Introduction: Freedom and Vengeance at the Movies

I am already up against a world I never chose when I exercise my agency.

(Judith Butler, “Interview with Judith Butler”)¹

From the cowboy and the pioneer to the road-tripper and the rogue cop, the free and independent individual has long been one of America’s most compelling cultural and political icons. This storied figure is the embodiment of a sturdy vision of personal freedom that fortifies an American myth of individualism, a shared social theory that privileges the personal over the social and the chosen over the unchosen. As a central feature of the liberalism that suffuses American politics and culture, this strain of individualism forms a key part of common sense in the US.² Indeed, the identification of freedom with individualism has only grown with the extension of the market to more and more facets of cultural life.

Freedom, long a cornerstone principle of Western political thought, is among the most captivating and seductive ideas today. One hesitates to even qualify it as a specifically political concept given the efforts that politicians, businesses, and universities, among others throughout contemporary culture, expend in order to present themselves as bearers, protectors, or enablers of freedom. Freedom – specifically individual freedom (for there is virtually no other kind, it would seem) – is apparently so universally admirable and desirable that dissent from or even qualification of the very principle is rarely heard. In the United States in particular, as political theorist Mark Lilla has noted, freedom owes a great deal of its contemporary dominance to the successful sedimentation of two great revolutions of the last 50 years: the revolution in “private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use)” associated with the cultural and counter-cultural changes of the 1960s, and the revolution in “economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation)” associated with the Reagan admininstration and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.³

Among the ordinary, recurring tropes of the free individuality characteristic of the American myth of individualism are, for instance, the practice (or even just the desire) of casting off the past and starting a new life from scratch and the act of taking justice into one’s own hands. The myth of self-reliant individualism underpins these ideals of freedom and vengeance, two recurrent and powerful political ideas that animate many of the familiar representations of American individualism. These two ideas stand out, finding near continual validation and reinforcement in the cultural mainstream with movie after movie, year after year. The desire for freedom, whether from the past or from the constraints of family or tradition, is a familiar and (to many) comforting trope in a variety of US movie genres, from romantic comedies to animated features. Similarly, presumptions about the legitimacy of vengeance inform so many action–adventure movies and dramatic films that it can be difficult for filmmakers and moviegoers alike to avoid the revenge narrative – particularly in certain genres, such as Westerns and action movies. As freedom and vengeance are among the most familiar of character motivations in American movies, audiences may be forgiven for thinking that these motivations and their related principles are inscribed in the natural order of things. But of course images of freedom and vengeance are cultural constructions, that (re-)circulate throughout the film industry as well as the broader cultural atmosphere. What is at stake politically when it comes to freedom and vengeance on screen is a cherished but misleading understanding of the individual’s relation to society, politics, and culture.

One of the more troubling expressions of license informed by the ideal of individual freedom is vengeance. The all-too-prevalent theme of vengeance in American film also betrays a seductive but impossible assertion of individual sovereignty. The avenger presumes himself or herself justified in not only extinguishing the life of another but also in thinking (in true Lockean fashion) that he or she is upholding the social order rather than undermining it. Still, when we experience the loss of someone dear to us, the ideological fiction of our self-sufficient individualism is breached, and the dependence necessarily entailed in our subjectivity can come more fully into view. Movies that narratively deploy loss as an opportunity to explore the ways in which we are inescapably connected and vulnerable to others are few and far between. Instead, the vengeance ritually invoked in movies as a naturalized response to loss amounts to an effort to deny subjectivity, dependency, and vulnerability and reassert sovereignty and control over the unruly world of social relations. One of the films examined here, Mystic River,⁴ offers a slightly different perspective on this tendency.

The vision of sovereign individualism underlying the depictions of freedom and revenge in many contemporary movies is often so pure that it becomes compelling precisely because it is a fantasy of decontextualization and depoliticization. “The American cultural emphasis on the importance of individual belief and behavior, and of individual heroism and failure,” according to political theorist Wendy Brown, “is relentlessly depoliticizing.”⁵ Feature films that focus on individual characters and leave the social, economic, political, and/or historical context only barely sketched or suggested play a large role in reinforcing the naturalness of this individualistic emphasis. Most movies only lightly suggest the structuring social and political context in which characters find themselves and must act, thereby leaving the impression that characters, especially heroic protagonists, are free agents, that all their action is inner-directed and self-reliant. Leaving the context out of focus results in depoliticization insofar as conditions necessary for enabling action and sustaining life are not acknowledged, and thus cannot become the subject of political deliberation. Two films examined here, Wendy and Lucy ⁶ and Winter’s Bone,⁷ reject the normal decontextualization and instead manage to give a strong sense of the challenging economic context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

The familiar but fantastic construction of the sovereign individual has the effect of abstracting from the troubling realities of unchosen powers, relations, and determinations that not only restrict but also enable our lives. In other words, the freedom and revenge so often sought in contemporary film ignores and erases the unchosen relations and circumstances that cannot ordinarily be overlooked or willed away but must instead be negotiated. The work of such negotiation is too often left off the screen, or is actively excluded by the on-screen action. At the heart of this vision, in turn, is a character familiar to movie audiences: the sovereign individual who is master of his or her world, whether casting off old traditions in the name of freedom or avenging loss through acts of vigilantism in the name of justice. This attention to character over context meshes seamlessly with the individualism of America’s liberal common sense. “Liberal ideology at its most generic,” Brown notes, “always already eschews power and history in its articulation and comprehension of the social and the subject.”⁸ Subjectivity as I use the term here is another way of signifying the idea of the individual person, and rather than emphasizing freedom of choice, independence, and uniqueness, it puts the emphasis on those elements of culture, context, and condition that shape and influence individuals, making them in some sense subject to forces beyond individual control. In other words, whereas individualism connotes choice, subjectivity suggests an accounting for the unchosen – those influences that despite being not chosen, are still active and influential.

