THE EMOTIONS OF REVENGE
The 2010 Tour de France will be remembered as much for cyclist mishaps and crashes among the riders as for exciting breakneck surges toward the final line. There was even an ungainly fistfight between two riders that served to demonstrate why these athletes depend mostly on their legs and should keep their fists solidly on the handlebars. And, of course, this was yet another year when Lance Armstrong had to swerve away from allegations that several of his earlier Tour de France triumphs may have been enhanced as much by illegal doping as by inhuman pedaling.
During Stage 15 of that year’s tour, however, which included a final climb through the Pyrenees, Andy Schleck, from Luxembourg, wearing the yellow jersey signifying that he was the tour leader, looked down from his seat and discovered that his chain had fallen off. The common courtesy in such instances is not to allow the leader of the race to lose time—or for the other riders to take advantage of his misfortune—due to a fall from his bicycle or an equipment failure. Usually, the riders wait until the leader hops back on his bike and resumes the race.
But Alberto Contador, the prior year’s tour winner and a personal friend of Schleck, was in second place, thirty-one seconds behind, when Schleck’s hands were about to be covered in grease. Contador decided to speed up just as his friend and main competition was slowing down and gained thirty-nine seconds to capture the lead, with Schleck falling to second place overall, eight seconds behind. Contador never surrendered the yellow jersey for the remainder of the tour, which he ultimately won by, ironically, thirty-nine seconds. (In 2012, Contador was stripped of his tour title because he had tested positive for a banned substance, a kind of just-deserts courtesy of the International Cycling Union.) The coincidence of the final times should have only deepened the wound that Schleck felt, but when the tour was finally over he was gracious in defeat. But that was not the case at the finish line of Stage 15.
Regardless of one’s appreciation of Tour de France etiquette and whether Contador’s sprint while Schleck fiddled with his chain was a breach of decorum rather than the mere luck of the roadway, no one could have faulted Schleck for speaking honestly about his feelings.
“I can tell you, my stomach is full of anger and I want to take my revenge,” Schleck said. “I will take my revenge.”1
Luxembourg may be at least one country where citizens speak honestly about vengeance without fear. Moreover, they apparently don’t feel the need to make fine distinctions when it comes to having their revenge. Schleck wanted everyone to know that he was justifiably angry about Stage 15 and that Contador’s insult would not go unanswered. The result was more than just a question of Schleck’s standing in the race; it was also his standing as a man. Yes, the Tour de France was at stake, but so, too, was his honor.
Even though cycling is a sport that depends on a clock and not a scoreboard, Schleck’s first impulse was to even the score. He lost thirty-nine seconds due to Contador’s brazen mad dash, and he wanted it back—or its equivalent: “thirty-nine seconds for thirty-nine seconds.” Given such a slight margin of victory, had Contador waited for Schleck to slip his chain back on, they might never have traded yellow jerseys and Schleck might have won his first Tour de France.
Nevertheless, at the conclusion of Stage 15, with feelings still raw and the spirit of sportsmanship shattered, Schleck was not a bitter, skinny hothead with massive legs. He was a man with justifiable reasons to feel anger and resentment toward a friend who scampered away from the scene of an accident for his own cynical advantage.
Anger, resentment, and revenge: all words that have a profound connection to justice—and the essential feeling that justice must been done—and yet they are widely regarded as the street talk of lunatics, the behavior of the mentally unstable, the kind of people in need of a Valium. We’ve heard it all before: no good comes from being angry; resentment can be its own prison; and revenge is an outdated artifact of primitive man.
As much as revenge is about justice, it is also about emotion. There can be no true feeling of justice without emotional satisfaction. They, too, are twinned. Justice cannot be separated from the public’s acceptance—in both a moral and emotional sense—that justice was, indeed, done. But since most governments do not allow feelings to be expressed within the institutional settings of a courtroom, true justice either never comes or is entirely wasted in the emotional wasteland of the law.
Robert C. Solomon understood this essential codependency between justice and emotion when he wrote, “To the dangers of vengeance unlimited it must be countered that if punishment no longer satisfies vengeance, if it ignores not only the rights but the emotional needs of the victims of crimes, then punishment no longer serves its primary purpose” (emphasis added).2
Human beings are deeply aware of when injustice has occurred and when payback is sorely owed. And victims have the moral right to demand satisfaction—in both material terms and with regard to the emotional benefits—even when it is the legal system itself that is the designated dispenser of justice. Revenge responds directly to the human needs of victims, and for all those who are mere witnesses to injustice, that order is restored. The community has its own emotional response to the actions of wrongdoers and an emotional investment in the cause and effect between wrongdoing and just deserts. But if these complicated emotional needs that arise from injustice are granted no admittance inside courtrooms and cannot be expressed through self-help, then where do they go—where should they go?
The ancient Greeks knew the harmful consequences of internalizing emotions that otherwise should be expressed—not simply for reasons of emotional catharsis but also because of moral correctness. Modern man is taught that anger and resentment are unhealthy emotions that reflect poorly on one’s character and judgment. And revenge surely should never become the instrument of that anger. The men and women of ancient Greece, however, possessed a far broader appreciation of what these emotions mean, where they come from, and what must be done to satisfy them.
