How many more stories about revenge are there? How many more can we handle? Stories whose protagonist is this man broken by life, whose precious family has been taken away from him and he has been left destroyed? Rhetorical questions. Apparently we can take many more, indeed we are thirsty about such stories, they will never cease to exist.
I have always liked them, myself. More importantly though, I’ve been struggling to find out why revenge stories are so important in the history of theatre, literature and film.
Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd is yet another take on the familiar plot: naïve barber has a nice family with a blonde wife and chubby baby daughter, evil judge eyes wife and daughter and arranges for the naïve barber to be taken off the picture, imprisoned somewhere far away for a crime he did not commit and we don’t even learn what is. Barber returns after fifteen years, bloodthirsty and much less naïve. He takes up his old profession with the aid of the baker, who is in love with him. He learns that wife has been poisoned and evil judge holds daughter. His plan is simplistic yet effective: barbers have knives and can shave, razors are sharp, maybe perhaps he could kill people that have wronged him? But what will become of the bodies? No problem as the love-stricken pie-maker needs fresh meat for her pies. The macabre enterprise proceeds with effectiveness, bringing fresh clientele for the barber and the baker, with little or no satisfaction for the former. The baker loves the barber though, she wants another shot in a happy life ‘it might not be as I dreamt, it might not be as you remember, but we can have a life’ she tells him. His empty face leaves no room for misunderstandings, he disagrees. His only goal is to kill the judge that deprived him of his life. In the end he succeeds amidst a bloodbath that spans an hour an a half of film, but alas in the process he also kills his wife, who poisoned herself, yes, but didn’t die and spent her life as a half-crazy beggar in the street. Sweeney is broken once again, when he sees that his life was not entirely lost, not until he was deceived by the baker and killed his wife. He holds her murdered body and he lives for one moment before the antagonist slits the final throat of the movie and Sweeney is reunited with his wife forever. And all this in songs, some of which genius.
The parallels with Oldboy are endless, minus the incest of course, no need to enumerate them here. Two tragic heroes that suffer for no reason and become worse than the people that wronged them. Oldboy can never be happy again, knowing what he has done and settles in a tormented existence. Sweeney dies, and perhaps gets his redemption in the next life. But the biggest affinity of the two of them is their metamorphosis, from naïve, kind-hearted idiots, whose mere existence is hubris to people that crave for love and boring family dinners and walks in the market, to the bloodthirsty monsters that they have become. Sweeny’s eyes say it all, he hates the world, he has finally grown up.
And that’s the tragedy, I think.
4 comments:
I should have waited for a day so I could have posted my revenge-film hint to a more appropriate posting... :-)
I've seen the Sondheim musical version of Sweeney Todd. It was a long time ago, but somehow I felt that even though the music is "scary" and the story is as it is in the film, the whole setting of a musical makes it inevitably more comical than it actually is. Musical as a genre is a caricature, even of music and theatre themselves. It blows things out of their proportions and it has the air of escapism around it. I don't think you can really deal with tragedy or futility of revenge, loneliness, etc. in a musical, even though many musicals have very "heavy" themes.
As Lady V knows, I'm not a fan of vengeance, as it just feels like a very immature way to deal with misfortunes and injustices in life, and these oldboy or killbill types of scenarios feel like musicals to me, pushing things to an extreme so that they lose meaning and can only focus on style.
It seems that especially men are useless, vain and stupid with all that revenge-stuff, their so-called honour and the rest of the jada jada. Oldboy and Kill Bill are both manly revenge stories, so is Sweeney Todd. They all somehow quantify the amount of suffering the protagonist has had to endure, then it gets multiplied and delivered back. Two eyes for an eye. And surprise, it fails to bring solace to the avenger.
Black Ice is a more nuanced story. :-) I'd almost say more feminine but I think I'll just say it is less testosterone-fuelled.
As you might expect, I don't I agree with you TH. Medea was a woman and a mother and that enabled her to create the worst revenge plan of all times. Also the Bride in Kill Bill, she is a woman and her revenge is plan is totally evil. It is not testosterone or lack thereof that makes revenge, male or female, stupid or whatever.
I like revenge because it is the epitome of tragedy, I think: a noble, naive hero gets transformed by this awful thing that happened to him and then there is no coming back. A 'normal' person ends up doing inhuman things, because of his pain. Sweeney Todd lost himself, in the process of his bloody revenge plan, but he couldn't help it. And that to me is tragedy.
Yes, I was a bit unclear, I didn't mean to say that revenge is especially masculine, I just said that I especially don't like the masculine revenge stories.
To me, Kill Bill is Tarantino's testosterone-induced killing rampage - regardless of who the main character is. To me it seems that the bride is a woman just for stylistic reasons, the rest of it is basic, stupid man-stuff.
I have to admit that I've only seen KB 1 but as it bored me to death I didn't feel the need to see the second part. :-)
I agree with what you say about tragedy. And I think that's why I liked Black Ice, it "got" this aspect better as it didn't have to deal with all that violence and blood.
I kind of understood what you meant with Kill Bill being masculine, and I agree with what you say about Tarantino's violent and macho aesthetics in the movie. I have to say though that I didn't see KB1 only KB2 and I really liked it, so maybe you want to give it a try, since that is the movie that has all the tragedy of revenge that I like.
But in any case it seems that we agree, and I am looking forward to seeing Black Ice (and maybe Frozen Land again) ;)
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