In this essay, we read Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River1 as an insightful exploration of the seductions and dangers of revenge and the relation of vengeance to violence and masculinity. What revenge offers in response to trauma and loss is the fantasy of control. The “value of vindictiveness,” to use Karen Horney’s suggestive phrase, is that revenge offers a “safety-valve” that protects a victim against the self-destructive impulses that accompany the act of being injured or insulted.2 Confronted by a traumatic injury, all people feel a “natural propensity” to hit back that, according to Horney, has its reason in the impulse to defend one’s ideal image of oneself; failure to respond to an injury threatens to show the injured party as either physically or psychologically incapable, which can lead to feelings of self-hatred so extreme that they “constitute a real danger for the individual.”3 By externalizing harm as a result not of one’s own weakness but of another’s wrong, the avenging victim both restores his injured pride and steels himself from self-blame and self-destruction.
Beyond the value of vengeance itself, Horney’s article “The Value of Vindictiveness” identifies two alternatives to revenge: neurosis and “becoming more human.” Neurotic capitulation, either from physical or moral incapacity to act upon vengeful impulses, leads the traumatized victim to see himself “as a helpless jellyfish, a prey to anybody who chooses to step on him and a prey also to his own self-contempt.” Becoming human, on the other hand, means abandoning his idealized vision of his own grandeur; by disowning his prideful belief in his uniqueness and his masterful control, the human victim becomes an “ordinary human being like everybody,” and thus “part of the swarming mass of humanity he so despises.” The goal of Horney’s therapeutic response to vindictiveness is to reverse the valuation of prideful vindication so that “‘becoming human’ will feel like the most desirable goal toward which to strive.”4
The authors thank Jenny Lyn Bader, Sara Murphy, and two anonymous reviewers for reading and providing helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. This chapter originally appeared in Law, Culture and the Humanities 1 (2005), pp. 316–32.
Horney’s tripartite understanding of the vindictive responses to traumatic injury offers a helpful frame within which to view Mystic River (2003). In Mystic River, three men are confronted with proof of their powerlessness; unable to prevent an injury to themselves or their loved ones, the men respond in different ways. Their choices, human in every way, are parables for three fundamental human responses to trauma. Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) is so overcome by trauma that he can only articulate a mere stuttering of his loss in speeches that remain incomprehensible even to those closest to him. Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), on the other hand, refuses to admit his vulnerability to trauma. In striving to overcome the forces buffeting him and in powerfully seeking to control his life, Jimmy rebels against the finite and limited nature of his humanity. His effort to avenge his daughter’s murder is a desperate struggle to understand and thereby to master a universe gone mad. Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) neither succumbs to his traumatic experience of his wife’s leaving him nor, however, does he deny her power over him. Rather, Sean comes gradually to humbly accept the limitation on his power and control that marks the humanity of his masculinity.
Together, these three responses to trauma—collapse, rebellion through vengeance, and upright acceptance of finitude—comprise the structuring triad of Mystic River. Whereas Dave is consumed by his neurotic response to trauma, Jimmy and Sean present two meaningful responses to the impulse to respond to injury with revenge. Jimmy’s act of vengeance is driven by an idealized fantasy of superhuman power and control. Sean, however, comes to embrace the very limited nature of humanity that Jimmy rejects. Sean’s heroism, his decision to become more human, is a powerful counterweight to Jimmy’s more traditional masculine heroism, one that is located in the need to stand upright as a man who recognizes he is inevitably shaped by forces beyond his control.
Precisely because Mystic River leaves the conflict between Jimmy’s avenging hero and Sean’s upright hero unresolved, it offers an insightful glimpse into the psychological foundations both of vengeance and the overcoming of vengeance. Jimmy may indeed strive to uphold an idealized image of himself as a proud and powerful person; moreover, Jimmy’s identification as a king, one with the natural authority to rule and to avenge that is denied to mere men, is, at least on one level, positively figured as the natural and noble striving of man for justice. It is this fantastic claim of kingship that Mystic River suggests can gird—if not justify—Jimmy’s act of vengeance. And yet, insofar as avengers rebel against their human limitations, they fail in the profound calling that makes us human: namely, the thoughtful embrace of finitude.
Mystic River, on one level, is a classic example of the genre of revenge movies. It begins with the murder of the nineteen-year-old daughter of Jimmy Markum. Jimmy is one of a trio of childhood friends who have grown apart, the film’s main characters. Suspicion quickly settles upon another of the three, Dave Boyle. The investigation is led by the third of the childhood friends, Sean Devine, now a detective. Although Dave’s own wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), comes to believe that he is the murderer, Sean remains skeptical and releases him from custody. Jimmy, distrustful of what he sees as the bureaucratic and laggard police, takes Dave out to a secluded bank of the Mystic River, forces him to confess, and executes him. By the final scene, Jimmy is perched on his front stoop surrounded by the followers of his former criminal gang, his wife, and remaining daughters; while he may still mourn the loss of his favorite girl, the traditional scene of familial bliss suggests that Jimmy has—through his revenge—asserted his power over the loss and chaos that threatened to consume him. At least on one reading of the film, the violence against Jimmy—and even the world itself—has been made right.