Aristotle, in section 5 of book 4 of his Nicomachean Ethics, wrote about anger not as a vice but rather as a virtue. Indeed, those who don’t feel or express resentment in response to injustice, insult, and ill treatment are ultimately blameworthy themselves. Moral cowardice is not a thing to be proud of. Resentment is a perfectly natural response to moral injury. In fact, the anger that arises from dishonor can’t be ignored without risking further damage to moral character. What kind of a person doesn’t stand up for himself? Aristotle would no doubt have responded to the aphorism “don’t get mad, get even” by saying that human beings should be expected to experience both sensations—justifiable anger and the impulse to avenge.
Peter French points out that Aristotle, along with the Greek playwright Aeschylus, believed that anger can, at times, be a perfect expression of morality—not just in the eyes of the community but also in the soul of the person.3 Anger is unavoidable, and there is no other substitute for it. Indeed, anger and resentment are key components of human engineering. To fail to experience these sensations as a natural response to moral injury is a design flaw. There are occasions when people should be angry, when they are expected to be angry, when their failure to exhibit an appropriate measure of anger suggests a defect in personal character. Aristotle wrote, “The person who lets himself and his loved ones get trampled on and overlooks it seems like a slave.”
Remember Michael Dukakis, another Greek who lived twenty-five hundred years after Aristotle? Dukakis, whose parents were Greek immigrants, was born in America and became the longest serving governor of the state of Massachusetts. It’s not clear, however, how much Aristotle he had read along the way. Dukakis is best recalled as the 1988 presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket who lost the election to the first President George Bush. His campaign was not a model of either execution (his opposition to the death penalty didn’t help, either) or elocution. In fact, his campaign for the presidency never recovered after one of the presidential debates when he stumbled through this question: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis (his wife) were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
Dukakis, the governor of one of the most liberal states in the nation, replied, “No, I don’t, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”4 He took the bait and said what everyone had expected of him. He was a liberal, after all. And a lawyer, too, a profession where emotion is not supposed to affect the even keel of measured, almost mummified dispassion. Yes, he was the governor for all of Massachusetts. And he wanted to lead an entire nation. But he was asked a question that most people felt called on him to respond as a husband whose wife had been raped, not as a political leader. It was the most personal of questions, where the raw emotions of a devoted husband should have trumped any canned stump speech. The question was not a test of his leadership but of his humanity—his very manhood. The public responded negatively and Dukakis lost the election. The country didn’t wish to be led by a man who didn’t fully appreciate his moral duty as a husband. Where was his anger? How could he have responded so clinically, almost robotically? The people expected to hear moral outrage. Dukakis should have said that as a husband he would have wanted revenge—that his grief and anguish over his wife’s murder would have driven him mad with righteous indignation—but as a government official he was accountable to the people and the laws of the state.
Anger doesn’t necessarily lead to blind vengeance. One can be angry and decide not to take revenge. It may be too risky, or simply not worth the effort. But the anger itself still should be felt. Moreover, there is nothing blind about vengeance. Just because revenge is driven by emotion doesn’t mean that the avenger is unable to see what he is doing. Quite the opposite is true. With revenge comes moral clarity. Blindness comes not from the taking of revenge but from looking the other way in the face of injustice.
Anger as a precursor to revenge is the most familiar route to justice. Those who violate laws, break promises, cause harm, and commit crimes will ignite in each of us the sick feeling of injustice and the reciprocal urgency that justice must be done.
No one who has been victimized can rightly claim any sense of personal worth if he or she registers no reaction, no personal feelings of indignity. Yes, anger can be subordinated to restraint, but to feel nothing when outsiders are appalled is nothing to be proud of.
In speeding up the Pyrenees during the Tour de France, Contador not only took the lead, he rendered his friend Schleck low, leaving him behind in increments far more deflating than the loss of those thirty-nine seconds, as if had let the air out of the tires of Schleck’s soul.
In 1992, Lady Sally Graham-Moon was filled with resentment and scorn toward her husband, Sir Peter, when he left their home and moved in with his younger girlfriend. In retaliation she poured more than a gallon of white paint over his prized blue BMW, took a pair of scissors and removed the sleeves of each one of his thirty-two Savile Row suits, and gave away all the priceless wine he had stored in his wine cellar to their neighbors. As anyone who knows anything about the British upper class, the lords and quasi-royals of the United Kingdom are nothing if not decorous and emotionally self-contained. “I’m normally quite in control of my emotions,” she said at the time. “In fact I am quite shocked by what I have done.”5
Elin Nordegren, the ex-wife of Tiger Woods, is not the first woman in a professional golfer’s life who found a more interesting and original way to use a golf club. Brenna Cepelak, the former girlfriend of pro golfer, Nick Faldo, took a nine iron and hit a double bogey on his Porsche when he left her for the woman who would become his third wife.6
For the ancient Greeks, these retaliatory responses were expected. To do nothing is to send a message to the wrongdoer, and the general public, that the victim has no self-worth and will not marshal the internal resources necessary to reclaim his or her honor. Shattered dignity is not beyond repair, but no elevating and equalizing of dignity can occur without the personal satisfaction of revenge.
Anger and revenge are tied to one another in ways both symbolic and real, it is little wonder that neither is deemed to be socially acceptable behavior. In the extreme, angry people who are not already incarcerated are, instead, encouraged to take anger management courses. No such demands, however, are made on those who suppress their anger, show no emotion—the zombies among us—those who are still capable of causing harm by way of silence and indifference. Passive-aggressive people are not similarly obligated to curb their passivity. There is a dedicated deference to those who are bottled up and in control of their emotions. They are not tarred with the same cultural stigma that is routinely directed against those who default to anger and revenge. The passive are given a pass while the enraged are looked on as if they cannot comport themselves within civil society.