The practice of individual freedom in America has, of course, a longer history that stretches well beyond its representation in Hollywood film. Writing in the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville noted long ago that in the American mind freedom is understood as a property of individuals more than of collectives.⁹ He was also attuned to the interconnections between politics and culture, captured in his focus on mores, or “habits of the heart,” including “the different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits.”¹⁰ One of the mental habits among Americans most striking to Tocqueville was individualism, whereby proverbial self-made men “form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine their whole destiny is in their hands.”¹¹ Such individualistic habits of mind are still very powerful today, and find sustenance through a variety of cultural representations and forms, including films, wherein heroes/heroines appear as sovereign masters of their own destinies.

The connection between singular individuals and pure freedom also has a long history, for throughout much of the Western tradition of political thought freedom has been identified with sovereignty, for the individual subject as well as the State.¹² This identification has of late produced a seductive, all-too-compelling vision of freedom as choice. This is a freedom from all that would be considered unchosen: all that would inhibit, even influence, the full realization of the individual, thereby compromising the sovereign individual. Yet to be a subject and to be subject to unchosen influences and relations, as we all are, is to be essentially non-sovereign and inescapably dependent. When the unchosen inevitably impinges on sovereign individuals in many movies, these would-be “masters of the universe” often react with resentment and vengeance, fighting against the condition of subjectivity in an attempt to preserve their sense of invulnerability. As a recurring trope, for instance, many popular movies often present only a single scene of grieving the loss of a loved one before the hero/heroine musters the will to seek and the tools to achieve vengeance.

Whereas tradition and custom are often understood to be polar opposites of freedom and liberty, especially in the context of individualistic liberalism,¹³ flattering representations of individualistic freedom have become customary and traditional in American culture, having found expression in classic literature such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as well as archetypal films like High Noon and Superman, or basically any superhero movie. This independent individual is roundly celebrated for saying and doing whatever he or she wants to regardless of custom, constraint, or even law.¹⁴ What the American myth of individualism obscures, however, are the ways in which individuals are always already subjects, seeking independence in a world inescapably built on dependence and thus perpetually exercising their free choice in circumstances not of their own choosing. Despite the liberal common sense, which is reinforced by a movie culture that overwhelmingly focuses on decontextualized individual characters, persons are always already subject rather than sovereign, living precarious lives never fully under their control.

Freedom is rarely as free, unencumbered, or frictionless as our liberal common sense tells us it is, or as many movies suggest that it is through their focus on individual heroic or villainous characters. Since freedom is always exercised in a specific time and place, there is always friction and subjection interwoven with it. That is, freedom is always braided together with a certain given – you might say “unfree” or “unchosen” – context that is itself constituted by those elements of culture including history, language, institutions, and identity that precede and exceed us. It is within these multiply determined contexts that we pursue and exercise our freedom. Given that freedom is today popularly understood as choice (not unproblematically, but still popularly), we might call this given context “the unchosen,” the unchosen that sets the stage for choosing. Not only understanding but representing this inescapable amalgam of freedom and unfreedom, the twinned ideas of the chosen and the unchosen lead to a better appreciation of the nature of agency as more a conditioned negotiation than that of purely “free agency.”

Like the proverbial image of the “glass half full,” the familar talk of freedom and choice is but one optimistic way of framing our perception of contemporary social life, leaving out of the frame questions about freedom’s opposite and the conditions that make freedom possible. (Proverbially, the glass is simply half-full or half-empty, as no one ever asks about the quality of the water or the provenance of the glass). Philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek addressed the apparent hegemony of the language of freedom when, in the context of the Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011 onwards, he frequently voiced the sentiment that “we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”¹⁵ For Žižek, not only are we unfree, we also lack the language with which to grasp that unfreedom. Thus Žižek raises the often elided question of freedom’s relationship to its opposite unfreedom both at the level of language and in terms of social ontology. (When I say often elided, I mean that the social and cultural dimensions of our unfreedom receive short shrift. Conservatives, however, never tire of demonizing the government as a source of unfreedom.) Though Žižek speaks to contemporary conditions specifically, the idea behind unfreedom is perennial and has assumed many forms in literature and philosophy, from fate and fortune to structure and nature. Niccolò Machiavelli, in the penultimate chapter of The Prince, asserts that while fortune controls half of our actions, we are left to control the other half. In contrast, the myth of individualism paints a picture that over-inflates the portion in our control and severely underestimates that which is beyond our control.

Elaborating her conception of precarious life, theorist Judith Butler has also problematized the ontological view associated with liberal individualism, even echoing the linguistic–ontological connection evoked by Žižek. “[L]‌iberal norms presupposing an ontology of discrete identity,” Butler writes, “cannot yield the kinds of analytic vocabularies we need for thinking about global interdependency and the interlocking networks of power and position in contemporary life.”¹⁶ Thus, we might say that our ideas of about the reality of independent individuals are at odds with the fact of interdependent subjects situated within matrices of power. Further, as a matter of politics, both colloquial and theoretical, there is a need for language with which to apprehend the unfreedom and interdependence with which we live continually but which we have difficulty naming and taking seriously. What I am calling the unchosen invokes those elements of our social ontology that condition our choices and are not fully in our control. These include social relations, relations of power, forces of history, and cultural representations and tropes. These things not only precede us they also exceed us – i.e. they exceed our (individual) grasp. In order to de-centre the language and ontology of individualism, I will throughout this book employ instead the language of subjectivity in order to suggest a more contextual view of individuals that takes better account of the unchosen factors that make identity less than discrete. Put slightly differently, behind liberalism’s familiar idea of the free individual is an oppositional, zero-sum supposition about the relationship between freedom and power. According to this view, where power is, freedom is not, and vice versa, such that one is free when and where power does not interfere. In short, power can only be a threat to freedom. This view underpins the great mainstream of American politics and betrays the extent of America’s liberal lineage. (In addition, on this view, the only, or at least the most significant, source of threatening power is government; social structure and/or culture are perceived as threatening. John Stuart Mill in On Liberty is exemplary in this respect.) By contrast, the view of subjectivity that I am elaborating here draws on Michel Foucault’s understanding that freedom and power are coeval and overlapping, such that both power and freedom are always there. Speaking against the very assumption that power is only negative and the antithesis of freedom, Foucault says that although power is always there, “We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it. So what I’ve said does not mean that we are always trapped, but that we are always free” (emphasis original).¹⁷ Subjectivity as opposed to individualism, then, indicates freedom and power; freedom and unfreedom are always imbricated together.

