That's What Bullets Do

Blue Ruin and the Purity of Revenge

Revenge is the thing we all want and never get.

You will never get to humiliate that boss you hated. You will never get to big-dog your landlord. The person who made fun of you in middle school almost certainly doesn’t care that you ended up with a nicer car than theirs. If you’re the coach of a high school football team who got humiliated by their arch-rivals last year, well, I wish you the best of luck. At least you might get a fair shot.

One of those vengeful hypotheticals probably hit a nerve. We’ve all felt these urges. There’s a reason why the law itself began with retribution, the eye-for-an-eye of the Code of Hammurabi. Presumably the impetus there was not that Babylonian judges were gory sadists, but that codifying how revenge occurred could stop things from escalating and spiraling out of control. We all want our enemies to feel pain that outstrips our own, and civilization as we know it is set up specifically to stop us from personally making them feel it.

Blue Ruin may be the purest revenge story I’ve ever seen. Jeremy Saulnier’s 2013 movie is just over 90 minutes long and isn’t particularly interested in sentimentalities such as “character.” Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) has exactly two traits: He’s a social outcast who lives in a car on the beach, and he wants to kill the man who killed his parents.

When I was failing to sell my first novel, a kind editor noted that it had something she tends to look for: Revenge. I was surprised to hear that this was considered an inherent strength for a book that had lofty ambitions. My novel did have a strange, hesitant revenge arc, but what felt clever to me at the time now seems unnecessarily tortuous. I thought I was making some kind of statement about (lack of) authenticity of feeling in fictional characters by making my protagonist’s motivations mercurial and meandering. I didn’t get what Saulnier understands so well in Blue Ruin, which is that the best drama often follows the straightest path.

At a key moment in Blue Ruin, we hear a distant crack. Characters turn toward the noise. After a quick beat, a man’s head explodes. The man who fired the gun later says of the mess left where a head once was, “That’s what bullets do.” Bullets go straight and they slam into things. If there’s a mess afterwards, well, that’s where the complexity comes in.

Dwight Evans goes straight and slams into quite a few things. When a police officer notifies him of the release of his parents’ killer, he rapidly transforms from listless hermit into avenging angel. He travels from the tourist beaches of Delaware to his native Central Virginia and begins dispatching clannish death. When his attempt to steal a gun is foiled by a safety lock, he settles for a knife. Saulnier loves spattering characters in blood.

Things spiral, of course. The convicted murderer targeted by our homeless hero is part of a clan of hillbilly criminals who are no more inclined to let matters rest than Dwight was. Dwight has a sister whose own family gets dragged into this emergent Hatfield and McCoys imbroglio. Twisting and turning in the widening gyre, Dwight Evans cannot hear the falconer, and he doesn’t care. He’s going to finish what he started.

I’ve already used the term “motivation” in this piece, and here is where I get to say that I often hate hearing it. Just like “stakes” or “character development,” it’s one of those shibboleths of storytelling craft that does have meaning, but always risks turning the elements of a story into machine-lathed industrial parts. The more polished these concepts become, the less they bear the grime of real life, real emotion.

Most of us, most of the time, don’t have “motivation” in the way a fictional character is supposed to. “Eating food so I don’t starve” or “going to work so I can buy said food” are motivations—you want something, and you act upon that desire. But they aren’t necessarily dramatic motivations, at least in that there’s no intentional effort to make them in any way compelling to witness. And anyway, when you’re at work, you’re probably thinking about a dozen different things, only one of which is the subroutine that tells you to finish tasks and not get fired. Real-life motivation is itself a mess; narrative motivation aspires to be the bullet that makes the mess.

Revenge may be the straightest-flying narrative bullet of all. You could probably imagine a situation in which you find yourself strongly desiring to take a cursed ring to a volcano, or wanting to hunt down a French warship off the coast of Brazil. You probably in fact have at one point wanted to charm the best-looking person in the room. These all count as “motivations,” and they’ve all launched good stories, but they don’t have what a good revenge impulse gives a character: An overpowering desire that is both familiar and forbidden.

We know we would want the same thing as Dwight Evans, and we also know we likely wouldn’t act on it. As Dr. Melfi of The Sopranos says at one point when contemplating that her patient Tony could probably take care of her rapist, “I won’t break the social contract.” She speaks for almost all of us. Very few of us will ever be Tony Soprano—or Dwight Evans.

If we were Dwight Evans, our actions would have a kind of clarity and directness that we may never achieve in our real lives. A song called “No Regrets” plays more than once during Blue Ruin, as if to affirm that Dwight will stay the course no matter what forces try to knock him off his path. We always doubt this kind of simplicity, even as we’re drawn to it. We’re also drawn to the ways simplicity of purpose isn’t allowed to stay simple, perhaps because we like to be reminded that we don’t get to live so elegantly.

Blue Ruin is a nice reminder that in drama we often want both the initial clarity and the resultant mess. We also want the former to be realer for us than the latter. We may aspire to Dwight Evans’ purity of purpose, but we probably don’t want to be sneaking into the house of a stranger to wash away another stranger’s blood. If you do want that, I’d suggest finding your own Dr. Melfi to talk to.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Everyone is a libertarian until the house catches on fire:

Both Calvin and Hobbes are seriously philosophical characters in this particular sense: They’re capable of taking what they think and say seriously, and they expect others to do the same. I suspect a lot of my own pontificating style as a kid was inspired by Calvin’s pomposity. Calvin has many failings, but being unwilling to engage with ideas is not among them.

And it’s not all “stupid,” even as Calvin excoriates himself here. I learned to reflexively question authority by reading Calvin and Hobbes, and if you read this segment of my newsletter every week, maybe you did, too. Calvin is wrong a lot, but his eternal suspicion of inherited hierarchy and arbitrarily stated rules are among his best traits. His problem is one he shares with many Americans: He mistakes any external claims on his conscience for oppression.

It’s nice to see Calvin grappling with a central dilemma of any concept of liberty: Once you’ve declared your autonomy from others, just how much autonomy will they declare from you? Calvin and Hobbes ultimately has more to say about this kind of thing than the vast majority of dissembling political punditry. We are all someone’s stupid kid, and we all sometimes want to come in from the forest and be taken back.

Other fun things

— My friend Natalie Elliot has a heavily reported longread in Aeon about emerging, cutting-edge theories about how life originates

— We could absolutely use a podcast about the murder of Frank Little in Butte, Montana in 1917. A crucial moment in American history, and not widely known

— I mean, of course Yukio Mishima wrote about the death of James Dean

A poem

Frank Bidart on death