Scumbunny Cinema

An analysis of the disturbing trend of movies with so-called protagonists who kidnap, assassinate, deal drugs, sell their bodies, rape and pillage, have sex with minors, and/or generally carry on in a manner our parents taught us not to admire.

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Around Christmas time of 1993, Kevin Costner appeared in a movie about an amiable kidnapper who also happened to be a murderer. A Perfect World was not your typical yuletide fare. Anything but. Making a clean break with the admirable, well-scrubbed, middle-American big-boys-next -door he had played in the past, Costner starred as a white-trash jailbird who busts out of prison, abducts a small boy, guns down his own accomplice, and then lakes the child on a violent rampage across Dixie until wizened law officer Clint Eastwood runs him into the earth. Costner's character is so unhinged that after one sequence in which he threatens to kill a black man who has taken him in for the evening and supplied him with a damned fine meal and impeccable lodging, the precocious abductee shoots him right in the guts. In crossing the line into the shadowy netherworld of justifiable manslaughter, the gun-toting tyke was clearly speaking for most Middle Americans, who generally don't warm up to this kidnapping stuff. Which is not terribly surprising, given that most middle-American moviegoers either have or still are children, and generally prefer to see kids in a pristine, cuddly, unkidnapped condition.

On the surface, the very notion of making a film whose central character is a violent low-life kidnapper seems unbelievably moronic. But when we look at the recent history of American filmmaking, we can see that the decision to cast Kevin Costner in this morally ambivalent role did have a certain logic to it. In 1992 Neil Jordan busted into the big time by directing and scripting an offbeat little number called The Crying Game, which starred Stephen Rea as a congenial member of the Irish Republican Army who helps capture a British soldier, befriends him, listens to his amusing anecdotes, and then flees the site of his murder, defects from the IRA and falls in love with the dead man's girlfriend, who turns out to be a rather well-hung man. In other words. Jordan was asking his audience to enthusiastically sympathize with one of God's rarest creations: the likable terrorist.

Next came Brian De Palma's film Carlito's Way. This action-packed tale invited the audience to commiserate with a 40-something heroin dealer and murderer who has recently been released from prison because of a minor legal technicality, and who is now trying to raise $75,000 so he can buy into a completely legitimate car rental company somewhere in the tropics. In other words, the audience was invited to sympathize with another of God's rarest creations: the likable heroin dealer.

In addition to the works of art already mentioned, Robert De Niro directed A Bronx Tale, an odious film about a mobster with a heart of gold; somebody directed Bad Girls, a movie about role-model prostitutes; and Neil Jordan came out with Interview With the Vampire, a movie about a likable if confused sucker of human blood. Just like A Perfect World, The Crying Game and Carlito's Way, each of these films invited audiences to sympathize, nay identify with, an array of morally deformed protagonists given to extravagant gestures of antisocial behavior.

At this point, many, perhaps most. Movieline readers are going to throw up their hands in exasperation and say, "All right, buster: so what's your goddamn point?" My goddamn point is this: Hollywood is not making films about congenial kidnappers, likable heroin dealers and charming terrorists because of some massive oversight, some hideous lapse of taste, some inexplicable faux pas. Hollywood is making films of this nature because it has run the numbers and determined that there is a market for these movies. By applying the peerless methodological techniques pioneered by Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich, Hollywood has determined that roughly 43 percent of the people living in the United States today are evil, and most of them are Democrats. In a nation of nearly 250 million people, that translates into a potential audience of roughly 107,500,000 ticket-buyers. Most important of all, Hollywood has established, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that evil people consume more popcorn per capita than any other segment of the population. And that's not factoring in the enormous retail potential in overseas markets like Thailand and France, where everyone is basically evil.

The way Hollywood has things sized up, the public is starting to develop a taste for maverick protagonists. And in casting social pariahs, revolting vermin or well-meaning vampires as heroic figures in a string of movies, Hollywood has tapped into some primal longing lodged deep in the dark recesses of the collective psyche of the American people. There-fore, as a service to these primal longers, I have compiled a list of morally repugnant movies featuring charismatic scumbunnies as sympathetic protagonists. Hopefully, this anthology of films can be used as the basis for a doctoral dissertation, a low-budget BBC special, a French film festival exploring primal longings lodged deep in the dark recesses of the collective American psyche, or yet another unreadable book by Michael Medved.

A Prayer for the Dying. Mickey Rourke plays a guilt-ridden IRA terrorist who comes to London to escape from his deeply conflicted past. Not to be confused with The Crying Game, where Stephen Rea plays a guilt-ridden IRA terrorist who comes to London to escape from his deeply conflicted past. In other words, A Prayer for the Dying is a movie about a likable assassin.

Bad Girls. Also known as Bad Actresses, Whores on Horses and Fools on Mules. Andie MacDowell, Madeleine Stowe, Drew Barrymore and Mary Stuart Master-son abandon dead-end jobs as prostitutes to enter the lumber business. At one point in the film, Stowe takes the opportunity to demonstrate her ability to speak Spanish, apparently saying, "Call my agent and tell him to get me out of this movie." In short, Bad Girls is a movie about prostitutes with hearts of gold, but brains of lead.

A Bronx Tale. Early in this film about an Italian-American kid growing up on the mean streets of the Bronx in the early 1960s, mob chieftain Chazz Palminteri gets on everybody's bad side by killing a man in a dispute over a parking space. But as the film progresses, the audience realizes that Chazz isn't such a bad guy after all. He's a snappy dresser, he has enlightened attitudes about dating black girls, and he's always more than ready to lend his nifty red convertible to his young protege. By the time he finally gets gunned down by the son of the man he killed in the parking dispute, the audience has come to love and respect this quirky capo di tutti Bronx caputi. In short, A Bronx Tale is a movie about a likable mobster.

Carlito's Way. Although he is a heroin dealer and a murderer, and thus would seem to be a not-very-nice person, Carlito comes across as a fairly gregarious sort, largely because Sean Penn is in the same movie. Also, in a clever scripting ploy, the audience is told that Carlito is a heroin dealer, but never actually sees him selling heroin to 12-year-olds. And while the audience is told that Carlito has killed a lot of people in the past, he assures Penelope Ann Miller that all the people he killed were bad guys. So that's OK.

What's more, the audience never actually sees most of the people Carlito has killed. The only people the audience actually sees him kill are two Hispanic criminals early in the film, and then three Italian-American gangsters. And, oh yeah, he does help Penn murder a mobster and yes, OK, OK, he does take the bullets out of Penn's gun so he'll be defenseless when the Mob comes gunning for him in his hospital bed after they screwed up by sticking a knife in his chest, but not sticking it in deep enough. So, fine, technically speaking, the audience does see Carlito participating directly in seven homicides, but it never sees him doing anything really unpleasant--like sending some-one a jar with a penis and a pair of testicles inside it like Jack Nicholson does in Hoffa. Carlito may be evil, but he isn't gross; thus, Carlito is indeed a likable drug dealer and killer.

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