Or so it appears. For underneath the conventional waters, Mystic River is a decidedly unconventional exploration of revenge as a response to trauma. In a bold break from the norms of contemporary American moviemaking, Mystic River never resolves the conflict between Jimmy and Sean. The movie’s strength is its incredible sympathy for each of its main characters.
This generosity of perspective is evident in Eastwood’s filming itself. Mystic River forsakes the usual Hollywood practice of presenting the story of revenge from an omniscient point of view in sympathy with the avenger.5 American revenge movies typically depend on the solitary male father figure, the “John Wayne figure,” who, like God and the Father, “embodies the fantasy of a man who makes himself out of nothing and who is therefore purely masculine, a hard man all through.”6 For this reason, revenge movies traditionally are filmed realistically from one central perspective that presents the hero’s world as simple fact.7 Instead, Eastwood films from the perspective of the character who is central to the resolution of the drama particular to each scene. We see Dave sink into his nightmare world; shot in near darkness in a room without any visible doors or windows, the scene pictures the claustrophobia of Dave’s internal world. Sean, too, is filmed from his own perspective. When he speaks to his wife over the phone, he is pictured through his own experience of isolation and disarray. We see Sean on the streets as a cop trying to assert some kind of hold on the trauma that is always haunting him. He is oftentimes filmed from the back or the side, speaking out to a reality that continually threatens his sense of control. Finally, Jimmy, in the scenes he dominates, is shown struggling to control himself and his world, and Eastwood’s filming focuses on the ferocity of his struggle. In one extraordinary scene, Eastwood shoots Jimmy’s frantic effort to break free from the police from above, showing Jimmy’s struggle to free himself as he is nearly crucified by his own anguish.
Beyond its merely filmic qualities, Mystic River also has a plot that separates it from traditional Hollywood revenge films. Most importantly, the act of revenge in Mystic River gets the wrong man. When Jimmy kills Dave, he kills an old friend, one whom life has profoundly scarred. While Dave did enact his own vengeance by killing a pedophile he caught raping a young boy, he did not kill Jimmy’s daughter. Dave may be troubled and pitiable, but he is also deeply innocent.
Because Jimmy avenges his daughter against the wrong man, Mystic River does not follow the well-worn path of revenge films that William Ian Miller describes as the journey from “pity and fear to catharsis”; there is no “sense of satisfaction of having the wrong righted on the body of the wrongdoer.”8 In the genre of revenge films, the avenging hero must be made not only palatable, but also noble. The avenger must be shown to be a man or a woman of justice, even if he or she is acting beyond the law. More precisely, it is the avenger’s claim to be doing justice beyond the obstacles and niceties of the law that underlies his or her appeal.9 In Mystic River, however, the usual sense of cathartic justice from an act of revenge well taken cannot emerge because Jimmy kills an innocent man.
An act of revenge against an innocent man might be made palatable if it were accompanied by the arrest and downfall of the errant avenger. Such a predictable result would have fit Mystic River neatly into the genre of anti-revenge films that portray the dangers and horrors of emotional revenge freed from the constraints of procedural legalism. Indeed, the undoing of a mistaken avenger might provide its own catharsis, insofar as it reinforces our faith in the justice and wisdom of our liberal legal system. A film in which the wrong man is killed in an act of revenge offers up revenge as an easy target of moral outrage.
Eastwood, however, resists the temptation of facile critique. The provocation underlying Mystic River is that Jimmy—along with Sean—is to remain one of the film’s two sympathetic heroes, despite his errant vengeance. Eastwood’s challenge, therefore, is to defend Jimmy’s vengeance without ceding to him the moral high ground typically accorded to cinematic avengers.
