Killer instinct

Yesterday was the morning after. The night before, I had watched Part 2 of the 2008 French film pair, Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, starring Vincent Cassel as the "most famous criminal in modern French history" (Wikipedia). Cassel was in last year's Black Swan, opposite Natalie Portman, who, interestingly in the current connection, debuted in the 1994 French film, Leon: The Professional [assassin].
    My wife stopped watching about half-way through, a little after I'd almost stopped myself. But even after she went to bed, I remained to watch, to the bitter end. Why did I do that? I "officially" rated Part 1 (which we had watched the night before) F[air] and Part 2 P[oor], but I'm not sure they are that bad (although Part 1 is a better-made film than Part 2, which was shoddily edited and tediously repetitious—my wife later commented that the additional depictions of Mesrine's bank robberies, prison escapes, and kidnappings provided "no new information").

I might have downgraded both ratings because of a recent challenge from a friend, who doesn't find anything positive in movies about such people, who he thinks should be exterminated rather than glorified in film. He said that films like Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and TV programs like The Sopranos desensitize us toward evil. He hasn't seen either of these, and he wondered why I watched them (The Godfather and its two sequels at least twice each).
    I plead a fascination with story, and I'm especially fascinated by a true one.

Bonnie & Clyde in March 1933;
photo found at their hideout

    Because of his caution about the corrupting influence of depictions of evil people, I did watch the Mesrine films a good deal more thoughtfully than usual: I more closely watched myself watching. I was glad to find myself clear on the point that Jacques Mesrine—even with all his (or was it Cassel's?) charm and evident intelligence—was no one to imitate (the French likened him and one of his female associates to Clyde Barrow & Bonnie Parker).

I should disclose that I didn't know that Mesrine (pronounced may-reen) was a real person until I looked the movies up on the Internet Movie Database. I think I would have been less inclined to stop watching Part 2 if I already knew that, just to see how it actually (as opposed to fictionally) turned out.
    Yes, it was a true story and, as my friend recommended, after Mesrine's several incarcerations in MSPs (maximum security prisons), from all of which he had escaped, the French police decided they had no choice but to exterminate Mesrine. The photo at the top is the final shot of Cassel as Mesrine slumped over thoroughly dead behind the wheel of his car, having been shot by several officers firing down on his windshield with rifles from a truck that had managed to position itself immediately in front of Mesrine at a stop light.
    Not knowing beforehand that Mesrine was real sharpens the question: Why was I watching? Such stories are the stuff (when well produced) of strong dramatic cinema (or TV), same as Oedipus Rex, with its patricide and oedipal sex and self-mutilation, was strong dramatic theater to the Athenians, or Macbeth, with all its carnage, to the Elizabethans. I plead a fascination with story, not any glorification or worship of characters portrayed.

Plato (424/423-348/347 BC)

Movies & TV dramas present the irony that even though people usually identify with certain of their characters and enter into the story in their imagination, they usually don't map the world of a story to the reality of their own lives. Or at least I don't. I tend to objectify story worlds and analyze them in terms of plot, theme, dramatic arc, etc., as well as of writing, acting, directing, editing. I watch as an amateur film connoisseur.
    My sense of the Mesrine films is that their producers had not set out to glorify or worship the bad guys depicted. But does that matter? Might not people who cut other people up with a chainsaw have gotten the idea from Brian De Palma's 1983 gangster film, Scarface? What if we knew that that's precisely where one such person got the idea? Should Scarface therefore not have been made? In Book X of Plato's Republic, poets are banished in order to protect the populous from indulging base emotions, if vicariously, and transferring them to their own lives, where the emotions can transform them into the characters they saw on stage.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

     Plato's student Aristotle looked at differently. Stories about bad guys permit us to examine and deal with our own "dark side." Aristotle held that achieving catharsis was a healthy reason to go out to the theater; it cleanses your emotions.
    But, again, it matters who "your" is. Myself, I don't ordinarily think I need an emotional purging; I don't think The Godfather—and certainly not the Mesrine films—helped me get in touch with my dark side. I know clearly where I stand.
    But I suppose some people, who actually lean toward doing evil and being bad guys (whether they're aware of it or not), can be schooled in evil by such portrayals, perhaps even be taught behaviors to emulate. Most people who have seen Scarface (including me) haven't attacked (and will not attack) other people with a chainsaw. Isn't it okay for those people to watch such films? Just not okay for the few people who do get evil ideas (and are likely to act on them)?
    So, who's going to enforce who watches what, or what films and TV programs are produced (or what books are written or published)?

Only I myself "enforce" what I will watch. My friend's challenge to me is that I be more mindful whether there's a better way for me to spend my time. A better movie to watch, a better TV program? A better activity altogether than watching—Reading? Going for a long walk? Writing a letter?
    My friend was questioning whether it's morally justifiable to watch a movie (and especially a movie about bad guys) because doing so is our habit or our custom or our tradition. I agree that habit/custom/tradition is not a moral justification—for anything. And it's often just the opposite, tradition granting permission to continue to indulge in questionable behavior.