On October 3, 2015, in a boiling room in Franklin, Tennessee, Donald Trump quizzed his audience about a well-known film during a campaign rally. It was like a game show, though he asked and answered the questions. The movie, Death Wish, which was released in 1974, had a big influence on the American public debate at the time.
For its fans, the movie is seen as a coherent assessment of insecurity, human nature and a legitimate examination of self-defense. For others, it’s nothing more than racist propaganda, vile advertising for gun ownership and incitement to murder. Yet the man who became the 45th president of the United States proudly claimed that he modeled his behavior on the moral of this highly controversial film. The Republican Party, and especially Trump, cannot afford to ignore the National Rifle Association (NRA), the United State’s powerful gun lobby.
After the assassination attempt on his life on July 13, some people were naively tempted to point out the irony of the situation. They noted that he came so close to falling victim to the free circulation of the weapons he so fiercely defends. The AR-15, the assault rifle used in the assassination attempt, is one of the most popular models in the United Staes. According to the Washington Post, 16 million Americans owned one in 2023, and it is often involved in mass shootings. When asked about this in Palm Beach on August 8, Trump unsurprisingly declared that the attack he had suffered did not change his stance on firearms.
As Death Wish remains his benchmark, let’s take a closer look at it. The movie is based on a best-selling novel of the same name by prolific author Brian Garfield (1939-2018), published in 1972. Equally prolific British director Michael Winner (1935-2013) convinced actor Charles Bronson (1921-2003) to lend his image to this tale of revenge against crime – originally a vigilante movie. The title, Death Wish, can mean “desire to kill” or “suicidal impulse.” In France, the title chosen, Un Justicier Dans la Ville (“A Vigilante in the City”), is much less ambiguous and far more restrained.
Stupid and lewd thugs
Paul Kersey, the hero (played by Bronson), is an architect reminiscent of Gary Cooper’s character in King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949), a cult film for libertarians. He’s also a New York liberal who deplores the “White flight,” a term used to describe the migration of affluent White families from urban centers to the suburbs.
One of Kersey’s colleagues and his son-in-law countered this with Ayn Rand’s (1905-1982) “necessary egoism” theory. Rand, screenwriter of Vidor’s movie and a cult novelist in the US but relatively unknown in France, was a staunch anti-communist. She argued that the promise of the welfare state – redistribution in exchange for security – had not been kept. In her view, it was the excluded who threatened society, not the other way around. In this ideological perspective, if “the well-being of the middle class is threatened,” it is no longer by the “Wall Street banker,” as in the 1930s, but by the “looters” that the government fails to control, as essayist David Da Silva, author of Le Populisme Américain au Cinéma: de D. W. Griffith à Clint Eastwood (“American Populism in Cinema: From D. W. Griffith to Clint Eastwood,” Lettmotif, 2015), reminds us. Kersey pays a heavy price for denying this truth and not fleeing the city.
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