Anti-American Anti-Heroes

When the Barrow Gang was conducting its brutal robberies and murders, socialists found in their exploits an echo of their anti-capitalist cause. So it was small surprise that the release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 marked the New Hollywood wave in which anti-heroes exposing the facade of American life through acts of dysfunction were to become the new focus of movies.“Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life,” Pauline Kael, the infamous film critic, gushed in her essay on the gangster film.

The anti-heroes were meant to be the heroes because American life was not heroic, it was anti-heroic, and the mission of the culture was to indoctrinate Americans with that message.

American heroes were not police officers, but the anti-heroes who killed them.

90 years after Bonnie and Clyde went down in a hail of bullets on the watch of Frank Hamer, one of the toughest Texas Rangers ever bred, and a half-century after the counterculture was launched with an appealing cinematic rebranding of the two criminals, a mentally unstable rich kid turned assassin became the new public face of the post-election counterculture.

Luigi Mangione is no hero except to those to whom American life is essentially anti-heroic. Luigi’s admirers are the same socialists who cheered on Bonnie and Clyde for robbing shopkeepers. Bonnie, Clyde and Luigi “made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life” and murder is the ultimate form of entertainment for anti-capitalist agitprop.

The three are not heroes because they are virtuous, they are anti-heroes because their admirers see America as evil, a corrupt oppressive capitalist society, hiding behind a heroic myth that must be deconstructed through propaganda, activism and terrorist violence.

A year before filming Bonnie and Clyde, its star Warren Beatty began working on the movie that would eventually become Reds (then titled Comrades) glorifying the Communist Revolution. Reds, unlike Bonnie and Clyde, never became a hit even though it’s beloved by leftists. Americans were not ready to embrace Communists as romantic heroes (unless like Nelson Mandella or other Communist figures, their Communist allegiances are kept secret.).

And that leaves the anti-heroes who are not Communists, socialists or radicals, but unwittingly serve their larger aims of violently deconstructing the American narrative. They’re criminals or lunatics who become popular in the process of assailing some outpost of capitalism. Their actual politics matter much less than the politics that can be attributed or read into their actions.

The anti-hero’s only real requirement beyond that is capturing the attention of the public.

Bonnie, Clyde and Luigi were all adept at media savvy crimes. The two robbers and killers built their reputation through the newspapers, like less anonymous Jack the Rippers, even posing for their own pictures. Like the average mass shooter, Luigi Mangione had his own manifesto, but even long before there was any public manifesto, leftists had adopted him as a class warrior of their own cause. But what Bonnie, Clyde, Luigi and countless school shooters, and leftists, really have in common is a malignant narcissism that leads them to lash out at the world.

Their half-baked narratives, Bonnie’s poems or Luigi’s manifestos, are a lot less interesting than the eagerness of leftists looking for killers who share their politics. Manifestos or messages from killers are symptoms not causes. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t actually steal because they had to, but because they wanted to be famous. Luigi went to great trouble to disguise himself and carry out a professional killing only to slip and give away his identity because he wanted to be caught. Men who truly don’t want to be caught, don’t carry manifestos explaining why they did it.

Killers of this kind, whether they pretend to be terrorists, school shooters, mass shooters or criminals, are narcissists. What they want most is to make their mark on the world. They’re narcissists who fume at the lack of recognition. By spilling blood, they want to make sure that no one ever forgets them. People scour their diaries and writings for clues, but whatever their stated grievances, it all comes down to some variation of, “I am angry at the world.”

The stated ideologies, even when they exist, rarely matter. The ‘incel’ shooters like Elliot Rodges, the supposed victims of bullying like the original Columbine shooters, the transgender shooters like the Covenant School killer, never actually have anything else to really say.

They are malignant narcissists who want to break the world because they’re unhappy.

Other people to them are interchangeable pieces or, in the slang of modern always onliners, ‘NPCs’ who can be smashed or killed to make a point. An entire culture exists around gamifying mass killers down to treating their victims like game scores and turning them into memes.

And that same species of violent narcissism also lies at the raw ugly heart of leftist politics.

Before Bonnie and Clyde hit movie theaters, the first modern mass shootings emerged most decisively in the University of Texas tower shooting. A few months later, the first copycat mass shooting arrived with an attack at a cosmetology school. The media became the vector for creating the copycat killers through its obsessive coverage of these new anti-heroes: the frantic efforts to find social or genetic excuses for their crimes and save them from execution.

The serial killer, in reality fairly rare, became a national phenomenon because he expressed the leftist cultural narrative that American life was not heroic, but anti-heroic, and should be understood not through the best of us, but the absolute very worst of us. Serial killers and mass shooters became the ideal anti-heroes, madmen lashing out at the mad society that spawned them. Exploiting the rising interest in nihilistic criminals as a commentary on a nihilistic society, Bonnie and Clyde reimagined the classic criminal duo and made anti-heroes into the heroes.

From there it was a short hop to A Clockwork Orange and dramas that made nihilism its star.

But that was back when movies mattered. Social media made life into entertainment while movies became special effects cartoons for overgrown children. There is no need to make a movie about Luigi (though one is reportedly in the works anyway) because his story already played out on the news and in social media. Whatever the trial will reveal doesn’t matter.

The Left successfully made Bonnie and Clyde into a referendum on banks (even though banks were not at issue) and it similarly made Luigi Mangione into a referendum on health care. And underneath both is the “anti-heroic” narrative of American life as a struggle against capitalism.

Glamorizing Luigi is not only about defending his crime, but inciting copycats to kill some more.

Reeling from catastrophic election defeats and the abandonment of the working class, leftists see in Luigi an opportunity to reboot their movement around a counterculture of class terrorism.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/8133028157394773542/comments/default