Scholars of political theory and cultural studies have in recent years worked to reveal the limits of sovereign individualism and the ways in which subjects are constituted by, and dependent upon, powers and conditions that precede and exceed them.¹⁸ Among the more compelling of these efforts is Judith Butler’s explication of the idea of “precarious life.” Against the ontology of the liberal individual, Butler affirms that “we are, as it were, social beings from the start, dependent on what is outside ourselves, on others, on sustained and sustainable environments, and so are, in this sense, precarious.”¹⁹ In contrast to the predominant emphasis on independence and self-reliance so characteristic of American culture, Butler underlines the essential fact of our social dependence, insisting that we (as bodies especially) rely on social conditions and structures of various shapes and scales for our very existence. Furthermore, precisely because each of our lives is not entirely self-sufficient but sustained by norms, organizations, and institutions, we are dependent and precarious in fundamental and inescapable ways. This precariousness is not as celebrated, popularly and discursively, as independence, and thus too often it escapes our attention because of the dominance of the myth of the free individual. A cultural politics of subjectivity, however, can undercut the habitual power of that myth.

The term “individual” generally connotes freedom and chosen features of identity and action, whereas “subject” (as in subjectivity) suggests unfreedom and unchosen features of identity and action.²⁰ While “radical individualism” is often a target of communitarian, republican, and conservative criticism because it connotes a withdrawal from the commons and from public duties, my use of the term is differently inflected. My concern is not that a celebration or normalization of individualism produces selfishness and withdrawal but that it promotes a misunderstanding of the powers that produce individual subjects and structure their social contexts. While, for instance, withdrawal was in part Tocqueville’s concern, he also recognized that in the American context “individualism is based on misguided judgment rather than depraved feeling.”²¹ Critics often disapprove of radical individualism for excessively celebrating choice to the neglect of given communities and/or moral orders.²² While I share the concern with the overestimation of choice associated with liberal individualism, I have a very different reason and a different understanding of the unchosen context within which choice is exercised. Whereas communitarian conservatives are often concerned to protect and promote respect for the unchosen context of traditional morality, my interest is in highlighting the unchosen social, structural, and cultural contexts that shape not only individual choice but also individual subjects themselves.

The conceptual shift from viewing persons as individuals to seeing them as subjects, captured in the discursive move from “individual” to “subject,” necessitates a perspectival shift away from spotlighting personal independence to investigating social dependence. Such an account of the necessary relations between subjectivity and power yields a chastened vision of freedom as something other than sovereign. On this view, freedom is itself situated and precarious, demanding attention to conditions and social relations and requiring negotiation with powers that cannot simply be willed away. Yet because the ideology of liberal individualism remains so dominant and compelling in the popular imagination – and since this ideology continues as well to be sustained by so many movies – the struggle to grasp subjectivity continues. This effort finds surprising nourishment in the heart of popular culture: a select few mainstream feature films that dare to question and rework the inherited figures of freedom and vengeance.

A critical analysis of individualism and the associated sovereignty of choice intimates the need to not merely better appreciate the unchosen, structural context in which agency takes place but also to rethink agency itself as less free, more negotiated, and subject to some external determination. Agency is hardly as free as it is often imagined, but is instead situated and conditioned by social, political, historical, and cultural circumstances. Such conditioning means that agency can be better understood as a form of negotiation with the given, and that subjects can be better understood as acting in medias res than as having carte blanche.²³ That is to say, the idea of starting over, free of determinations of any kind, is simply a fantasy because we are always already subject to contexts and determinations that constructively shape our identities and actions. To put it directly: I do not have carte blanche, but must instead negotiate with the given, the unchosen that precedes and exceeds me. We cannot but be in the middle of things when it comes to culture and politics. Liberalism’s common-sense vision of freedom and individuality can be critiqued through an examination of freedom and vengeance, subjectivity and vulnerability in a select few contemporary films in order not only to make visible their individualistic assumptions but also to explore alternative frames.

Through an analysis of the cultural politics of radical individualism in film, I seek to contribute to the effort to re-politicize the individual whom liberalism and neoliberalism have depoliticized through their privileging of choice and de-emphasizing of unchosen contexts, relations, and structures. Though the individual in contemporary liberal capitalist society in some ways seems always already political insofar as he or she bears rights and enjoys social, economic, and political freedoms, this individual subject less often appears politicized, or apprehended as a political problem requiring naming and addressing. Common-sense liberalism depoliticizes the subject – situated in specific cultural contexts and norms as well as concrete relations of power – and presents instead a seductive picture of the individual – free, equal, rational, and able to consume. Such an image is a significant cultural achievement, a construction that naturalizes or ontologizes the free individual as independent of constraint. A cultural politics of subjectivity, by contrast, can defamiliarized and denaturalize the individualist ontology that informs/underpins reductive representations of freedom and vengeance on screen. The rights-based individualism of liberalism as well as the consumerist freedom of neoliberalism both contribute to the dominant representation of the free and independent individual, capable and worthy of the ultimate feature of dignity in today’s world – choice. And yet, individual agents are always formed and acting in and among unchosen structures over which they do not have full control. A cultural politics of subjectivity can use cultural texts to bring into view our dependence and the precarious character of life.