It is to overcome this difficulty that revenge movies generally share one premise: the avenging hero gets it right. In fact, revenge stories are rarely whodunits. In The Searchers (1956), it is expected that Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) will spend years tracking down and eventually killing the Indian Chief, Scar (Henry Brandon), because we know that Scar killed Ethan’s family as well as his true love. Similarly, we accept that Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), thrust into the title role of The Godfather (1972), will go on a killing rampage because we understand he is driven to it by the murder of his father. And we can understand why Myrl Redding (John Cusack) in The Jack Bull (1999)—based on the great Heinrich von Kleist story Michael Kohlhaas—will burn towns and sacrifice his life in order to avenge the injury that Henry Ballard (L. Q. Jones) has done to his honor. Indeed, in nearly every Hollywood revenge movie, the film’s omniscient viewpoint subdues the fear of unjust revenge with the promise that the heroic avenger will get the right man.10 Whatever ethical problems with revenge might remain, the question of the need for due process is rendered mute by the moral clarity of the final act of justice.11
Against the facility with which Hollywood eases the justification of vengeance, Eastwood’s Mystic River stands out as the rare film willing to present revenge as a defensible urge and, simultaneously, as a terrifying danger. Our aim in turning to Mystic River is neither to justify nor to vilify revenge, but to understand why it continues to so fascinate and seduce. To this end, Mystic River offers a nuanced canvas. Because Mystic River so radically breaks with the tradition of killing the right man that is embedded in “revenge movies,” it offers an especially rich way to focus on the question of the claim to justice in the activity of vengeance itself, apart from its consequences. For this reason alone, Mystic River stands out as worthy of serious attention.
The movie starts with the three boys who, after playing a street game, decide to mark their initials into the wet cement of a nearby sidewalk. Suddenly, a man pretending to be a police officer orders Dave into his car for having defaced public property. Confused, the other two boys reluctantly allow Dave to get into the car. What is done to Dave by his kidnappers is the sort of trauma that reveals the very real vulnerability of men to an act of penetration. Dave, therefore, experiences the shattering of the ultimate heteronormative fantasy that conflates masculinity with impenetrability.
Mystic River revolves around three male characters, each of whom reacts differently to traumatic experiences of loss that challenge both their masculinity and their power to impose order on their worlds. While Dave is broken by his ordeal, Jimmy and Sean confront their traumas in very different ways. Jimmy, the avenging hero, acts from the prerogative of right. A man’s man, he is a king in his own house. The literal and repeated identification of Jimmy as a king—as one with the natural authority to order a world—works to justify Jimmy’s refusal to give in to trauma as well as his decision to forcefully resist it. Sean, on the contrary, neither succumbs to trauma nor masters it. Instead, Sean—when confronted by his wife’s challenge to his masculine control and with the fact of Jimmy’s lawless and unjust vengeance—responds by admitting his vulnerability and indeed identifies with Dave Boyle. In all of his actions, Sean remains faithful—to his wife, who has left him, and to the law, which he faithfully upholds. He is an upright man struggling to balance his masculinity with the reality of his tragic limitations, and his willingness to accept his finitude is set against Jimmy’s rebellious insistence on maintaining his fantasy of superhuman strength.
After Dave escapes his kidnappers, we see him only as a shadowy figure. We see the two boys looking up at their recently escaped friend behind a bedroom window only to have his mother quickly shut the shade, as if to hide Dave from the world and himself. Dave, as he will say later, survived but not as himself; as he puts it, whoever got out of that basement was not Dave Boyle.
Later in the movie, an adult version of Dave Boyle returns one night from a neighborhood bar covered in blood with a stab wound. His story to his wife was that he was robbed and had to defend himself against the mugger. He is completely undone by the violent act he has undertaken, sputtering in horror about what it felt like to hurt another human being. We only later find out that Dave had caught a pedophile in the act of raping a young boy and beat the perpetrator to death. Yet the closest Dave comes to revealing this truth to his wife is through cryptic confessions telling his wife how he feels like a monster, an admission that tells us more about how Dave feels haunted by his trauma then it does anything about his incoherent efforts to communicate to his wife what he has done. But in a deeper sense, why was Dave unable to tell his wife what happened that night?
Here we are returned to the wordlessness and unspeakability related to traumatic events. Dave feels like a monster before his own vengeful act, an act that takes him back to the traumatic scene where he acts out, but is unable to come to terms with, what he did and what happened to him. The act is unplanned on the deepest level. Dave is horrified by the nightmare scene that he is once again returned to, even if now as the perpetrator. In the deepest sense, the nightmare that was his life in the basement of his kidnappers completely takes him over as he beats the pedophile to death. But this death cannot bring peace; it only brings the nightmare fully to life again. As Dave tries to express his sense of being a character in an ugly alternate universe, his wife tragically comes to identify him along these lines and suspects him to be the murderer of the daughter of his childhood friend Jimmy. The more he tries to speak from his understanding of his reality, the more he takes his nightmare to be a reality. He is desperately trying to explain how he has been ensnared by the original trauma. There are no words to describe the subterranean world Dave Boyle remains trapped in; his incapacity to express himself only furthers his identification with a monster with no means to represent himself. Of course, when Jimmy falsely accuses Dave at gunpoint and demands an explanation for his recent strangeness, Dave is unable to communicate the truth: he murdered the pedophile and not the daughter of his childhood friend.
