given enough time to really prove her villainy and actually try to stop Judy and Nick any damn way she can - i.e. rather than only confront them at the museum, she's discovered earlier and thus goes on a wild goose chase, only then resulting in everything at the museum - but instead kept as the twist villain. She's kinda like a weaker Hans from Frozen. She's there for the twist and maybe a few hamfisted messages about how fear breeds control, like how Hans is a critique on love at first sight, but you could do better. With Hans, you could have him still try to kiss Anna, find out that it's not working as intended, and determine that it's not so much the kiss that can break the curse, but the fact that Anna is linked to Elsa. The person he fought to protect earlier he believes has to die just to save his love, locking Anna in so she won't intervene and accidentally kill herself - and Anna realizes that he's going to kill her because he doesn't understand. He doesn't know that Anna's not in love with him anymore.
But Disney thought that was too complex and directly dealt with his character in an organic way, so Hans the bad twist villain we got.
But Bellwether is not that in the movie. I had to create an unnecessarily complex headcanon that was my first time coming up with a backstory for a trans villain that isn't just Lt. Einhorn from Ace Ventura: Why Do People Think These Films Are Funny? just to give some weight to the twist villain sheep. Of course that backstory itself is problematic - one: it doesn't exactly pass the Vito Russo test (Bellwether's villainy is somewhat linked to her headcanon status as an LGBT person) and two: it's about as bare-bones as I'd prefer my villains to be, which isn't exactly a good thing in the age of increased representation. I feel like I could've done better.
Otherwise, she's just a pretty weak villain. She's not given enough time to really prove her villainy and actually try to stop Judy and Nick any damn way she can - i.e. rather than only confront them at the museum, she's discovered earlier and thus goes on a wild goose chase, only then resulting in everything at the museum - but instead kept as the twist villain. She's kinda like a weaker Hans from Frozen. She's there for the twist and maybe a few hamfisted messages about how fear breeds control, like how Hans is a critique on love at first sight, but you could do better. With Hans, you could have him still try to kiss Anna, find out that it's not working as intended, and determine that it's not so much the kiss that can break the curse, but the fact that Anna is linked to Elsa. The person he fought to protect earlier he believes has to die just to save his love, locking Anna in so she won't intervene and accidentally kill herself - and Anna realizes that he's going to kill her because he doesn't understand. He doesn't know that Anna's not in love with him anymore.
But Disney thought that was too complex and directly dealt with his character in an organic way, so Hans the bad twist villain we got.
Similarly, you could do much better with Bellwether and have her actually control the ZPD, kinda like how Frank, through the N.W.A., controls the Sandford Police Department. Again, really hit hard that "fear breeds control - and fear always works" message. However, since Disney makes films for kids and we live in a world where Watership Down is considered adult animation despite it being based off a children's book and was intended to be a film for families to watch together, all that complexity behind Bellwether is thrown out the window and we instead get a Zootopia where the cops may be boneheaded, but they did no wrong.
Mark Fuhrman was boneheaded. His involvement with the OJ Simpson case, especially in the wake of the Battle of Los Angeles and the fact that OJ's legal team appointed Johnnie Cochran (who had experience in cases regarding race as a major issue), derailed the prosecution so badly that a person that even most of the jury believed wasn't exactly innocent didn't want to indict him mostly because that would mean that it would prematurely rehabilitate the image of the LAPD without them having earned it. Also, the dude's an unapologetic racist.
The cops that beat up Rodney King were boneheaded.
The cops that thought it'd be great to choke Freddie Gray to death were boneheaded.
The cop that shot Tamir Rice over a toy gun with the tip popped off was boneheaded.
The institution is so boneheaded that it revels in it. It doesn't so much punish the cops as much as temporarily take them off the force or give them a good premature retirement with a payday. It's like there's no consequence for screwing the pooch if you're protected by the badge. There's a reason why "abolish the police" and "ACAB" are catchy slogans now - all the manipulation of the system by outside parties, namely rich people trying to protect themselves from any sort of punishment AND white supremacist organizations trying to find the details on some person they want to humiliate, has left the institution beyond saving in its current form. No amount of Nick Wildes and Judy Hoppses are going to fix the institution outside of giving it slightly better p.r. - and in the age where people doubt those stories where somebody tells somebody off in detail because we've all heard them in copypastas and the God's Not Dead trilogy, p.r. doesn't cut the mustard anymore. As much as "Zootopia is cop propaganda" is a terrible take and tries to act as a denouncement of a movie that wants to say so much more but couldn't due to corporate meddling, it's a meme for a reason.
