Friday, June 12, 2020

The Heir now gets to talk about the movie Death Wish, and its implications for today.  What the Heir understands about Death Wish comes from a parody by Mad Magazine back in the day.  Charles Bronson plays an ordinary Joe living in a city environment whose wife and daughter are viciously attacked by muggers.  His wife dies and his daughter lies in a vegetative state.  He believes that all this could have been prevented if there was a stronger police presence, but the police were virtually non-existent for a number of reasons, including their being outnumbered and out-equipped by the muggers.  He then takes it on himself to become a vigilante to both try to make his neighborhood safer and kind of exact revenge on the muggers who attacked his family.  Apparently, things get out of hand when he thinks, let's not stop with the muggers.  Let's go after *anyone* I suspect of committing crimes, possibly including scofflaws and jaywalkers.  The Heir believes the 2010s would consider the Bronson character to be proverbially autistic.  But anyway, there's increased worry that this vigilantism poses a greater threat than the muggers, and the Bronson character is brought to justice.  The cops are forced to admit that their failure to stop crime gave rise to this vigilantism, so the Bronson character enters into an agreement that he move out the city and never come back.  The Heir only saw previews of the movie itself, and they were pretty dark and hard to take.  But the Heir feels that the Mad Magazine parody was enough to illustrate the points the movie proper was trying to make.  So here's the Heir to sum it up below.

"For those of you who still want to abolish the cops, heed the movie Death Wish, and be careful what you Wish for."

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