Aristotle and Aeschylus, of course, lived long before Christ. They never considered the salvational benefits that come to those who practice forgiveness. When in Rome do as the Romans do. The Greeks understood the world and the inner life of human beings in a particular way—anger is normal and revenge is expected. In the Western world, however, the motto seems to be: do as good Christians would do or, as Jesus actually said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matt. 7:12).
Does the Golden Rule apply to revenge? Shouldn’t victims be expected to retaliate in kind to another’s misdeeds? After all, those who do harm are, by their actions, announcing that this is how they wish to be treated. People who do to us what we would never do to them—when they act not with kindness and caring but with violence and disrespect—should expect reciprocal treatment. Christ articulated the path for a good Christian to follow. But not everyone is following the same Golden Rule. Many are doing onto others what they would never tolerate if directed toward them. Reciprocity, obviously, works both ways. But this principle of restraint—whether in turning the other cheek or in doing onto others as one would wish to be treated—is all upended when damage is done and retaliation is withheld. The moral universe collides against notions of Christian charity, resulting in lost honor and wounded pride.
In recognizing this paradox in Christian belief, Peter French wrote that “those that get angry when they or their family or community are attacked, harmed, insulted, treated with disrespect, and so on, and restrain themselves, do nothing in response, are moral failures, not, as Christians would have it, to be praised for ‘turning the other cheek.’”7
Anger and resentment is the default position that crystallizes in the aftermath of moral injury. To not experience those feelings is unnatural. And having such feelings makes the most moral sense. Forgiveness may be a virtue, but what is so virtuous about being trampled on repeatedly without delivering an appropriate response? Reputations are made equally of honor and cowardice. Forgiveness suppresses the emotional underpinnings and moral imperatives that are most alive in the face of injustice.
Which is why forgiveness is without virtue if it demonstrates to the world that the victim lacks self-respect. As law professor Jeffrie G. Murphy wrote, it is morally essential for victims not to be “doormats” for others because, “if I count morally as much as anyone else (as surely I do), a failure to resent moral injuries done to me is a failure to care about the moral value incarnate in my own person . . . and thus a failure to care about the very rules of morality.”8
Of course, conversely, to express righteous indignation over moral injury not only contradicts Christian teachings, it also goes against the canon of jurisprudence—the loaded cannon of the legal system—which, for hundreds of years, has blasted human beings for their revenge impulses, demanding that they respond to wrongs by going to their respective corners, cooling off, and then filing a criminal complaint or retaining a lawyer for a civil suit. And so for most people in the Western world, personal vengeance was not an option, and personal satisfaction was surrendered to the rule of law.
So have we, all this time, been cowardly wimps, morally stunted and underdeveloped, unable to stand up for ourselves and all too willing to look to the legal system to retaliate on our behalf—without any emotional involvement? As we recurringly failed in our revenge obligations—either because we were too afraid to do it ourselves or too eager to delegate the responsibility to a dispassionate third party—we salvaged the vicarious thrill of vengeance not by entering courtrooms but by reading novels and watching plays and movies. The suppressed revenge instinct is rather openly and unapologetically displayed in popular culture.
Revenge should have a life outside of aesthetics. Human beings take immense pleasure in cultural depictions of revenge, but their enjoyment is always tempered by the knowledge that revenge dramas are not to be taken seriously because they are, alas, only imaginary. And vengeance can’t be taken personally, either, because the feelings that coalesce around justice have been completely depersonalized.
It doesn’t only have to be this way with courtroom justice neutered of emotion while movie houses teem with the exhilaration of revenge. The opportunity was always there to invite revenge inside courtrooms. Given its relationship to justice, vengeance should have had a home in courthouses apart from culture. Instead, legal retribution, empty of passion, is what citizens come to understand as justice. As the distinguished jurist, Richard Posner, has written, “law channels rather than eliminates revenge—replaces it as system but not as feeling” (emphasis added).9 The more legal systems have failed to deliver justice, the more people have rushed to read novels and watch revenge films where justice made more sense and appeared to be recognizable, at least morally. The primal feelings so essential to the moral development of humankind gravitated to stories of revenge over legal opinions. There is a deep inner longing to experience the emotional pleasure of vengeance freed from the dryly mechanical, overly technical confines of courtrooms. If not for art, human beings would be completely revenge starved. The emotional absence that victims experience from an unfeeling legal system is roughly equivalent to the emotional investment consumers make in the culture of vengeance.
It’s not simply that artists understand the moral necessity of revenge in ways that judges do not.10 It’s that judges simply refuse to see the moral and emotional connection between justice and vengeance. It is not part of a judge’s job description to have victims walk away from courtrooms feeling avenged. For artists, vengeance is the most compelling of human dramas. By contrast, judges will do whatever they can to eliminate drama from their courtrooms and allow for as little humanity as possible. This is one of the reasons why dramatic trial scenes in art have no real world counterparts in actual courts of law.11 Citizens who serve on juries, conditioned by The Practice and Law & Order, not to mention Perry Mason and Matlock, often wonder how real trials can seem so boring by comparison.
