Revenge is a dish served hot to a restless and hungry citizenry these days. It can taste good, but so can poison.
This spring, rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake entertainingly squared off in an escalating series of diss tracks.
We’ve also seen literary tell-alls. Truman Capote’s deeply personal eviscerations of the women he once called his friends seem one part revenge and another part self-destruction. Alexander Howard’s essay in the Conversation quotes Capote’s authorized biographer Gerald Clarke, opining that a settling of scores was behind Capote’s decision to publish: “It represented an opportunity ‘to get back at some of his rich friends who, for one reason or another, had offended him over the years.’”
In other artistic media, the connection is much more direct. Movies in particular love a good comeuppance story. The unstoppable vigilante serves as hero in many a movie, from 2008’s Taken to 2014’s John Wick and 2016’s London Has Fallen.
Shakespeare well understood how effective a good bit of getting even could be. It’s the meat of many of his plays. There are Hamlet’s famous words “The son of a dear father murdered/Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell.” And there’s the vengeful bloodbath that is Titus Andronicus.
Revenge seems to motivate a lot of today’s political candidates as well as their voters, to whom they promise, as Donald Trump brays, “retribution!”
Trump’s first run for the highest office in the United States was supposedly the result of being the butt of the joke at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. And long before Steve Bannon became the architect of Trump’s presidential era, he was obsessed with Titus Andronicus.
In Rex Weiner’s often horrifically funny 2016 Paris Review essay about Bannon’s abortive film career, this paragraph leaps out:
“One may speculate what a fixation on Titus Andronicus reveals about the man advising our next Leader of the Free World, and what it may portend: the nation — and the globe — anxiously await what ‘thousand dreadful things’ may be in store. Certainly, the reports of Bannon’s violent personality dovetail with his fixation on Andronicus and its gory mayhem, to say nothing of its vengeful streak.”
Of course, we all know what happened next, and is still happening.
In ancient stories the gods themselves were motivated by the desire to get back at other deities. Or, fed up with wayward mortals, they’d shock and awe with divine retribution. The smiting Christian God of the Old Testament was really into revenge.
But in many of those ancient examples, there is usually a moral at the end of the story. Like maybe don’t take out all your most violent impulses on those you feel have wronged you, because after the jolt of cruel satisfaction fades, acts of vengeance just create a cycle of pain and destruction that never really ends well.
So if revenge is a fundamental human impulse (also apparently present in some other animals), sages of the past seemed to understand the need to restrain the urge.
Have we lost sight of such lessons? In this digital age, are too many of us ruled by an algorithm-laced obsession with punishing our enemies?
I would have to say a definitive yes after watching The Sixth, a 2024 documentary told through the voices of six people who lived through the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
One would think that the film, directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers and distributed by the cool-kids distributor A24, would be on screens all over the place, especially in a U.S. election year. But one would be dead wrong.
Curiously, The Sixth is not easy to find. It did not screen in local theatres, and as far as I can see, it’s not been widely promoted. I watched the film a few weeks ago, but the main thrust of its narrative came roaring back this past weekend, when a lone gunman took aim at Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
While the heated debates are still very much at the boiling point, it’s difficult to assign meaning or even barely make sense of events. Time, distance and reason are needed for that. It’s worth taking a look at The Sixth, because it does exactly that, providing a bigger picture, but also illustrating the human cost of revenge enacted in the political arena.
The events covered in the film have been well documented in a number of places, but directors Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine capture both the overview and intimate moments with people who were on the ground reacting as things unfolded.
Some of the nuances are startling, like the fact that Rep. Jamie Raskin had just buried his 25-year-old son, Tommy, the day before. Jan. 6 marked his return to work in order to participate in the supposedly peaceful transition of power to president-elect Joe Biden.
Others featured in the film, including government staffer Erica Loewe, are ordinary people who suddenly found themselves caught up in extraordinary historical events. Loewe puts the viewer on the scene with her visceral and emotional testimony, as she recounts how Capitol staff tried to barricade the doors as insurrectionists roamed the hallways of the building, howling threats and taunts.
Other statements, like those offered by D.C. police officers, are even more dramatic. Metropolitan cops Christina Laury and Daniel Hodges, as well as police Chief Robert J. Contee III, only a few days into his new role before Jan. 6, talk openly and bluntly about what they saw and endured. Hodges suffered brutal injuries, and many police officers who were on site that day suffered from PTSD and other forms of serious emotional trauma.
Photographer Mel D. Cole tells of witnessing Capitol police officer Michael Fanone begging for his life after being dragged into the crowd of insurrectionists.
Cole states with weary sadness, “I felt embarrassed for all of us.” He describes a conversation he had in the heat of the struggle with a woman who explained she was willing to give up her life for the Trumpian cause. Around them, the MAGA mob she’d joined clamoured for bloody payback. And yet, Cole marvels, “She was just so nice.”
When enough supposedly nice people fall under the spell of schemers like Bannon whipping up grievances to goad and divide, violence is only a step away. In the cauldron of cathartic retribution, how do you ever trust your fellow citizens again?
If we allow vengeance to rule our hearts, it doesn’t really matter which side we’re on. We all lose something fundamental and precious. Our humanity.
‘The Sixth’ is now streaming on Apple TV as well as other video-on-demand platforms.
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