Jimmy was one of the three boys who were at the scene of the initial kidnapping; he grew up to be the leader of a neighborhood gang and was briefly imprisoned. Jimmy had a partner in crime named Ray Harris, whose sons are important to this story. While in prison, Jimmy learns that he was betrayed by Ray. Jimmy kills Ray for his transgression. However, Jimmy does not leave the tragedy behind him, because he continues to support Ray’s two children: Brendan (Tom Guiry) and Silent Ray (Spencer Treat Clark), Brendan’s supposedly mute younger brother. We meet Jimmy as a struggling adult trying to leave the criminal world behind and make it in a small legitimate business. His daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum) falls in love with Brendan, but Jimmy will not allow the relationship to go forward because Brendan is the son of the man he murdered. Katie and Brendan decide to run off to get married, but she is murdered the night before their escape. Jimmy is drawn to the murder scene as he exits from the church where another of his daughters is taking her First Communion. The haunting image of him being restrained by a gaggle of Boston police as he screams to Sean and to heaven, “Is that my daughter in there?” is among the most harrowing portrayals of emotional despair ever on the silver screen. And yet as overwrought as Jimmy is over the loss of his daughter, he quickly pulls himself together. His old gang members Nick and Kevin Savage (Adam Nelson and Robert Wahl-berg) show up, and Jimmy immediately starts giving orders.
In the next scene, Jimmy is sitting with his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney), and talking with Sean and Sean’s partner, Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne). Jimmy asks Sean: “Did you ever think about how just one little choice can change your whole life? I heard Hitler’s mother wanted to abort him. At the last minute she changed her mind. See what I mean.” Jimmy continues:
What if you or I had gotten into that car instead of David Boyle? . . . If I had gotten into that car that day, my life would’ve been a different thing. My first wife, Marina, Katie’s mother, she was a beautiful woman, regal, Latin women are and she knew it. You had to have balls just to go near her and I did. Eighteen years old. Two of us. She was carrying Katie. Here’s the thing, Sean. If I’d have gotten into the car that day, I’d have been a basket case and I never would’ve had the juice to go near her. Katie never would have been born, and she never would have been murdered, you know.
Even as Jimmy considers whether it would have been better had Katie never been born, we learn something about the mettle of his character. Dave was destroyed by his kidnapping and molestation. Jimmy, however, escaped. And for Jimmy, this is no mere accident. Even when they were young, it was Jimmy who was the leader of their gang. And as a man, Jimmy remains a leader, both of his criminal gang and, more recently, of his community. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that Jimmy refers to his first wife as regal. She was a queen, and, by implication, Jimmy is a king.
It is precisely Jimmy’s claim of royal prerogative that is the lynchpin of Eastwood’s attempt to give meaning to Jimmy’s wrongful execution of Dave. The movie’s penultimate scene opens with Jimmy silhouetted in front of his bedroom window. He is naked from the waist up, and we see, for the first time, the tattooed cross that fills his back. Religion, however, plays an ambiguous role in Mystic River. There is the suggestion from his ring that one of the men who abducted Dave in the opening scene was a bishop. Jimmy, a practicing Catholic, attends his daughter’s First Communion. Given that Jimmy has just learned that he has taken revenge on an innocent man, and on his former friend, it might be thought that the cross on his back signifies the burden that Jimmy must bear. Indeed, as he hears his wife step lightly into the room behind him, Jimmy confesses: “I killed Dave. I killed him and I threw him in the Mystic. But I killed the wrong man. That’s what I’ve done. And I can’t undo it.” But the scene of Catholic repentance that this opening promises quickly veers in an altogether different and more secular direction.
In response to Jimmy’s confession of sin and powerlessness, Annabeth responds by cooing, “Shhhhh, Jimmy, shhhhh.” She will hear nothing of his confession, weakness, and doubt. Instead, as the devoted wife, she offers a speech of belief and power. Annabeth believes in Jimmy, in his goodness, his strength, and his nobility. As she comes up and embraces him from behind, she strokes him, caressing his ego, and whispers into his ear. She says:
I wanna feel your heart. Last night when I put the girls to bed I told them how big your heart was. I told them how much you loved Katie, because you created her, and sometimes your love for her was so big it felt like your heart was going to explode. . . . I told them their daddy loved them that much too. And he had four hearts. And they were all filled up and aching with love for them and they would never have to worry. And that their daddy would do whatever he had to for those he loved. And that is never wrong. That could never be wrong. No matter what their daddy had to do. And those girls fell asleep in peace.
There is a vision of wifehood here that is explicitly contrasted with the other two wives in the movie. Whereas Celeste, Dave’s wife, becomes convinced that Dave killed Katie and rats on him to Jimmy, and Laura, Sean’s wife, demands equal standing in her marriage—so much so that she leaves pregnant (a traditionally vulnerable position)—it is Annabeth who plays the dutiful and adoring wife. She knows that a man’s job is to protect his women, and Jimmy is a master at protection. He has four hearts, one for each of his girls, and he will do whatever it takes to make sure that they are safe. And when that is not possible, he will seek to make those who hurt them pay. That is his job. Annabeth’s role is to keep her husband standing erect.