Analysing the cultural politics of the sovereign individual’s filmic representation helps to re-contextualize and re-politicize the way in which we understand the pursuit of freedom and vengeance. “Reading” films that not only contribute to this figure but also call it into question, this book seeks to make visible and challenge two all-too-familiar tropes: firstly, facile representations of freedom that do not account for the ways in which individual subjects are the products of unchosen powers; and secondly, the familiarity of murderous vengeance as motive for characters who ignore or seek dominance over the social relations in and through which we craft our lives. Through the lenses of political theory and cultural politics, we will examine how these contemporary films contribute to the writing and rewriting of these political concepts in public discourse, complicating the ordinary understanding of freedom, vengeance, and the sovereign individualism that too often informs them.

This book focuses on a group of contemporary US feature films that illuminate precarious lives – that is, films that shed light on the ways in which individual subjects are always already non-sovereign, dependent upon and acting in contexts not of their own choosing (whether they know it or not). In particular, we will look at two different kinds of film. On the one hand, we will consider Into the Wild ²⁴ and Mystic River, films in which protagonists infused with sovereign individualism’s common-sense vision of freedom and invulnerability struggle for independence and vengeance with devastating consequences. On the other hand, we will analyse The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,²⁵ Wendy and Lucy, and Winter’s Bone – films in which protagonists, well aware of their own precarious subjectivity, respond to circumstantial predicaments (the murder of a friend, the loss of economic security, threatened loss of the homestead) in ways that acknowledge the inescapability of subjectivity and precarious vulnerability, or the fact that the unchosen always impinges upon us.

Given that subjects are too often seeking independence in a world inescapably built on dependence, we will examine both the dangerous and depoliticizing effects of the aspiration to sovereign individual independence in recent cinema. At the same time, we will explore films that examine the situated negotiations of those subjects who acknowledge the unconquerable conditions on which they depend. Building upon recent work in both political theory and cultural studies that has expanded our understanding of the political beyond government and public opinion, this book makes a significant contribution to understanding in concrete visual terms what Wendy Brown calls “the varieties of social, economic, and political powers producing subjects and conditioning their thinking and actions.”²⁶ The precarious lives on film examined here illuminate some of the various in which subjects either deny or negotiate the unchosen powers constitutive of the world in which we live.

Approaching the Cultural Politics of Film

If you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear.

(Roger Ebert, “Reflections After 25 Years At the Movies”)²⁷

In the broadest sense, this book is about politics and movies. But note that it is not about political movies, at least not in the most ordinary sense of the word “political.” Films such as Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln are prototypical “political movies” insofar as their subject matter directly concerns politics and political institutions in the most commonplace sense of what politics is and where it takes place. They are, however, in a sense too easily recognizable as “political,” and as such they reinforce a restricted idea of politics and of how power circulates and functions in contemporary society. To be more precise, then, I am concerned here with politics and movies as situated in the matrix of culture – that is, what we will call the cultural politics of movies. The approach to movies and politics employed here is rooted in the intersection of cultural studies and political theory. From these two fields of study, I derive two guiding insights: one, that politics is not confined to the halls of government and ordinary political debate; and two, that movies can do important cultural work to politicize and/or depoliticize issues and ideas, identities, and discourses. These two insights are fundamentally related, two sides of the same coin if you will: the cultural character of politics and the political character of culture.

One pillar of misleading conventional wisdom about politics concerns the very basic sense of what politics is and where it happens. There exists a long-standing tendency among citizens and scholars of politics alike easily and rigorously to demarcate politics as specific to political campaigns and government, even though such delimitation misunderstands the fluidity and porousness of politics and its embeddedness in culture – particularly in democratic societies. While scholars working in the field of cultural studies have long recognized popular culture as a political space, many political scientists and political theorists have been surprisingly reluctant to affirm and attend to the cultural character of politics, instead treating culture as a variable, either “independent” or “dependent,” abstracted from the rich texture of social context and endowed with explanatory power.²⁸ Such scholars seem to want to hold fast to the notion that politics is autonomous rather than situated in, and affected by, culture.

Consider, by contrast, the way in which ideas, idioms, and images employed in political debate do not necessarily originate there, but can travel and filter in from culture at large, carrying many layers of meaning and harboring multiple avenues for connection. One of the more memorable examples of this kind of migration in American politics is the figure of a former Hollywood actor later elected president, Ronald Reagan. He himself was remarkable evidence of the mutually constitutive relationship of politics and culture.²⁹ Reagan used his actor training to good effect throughout his political career. Recall, for instance, his rhetorical appropriation of the motto of one of the most famous movie vigilantes. Speaking at the White House to members of the American Business Conference, Reagan said, “I have only one thing to say to the tax-raisers, go ahead – make my day.”³⁰ Reagan’s use of a popular movie hero’s signature phrase highlights the porous border between politics and culture. Like many political statements before and after, such a performance activates a whole complex of images, meanings, and associations, from the masculine toughness of Westerns to the urban vigilantism of 1970s exploitation films. Reagan’s appropriation was politically efficacious not only in working directly to demonstrate his resolve to keep taxes low, but also in reinforcing indirectly the legitimacy of rogue-cop vigilantism as well as the racism and sexism that fuelled it. Political scientist Michael Rogin, recalling the context in which Clint Eastwood’s character “Dirty” Harry Callahan utters the famous line, notes that the effect of the line is that Dirty Harry is “daring a black man to murder a woman, in other words, so that Dirty Harry can kill the black.” In short, Reagan appropriates a performance of masculinity in which “the lives he proves his toughness by endangering are female and black, not his own.”³¹

The rhetoric, ideas, and discourses that we use every day to describe ourselves, the world, and our place in it are not isolated from what we ordinarily understand as politics. Rather, they are always circulating in and across domains, crossing over from one to another and back again. The conventional and narrow idea of politics – again, held by many ordinary citizens as well as political scientists – separates politics not only conceptually but actually from culture,³² narrowing it to mere electioneering and governing without attending to the cultural environment that not only is constituted by the subjects and institutions doing the work of electioneering and governing but also in fact constitutes those very subjects and institutions. Understanding politics as always situated within culture opens up politics beyond governing to encompass a much broader set of activities and ideas, practices and discourses, and policies and meanings that impact subjects in and out of the spheres of government and campaigns.

