Taken By Propaganda

I am swimming in the same waters as Warner Todd Huston today. He has posted about the forthcoming WATCHMEN movie, fretting about the unheroic qualities of the the lead characters. As it happens, I am about to the do same about another movie, but at least I've SEEN it. (Note: apologies to WTH; he never claimed to be writing about the movie, but the graphic novel)

Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD! Among them the revelation that Fox is finally using the movie division to push Rupert Murdoch's worldview onto us.

TAKEN, starring Liam Neeson as an estranged father who will do anything to save his teenaged daughter from an Albanian white slave ring in France. I caught this Monday afternoon and the audience applauded at the end, so it's clearly a crowd pleaser. In his quest Neeson kills around twelve people (torturing one to death) and shoots an innocent woman in the arm to force her corrupt husband to talk. France is depicted as decadent and creepy. I left the theatre with a nagging question on my mind, and sure enough, when I took the trouble to look it up, I was right.

It's a Fox release.

Just as Fox TV's 24 exists both as entertainment and a shorthand legal argument for Justice Scalia to explain why torture is a handy tool to have in your bag, TAKEN is a way to make you think, "well given the right circumstances I guess I'd hook some guy up to a lamp cord." I wrote elsewhere about the phenomenon of "movie morality", a screenwriting convention that generates sympathy for the hero. If someone does wrong and is punished for it somehow, the audience is satisfied. Even if they're struck by lightening or they choke on a hunk of meat, something bad has to happen to them.

Neeson is not punished for torturing here, so what gives?

I'm spitballing here, so bear with me. I think Neeson is given the DEATH WISH exemption to the movie morality rule here. In this loophole, if the character does terrible things in the service of punishing characters who have done even worse things, it's cool. The guy Neeson hooks up to electricity is part of a ring of villains who kidnap young girls, drug them, and sell them into prostitution. He's got it comin', and someone's gotta do it.

Even so, Neeson does two incredibly gratuitous things here which put him into flawed anti-hero territory as far as I'm concerned. The first one is this guy above - Neeson tortures information out of a guy, then keeps torturing him anyway. Considering that he's on the clock, this is both villainous and a waste of precious time. Secondly, he shoots this woman as a way of dragging information out of her husband. An innocent woman who clearly has done nothing wrong. He mitigates the act by asking her husband to apologize when she regains conciousness. But I cannot reconcile this act with movie morality. There were alternatives to shooting the innocent woman, among them taking the husband into another room and shooting him.

That second one is what fascinates me about this movie, because it's so clearly bad propaganda that I'm wondering if the filmmakers threw it in as a slap in the face to the producers. There's precedent for this too: Roman Polanski's FRANTIC, in which another American chases around France to rescue a female he loves, ends with a gratuitous long take of a garbage truck driving away, as if taking this commercial populist merde with it.

So this is why I think TAKEN is a propaganda movie, because it goes out of its way to violate the movie morality rule and yet keep the hero likable. It's trying to negate the rule by making the immoral actions themselves palatable. Creepy. Making a movie like this is so counter-intuative, releasing it takes a Triumph of the Will.