This familial fantasy of a wife who supports her husband and of a man possessed of a love so strong that it will require and justify any violence is at the core of Mystic River’s exploration of revenge. From this perspective, revenge is not merely a paternal right; it is a duty of love and obligation. Just as Sethe’s love for her children in Beloved redeemed even her tragic killing of her children, so here are we asked to understand, if not forgive, Jimmy’s transgression borne out of a love too strong to be harnessed within legal bounds. Similarly, one of the authors of this essay grew up with a father who repeated, throughout her adolescence, that if anyone ever harmed his children, he would seek them out and tear them apart. Recently, prompted by a viewing of Mystic River, he reiterated that he would have truly acted on his promise to kill someone who had harmed his children. We tell this story because children are not the only ones who may be terrorized and thrilled by such a fantasy of paternal love; as adults, movies like Mystic River enable us to, at the very least, understand Annabeth’s boast that her children fell asleep in peace. The fascination with Eastwood’s movies is, in part, an attraction to characters like Jimmy, who has a heart so big that he will make the world safe. Vengeance borne of love, in other words, comes to buttress a rhetorical demand for safety that trumps all competing conceptions of justice.12
Love alone, however, cannot authorize Jimmy’s revenge. If love were the only ground for Jimmy’s killing, it might work to justify his taking revenge against Katie’s killers; but, Jimmy made a mistake, one that, as he understands, he cannot undo. While an act of violence in the name of love might suffice when the outcome is considered correct, Jimmy’s love for Katie does not explain Mystic River’s at least grudging acceptance of Jimmy’s vengeance.
Eastwood refuses to condemn Jimmy for mistakenly killing Dave. Instead of abandoning the avenger who gets it wrong, Mystic River takes seriously the claim that the rightness of revenge, insofar as it is just, is independent of whether the outcome is correct. By dramatically presenting the deep psychic appeal of Jimmy’s willingness to act whatever the consequences, Mystic River necessarily forces open the question of revenge in a radical way. Beyond the question of a successful outcome, it asks: what is the original source of the ancient and seemingly irrepressible recognition of the justice of revenge?
While it is possible to make a legal argument defending Jimmy based on mens rea, that argument would only provide Jimmy with an excuse; the strong claim that Annabeth makes in the movie is that Jimmy acted justly.13 Whether or not Jimmy’s revenge was correct, legal, or justifiable, it is Annabeth who makes the claim that it was right. And in spite of the ambivalence of the film’s final scene, which we will discuss below, it is impossible to read the respect and honor accorded to Jimmy out of Mystic River. Instead, we believe it is important to take seriously the way in which Eastwood’s film grapples with what is perhaps the cinema’s most subtle and powerful defense of vengeance.
Within Mystic River, the claim of rightful vengeance can only be grounded in the right of the one who takes it. It is a claim of natural right that attaches to the person of the actor. And here is where Mystic River offers its ultimate defense of Jimmy’s revenge. His act is not a mere emotional reaction; rather, it must be seen as the act of a loving king. As Annabeth says,
I told the girls: Your daddy’s a king, and a king knows what to do and does it, even when it’s hard. And their daddy will do anything he has to for those he loves. And that’s all that matters. Because everyone is weak, Jimmy, everyone but us. We’ll never be weak. And you? You could rule this town. [They begin to have sex.] And after, Jimmy. Let’s take the girls down to the parade. Katie would’ve liked that. [Cut to parade.]
Here Jimmy is figured as a king, and his murder of Dave is sanctified as a kingly act grounded in love. In order to understand one of the many viewpoints about revenge present in Mystic River, the ideas of noble rule and royal prerogative must be further explored.