And it’s not just judges. Lawyers, as well, are neither trained to be attuned nor especially sensitive to the complexity of human emotion.12 This often proves to be a most tragic and ironic deficiency. After all, clients come to lawyers at their most vulnerable. And lawyers are generally obtuse to what their clients have to say. When a client demands a “pound of flesh,” most lawyers don’t realize that the client isn’t serious, that the demand is merely symbolic of a deeper moral wound that cannot easily be appended to a legal complaint.
Moral injury is not the focus of law; indeed, most lawyers have never heard of it. The law is concerned chiefly with bodily injury, property damage or theft, and punishing criminal behavior. For lawyers, legal remedies are limited to settlement checks for civil plaintiffs and jail time for criminal defendants. There is essentially no other relief that the law provides mostly because there is so little imagination among lawyers to envision an array of remedies that would address moral injury. Emotional and spiritual relief is the handiwork of psychologists and the clergy, they would say. Lawyers do not deal with subjective human debris. The fact that there are emotional injuries that the law neither redresses nor heals is of little interest to lawyers who are presumably, and paradoxically, in the business of providing relief from the fallouts of human interaction.
Why emotion is consigned exclusively to clergy and mental health professionals is not always so clear. Doctors and priests do not resolve disputes among those who have suddenly become adversaries. Rabbis and psychologists have no jurisdiction over strangers who cause harm. The clergy can’t place criminals in jail, nor can they give victims a public platform to articulate their feelings of loss and indignity and have it memorialized for future generations. Courtrooms should welcome within its precincts all that it means to be human. No other profession can possibly claim as close an affinity with human emotion as the law, and yet no other profession makes such an effort to be so assiduously above it. Doctors and clergy are expected to get their hands dirty with the messiness of humanity; lawyers, by contrast, busy themselves with lifeless case precedents and statutes, which they apply to humanity only as blunt instruments, showing little regard for how anyone feels afterward.
And so it is the artists that are given free reign over revenge. Who else can be trusted with such sensitively raw, emotional material? Artists, after all, are not afraid of the emotional world. Emotion is the muse for artistic inspiration. It is what fills up the silver screen and the blank canvas. It is the language of poets and what comes alive on stage. Revenge is instantly familiar because in the moral universe it is infinitely just. And it crosses all cultures and continents, transcending all languages. Artists illuminate and enrich the human experience with emotional truths, which aren’t the same thing as findings of fact in courts of law. When it comes to unpunished wrongdoers, such emotions reflect the human longing for revenge that has been found wanting in the actual delivery of justice.
Perhaps this explains the undeniable influence that revenge stories have had on popular culture—from ancient Greece, to Elizabethan stages, to French novels, and to feature films.13 Neither the Greek tragedy nor the Hollywood Western would have ever existed were it not for the human impulse to avenge and the larger community’s need to witness justice delivered and served in this manner. Revenge sagas—the spectacle of scores being settled and just deserts received—have proven to be the most durable and bankable form of mass entertainment.
Why is revenge such a spectacularly compelling art form? Why are we so hooked on watching it? What’s the source of its adrenaline rush?
For one thing, there might be an evolutionary basis for our love affair with the artist’s rendering of revenge. Our capacity for altruism may have developed precisely because of our affection for imaginary heroes and in spite of our genetic predisposition for selfishness. William Flesch, a Brandeis English professor, has suggested that fictional heroes, or “altruistic punishers,” are popular throughout culture because “nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at people who do harm and a sense of delight when they are properly punished.14 Flesch suggests that at very early stages of development human beings realized that they had “an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation.” The altruistic punisher is sending the ultimate moral message: those who do wrong must be punished, even if it has to be performed by someone who has not been victimized and otherwise has no incentive to do so. The hero emerges because his moral conviction has been ignited and he knows what must be done.
Another reason is that with religions and governments having condemned private vengeance, and with legal systems often failing to provide justice that feels morally just, it becomes emotionally necessary that we see revenge played out, even fictionally, in ways that balance the scales. We have to be reassured that it can be done even if we see it so rarely performed in our lives. We applaud these heroes because we know they are right and we are relieved to see that wrongs can be righted. And there is the despairing sense that, placed in a similar situation, we, too, would have nowhere else to turn. If the avenger doesn’t take justice into his own hands, then justice will not be done, the guilty will not receive their due, and all will be wrong in the moral universe.
We see something of ourselves in the avenger’s struggle. Street justice is inherently familiar because most people, at one time or another, have been victimized by the neighborhood bully, the abusive boss, the petty thief, the vulgar thug, the odious merchant, or the adulterous spouse. And the person who did wrong went unpunished. In the vast spreadsheet that itemizes the accounts receivables of revenge, there is simply too much that doesn’t add up, too much debt, too much indignity and disrespect, and not enough payback.
Fortunately, the nature of those wrongs seldom rises to the grotesque horrors that are depicted in literature, drama, or film. Many people can live without receiving their satisfaction from the garden variety wrong. But that doesn’t mean that the moral injury is any less powerfully felt. Most people can’t, or won’t, retaliate with the same flair and fury of a Hollywood hero. Surrounded by so many unpunished, unavenged wrongs, is there any wonder why bestselling novels and blockbuster films often depend on stories of revenge to keep pages turning and audiences in their seats? We live vicariously and enjoy the vindication of someone else’s sweet vengeance.