While many political scientists have at best downplayed the role of culture in political life and at worst ignored the necessary and constitutive relationship between politics and culture, others, particularly political theorists, have illuminated the close relationship of culture and politics and worked against the perceived autonomy of politics in order to bring about an expanded understanding of the political and its necessary relationship to culture. They have worked to reshape the meanings associated with phrases such as “political culture” and “cultural politics.” Contrary to the received wisdom in political science, political theorist Anne Norton argues for “understanding the political as an aspect of culture, and culture as the field in which politics is conceived and enacted.”³³ Given that culture and politics are inescapably interrelated, politics cannot but take place in culture, and culture is itself always political and has the potential to become contested.

In this view, culture is understood not in the familiar but limited sense as the arts or even as a particular set of customs, but rather in the larger, yet still ordinary, sense of a “whole way of life”³⁴ or as a matrix of meanings and practices, as well as texts.³⁵ Apprehending culture as a matrix aids in expanding our view of politics and power by grasping their constitution in culture. “The idea of culture as a matrix,” writes Norton, “directs us to look at culture not only as a field or as a network but also as a medium – the medium in which we are cultured.”³⁶ The approach to film that I employ here starts simply from the idea that movies are part of the matrix of culture that includes politics as well. When we understand this relationship between politics and culture, we can see that other films may be just as political as familiar “political movies,” but differently so. The question for political analysis then becomes what kind of intervention in cultural politics can this or that film be interpreted as making, and in what context(s). “Cultural politics, like democratic politics more generally,” argues political theorist Samuel Chambers, “emerges in unexpected, unpredictable, and uncontrollable ways. The job of those who study politics ought not be the vain effort to predict those occurrences, but the attempt to read and perhaps rewrite”³⁷ the cultural meanings, tropes, images, and discourses that arise in the medium of culture. To a greater or lesser extent, films contribute to either reinforcing or undermining (sometimes both, in different ways) the common sense of our times as constituted through the words and images that we use to talk about and represent the world that we hold in common.

As the boundaries of the political are more permeable than is usually understood, Chambers argues that “[t]‌here can never be a thing called culture that is hermetically sealed off from a thing called politics. Cultural politics is all there is³⁸ (emphasis in original). If politics is necessarily in and of culture, then in studying cultural politics we investigate, among other things, (a) the role that cultural texts and practices play in (re)producing and circulating the stuff of politics – the ideas, the opinions, the issues, the biases, the interests, and so forth; and (b) the role that political ideas and political language play in culture, too, as they make their way explicitly or implicitly into film, television, novels, and other arts. Therefore, I want to examine movies as a site of cultural politics where images, ideas, and discourses circulate and compete for attention as they work to define and redefine our sense of how the world works and of our capacities within the world. Thus for me, investigating movies as a space of cultural politics means analysing how movies participate in the reproduction or interruption of social and political ideas and possibilities – specifically freedom, vengeance, subjectivity, and precariousness.

From this perspective, examining political movies through the lens of cultural politics presents an opportunity to abandon the sequestration of politics and to expand our sense of power, the public, and the political in order to better make sense of political stakes and connections throughout culture. As Chambers, again, argues, “to theorize cultural politics is to change the meaning of politics, to show that there is no such thing as ‘politics itself.’ ”³⁹ I theorize the cultural politics of freedom and vengeance through movies. Reading certain films effectively as texts of political theory, my argument is that these films have something significant to say about the central political concepts of freedom and vengeance, theorizing as they do the individualist subject of liberalism through the deployment of ideas and tropes of freedom and vengeance.

Many scholars working in the area of cultural studies over the last few decades have brought critical political attention to the whole expanse of contemporary culture, showing us that images and ideas collide, that discourses circulate, and that power is exercised throughout culture in ways large and small that contribute to how we make sense of the world. Movies are, of course, part of the broader cultural matrix, a matrix whose political dimensions leave it fluid and open to revision. While my approach takes its bearings from the work of political theorists who have unsettled the boundaries of the political in order to foreground the relationship between politics and culture, it also finds support in the work of cultural studies scholars who have helped to bring to light the ways in which movies and visual culture can be politically significant. Thus, I also want to push beyond limited views of movies, seeing them as “neither merely vehicles of a dominant ideology, nor pure and innocent entertainment,” as Douglas Kellner argues, but instead seeing them as “complex artifacts that embody social and political discourses”⁴⁰ reflective of the time. In particular, the subject here concerns the discourses of freedom and vengeance understood in light of the reality of precariousness and the limits of individualism. My analysis takes movies seriously as political interventions in these discourses, reading them through the lens of cultural politics in order to understand how they reflect and construct political desires, fears, and needs for and around freedom and vengeance. More than merely political ideas, or even ideals, freedom and vengeance circulate promiscuously through politics, culture, and society via images, representations, discourses, and practices.

If politics concerns our common life, then culture, including film, participates in the (re)production of our common sense – but this production is contested. “Film is the site of a contest of representations over what social reality will be perceived as being and indeed will be,” as Kellner and Michael Ryan claim in their outstanding study of politics and ideas in movies Camera Politica.⁴¹ The approach deployed here starts from that same premise and concentrates on how films can either fortify conventional, accepted ideas about the social and political world or undermine familiar notions about what is socially commendable and politically possible, thus either buttressing or eroding common sense. Films do this work through many avenues, including the stories they tell, the characters they set forth, their formal choices, and the modes of perception that they elicit. While formal politics stages the struggle over the government and legal ordering of our common life, movies feed into formal politics by accentuating or ridiculing, sanctioning or validating particular ideas, metaphors, and images about our common life. For example, from John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards of The Searchers and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry to Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills in the Taken series, Hollywood feature films routinely deploy murderous vengeance as an overriding character motivation, thereby repeatedly presenting violent retribution as the natural, accepted response to violent trauma. These characters participate in a long-running constellation of aspirations and agitations that brings together individualistic ideas about vengeance and freedom to inform the justice system itself.⁴² In the following chapters, I analyse some of those political ideas, images, and associations related to freedom and vengeance that work on our common sense.