To say that revenge is a right of kings sounds strange at a time when all privileges, including revenge, are seen as the equal right of all people. But it may be, as Goethe once wrote of Hamlet, that some people are not equal to the task of revenge.14 Indeed, the very thought that any mere mortal would assume the right of vengeance flies in the face of the entirety of Judeo-Christian morality: “‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord.”15 And there is something about revenge that, as Shai Lavi argues, exceeds any attempt at human justification.16 God’s divine right of revenge, his destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, is just even though—and in fact precisely because—it is not justifiable according to any utilitarian or ethical calculus. Similarly, in every act of mortal revenge, there is a partial claim that one acts justly above and beyond any need for rational justification. Revenge, in other words, partakes in the hubristic claim to act like a god.17
Given the intimate connection between revenge and divinity, it should not be surprising that kings would come to be accorded the right of taking vengeance.18 The great German historian of kingship, Percy Ernst Schramm, spent a lifetime exploring the way in which the institution of kingship relies upon and is infused with religious, mythic, and magical power. Early Germanic kings carried a standard (“Standart”) representing the tree of life (“Weltenbaum”); throughout the Middle Ages, French kings, after being anointed with the holy oil and crowned in Reims, traveled to the little village of Saint Marcouf where they healed the sick; European peasants would travel to the funerals of their kings to lay seeds on the coffin in order to guarantee that they yield better fruit; and German Emperors from Konrad II (990–1039) to Otto I wore miters under their crowns, draped themselves in carpets adorned with the zodiac, and carried bells, all to associate themselves with the high priests of the Old Testament.19 The Greek word for “king,” basileus, denotes the highest cult officer in the polis, and early Greek states divided governance between basileus and an archon who was responsible for the day-to-day administration of the polis.20 The king, as Ernst Kantorowicz has shown, has two bodies; beyond the earthly flesh, the king also has a political, mythical, and spiritual body.21
The irrepressible connection between secular and divine rule requires a rejection of any theory of sovereignty that is founded upon simply the sovereign’s formal power to decide on the exception.22 That is why Michel Foucault—who preserves the traditional distinction within kingship in a way that Giorgio Agamben does not—structures his account of the political nature of sovereignty around an analysis of Plato’s discussion of the question of whether the king of a community is like a shepherd.23
A shepherd, Foucault argues, has a number of characteristic tasks which include: to supply his herd with food; to care for them when they are sick; to entertain them and guide them; to aid in their procreation and the rearing of the young; and finally to be at the head of the flock as the leader. The politician, however, isn’t concerned with “feeding, nursing, and breeding.” Instead, the politician’s task is to bind a people together: “The royal art of ruling consisted in gathering lives together ‘into a community based upon concord and friendship.’”24 Kings—as politicians—are engaged with the problem of unifying what might always already be unified and governing a (already) bounded multiplicity. The king, as the person charged with speaking the law of the community, articulates and rearticulates the law that unifies the community.25 It is this legal-political realm that the king governs. The legal and political ideal of kingship that Foucault illustrates cannot be reduced to mere juridical governance; even in his role as judge and avenger, the king is more than the formal seat of the power to decide. Rather, the essence of kingship is the political and legal relation—the unifying and bonding relation—par excellence.
Jimmy’s claim to kingship is neither hereditary nor economic; instead, it is “natural”: a sign of his God-given gift of (supposedly) superior masculinity. Even as a child, Jimmy was the leader of his gang. As an adult, he inspires admiration and fidelity from his friends and neighbors. The Savage brothers, Jimmy’s praetorian guard, follow him blindly out of nothing but love and respect. Celeste, Dave’s wife, goes to Jimmy with her suspicions that Dave killed his daughter rather than to the police. Jimmy’s first wife, a “Latin Queen,” chose him when she could have had any man in the neighborhood. And then, in the film’s final scene, a parade passes right in front of Jimmy and Annabeth’s front stoop. While Celeste scurries around the parade grounds and Sean stands amidst the throng, newly reunited with his wife and daughter, Jimmy strolls gallantly out onto his stoop, surveying the parade from above. Surrounded by his wife, two daughters, the Savage brothers, and a coterie of friends, it does appear that Annabeth is right: Jimmy can rule this town.
Mystic River does not necessarily suggest that Jimmy’s killing of Dave is justified, nor does the film condemn it. As a kingly figure, Jimmy acts not out of a theory of justified punishment, but from his natural and elemental right. Importantly, he resists crying for his daughter. Tears are not his medium of grief. A king does not cry; he acts. And his power comes from his nature.
The natural source of Jimmy’s power is most clearly evidenced in the scene in which Annabeth names him a king. As she does so, she seduces him to sex, first climbing atop him, and then allowing him to turn her over and mount her from above. “You could rule this town,” Annabeth tells Jimmy. Then they have sex, followed by the horns and ecstasy of a parade. The conjugation of sex and parade is nothing if not an orgasm, which literally means “what rises from earth.” The Greek word also has an intimate connection with the anger that swells as a natural response to wrong and leads to the justification of punishment.26 Similarly, Jimmy’s claim to kingship and his arrogation of the right of revenge are grounded in nothing but his elemental and orgasmic fertility. It is a right he has as the man he is.27
Sean, the last of the three childhood friends, has become a detective. He is, importantly, a man of the law. In contrast to Jimmy, who claims to be a hero of absolute kingship, Sean is a hero of fortitude and fidelity to law.28 He seeks to be an upright man whose commitment to justice is tempered by the recognition that no “man” gains from lawlessness. We first meet the adult Sean at a crime scene. He is silent, until he wanders to the edge of a bridge and looks longingly at his past. “What are you looking at, Devine?” asks his partner. “The old neighborhood,” he replies. Sean at first appears as a melancholic figure holding on to a lost childhood and standards of morality that have lost their ground. Only Sean, the one of the three male characters who has moved up and out of the old neighborhood, flips through pictures of the childhood he has lost. But as Eastwood unfolds Sean’s character in Mystic River, we see his commitment to the real world beyond himself and to actual institutions such as law and marriage. Pulling himself away from melancholia into an acknowledgement of vulnerability and love, Sean allows himself to remain open to a radical transformation of who he has become—a transformation unavailable to Jimmy, who remains snared as he is in the fantasy that he can be king.