I still think it's good, but I acknowledge that Hot Fuzz does a much better job promoting a better way of fixing the police than just slapping a Band-Aid over the area and not doing something about the institution leading to people like Bellwether easily taking the reins.
Mark Fuhrman was boneheaded. His involvement with the OJ Simpson case, especially in the wake of the Battle of Los Angeles and the fact that OJ's legal team appointed Johnnie Cochran (who had experience in cases regarding race as a major issue), derailed the prosecution so badly that a person that even most of the jury believed wasn't exactly innocent didn't want to indict him mostly because that would mean that it would prematurely rehabilitate the image of the LAPD without them having earned it. Also, the dude's an unapologetic racist.
The cops that beat up Rodney King were boneheaded.
The cops that thought it'd be great to choke Freddie Gray to death were boneheaded.
The cop that shot Tamir Rice over a toy gun with the tip popped off was boneheaded.
The institution is so boneheaded that it revels in it. It doesn't so much punish the cops as much as temporarily take them off the force or give them a good premature retirement with a payday. It's like there's no consequence for screwing the pooch if you're protected by the badge. There's a reason why "abolish the police" and "ACAB" are catchy slogans now - all the manipulation of the system by outside parties, namely rich people trying to protect themselves from any sort of punishment AND white supremacist organizations trying to find the details on some person they want to humiliate, has left the institution beyond saving in its current form. No amount of Nick Wildes and Judy Hoppses are going to fix the institution outside of giving it slightly better p.r. - and in the age where people doubt those stories where somebody tells somebody off in detail because we've all heard them in copypastas and the God's Not Dead trilogy, p.r. doesn't cut the mustard anymore. As much as "Zootopia is cop propaganda" is a terrible take and tries to act as a denouncement of a movie that wants to say so much more but couldn't due to corporate meddling, it's a meme for a reason.
I still think it's good, but I acknowledge that Hot Fuzz does a much better job promoting a better way of fixing the police than just slapping a Band-Aid over the area and not doing something about the institution leading to people like Bellwether easily taking the reins.
Chapter Four: The One Where I Clumsily State Out My Point
There's this scene in one of my all-time favorite films - this childhood favorite that I noticed on my grandfather's VHS shelf and only watched because it had a cool if really dated commercial for the then-new Universal Studios Florida - the sadly underrated The 'Burbs by Joe Dante, one of cinema's underappreciated artists, where Ray (Tom Hanks) and Art (Rick Ducommon) successfully, if by accident, blow up the Klopek house. All throughout the movie, we're given this air of mystique regarding the Klopeks and their sudden arrival, only to be subverted at every turn: they spent an entire day moving their wares in; they mostly keep to themselves, being German neighbors in an otherwise WASPy neighborhood, their traditions are their traditions (suck it down), and they don't really get attached to their houses due to Dr. Klopek always being on the move thanks to him being the field of pathology (and being in high demand). And of course, since we're outsiders looking in, Dana Olsen's script and Joe's direction both go with the direction of horror-comedy with Hitchcockian elements - because what else is scarier to a WASP family than obvious foreigners who go from town to town moving in? And when "strange things" happen around the neighborhood - notes being returned, a neighbor being out without his pet - Ray, Art, and Vietnam War veteran/"arms dealer" Rumsfield (Bruce Dern) investigate at full force, hoping to find some leads regarding a suspiciously human bone found in the backyard of the Klopek house.
After digging the backyard for ages, Ray and Art check the basement and find that their furnace is unnecessarily well-equipped for a middle-America home heating device - it has temperatures that go up to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Rather than check the inside of the furnace, Ray and Art do the same thing that they did in the backyard: they did up the floor. Ray hits the gas line for the furnace and the house blows up...just as the Klopeks get back from a visit with the local college dean regarding a transfer. Ray comes out, burned and in a daze, only to see Art and Rumsfield trying to convince the detectives that the house was blown up due to probable cause (the exhumation of human remains) - and he immediately snaps at them for destroying the lives of the new neighbors all because they acted different.
But rather than snapping directly at them, Ray snaps at us.