Susan Jacoby has observed this phenomenon of the artist’s rendering of revenge by writing that “these screen images cannot be dismissed as trash catering to the idle daydreams of bourgeois audiences; their popular appeal is a clear indication that something is askew in the delicate social balance between retribution and compassion. Moreover, there is a profound conflict between the emotions expressed by cheering audiences at Death Wish and a public ethic that insists on a justice/revenge dichotomy.”15 The consumers of revenge dramas are no closet barbarians. They are feeling human beings who need to be given some assurance that there is justice in our world, even if it exists largely in art.
There is a rich cultural vocabulary when it comes to revenge. Audiences around the world root for Hamlet, urging him to take revenge against his father’s murderer. They grow impatient by his hesitancy. What is rotten in Denmark can only be repaired by revenge; no Danish courtroom will do. Edmond Dantes, the cool and calculating avenger who transforms himself into the Count of Monte Cristo in the eponymous novel by Alexandre Dumas, remains the poster boy for justified revenge. In fact, the novel has influenced an entire genre of revenge-themed feature films that invoke Edmond Dantes as a reminder of the avenger’s cause—V for Vendetta (2005), Sleepers (1996), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). As a further example of the count’s adaptability and appeal to the modern era, a new television drama, Revenge, a loosely based retelling of Dumas’s story, debuted on ABC in the fall 2011. When audiences hear The Count of Monte Cristo mentioned, they know they are about to witness a terrible injustice, the law will fail to punish the wrongdoer, and this tear in the moral universe will call for a righteous avenger to show himself and do what must be done.
Audiences soak up the satisfaction, if not the actual blood that is spilled, in such disparate revenge sagas as Gladiator (2000), The Godfather (1972), Death Wish (1974), both the novel and film version of A Time to Kill (1996), and even the grisly musical of splattered capillaries, Sweeney Todd (2007). Manohla Dargis, in reviewing the recent remake of True Grit (2010) for the New York Times, referred to revenge films as an “old-time American religion.”16
Many of these films are box office blockbusters, others received critical acclaim, and each of them is regarded as a classic of the revenge genre, precisely because they operate on an emotional level, tap into a profound human need, and address an essential moral truth.
Mel Gibson has revealed himself as of late to be an alternately crazed racist and anti-Semitic lunatic, and that’s when he’s not drinking. His boorish behavior can now reasonably lead to speculation that when it came to some of his iconic films, he wasn’t really acting at all—he was merely playing an unhinged version of himself. No wonder he was able to so convincingly apply his lunacy in the service of revenge.
Two of his films, Braveheart (1995) and The Patriot (2000), in addition to a film version of Hamlet (1990), and, of course, his Mad Max oeuvre, are among his most admired performances, and in each Gibson portrayed the avenging hero. The success of the films was due, in part, to their ability to capture the essence of the vengeance genre, the avengers who are easiest to root for and even easier to understand.
The avenger in art is not unlike the prophets in the Bible: neither one wants the job. They’d rather be doing something else. For the revenge seeker, the larger struggle is, initially, not his concern. In Braveheart, William Wallace, who will go on to lead the First War of Scottish Independence against England during the fourteenth century, is introduced in the film as someone who merely wants to be a farmer and has no interest in putting an end to the British outrages against the Scots.17 In The Patriot, Benjamin Martin, widower and the father of seven children in South Carolina, decides that his allegiance to his family takes precedence over joining the American Revolution against the British in 1776.18 In Mad Max, Max Rockatansky, a retired policeman living in a dystopian future where the law no longer takes responsibility for punishing the lawless, is forced to avenge the murder of his wife and son when they are ruthlessly killed by a motorcycle gang.19
William Wallace, Benjamin Martin, and Max Rockatansky each know that they possess the skills that would make wrongdoers pay mightily if ever faced with the duty to avenge a wrong. But none of them are daredevils and thrill seekers; they are not looking for a fight. As is so often true with revenge, the fight is, instead, brought to them. Wallace’s wife is murdered after British soldiers try to rape her, and a Scottish rebellion is suddenly set in motion—led by an avenging husband. One of Martin’s sons is murdered and his home is burned down by a ruthless British colonel, and suddenly the Colonials of the Revolutionary War have an avenging father leading a ragtag militia of guerrilla fighters who will make life miserable for General Cornwallis in the American South.
Wallace and Martin would have no doubt preferred that the wrongdoers had picked another victim. But once a wife and a son are murdered with such brutality and callousness, there is no way for Gibson’s avengers to turn back.
In contemporary culture, especially in feature films, there is a subgenre of revenge narratives about men whose wives and daughters have been murdered, raped, or both, whose families have been taken away or their children killed, whose property was set on fire and destroyed. And in response to these injustices, the law is either silent, or doesn’t exist, or, even worse, is complicit in the crimes.
The classic Western The Searchers (1956) and the blockbuster Gladiator had these themes in common. In Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and The Patriot, the larger historical claims to freedom as depicted in the fourteenth-century Scottish rebellion for sovereignty and the eighteenth-century American Revolutionary War, respectively, are somehow secondary to the moral obligation to avenge one’s family. Audiences, whether in Scotland or in the United States, recognize the more personal, if not righteous, cause that overlays these historical events. To be sure, the liberation of oppressed peoples is important, but audiences indentify instantly and far more strongly with the grave injustice—experienced on a profoundly personal level—that triggers the duty and unleashes the fury of a man who must now right a terrible wrong.