If Jimmy deviates from our idea of the stereotypical avenger by getting the wrong man, Sean’s upright detective also departs from the usual image of the detective. Sean is neither a corrupt cop nor a Dirty Harry–type rebel. When his police chief asks him where the investigation stands, Sean responds, in a whispering and breaking voice: “We’ll get the guy, sir.” Not a hotshot, he is nevertheless a dedicated officer who believes in the promise of the law and acts upon his belief.
The law, however, is not the only object of Sean’s fidelity. Sean’s wife, Lauren (Tory Devine), left him while she was pregnant. In the months since she left, their baby was born, but Sean doesn’t even know its name or sex. Lauren calls, but not once does she speak. These calls pierce the movie with their silence, as Sean struggles to find the words to bring his wife to speak with him. He clearly does not understand what his wife expects of him, and yet he insists upon being faithful to her. Early on in the movie we see Sean turn down a good-looking female police officer who is clearly seeking a casual sexual relationship with him. His colleague teases him, saying: “So the wife left you what six months ago . . . The girl just wants to bed you, she doesn’t want to wed you. You don’t even blink. She wants to worship at the temple of Sean Devine.” Sean’s response is to simply confirm that he is married.
Eastwood has been long interested in the promise of fidelity as a way in which the masculine persona resists the notion of the exchangeability of women. In the movie Unforgiven Bill Munny remains faithful to his dead wife. In Mystic River, Sean’s promise of fidelity is portrayed as one way a man can articulate a masculinity that does not have to define itself upon treating women as exchangeable objects.
Throughout the movie, Eastwood films Lauren as a classic fetishistic object. We see her only from Sean’s viewpoint and as she appears in his imagination. We hear her breathing and see her mouth. The shots of her mouth, silhouetted against a white background or painted bright red in scintillating close-ups, are some of the most arresting of the whole movie. Lauren is portrayed as the infinitely desirable mouth that engulfs Sean in its silence. We see nothing else but the mouth. The beautiful, perfectly made-up lips tempt him, but Sean has no idea what she wants him to do in order to break the silence.
In order to understand the significance of Sean’s obsession with his wife’s mouth, we have to proceed through how Freud understands the nature of the “sexual drive.” For Freud there is no “sexual drive” per se (which is why we put it in quotation marks). Instead drives are always partial in two senses. First, the sexual drive is partial insofar as it focuses not on a person but only on parts of a body—for example, the genitalia, mouth, eye, or ear. The mouth, Sean’s particular obsession, is also the object that represents dependency in that it needs and desires the mother’s breast, which it is always in danger of losing. The mouth is the child’s own projected identification with the breast as an object that can be taken away. Sean’s infatuation with his wife’s mouth, therefore, is a symbol of his fear and insecurity in relationship to the goal of sex and reproduction.29
The second reason the drives are partial is the object of the sexual drive, which is always one’s own self; the sexual drive, in other words, is autoerotic. From this point of view, a sexual partner is always a means and never an end in him or herself. The supposedly loved Other serves merely as a partial object as a means of achieving a goal of self-satisfaction. Hence, what is focused on in the objectified person of the Other is the partial fantasized object that can always be exchanged with another object—the mouth of a lover that serves as the goal of the sexual drive can then be replaced by any other mouth; any woman’s mouth will do.
The stalemate between Sean and his wife extends so far that he cannot see her or hear her as she is to herself. Her silence is the resistance to this reduction of her self as the object of Sean’s partial drive. That is why she waits for him to speak to her as a gesture acknowledging that she is a person to him and not an object of his fantasy. Although Sean is unable, throughout most of the movie, to speak to her, he is in an internal struggle with himself against the vision that both drives him to her and keeps him from seeing her; instead, he is captured by the vision of her as the scary, infinitely desirable made-up lips. His resistance to domination by his own partial drive takes the form of a promise of fidelity only to her.
