A dish best served cold: The changing flavour of revenge.

The revenge story is hardly a new narrative concept. It is older than Shakespeare’s tale of Hamlet’s revenge on his fratricidal uncle (to put it simply) and older still than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I would even dare to venture that if you inspected the cave scratchings that make up the earliest examples of human artistic storytelling, you would find the fledgling beginnings of the human proclivity to create fiction which allows them to righteously avenge the wrongs that befall them.

Revenge narratives allow the author, and by proxy the reader, to see that ‘divine’ retribution is effectively dispensed. Whether you believe in karma, or a deity, or nothing at all, we all hold on to the belief that everything happens for some kind of reason and that there are systems in place, human and supernatural, to ensure that the balance of good and evil is ultimately evened out. Over the years, humans have found it irresistible to explore the many depraved ways vengeful justice can be creatively enacted through their chosen artistic medium. Likewise, as readers, consumers of art, film watchers, and voyeurs, the masses devour these stories because they seem to provide a justification for the kind of bloodlust and hunger for violence that has existed in human societies since the beginning of time.

With such a solid history of producing some of the most evocative pieces of literature and art, it is surprising to me that I find the genre has gone somewhat stale. Perhaps I am suffering from the common affliction of distaste for one’s own era’s artistic expressions. This is when we nostalgically look back at earlier times and appreciate literary or artistic works more simply because we coat them with a sepia filter and put them up on a retrospective pedestal. Maybe in a generation or two our works will be given the same retrospective treatment, as it is, I can only examine them from my place firmly in the present and I must admit I can’t help but feel a snobby distaste for the homogenized, overly masculinized, brooding bullshit revenge movies Hollywood shovels out at production line speeds.

If I have to see another ‘good guy gone bad’ tortured man avenging the kidnapping/rape/murder of his girlfriend/wife/daughter, I might just get in the sea myself. Blockbusters like Braveheart and Gladiator did it in 1995 and 2000, respectively, well and truly covering off the faux-historical avenger trope. Then Memento brought an entirely new spin to the genre and I could dig that, but at some point some fat cats wiping their arses with $100 bills in Hollywood decided that basically every contemporary urban tale of morally sanctioned revenge had to fit into the same cookie-cutter mold. With titles like The Punisher and Death Sentence, and with Hollywood heavy-hitters like Gerard Butler, Denzel Washington, and Colin Farrell, these films are utter gold mines for production companies. However, in my heavily pessimistic view, their success is merely indicative of the zombie-like way we fulfill our cultural needs in the present day. We don’t get the creative, innovative films we deserve because we mindlessly consume the drivel they churn out year after year.

Just once I’d love to see a contemporary film made that takes its cue from the complex and diverse revenge stories that can be found in our distant past. They need not look further than one of my very favourite novels, The Count of Monte Cristo, which saw its author Alexandre Dumas become synonymous with the revenge story. Although the Count of Monte Cristo does lose his beloved it isn’t to some gratuitous, misogynistic violence. She is lost to him along with his freedom and his bright future. Dumas explores the different ways the Count suffers and the stages of grief he moves through. There is no instant blackening of his heart, the reader sees him change gradually page after page. Best of all when the time comes to seek revenge on those who wronged and ruined him he doesn’t, as modern antiheroes do, take up a weapon and proceed to massacre everyone within a ten kilometre radius. Dumas is masterful in how he slowly unravels the Count’s elaborate plan. There is bloodshed, but he also understands that death is not the only means to avenge something. There is also a delicious dose of fantasy involved in the tale, when after everything going so wrong for the poor Count he comes across an infinite fortune in the form of buried treasure. Things go right for the Count. We see him rebuild his life and live beyond his hardships.

In the bloodbath revenge films of the present we inevitably watch the wronged hero make the world burn. He often ruins what is left of himself leaving no light in the darkness of death and revenge. Oh except shagging. Sometimes there is shagging. In the absence of inspired storytelling and interesting dialogue, these films slap on a plate some sexual titillation along with lashings of blood, sweat, and tears. And don’t get me started on their subliminal phallic metaphors in the penetration of bodies with all manner of weapons. Sure there’s a knife fight in The Count of Monte Cristo. There’s a suicide, kidnapping, attempted infanticide, and several poisonings too, however, the meat of Dumas’ story lies in the details that surround these centres of action. We ‘watch’ him grapple with the reality of seeking revenge and, in particular, the way in being dispensed it inevitably results in collateral damage. Where Liam Neeson carelessly kills half of Paris and causes enough vehicular collisions to bring insurance companies to their knees in pursuit of his kidnapped daughter, Dumas’ Count is tortured by the consequences his long-laid plans will have on those around his targets. There is a humanness to the writing; an intimacy that cannot be achieved when life is treated so flippantly.

This is not to say the Count rescinds on his solemn promise to see justice for himself and others he has met on the way. In fact, in a way the individualized, carefully plotted, creative ways he sees his antagonists punished makes for a colder, more satisfying end. They do say revenge is a dish best served cold.

More than anything else, Dumas weaves his lengthy tale of revenge with little golden threads of redemption. However, this redemption doesn’t play out in the form of remorse and apologies, rather it asserts that a child should not pay for the sins of the father. The arrival next generation presents the Count with the dual role of protector and destroyer. It is a balancing act he maintains until the very end. In acknowledging and agonizing over the innocence of bystanders Dumas makes his tortured protagonist far more interesting and complex than any twenty-first century cinematic trigger-happy, karate-kicking, middle-aged white guy hell-bent on revenge. Maybe I’m nostalgic, maybe I’m a film-snob, but I would love to see modern filmmakers reimagine the parameters of the revenge genre. I’d love to see them take their cue from some of the great writers, the great narratives, of the not so distant past. There are an infinite amount of stories to be told in an infinite amount of different ways if only we can extract ourselves from the safety of mind-numbing blockbusters. Stories should always urge us to think about ourselves and our world and few have the potential to do it better than revenge narratives. I’m hopeful that cinematic depictions of revenge will eventually return to more nuanced examinations with less caveman violence versus violence, but in the meantime I think I’ll just read the classics.