No, scratch that. Tom Hanks snaps at us.
No, scratch that. Dana Olsen and Joe Dante snap at us through Tom Hanks through Ray to Art and Rumsfield.
"It's not them, Art! It's us!"
A beat.
A beat.
"It's us."
What a great way to drop your anvil. We've normalized vigilantism that we've all tried to play the hero when it comes to the suspicious, the evil, the monstrous - and we end up biting off more than we can chew. In a lot of ways, we're no better than the people we claim to fight against - hell, we're even worse than they are because we try to hide it under the guise of being brave, helpful, and full of derring-do. We think we're playing the hero, but we're merely just La Tenia scouring the tunnels. We're Dr. Brenner, psychologically torturing psionics until they snap and do what he wants. We're Sgt. Butterman, cynically using the death of his wife to justify the deaths of innocent people (including minorities that are regularly murdered just for being minorities).
We're even Judy Hopps, pinning the blame on our actions to one singular person than the culture surrounding them. We create our own Bellwethers rather than try to fix/abolish the systems currently in place - because change is scary for us. Rather than pin how the indie music scene, especially subsections of both the emo and DIY scenes, normalizes sexual relationships between minors and adults, we pin the blame on Lou Diamond because they got caught. Rather than pin the blame on Hollywood regularly mistreating women and minorities, we pin the blame on Harvey Weinstein because he got caught. Rather than pin the blame on the comedy scene's unwelcoming nature to women and that general attitude, we just pin the blame on Louis C.K., Woody Allen, and Bill Cosby - and we call it a day. We got rid of the bad people - why do anything more?
At least Hannah Gadsby called bullshit on that in Nanette. Go watch it if you haven't - she's incredibly insightful and a good two-thirds of the show is funny despite what the detractors say. She makes a good point about how we tend to single out the person for either being really bad that we ignore the big picture (i.e. the issue) or being really good that we ignore what made them good (i.e. Vincent van Gogh painting as well as he did because he regularly took medication for his psychiatric disorders that made his perception of color that more intense) and instead show them as geniuses that descended from high. Rather than leave her point about Picasso's infamous misogyny - which I've known since I found out that his most famous paintings were just angular depictions of women Picasso would sleep with (even if they were young) - at just "he was a bad misogynist, Cubism is overrated," after all things she does to make Nanette even more uncomfortable/cathartic for the viewer (depending on who you are), she mentions that Picasso couldn't fight off his demons and that Cubism in comedy is kinda like something she's doing. Comedy from a different perspective - but rather than do the same-old-same-old with the "ha ha i'm laughing at myself i'm mocking myself i give you permission to laugh at my misery," why not cut out self-depreciation? It's even more passé than heroin at this point. Also, if you want any change, you have to recognize all the humanity in somebody.
I have to recognize that even though I doubt that Woody Allen molested Dylan Farrow due to the conflicting accounts, he has engaged in rather misogynistic activities over the past 30 years, especially trying to smack-talk Mia Farrow at every turn. Rather than maturely deal with a sex scandal that could destroy his career, he instead wanted to play dirty because he felt that Mia played him dirty. That doesn't make him sympathetic! Neither does his marriage to Soon-yi or his failed relationship with Mariel Hemingway make him sympathetic. I get it - he's an undiagnosed autistic - but Picasso was also depressed. Sgt. Frank Butterman was distraught and devastated at his wife's suicide. Dr. Martin Brenner was forced by the US government to engage in espionage activities immediately and couldn't leak out anything regarding the psionics (even to their parents). Ray Peterson and Art Weingartner were concerned about the well-being of their neighbor Walter. Dawn Bellwether was pushed down by everybody in society because she's "too meek." Lou Diamond had crippling gender dysphoria and had their band JANK blow up way too quickly after forming. Marcus and Pierre were distraught that the police had only dead-ends regarding the assault and possible murder of their friend. John McCain fought in a war nobody wanted to fight in, given orders that even he probably thought were malicious at best - and was seen as the Republican Party's go-to "maverick" for all their decisions.
But it doesn't justify anything they did. Vigilantism tries to justify it, but it cannot.
Let me repeat: it doesn't justify anything they did. At all. Bad people are still bad people - but they're still people in the end. People in need of more than just a slap on the wrist, but definitely not White Bear Justice Park, no. Nowhere near that level of callousness.
Vigilantes suck.
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