Beyond the notion of apprehending film as a space of contested social representation, scholars working in cultural studies have also drawn attention to the way that movies bridge the personal and the political, thus influencing and shaping subjectivity. In particular, Henry Giroux has formulated an instructive approach to the cultural politics of film that resonates in many ways with my own approach. Giroux and I share an interest in bringing movies into broader public conversations about the world we live in today, especially through an attention to the politics of subjectivity as engaged by film. Investigating how movies participate in their social and political contexts in order to “both mirror and construct the interests, fears, longings, and anxieties” of their times,⁴³ Giroux appreciates that films are a cultural force in the dissemination and circulation of images, ideas, and identities that can have either interruptive or reproductive effects on subjects and discourses. Film, according to Giroux, “offers up subject positions, mobilizes desires, influences us unconsciously, and helps to construct the landscape of American culture.”⁴⁴ Bridging the personal, the social, and the political, movies exercise power in ways that demand critical analysis like any explicitly political or governmental power does, regardless of any formal distinction between civil society and government, or public and private power. Analysing and theorizing the cultural politics of film, as I do here, involves investigating how the “meanings that film produces align, reproduce, and interrupt broader sets of ideas, discourses, and social configurations at work in the larger society.”⁴⁵ Finally then, this book brings movies into conversation with political theory and cultural studies in order to open both the films and the theory up to broader public engagement around questions of freedom, vengeance, subjectivity, and precariousness.

JFK and Cultural Politics

Before bringing this introduction to a close, I would like to briefly discuss a “political film” that exhibits the double movement that characterizes my approach to the cultural politics of film – the double movement, that is, of situating politics in culture and of articulating movies to politics. While a film about the assassination of the 35th US president is obviously a political film in the most familiar sense, Oliver Stone’s JFK is an uncommonly political film. To be sure, it makes a political argument – indeed, a challenging, even radical, one about who killed the President – but JFK is and does more than this, not only because of its status as a film addressing politics but also because of the relationship of its form to its content. The way the film clothed its critical and historical politics in the narrative trappings of an investigative procedural and courtroom thriller was out of the ordinary for both movies and politics, as was the aestheticized form of political argument. JFK is thrilling and entertaining, even as it brings up for consideration the relationship between aesthetics and politics through its innovative aesthetic choices in cinematography and editing. The film’s seamless blending of actual and simulated/recreated historical footage with classical Hollywood film-making was new and distinctive, and for many journalists and critics responding at the time it represented a controversial and dangerous blurring of supposed partitions between “fact” and “fiction,” or “journalism” and “entertainment.” The debate around the film, as dominated by those determined to delegitimize or at least question the filmmaker and his work, was as fascinating and instructive as the film’s content, and an exemplary instance of the cultural politics of film.

In December of 1991, after months of negative press coverage, JFK was released in theatres across the United States and quickly began to accumulate box-office receipts that would eventually reach nearly $100 million in the US. As the number of JFK viewers grew, so did the controversy over the movie, its director, its/his politics, its content, and its form. The movie was the target of strong media condemnation for months before and for months after its release. Indeed, the news media constructed this particular movie as an event meriting intense public discussion by making the film’s consumption and production the subject of public attention for months. That is to say, before the movie was even released, and hence before there was any reaction to it from the public at large, a number of articles had appeared warning of and/or condemning the movie’s conspiracy-theory aspects and historical revisionism.⁴⁶ As one scholar has noted, “[m]‌ajor newspapers approached JFK as front-page news,” such that the New York Times, for example, “deemed the [motion] picture worthy of editorials, a run of op-ed pieces, political columns, cartoons, dozens of letters to the editor, and two lengthy reviews.”⁴⁷

Although movies are not generally considered to be politically significant or even “political speech,” especially in the popular press, JFK became a political matter, and not merely because of the political character of its content (its argument for a conspiracy behind the death of the President). What was striking at the time was the development of an intensely fraught public discourse around the film, including an immense amount of scorn aimed at director Oliver Stone for questioning the received history of John Kennedy’s assassination. While Stone was able to make his historical and political argument with the film, many other voices in the media “tribunal” passed judgment as well, and their efforts to marginalize and discredit the film ended up framing many people’s perception of it. Crossing borders between politics and movies, this episode of cultural politics offered a glimpse of the politics of not just the sayable and the unsayable, but also of who can intervene in political and historical discourses.

By merely addressing the film and its director, the news media (not simply the movie reviewers and entertainment press) accorded Oliver Stone and his film a certain degree of political status not ordinarily given to movie directors and motion pictures. From the moment the first damning article appeared, Stone shot back at his critics, defending JFK against the charges. Nevertheless, the media commentators set the terms of the debate before the film was even released, and as a result Stone appeared always to be on the defensive, having to reply on terms he had not set. As the debate wore on for months and as a number of commentators began to question why the media reacted to JFK in the way it did, Stone received insightful support from critics on the left, but they were writing in publications, such as Z Magazine and the Nation, with much smaller circulations than the New York Times and Newsweek.

If we look at the issue through the lens of cultural politics, the very fact that the film became a matter of politics suggests the power of its challenge to received ideas about political speech and political speakers. The film’s provocation, as evidenced by the popular debate that it generated, illuminates the interrelated character of culture and politics, as the boundaries between fact and fiction, journalism and entertainment were alternately contested and defended. Troubling some of the conventional borders between news and entertainment, politics and movies, journalism and history via its form as well as its content, the film unsettled perceptions of the boundaries between politics and culture in ways that make apparent the ineluctable imbrication of politics and culture.

