How Hollywood Serves Up Vengeance

Illustration: Randy Mora, Images: Everett

Khan was right: Revenge is a dish best served cold. But that doesn?t mean it can?t be gourmet, with an expansive menu and interesting cutlery. In pop culture, the bad deeds that inspire vengeance?and the vengeance itself?are infinitely variable. Still, careful observation does reveal a few key subtypes, each with its own set of predictable outcomes. Vengeance vichyssoise, anyone?

• Harming a Beloved
  More often than not it?s a wife that buys the farm, as in Memento, Sweeney Todd, and the manga masterpiece Lone Wolf and Cub, in which a samurai and his toddler son take 8,000 pages to get even. A mugger kills Bruce Wayne?s parents, Maximus? whole family is killed in Gladiator, and Foxy Brown gets her bell-bottomed revenge for the murder of her boyfriend. But blood can?t fill a hole in your heart. No one ever seems to feel better at the end of these epics. As Mattie says in True Grit: ?You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another.?
• Spurned Advances
  Awww. Did the apple of your eye reject your affections? You should totally get even. Just don?t expect it to feel good. The murderous Mr. Ripley barely escaped with his freedom, and Glenn Close got nothing more than drowned and shot in Fatal Attraction. Sure, class warfare and hunger for approval were behind Mark Zuckerberg?s ascent to Grand Poohbahsity, but z posits that it all began with a girl who said no. Ah well: We?ll always have Facebook. (We could mention My Super Ex-Girlfriend here, but that in and of itself would be just cause for retribution.)
• Wrongful Detention
  Edmond Dantes had a promising career and a beautiful fianc?9e until friends framed him for treason in The Count of Monte Cristo. Both V for Vendetta?s titular anarchist and Wolverine?s titular disembowelist were experimented on by their captors, while Khan Noonien Singh?s exile turned him lethal in Star Trek II. Still, the ?Damn, I Got Royally Screwed? trophy goes to Oldboy?s Oh Dae-su, locked up for 15 years. But look what they all got in return. Prison, it turns out, is really good for (a) getting into fighting shape and (b) stoking the desire to punch someone in the brain.
• Mass Slaughter
  One little genocide and people get all upset. Humans fight off Battlestar Galactica?s cylons; the toasters come back with nukes. The English annex Scotland, and William Wallace paints his face blue in Braveheart. Israel?s retribution against the killers of its Olympians in Munich was mostly about hitting someone back for the Holocaust. The trick is, small bands of survivors aim their responses wildly. The jocks deserved cuckolding in Revenge of the Nerds, but did Yoda really deserve to have the Imperial Senate thrown at him in Revenge of the Sith?
• Beehive Poking
  Why does it seem like the most dangerous people are the ones most often wronged? Those prick rapists in the exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave had no idea they were messing with a girl prepared to cut off a prick. And in Kill Bill, was it really a good plan to shoot the Bride in the head and then kidnap her baby? She?s a ninja assassin. So, like, don?t threaten to sacrifice the grandchild of a hell-bound wheelman, because that?s what makes Nicolas Cage strap on his action hair and Drive Angry. Lesson: Never provoke people with a predilection for inflicting massive damage.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/DXgqLj5JRbQ/

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