In art, the killing of a wife or child waits for no jury. The death of a child or the rape and murder of a spouse supplies the avenger with his marching orders, especially if justice cannot be found any other way. Justice is the one moral imperative that can’t be negotiated away easily. The avenger must do what is morally necessary because tolerating an injustice is viscerally unbearable. It is not only the avenger who won’t be able to sleep until justice is obtained. The same is true of the audience.
Revenge sagas operate in a world of moral absolutes. There are no gray areas—not because the story works best without added complexity, but for a far simpler reason: the bad guy truly is bad. He is the “worst of the worst,” a subject I will return to later. This idea is often neglected in the politically correct, morally relative times in which we live. We are told that evil is banal. All men are equally flawed. Who is anyone to judge? One person’s evil is another’s self-righteousness. But in artistic representations of revenge there is no point trying to wish a wrongdoer away, excuse his actions, or give evil a less condemning name. The moral relativism of modern life is rejected in favor of the moral realism that evil does, indeed, exist in the world. We are surrounded by injustice. And guilt that has gone unpunished. Many wrongdoers have not received their just deserts. With the scales so unbalanced, audiences crave stories that are not laced with moral ambiguity, where those who have seen evil will not casually, and cowardly, look the other way.
Revenge narratives have had an enduring influence on worldwide culture. They have inspired the Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the Elizabethan playwright Shakespeare. Vengeance is found in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Racine’s Phedre (1677), and Heinrich von Kleist’s, Michael Kohlhaas (1811), which, in turn, influenced E. L. Doctorow’s, Ragtime (1975). The Sicilian vigilante sagas received an American makeover with damaged victims transformed into heroic avengers, from Batman to Death Wish to Showtime’s Dexter. And, of course, there was Clint Eastwood’s revisionist take on the Hollywood Western, Unforgiven (1992), and the infinite offering of horror films that serve as wake-up calls in the middle of the night that the dead demand the justice that doubles as revenge.
Movies such as A Time to Kill, Kill Bill, and Righteous Kill (2008) have much more in common than merely a certain lyricism about killing. As film titles they are, perhaps, emblematic of the fate of humankind—retaliatory killing is, sometimes, a moral necessity.
No one appreciated this human dilemma better than the ancient Greeks. For them revenge was not only one of the many cruelties of fate that the gods inflict on man. Revenge was also a moral imperative, even without the mischievous intervention of the gods. The gods may have put men and women up to it by placing them in impossible situations, their honor challenged, their sense of fairness tested. However, when faced with the duty to avenge, the people of ancient Greece saw the myths not as mere parables but as instruction manuals for moral survival.
Take the myth of Oresteia, dramatized by Aeschylus as a trilogy, which deals with the House of Atreus, the granddaddy of all Greek tragedies and family blood feuds.20 It starts with Atreus, the King of Argus, who banishes his brother, Thyestes, from the kingdom in retaliation for sleeping with his wife and attempting to trick him out of his throne. Thyestes ultimately returns under religious protection, but Atreus is still in no forgiving mood. Adultery is not easy to forget, especially when combined with a breach of brotherly love. Thyestes had something coming, but what? The same age-old question remained, going back twenty-five hundred years: What constitutes proportionate revenge? Exceed the law of the talion, and all hell breaks loose.
Specificity and number crunching is always a tedious and exacting exercise, but ancient audiences to this drama were at least certain as to how much Atreus’s vengeance against his brother would violate the talion. Atreus would go too far. He concocts a sinister scheme worthy of the most sadistic horror flick. Inviting his brother to a feast, Atreus serves, as a main course, the ground-up remains of Thyestes’s own children (except for their hands and heads), who Atreus had killed in final revenge for his brother’s betrayal.
What was final for Atreus, however, was far from over. In taking too much in repayment for the debt, in running up the score rather than settling it, Atreus’s horrifying actions would invariably invite further vengeance. The House of Atreus had raised the ante on revenge. Now even the children of this family would become fair game. And there can be no proportionate justice when children become the surrogate targets for the crimes committed by their parents. Rather that being killed by his brother, Atreus is, instead, cursed by him. The Oresteian revenge saga is set in motion, taking place over several generations.
Agamemnon, who is best remembered as the victorious king of the Trojan War, is Atreus’s son. With the curse fully in place and his fate sealed, Agamemnon should probably never have celebrated his victory—or believed that his life would proceed without tragedy. After all, his father had murdered Agamemnon’s cousins and served them up as dinner to his uncle—their father. Surely just deserts would be due. Agamemnon is ultimately murdered by his own wife, Clytemnestra, who took revenge against her husband for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, to the will of the gods. (Agamemnon was warned that unless he killed his daughter the Greek fleet would never reach Troy alive.) Clytemnestra, the aggrieved mother, is assisted by Aegisthius, Thyestes’s surviving son (and Agamemnon’s cousin), who symbolically, took revenge against Atreus, the uncle who murdered his siblings.
Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, flees the country when his mother marries Aegisthius, who has every intention of killing Orestes. Eventually, Orestes returns and, cheered on by his sister Electra, avenges his father’s murder by killing his mother, Clytemnestra, and her accomplice, Aegisthus. Wait: there’s more to this true Greek tragedy. The Furies, representing human emotions on steroids—vengeance, violence, grief, fear, anger, and hurt feelings—ultimately avenge Clytemnestra’s death by driving her murderer (her son) to madness. Is this fair punishment? Even the Gods now begin to wonder whether they have allowed this sadistic saga to spiral out of control. And the best way to create order is to convene a legal proceeding. The God Apollo intervenes and instructs the Goddess Athena to establish a court system within Greek society where Orestes will be placed on trial—the first criminal trial in Greek literature that resembles the administration of law as we know it today.
