You might want to read up about NYC in the 70s. Its not the ‘country’, but it was where the fear came from.
I know plenty about New York in the '70s. Still, the country was not falling apart. And it fueled a rage-filled fantasy of murdering “those people,” how ever any particular individual defined it—hippies, punks, druggies, drug dealers, gang members, blacks, minorities, liberals, scumbags, welfare queens, etc. It’s part of the whole conservative backlash that continues today (with even less justification now).
Some big cities certainly had problems, but the popular culture way overblew it, and supplied for blame a range of stereotypes. Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson weren’t just popular in New York City, where crime was bad. They were popular nationwide, and they were popular because a lot of people liked the idea of being able to harbor murderous rage against the “other.”
Dirty Harry villains were almost all white; including corrupt cops in Magnum Force. Many people thought the pendulum swung too far on the rights of the criminal at the expense of the victims of crime.
I’m not sure that I said anything that this would contradict, but okay.
Why did they think that? Were they right? (Hint: I believe they were wrong.)
And even if they had been right, why did they so love the idea of murderous vigilantes? That doesn’t rectify any imbalance of justice in society.
Remember, the vast majority of people in the country who so loved the vigilante ethos were never subject to street crime.
They just loved the idea of justified murderous rage against the “other.” And they loved it for pretty much the same reasons that people love Trump. They love the idea of a group of underserving people who deserve, for whatever reason, to be hated. They wanted to be justified in their hate, and loved the fantasy of being able to murder to fulfill that hatred.
Imo you seem to be doing exactly what you claim the ‘vigilantes’ were doing: Hating and painting with a very broad brush. People still remembered the massive street protests of the late 60’s. There were terror groups very active in this country; The Weathermen and the SLA, for example. The drug culture was exploding. Parents were afraid what was to become of their children. The vast majority of people didn’t hate; they were just afraid that the country was out of control.
No, I reject that. I’m not hating; I’m criticizing. I’m not participating in a cultural movement to fantasize about killing them. There’s no equivalence.
They weren’t “just afraid.” They indulged in group fantasies about murder. And they took their fears—much of which was overblown, exaggerated, or based on false premises—and they wielded it as a weapon on other people in our society.
They created a movement that made other peoples’ lives worse, based on hateful fantasies. The movement has now elected a president who decades ago took out full page newspaper ads calling for the execution of railroaded crime suspects and when faced with their factual innocence, refused to back down.
There’s nothing harmless or innocent about how they latched onto their fears and spun them into a hateful cultural ethos.
Oh I get it now.
You just want Punisher to target the Trump administration.
I gots yas.
Ha, okay, funny.
I just want to make it crystal clear that I don’t want any vigilantes murdering people in the Trump administration and I don’t want to see a rise in that kind of movie or comic book genre.
Murder doesn’t actually solve problems.
You’re about 120 years too late.
The genre of murdering members of the Trump administration goes back to the beginning of film?
I’ve followed him off-and-on over the years. I found most of his stories at least pretty good, or at worst not painful. (I’m actually kinda curious as to how the “angelic servant” stuff turned out. Absolutely everyone seems to utterly loathe it, which is pretty much a stone cold lock that I’d be at least intrigued.) I guess the main appeal for me was that he gets thrust into one horrible situation after another, yet always finds a way to prevail and never stops fighting the good fight, never forgets the innocent lives he’s protecting. While I can understand why he’d be a tough sell in today’s environment, I don’t doubt his heroism for a moment, even if he’s a mass murderer (and he totally is). A lifetime both learning about and dealing directly with nightmarish injustice has taught me that some people simply deserve death, and, while a gun-toting vigilante in reality is never a good thing for a multitude of reasons, I can completely understand the appeal of a fictional one.
