Old London's Revenge: Harry Brown & We Still Kill the Old Way

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Street punks. Punking! Mocking! Killing! Robbing! Raping! No respect for elders! Speaking less intelligibly than a mumble rapper or a bloke from Newcastle! Coppers doing nothing! Traditional Londoners, older and poorer. Pushed aside. Immigration on the rise! London no longer London?!? Take it from John Cleese.


Enter the revenge fantasy. In the present case, a carefully crafted fantasy for a generation which will soon be extinguished as the world endlessly churns and changes. Old man shakes his fist and yells at the sky. Think Death Wish, if Paul Kersey was an ageing Brit.

Harry Brown gives us Michael Caine as a retired Royal Marine who has had enough of street punks terrorizing his council estate (read retirement ghetto). We Still Kill the Old Way, on the other hand, conjures up proper old-school thugs to kill the upstart new school thugs. In this case, our filmmakers attempt to cash in on the the craze about the Krays brothers. One (retired) gangster is killed stopping a rape in an alley, bringing his brother out of retirement in Spain to make Britain British again!

I could describe the plot, but you already know it. Provocation. Bad guys begging the universe to kill them and the universe obliging with someone who has had quite enough of it.

What's interesting is that this is a cultural snapshot of one demographic fantasizing about how to handle another demographic. "Well, what if we terrorized these little s**ts until they started acting properly civilized and British?" In the end, it's a sad safety valve for people who are scared, impotent, and on the way out. For younger people, on the other hand, who might take inspiration from it, it could be overture for violence in the future.

We should pay attention to our fantasies. They show us as we were (and as we never were--nostalgia), as we are (and as what we pretend we are), and what we might be (hopes and fears). The revenge fantasy is a failure of imagination, a quick fix, a sign that our cultural conversation is failing.



Victim of The Night
Street punks. Punking! Mocking! Killing! Robbing! Raping! No respect for elders! Speaking less intelligibly than a mumble rapper or a bloke from Newcastle! Coppers doing nothing! Traditional Londoners, older and poorer. Pushed aside. Immigration on the rise! London no longer London?!? Take it from John Cleese.


Enter the revenge fantasy. In the present case, a carefully crafted fantasy for a generation which will soon be extinguished as the world endlessly churns and changes. Old man shakes his fist and yells at the sky. Think Death Wish, if Paul Kersey was an ageing Brit.

Harry Brown gives us Michael Caine as a retired Royal Marine who has had enough of street punks terrorizing his council estate (read retirement ghetto). We Still Kill the Old Way, on the other hand, conjures up proper old-school thugs to kill the upstart new school thugs. In this case, our filmmakers attempt to cash in on the the craze about the Krays brothers. One (retired) gangster is killed stopping a rape in an alley, bringing his brother out of retirement in Spain to make Britain British again!

I could describe the plot, but you already know it. Provocation. Bad guys begging the universe to kill them and the universe obliging with someone who has had quite enough of it.

What's interesting is that this is a cultural snapshot of one demographic fantasizing about how to handle another demographic. "Well, what if we terrorized these little s**ts until they started acting properly civilized and British?" In the end, it's a sad safety valve for people who are scared, impotent, and on the way out. For younger people, on the other hand, who might take inspiration from it, it could be overture for violence in the future.

We should pay attention to our fantasies. They show us as we were (and as we never were--nostalgia), as we are (and as what we pretend we are), and what we might be (hopes and fears). The revenge fantasy is a failure of imagination, a quick fix, a sign that our cultural conversation is failing.
Yeah, I think I probably agree with all that.



The "summoning" of the force of revenge (e.g., Dirty Harry, Paul Kersey, Harry Brown) is a primitive impulse, reflecting the creation of the Golem, an invocation of a curse, the wish someone to become the "clay" inhabited by the spirit of revenge. The contrast between the old (mystical) curse and the modern (human) cure can be seen in Stephen King's Thinner in which a man cursed by a gypsy invokes his own "curse," hiring a mechanic/hitter (Richie "The Hammer" Ginelli) to terrorize a band of Roma until they agree to lift his curse of growing thinner. Falling Down is an interesting turn of the wheel as it shows the dangers of the invocation of the Golem, even in human form.
WARNING: "Spoilers!" spoilers below
Michael Douglas spirals out of control and is revealed to be a psychotic villain.