The debate around the film might be read simply as a question of content, of what happened in Dallas in November 1963, such that Stone’s challenge is the challenge of conspiracy against the official narrative of the Warren Commission, otherwise known as the “lone gunman” theory. Though the content as conveyed through the film’s formal structure is politically significant, I read the debate elicited by the film differently, for it reveals more than just a dispute over the “facts” of the event. It was in actuality a dispute over who can address politics and political history in a publicly prominent way. The film, and many responses to it from many quarters within the media and the academy, ended up raising questions of who can intervene in politics and how different media are constituted as legimate political speakers. One scholar remarked that JFK, like the novel and the newspaper before it, “recognizes the media as a terrain” of political and cultural struggle.⁴⁸ In other words, JFK and the debate that grew up around it are indicative of a kind of cultural politics that has only become more prominent over the ensuing years. For that reason, it bears scrutiny as we begin this book’s exploration of movies and cultural politics.

JFK helps to make visible the way in which politics is situated in culture, for the discourse spawned by the film attests to the contestation over which institutions and agents are the proper custodians of national history and arbiters of political discourse. On the one hand, a Hollywood director of a major motion picture intervened in the cultural and historical politics of the assassination and made a claim on power, while on the other hand, established figures in traditional journalism interpreted JFK as a threat to their authority as the “gatekeepers” of political debate and national history. Media scholar Barbie Zelizer writes in her book Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and the Shaping of Collective Memory that JFK “gave rise to extensive public discussion that made the workings of cultural authority an explicit topic of popular discourse and popular culture.”⁴⁹ Indeed, the whole episode was remarkable precisely because of the cultural contest over legitimacy of political speakers and speech. The fact that the film came to be positioned at the centre of a large public debate that carried on before, during, and after its release attests to the discursive character of cultural politics. “Cultural politics does not exist simpliciter,” as Samuel Chambers argues. “Rather, it is produced through a set of discontinuous discursive practices. This is certainly not to say that cultural politics somehow turns out to be a solely academic exercise. Activists, artists, and ‘ordinary’ people practise cultural politics every day.”⁵⁰ The range of political and cultural actors involved in this episode of cultural politics elicited by JFK bears out the film’s challenge to, and the journalists’ defence of, the notion that films are not legitimate interlocutors in political debate. The film and the debate around it, then, serve to corroborate the notion that politics is not carried out separately from culture and aesthetics but rather is contested in and constituted of culture and aesthetics. The very existence of the debate around the film argues for the cultural character of politics.

In addition to the cultural character of politics, JFK also proves valuable for illustrating the political character of culture, or how film as an aesthetic experience in itself can also be political and politicized. In addition to the way in which it contests cultural and political authority, as manifest in the debate, JFK as a filmic text also intervenes politically in two important and related ways. Firstly, it de-centres a traditionally singular and individual visual and narrative perspective, and instead offers multiple, unconventional subject positions for its audience; and secondly, it contests familiar ideas and representations of American politics around individualism and conspiracy.

The debate around JFK reveals that it was challenged and criticized because of its origin and status as a feature film, traditionally the preserve of “fiction” films (i.e. “entertainment”), and the implication was that this film was intruding on the terrain of political journalism. In the same vein, it was also criticized by journalists because of its distinctive mixture of form and content, specifically its jump-cut editing and continual juxtaposition of many different film stocks (not to mention its conspiracy-at-the-heart-of-American-government thesis). Criticisms of these aspects help, in turn, to reveal the political potential of film generally, as well as the political character of this film in particular.

JFK’s combination of conspiracy content and fractured imagery and editing worked together as a provocation to the conventional idea of political speech as reasoned, true, and primarily linguistic. Historiographical and literary theorist Hayden White summed up what seems to have troubled many traditional political journalists about this particular film’s intrusion into the political discourse: “Stone’s film seemed to blur the distinction between fact and fiction by treating an historical event as if there were no limits to what could legitimately be said about it, thereby bringing under question the very principle of objectivity as the basis for which one might discriminate between truth on the one side and myth, ideology, illusion, and lie on the other.”⁵¹ Clearly a film that does this would be threatening to a journalistic profession premised on impartiality and fidelity to “the facts,” and yet White situates the film’s provocation within the larger cultural dissolution of “the taboo against mixing fact with fiction, except in manifestly ‘imaginative’ discourse.”⁵² White’s assessment alludes as much to the film’s visual form and structure as to its content. One of the most distinctive and potent features of JFK’s politics is its look – whether it is thought to be politically troubling or aesthetically thrilling, or both.

Such a taboo has only further weakened in the years since JFK’s release, particularly with the rise of the internet, the ubiquity of video, and the growing prevalence of remix culture. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2013, film critic Bilge Ebiri argued that the movie still holds up over 20 years after its first release, particularly with respect to its form:

The real attraction in JFK was the film’s densely packed, kaleidoscopic whirr of mixed-media imagery – golden-hued cinematography cut with newsreel cut with fake newsreel cut with still shots cut with flashbacks cut with re-creations. Here was a stylistic breakthrough and a historical document all in one, a movie that wanted to change both cinema and the world.⁵³

Indeed, its style was part of the film’s political intervention, as the debate over it confirms. These and other cinematic techniques are part of the film’s effort to self-consciously style itself as political intervention. In a sense, it worked – for it ignited a startlingly large and intense public debate over many, many issues, including not only social and cultural questions about the relationships between (and among) movies and politics, movies and journalism, and movies and history, but also artistic and cinematic questions about spectatorship as well as the relationship between truth, fact and fiction, art and truth, and politics and myth making.