One thing I’d like to see tackled…canon or noncanon, doesn’t matter…is what ability he has that allows him to be so perfect. See, that’s the difference between Frank Castle and a real-world avenger, he never, ever screws up. He never harms an innocent, never misidentifies a target, never does excessive damage, never has a bullet or grenade or bazooka shell go astray, never misreads data or takes a wrong turn or breaks through the wrong window or gets taken by surprise in an ambush or has a bomb go off in his face. He has spent several decades in a line of work where massive collateral damage is practically inevitable, yet for all the blood he shed he has none on his hands. THAT’S why I think he’s been a superhero all along. Plus the astonishing toughness and being able to predict when Bullseye is about to shoot him.
In a country where so many people have cause to be afraid of both the government and the police, is a vigilante really so out of place?
If they want to make this guy relevant then just make him black, have him out chasing racists.
A gun-toting black man running around killing scads of white people? THAT would go over well in Trump’s America. Hell, that wouldn’t have flown in Obama’s America.
My gripe with Punisher is the same as most 70s heroes - Marvel shamelessly stole from 70s B-movie genres (unlike when they shamelessly stole other companies ideas) and those period characters have struggled to fit in since the 80s, much like Gaiman’s Goth Gods of the 90s look weird now (though yeah, Death is still cute).
They’ve fixed this in Castle’s case by having him battle government conspiracies rather than street crime, making his a downscale Captain America.
DKW, what makes you think that he is perfect? I think the simplest explanation is that, yes, he really has misidentified his targets and killed innocent people, probably many times. Do we have any evidence to the contrary, other than he himself saying “Yeah, got him, that was the right guy”?
I’m not a comic book reader, but have seen all 3 terrible-to-mediocre films, plus his appearance in the far superior Daredevil s2. As a sometime comic book reader of The Punisher, do you think that the character is capable of supporting his own decent series or even franchise? He is basically, as far as the films are concerned, a murderous vigilante with a gun. Thats the plot of a gazillion 80s action movies. That’s not a particularly interesting superhero - i’d rather see a reboot of Howard the Duck.
OMG! Frank Castle is… Steven Seagal.
This infallibility is exactly the fascist fantasy that makes the whole mainstream superhero genre disturbing. At some level people do think that their judgment of who deserves to die is infallible and this depiction serves as a wish fulfillment in which they can go ahead and kill with impunity.
The Punisher is more disturbing than Batman in that there are at least some variations of Batman in which he holds to a principle of restraining himself from outright murder.
Right now, in our country, we are seeing the unleashing of an ideology that is wedding to eliminating people from society based on their being identified as less deserving, or less human, or less something. The vigilante fantasy feeds straight into that.
Honestly, I don’t know what benefits society or any individuals actually get from killing a bad person, as opposed to confining him or her. But granting the presumption that some people deserve to be killed, what I don’t see is that anyone—individually or as a group—“deserves” to be a killer.
Besides the obvious benefits of the person not repeating the behavior and society not paying an average of $30,000/year to feed, house, and provide health care to the bad person indefinitely (things we steadfastly refuse to do for children, the mentally ill or the elderly)?
This is debated in Batman all the time. The Joker has killed hundreds of innocent people in Gotham, and Batman simply drags him back to Arkham after every spree. In many incarnations of the character, the Joker kills simply to torment the Batman and try to goad him into breaking his moral code.
This was also the main thrust of the conflict between Daredevil and the Punisher - that killing the criminals prevents repeat offenses and is a stronger deterrent to crime in general.
I don’t consider that an adequate justification for killing.
That’s a mistake too.
I don’t accept this as a problem we actually have in real life. How often has a real mass murderer repeatedly been let loose to keep killing?
Imprisonment in real life works pretty damn well.
I don’t believe that this is actually true.
And of course, in comic-book land, execution of criminals doesn’t stop them from killing again, either.
Ha! My biggest pet peeve pf Daredevil the series and comic is…how the EFF is Turk not in jail??? Gets caught doing crime, gets beat up,is out getting beat up next ep/issue.
So does Spectre get a pass for his rampage of negating due process because he works for God?