Rotten Wish Fulfillment

I'm about 20 minutes out from seeing the movie "Wanted" and can't get a certain bitter taste out of my mouth.

A word about the movie: As a brain dead piece of summer entertainment, you could do a lot worse. The action "kicks ass" as it were, completely with flipping cars, bullets that travel in a round pattern and Morgan Freeman as an assassin. James McAvoy proves an extremely capable lead and Angelina Jolie is monosyllabic and shows her butt (I'd prefer she had more dialogue and her butt more screen time, frankly). Like I said, you could do worse.

But there was an element to the film that, the more I think about it, I find flat out despicable. The movie opens with a quick introduction to the life of Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), an office droan whose boss yells at him, whose girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend and who thinks about how he can't "feel anything" all the time. He calls himself a loser, a nothing, a nobody. Then he's recruited by a fraternity of assassins (except for Jolie who cannot be in a frat, can she?) and begins extensive assassin training and begins shooting a bunch of people.

Wesley is involved in an initial shoot out before he decides to leave his life as an office droan and undertake killing people in the name of a magic loom that spits the names of people who need to be killed "in the name of fate" in binary code (that's the plot, I swear to God). After the shoot out he goes back to his office and feels "different." His vulgar boss, whose girth is played for laughs, pushes him to the breaking point where he swears at her and informs her everyone would feel sorry for her if only she were nicer to them. Instead they hate her. His best friend, the one who's boning Wesley's girlfriend, goes in for a high five only to be smashed in the face with Wes's keyboard. Letters fly off the keyboard and spell "Fuck You" with one of the man's tooth substituting for the second "u." Attention to detail and all that.

In the context of the movie as a hypstylized fantasy about shooting people, it's completely in line with the rest of the movie. Things started to go south for me when folks in the crowd started to cheer the in-office violence. A couple people whooped. The dude in front of me (the one with his baseball cap on backward) stood up and pumped his fist like his inner monologue had FINALLY been expressed in celluloid, like the director had reached into his soul and expressed his deepest longing.

I have to admit, I grinned. Like I said, in context it fits in a movie where you flip your car in order to shoot a guy through his sunroof or where a curved bullet goes in a circle and kills half a dozen people on its flight. But no one cheered any of those scened. They cheered the use of violence to deal with something they could relate to (betrayal, office boredom, a feeling of powerlessness).

I was ready to let it go until the last scene in the movie where Wesley provides a voice over as a bullet flies an impossible distance through his best friend's energy drink can, through the hole in his boss's doughnut and into the head of the big bad guy. He says "this is me taking control of my destiny. What the fuck have you done lately?"

Well, I haven't saved the world from an evil syndicate of killers, but I've resisted the urge to punch people I disagree with on a fairly regular basis, so lets call it a wash.

Here's my problem - people responded to fixing a situation they relate to with violence instead of any of the other guilty pleasures in the movie. I remember when I saw "Knocked Up" people cheered when Seth Rogan finally stood up to Leslie Mann's nosy sister, who was trying to force him out of the delivery room. That was an instance where a man took control of a situation and firmly (but with great vulgarity) asserted himself. He didn't knock her teeth out. I love that scene in the flick and I clapped when I first saw it in the theater. I was the only one. Maybe if he's punched her in the boob...

The thing is we WANT to be violent. It's in our DNA to resolve things by hitting them, and it's why society has created laws saying if you do that, you go to jail. That's something we've always contended with. But I've noticed this sort of post Office Space hatred for the day to day work we all do that is rooted both in entitlement and ego. If someone gives us shit over the course of our day, as happens to absolutely everybody, we've gone from fantasizing about destroying the copier to kicking some ass. It's on the Internet in major proportions. It's spoken aloud in bars after work. And now guys are standing up and cheering when it happens in our pop entertainment.

Part of it stems from ego but another part stems from the awful corporate cultures cultivated in this country. When it's made clear to you that you're either expendable or not appreciated you feel powerless and when you feel powerless you want revenge on those who have the power. That's as human as dwelling in houses.

But it's a shift toward violence as a solution in the name of sophistication that bothers me - it's the worker saying I'm brilliant and misunderstood and deserve to be treated like royalty and if not I reserve the right to fucking kill you. That's the mentality that manifested in that reaction to the first 20 minutes of "Wanted." It's ego to a massive degree, and if research and trends are holding true it's going to get worse before it gets better. I just hope, for the sake of keyboards and dentists everywhere, we have less hitting and more, I don't know, talking.