At this trial, Orestes is exonerated of his crimes when a jury of Athenians is deadlocked and Athena casts the deciding vote in his favor. The Furies, now furious, are legally prevented from carrying out any further vendettas against the House of Atreus. What else should be done with the furious emotions that give meaning to their name? They threaten to unleash a poison onto the land in retaliation for Orestes not being punished for his crime, essentially taking vengeance against the legal system for not doing justice. But Athena convinces them, instead, to become part of the community, participate in future trials, and contribute to the legal system.
Many read this portion of the play, titled Eumenides, the third part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, as world culture’s first attempt to domesticate vengeance by converting it into a trial of state-supervised, legal retribution. But that’s not all it does. Eumenides stands for the principle that vengeance and vendettas are officially over, replaced by a legal system. But this legal system is not all machinery; it also has heart. The emotions that animate revenge are not banished from a Greek’s conception of justice. By making room for the Furies, the Gods ordained that justice cannot exist without a full outpouring of human emotion. The Furies, and their grab bag of emotions, were given a new assignment. As law professor Paul Gerwitz has written, “Fury is law’s partner. . . . Law and passion are inseparable.”21
Short of exiling emotion from the courtroom, Athena made it possible for the feelings associated with vengeance—all that the Furies bring to bear on revenge—to become a fixture of every legal trial. One implication of Eumenides is that victims, and their complicated mix of emotions, cannot be excluded from criminal trials.22 Those who have suffered the harm, those who are looking to the law to do what’s just, represent the deepest repository of emotion in any trial—criminal or civil. The raw emotions that Athena invited back into the courtroom are best typified in the agony and anguish of those who gather in courtrooms in pursuit of justice. If not welcomed inside courtrooms, they will end up unleashed onto the world like the very poison the Furies had threatened and which Athena wisely avoided.23
Why then, twenty-five hundred years later, can’t courtroom judges display the same wisdom and emotional intelligence of Goddess Athena?
Law can’t be limited solely to a strict adherence to a set of rules and procedures without also accounting for the range of emotions that fuel the moral imperatives of revenge. The ancient Greeks understood that perhaps private vengeance would play out better inside courtrooms. But a change of arenas shouldn’t shut the door on the human element that would otherwise be on full display in cases of private vengeance. Aeschylus set Eumenides outside in a theater in the round hoping perhaps that future avengers would find themselves discharging their fury inside courtrooms—an altogether different kind of theater—where human dramas are real, and the shared morality of the community would have meaning.24 Courtrooms would welcome every variety of victim who stopped short of becoming an avenger. Indeed, everyone should be encouraged to bring their grievances to the law rather than settling them privately, especially if those grievances are simmering from emotions both unabated and unappeased. As Robert C. Solomon has suggested, “Vengeance deserves its central place in any theory of justice and . . . the desire for revenge must enter into our deliberations along with such emotions as compassion, caring and love. Any system of legal principles that does not take such emotions into account . . . is not . . . a system of justice.”25
Elle Woods, the fashion-obsessed, dim-witted, legal genius in the film Legally Blonde (2001), quotes Aristotle while delivering her Harvard Law School valedictory speech: “The law is reason free of passion.”26 The larger point she makes, however, is that Aristotle was wrong. (Ironically, Aristotle didn’t have much of a problem with anger, but he did seem to feel that the legal system could do without passion.) A Hollywood film about a beautiful blonde-haired law student naturally falls on the side of emotion over bloodless legalism. What Elle Woods didn’t say is that twenty-five hundred years later, the legal system is still taking its cue from Aristotle in showcasing legal actions devoid of human feeling.
Humankind would have been far better served, however, had another Greek—Aeschylus, not a philosopher but a playwright—left his lasting imprint on the law. Aeschylus understood the role of emotion in revenge and believed that trials couldn’t be sanitized, antiseptic affairs. Legal trials may be preferable to blood vengeance, but a court proceeding without emotion is a trial that will not end in justice. Aeschylus was the patron saint of human grief and vulnerability on display inside courtrooms. Without Aeschylus there would be no TV dramas such as Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, Judging Amy, and surely no classic film such as 12 Angry Men (1957), perhaps the very best example that the search for justice cannot be achieved without anger being first revealed and then, finally, tempered.
A society that welcomes antagonists inside its courtrooms must respect that an entourage of emotions and hurt feelings will be joining them and will insist on front-row seating. Instead, victims are ushered to the rear, their emotions are stifled while prosecutors and defense attorneys haggle over fine points of law. These very same victims exit courtrooms regretful that they didn’t simply take justice into their own hands. Instructing wounded parties to contain their emotions is tantamount to telling them that they were never welcome inside the courtroom in the first place, that the law simply refuses to acknowledge or satisfy their retributive needs. One of the many virtues of courtrooms is that they have the potential to serve as the setting for vicarious vengeance. Unfortunately, the legal system has yet to get behind such possibilities—twenty-five hundred years after Eumenides first introduced a way for emotions and justice to coexist within the same legal proceeding.