A central feature of many arguments against Stone’s JFK was the assertion of the manipulative power of motion pictures and the corresponding assumption of the vulnerability of younger audiences – an assumption that sees audience members (other than the purveyor of such an argument, of course) as passive receptors and empty containers into which images and ideas flow unimpeded, rather than as the engaged citizens and discerning jurors that the film tries to construct as its audience. Still, in such arguments, critics use this stance to justify their concern that the younger generation will be led by this movie to believe that there was a conspiratorial plot behind the assassination of President Kennedy.⁵⁴ In order to demonstrate this point, one journalist even went so far as to interview a number of youths who had seen the movie and believed that there was a conspiracy.⁵⁵

The troubling of the borders between journalism and fiction cited in the debate over Stone’s movie derives in large part from the film’s formal techniques. JFK’s distinctive mixture of visual imagery deprives viewers of the ability to take the film’s “grammar” for granted, as is usual in Hollywood fare. Instead, their viewing experience is unsettled with unconventional editing and multiple, shifting film formats that make up this protean visual form of political argument. The shuffling of footages and filmstocks in JFK not only fractures the look of the film but also has the effect of fracturing and de-centring the traditional movie-viewing subject, multiplying the subject positions and encouraging the audience to watch themselves as they watch the film. Beyond their vantage points as consumers of a political thriller and a courtroom drama, viewers of JFK are also positioned variously as citizens evaluating political speech, as protestors against the government and its official explanation, as television viewers of historical events, and finally as jurors in the conspiracy case brought by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. The film thus gives visual expression to the theoretical insight that identity is multiple, and this is a notion crucial to the very idea of the subject as distinguished from the notion of a unified individual. For whereas “subjects are manifold, containing constellations of identities,” as Anne Norton reminds us, “the concept of the individual, like the word itself, argues for a notion of the subject as indivisible, a single being.”⁵⁶ Though JFK has political aspirations, it does not limit itself to imagining its audience only as citizens. Rather, the many subject positions that the film invites its viewers to occupy serve as an argument for the multiplicity of the subject and the necessary intertwining of politics and culture in the matrix.

Finally, the film’s de-centring of the traditional movie-viewing subject and multiplication of subject positions also serve as an echo and amplification of the film’s narrative political argument for conspiracy. In addition to the contestation of a familiar idea about the unified individual via the film’s form, its story also contests familiar, explanatory representations of social and political life using the figure of conspiracy. Like the conspiracy films from the 1970s that “reverse[d]‌ the polarities of earlier political thrillers, which generally affirmed American institutions, by suggesting that the source of evil was those very institutions,”⁵⁷ JFK targets a particular nexus of institutions at the centre of American life as the source of danger. From its very first frames, the movie takes aim at “the military-industrial complex.” The phrase is, of course, a durable piece of American political discourse, coined by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, and JFK itself begins with video of Eisenhower’s televised address delivering his warning against this very complex: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex […] We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” Viewers of the film see Eisenhower caution them, for they are positioned as members of the American polity and viewing public. The video clip of the historic, televised address appears during the film’s opening credits and directly after an epigraph from Ella Wheeler Wilcox that states, “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.” The unusual combination, at least in terms of Hollywood classical style,⁵⁸ of an exhortatory epigraph with President Eisenhower’s grave admonition at the very outset of the film positions the audience as engaged readers and critical citizens, rather than simply passive moviegoers, and primes them to shift their thinking to the institutional and structural level of the complex and away from individual actors. That is to say, JFK frames itself in an unusual way.

There has long been a popular suspicion regarding the official “myth” of the Kennedy assassination that there was no conspiracy, predating not only JFK but even the Warren Commission’s report itself and its infamous “single bullet” and “lone gunman” theories regarding Lee Harvey Oswald. Since the release of the Warren Commission report, the number of distrustful Americans has only grown.⁵⁹ Much of the general populace continued to believe that there was a conspiracy behind the death of President Kennedy; polls before and after the release of JFK showed a significant measure of conspiracy suspicion. Consider, for example, these two, one taken before and one after the release of the film: (1) “A Washington Post survey in May 1991 revealed that 56 percent of the population believed in a conspiracy; only 19 percent agreed with the Warren Commission’s thesis”; (2) a February 1992 NBC poll reported that a mere 6 percent of those surveyed believed the Warren Commission.⁶⁰ The high-box office gross garnered by JFK may also be read as a sign of conspiracy’s “thinkable-ness” among the American public, if not a confirmation of their belief in it. When Stone’s movie was released in December 1991, it entered a public sphere where serious doubts about the notion of the absence of conspiracy in explanations of the assassination of President Kennedy had long been features of the terrain. These doubts are symptomatic of a widespread cynicism that has followed in the wake of the recent history of American political scandal, corruption, and conspiracy at the highest levels of government.

Given the contours of debate into which it intervenes, what is most striking to me politically and theoretically about JFK is the collision that it stages between two radically different perspectives on social reality: a familiar, individualistic apprehension of social and political reality as epitomized by the so-called “lone gunman theory” (as well as the “magic bullet theory” for that matter) and a more challenging, institutional-structural understanding of social and political reality as represented in the film’s central argument that the military-industrial complex was behind the murder of the President.

With respect to its explicitly political content, on one familiar reading, the film’s political force lies in the charge of conspiracy as a challenge to the “lone gunman theory.” But when the content is grasped in its connection with the introductory frame, the fractured visual form, and the de-centring of the subject, the charge of conspiracy takes on a different valence. The conspiracy critique begins to point toward the social and political forces that shape and influence persons, making them situated subjects rather than voluntaristic individuals. Reading the conspiracy in this film metaphorically – or more precisely, reading it as a synecdoche for the social and political structures within which subjects necessarily act, we can see that the opposition the film stages between the lone gunman theory and a conspiracy charge in a sense maps onto distinction between two different ways of understanding social and political phenomena or events: a reductivist, individualist explanation versus a complex, structural account of forces. In turn, this distinction echoes conceptually the distinction between the individual and the subject.

Beyond the political ordinary, then, what a look at JFK offers to a study of cultural politics is a revealing example of the intertwining of the political character of culture (film in particular) and the cultural character of politics. On the one hand, an examination of this particular film shows how movies are capable of political work – contesting representations of social reality and politicizing issues, institutions, and subject positions. On the other hand, the film and the debate that surrounded it afford us a view of how politics extends beyond the halls of government and the ordinary circuit of political debate, contesting presumptions about the mode and agency of “political speech.” JFK, together with the discourse spawned around it, testifies to the multi-layered character of cultural politics.