Keeping Wounds Green

“In the aftermath of the fiasco that was the Fall of Kabul, it was predictable that American commentators would detect a mirroring effect of the Afghan loss on political crises in the United States.”

Revenge is a dish best served cold, or so the banality has it. It is a facile cliché, applicable nowadays mainly to the efficient choreography of American action movies. Think: Tom Cruise’s tersely determined announcements to the villains in both Jack Reacher films of exactly what he will do to them (the script following the books of Lee Child), or countless cold dispatchings of big baddies who have it coming to them in lesser fare, or the shocking denouement of Benicio del Toro’s character Alejandro’s mission of getting even with the cartel kingpin in the first Sicario. Revenge may well be bred in the film storyline bone. If movie characters are short-lived, movie vengeance itself, alas, is not.

Even those artsier violent films with aspirations to subvert revenge (or socially editorialize on it) fight an uphill battle to win over the ratiocinative soul. As Oliver Stone has put it:

“But truly, I’m not sure movies make a difference [b]ecause there have been so many great movies with violence, done so effectively for over a hundred years now, yet it hasn’t seemed to deter people from acting violently and stupidly.”

Beyond pop-cinematic concoctions and good intentions, though, revenge’s culinary conceit loses its flavor against most real-world tragedies giving rise to, or carrying out, the vengeance emotion. Material events’ velocity, ambiguity, and unintended consequences exceed the brooding induration and motive of redress of grievance—no matter how collectively shared and frigidly “justice” is delivered.