Who Is My Enemy?

I HAVE A SIMPLE view of what makes a movie great: Technical craft and aesthetic vision operating at their highest frequencies come together in service of a story or images that help us live better. How does the movie interact with what Mennonite peace theorist and practitioner John Paul Lederach calls the choice to participate in escalating dehumanization or escalating humanization? In other words, does the movie help us become less human or more? In a narrative film, do the characters’ doubts and loves, the pain they suffer, and the results of their actions leave us with a deeper sense of our own humanity?

No aspect of popular culture more urgently deserves our attention than how “enemies” are presented. What motivates “bad guys,” and how are they dealt with by “good guys”? What side is the audience on? It has been noted by some that every audience watching Star Wars wants to believe that it’s the Rebel Alliance, fighting a titanic battle against an Evil Empire. Some viewers may imagine the Empire is North Korea. Others may imagine it is the U.S. Then, of course, there is the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s clarity: that the line between good and evil runs through every person, not between us.

I want movie bad guys to be more than monsters. That’s the only honest way to portray the bearers of evil action. Broken, twisted, overcome by selfishness, to be sure, but human still.

The movies that tell the truth about violence and what it does to those who carry it out range from The Godfather to Unforgiven, from Munich to Do the Right Thing. They reveal the vicious cycle in which killing never solves anything. Then there are movies that show mercy to antagonists and present another way than merely “wiping out” your enemy— The Color Purple, Shutter Island, Beatriz at Dinner, Jean de Florette, the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy.

But it’s striking how often primarily humane movies opt for simply killing the bad guy. Two otherwise-exquisite recent movies, Coco and The Shape of Water, are diminished by not imagining a response to their villains beyond retribution. More thoughtful is the resolution of the amazing Get Out, which metaphorizes the history and legacy of slavery and allows the protagonist to kill only in self-defense, even offering some mercy when we in the audience might easily settle for summary execution. It left me thinking: If we don’t support the death penalty in real life, we probably shouldn’t applaud it in the movies.