Sean’s promise to a woman he can’t actually see as a woman is the necessary first step in his coming to resist the seduction of the partial drive. What stops him from seeing Lauren as a whole woman, within Freudian psychology, is the repressed fear of what the female body represents—the fantasized possibility of castration that symbolizes his inability to control his world. And yet, Sean’s absolute pledge of fidelity opens a space for the possibility of transformation.30 This space not only offers to women the possibility of an imaginary domain—that “moral space” where women are freed to dream themselves independently from their roles in the partial drives of men—but also allows men to learn to care for women free from the psychic fear of femininity as the general unease of Otherness itself.31
Within Mystic River, the fear of castration that would destroy sovereignty is palpably represented by the rape and kidnapping of Dave Boyle. Having seen his friend subjected to the ultimate male terror, Sean is aware that he too can be penetrated, reduced to a powerless object to be “fucked” on the basis of nothing more then the whim of the Other. It is as an example of an upright confrontation with femininity as a threat to his masculine fantasy of control, mastery, and even kingship that Sean stands opposed to Jimmy in Mystic River. Sean’s fortitude is his struggle to let Lauren be the person who she is, an allowance that demands he accept his finitude and relinquish the drive for sovereignty.32
Sean only faces his fear in the movie’s climactic scene, when he seeks out Jimmy to tell him that the murderers have been caught. Jimmy is sitting on the curb after a drunken night trying to drown his own grief and sorrow. Sean realizes that Jimmy might have already acted against Dave. It is at this point that the two are standing exactly where they were when Dave was so brutally kidnapped, and when the two failed in their minds as men because they did not try to rescue their friend, even though they were only children. Sean fully confronts his trauma and speaks it to the extent he can by suggesting to Jimmy that “we are still eleven-year-old boys locked in a cellar, imagining what our lives would be like if we escaped.” By bringing the unspeakable to speech, Sean comes to terms with how his own most profound relationships have been shaped by the traumatic wound that undid David Boyle.
Having faced down the fear of castration, Sean is finally able to speak to his wife and risk confronting her as her own person. Immediately after the scene with Jimmy, Sean’s phone rings. It is Lauren, and her luscious red lips fill the screen with silent reproach. Yet, having faced the trauma he can now face the wound of his own inability to speak to her. He dares to speak first, saying, “I know I pushed you away and I am sorry.” At this point the mouth finally responds, “You have a daughter,” and the fetishistic object now turns into a living woman. Sean tells her that the house is just as she left it and waiting for her return, allowing the conversation to end on the hope for their reconciliation.
Here is where Eastwood points us toward the hope for the end of the cycle of violence unleashed by the traumatic event caught in the kidnapping of Dave Boyle. When Sean reaches out to his wife, asking for a true connection with her, he risks making himself vulnerable to her rejection, but she is finally able to appear to him as a fully embodied women. Scary, yes, but someone he can dare to face. He is the one who ends up with a wife and a living daughter.
In the final scene, standing together at a parade, Sean and Lauren are awkward and strained, but they are together as a family with their daughter. It is in the acknowledgement that he is sorry, even if he does not know for what, that opens Sean to the possibility for contact with a woman who is not simply a fetishistic object. Eastwood is not a Lacanian, so he would not put it this way, but by accepting his vulnerability, and thus his symbolic castration, Sean can now relate to a woman as a human being and as a full person.33 This is precisely the hope that is left open when Sean breaks the silence and risks that his apology may not be heard or accepted by his wife.
In Sean and Jimmy, Mystic River gives us two very different versions of masculinity and also of the response to a criminal trauma. For Jimmy, the attack calls for a response that reestablishes his sovereign personal identity as well as the claim of vengeful justice. Even though the act of revenge killed the wrong man, it is justified—or at least underpinned—by the higher need for recognition that underlies the psychoanalytic theory of the sovereign self as well as liberal political thinking regarding the sovereign state. Jimmy’s embrace of kingship and the arrogation of the right of revenge serves to “deflect the experience of finitude.”34 In doing so, however, it offers a powerful critique of the very idea of sovereignty embodied in the liberal legal state. As an absolute and unjustifiable arrogation of the right to avenge, Jimmy’s claim goes far beyond the usual effort to excuse vengeance on the grounds that otherwise justice would never be done. As a royal prerogative, Jimmy’s revenge is a right of nature; it sounds, therefore, in a register fully antithetical to the liberal idea of law as the justified act of a sovereign power.
Sean, on the other hand, counters Jimmy’s justification for identity-giving vengeance. Instead of responding vengefully to his pregnant wife’s departure, he struggles to open a space in which she and he can relate as friends. In doing so, Sean gestures toward an Aristotelian ideal of friendship that, as described by Jill Frank in her book A Democracy of Distinction, both preserves his own identity while also offering to others the space to be themselves. Such an understanding of friendship that, as Aristotle suggests, gives to each their own, is built upon an ideal of the self that can forego the fantasy of identity that revenge so powerfully supports. Indeed, Sean comes to accept his finitude and thus to seek a relation with his wife that is based on friendship rather than exclusion.