From betrayal, murder, cannibalism, the murder of one’s own child, the murder of a husband, the murder of a mother, the complicity of a sister, to the madness that spills out alongside all that blood, Greek audiences were not surprised by the events described in the Oresteia trilogy. Given the horror of the House of Atreus, the Oresteia provided a portrait of a doomed family destined to a life of blood vengeance, with overlapping tales of revenge that saw no end until justice and vengeance came to mean the same thing. No family member was safe from another. That’s what happens when you kill, cook, and then eat two small children to avenge a single act of adultery. The law of the talion is severely transgressed and disproportion becomes a gross understatement. The ancient Greeks saw in the Oresteia a cautionary tale about how an unbalanced reprisal inevitably leads to the recycling of revenge.
In still another Greek myth, Medea, a scorned wife takes revenge against her husband, and does so in the most ghastly of ways. Medea was a princess in her native land. She betrayed her family and country by saving Jason’s life and by also assisting him in his quest to steal the Golden Fleece. For this she was exiled from her homeland, which in those days did not come with a return ticket. Nevertheless, she marries Jason and they travel to his homeland, Corinth, where they have two sons. Not long thereafter Jason falls in love with the king’s daughter, who also happens to be a younger woman. As so often happens, these trade-ups for trophy wives end up being terrific career moves—but not so splendid for the abandoned spouse. Especially in this instance, given all that Medea had sacrificed for her husband, Jason’s act was a most unbearable betrayal.
Medea is cast aside, discarded without even a good Corinthian divorce lawyer to obtain custody of her children. She now finds herself living alone, in a strange land, no longer a princess or a wife. Everything is lost through no fault of her own. The fact that she bore Jason two sons is suddenly irrelevant. Corinth permits husbands to abandon their wives without any rights granted to the wife or obligations owed to her. Jason freely remarries this year’s model of the local princess, and now he and the sons that Medea gave him stand to inherit the Corinthian throne.
Surely this is not right; this is not just. Something must happen here. The Greeks knew that. Medea couldn’t be expected simply to walk away, to pretend that she was neither a wife nor a mother. Some form of justice must exist for wives who were treated so abysmally by their career-savvy husbands. Alas, the justice must come of her own making. Medea takes her revenge by killing not only Jason’s new wife, the princess of Corinth, but also her own two children, thus depriving Jason of the royalty and immortality that resulted from his marriage to another.27
In the moral universe, what else was Medea to do? Yes, her actions surely made her a candidate for a temporary insanity plea should Athena have convened another trial. Medea’s chosen remedy to redeem her shame exceeded any fair measurement of proportion. The murder of her two children, along with the death of the home wrecker herself, is without balance as retaliation for the crime of adultery. The laws of Corinth had failed her. Medea could not live exiled from her former home while, at the same time, tragically devalued in her new one. But she had gone too far.
The citizens of ancient Greece understood that Medea was deserving of some payback. She had to avenge Jason’s betrayal and the shattering of her self-worth. He had it coming, but he could never have seen this coming. The Greeks may have been appalled by Medea’s methods but not by her retaliatory instincts. There is justice in revenge. But too much revenge can turn the avenger into a metaphor for madness, and diminish his or her claim to justice.
All audiences know this to be true, whether they watched from the open air Theater of Dionysus in ancient Athens, or in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in present-day Los Angeles. Revenge is tantalizing to everyone. This is mostly true because revenge stories are ultimately morality tales. We respond to them emotionally because they serve as object lessons on how to live and on what kind of a world we wish to live in. An injustice needs to be remedied. A victim must be vindicated. A truth has to be told.
Generations of readers have lustily devoured The Count of Monte Cristo—not under the covers with flashlights but in plain view. More recently, The Brave One (2007), Reservation Road (2007), Taken (2008), Inglorious Basterds (2009), Death Sentence (2007), Red (2010), Law Abiding Citizen (2009), and Colombiana (2011) have revived the rich cinematic tradition of vigilante justice in art.
Hundreds of millions of people have purchased tickets to see revenge films where the final curtain really means The End. Justice was served, and the justice itself was final. There are no loose ends, ambiguous outcomes, legal acquittals or procedural technicalities by which the guilty are set free. Reasonable doubt is not in doubt, nor can it be so easily manipulated, as it so often is in courts of law. There is nothing quite as morally revolting as someone who gets away with murder. An audience won’t sit still for that; and in actual criminal matters, the consequences are far worse: when the guilty go unpunished, the general public loses faith in its institutions.
All debts from moral injury must be settled and satisfied—both in art and in life. When the lights come on in darkened theaters after watching a revenge film, no one feels emotionally deceived. This is perhaps what makes them different from love stories and romantic comedies, where triteness prevails over moral purpose. Revenge movies end with a true sense of resolution, closure in need of no sequel. The guy may not walk away with the beautiful girl, but he does get the wrongdoer, a conquest that is even more universally appreciated.
It is plainly wrong to dismiss the box office receipts of revenge dramas as merely silly fare, the violent fantasies of the savage and bored. Their popular appeal derives from a deep moral conviction about justice and fair play. And they allow the emotions surrounding vengeance to share screen time in ways that are foreclosed in courts of law. The sad truth is that cultural depictions of revenge are far better at dispensing moral lessons than a legal system that releases wrongdoers, shackles the emotions of victims, and disappoints everyone having any contact with it, leaving them frustrated and enraged.