I recently finished and enjoyed season one of Fargo, the television show. I was not expecting to like it but I think that not being a huge fan of the movie may have helped (yeah, I know you love that movie, everyone does, let it slide). The other surprise was how much I loved Billy Bob Thornton. Billy Bob in real life just strikes me as such an odd guy, full of quirks that only millionaire actors can have. I remember watching his grand entry into entertainment – Sling Blade – and not really getting it. But he was great in Fargo as a cold blooded and almost mystical hitman.
It got me thinking, though, not only did I love this hitman character but I love most hitman characters. Steve Buscemi in Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead. Brother Muzone in The Wire. What’s that about?
We Americans revere individuals and we love them in our entertainment. Stephen Fry talked about American cultural beliefs and their impact on American versus British comedy (see below). Granted he’s talking about comedy but I think it is relevant here. The Brits like a leader who is a buffoon (David Brent) or people “on whom life craps from a terrible height” (Basil Fawlty). Americans like the wisecracking maverick (Peter Venkman).
Stories of individuals are woven into the fabric of American mythology. We love private eyes (Sam Spade), pseudo private eyes (The Dude), teachers who buck the system (Jaime Escalante), cops who buck the system (Jimmy McNulty), politicians who buck the system (Jefferson Smith). Each one is just a different shade of the individual.
The darkest shade is the hitman.
I’ve written about an adjacent character before: The CIA Badass. The CIA operative a la Denzel Washington in The Equalizer, Liam Neeson in the Taken movies, or Matt Damon in any of the Bourne movies is like a hitman but more like a super soldier. I would even count Jack Reacher here (the character in the books, Tom Cruise was horribly miscast) even though he was in the military, not the CIA.
The hitman is a darker and more stripped down than the CIA Badass. He’s the dub track to the CIA Badass’s reggae. There’s always an emptiness to the hitman and that emptiness is seductive. He (and I’m using the masculine pronoun here because I have yet to see a hitwoman, though, I’d love to be corrected on that front) is a damaged loner. He wears black. He wears gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. He maintains no attachments (to use DeNiro’s language from Heat). The existence of his soul is in question. The hitman is an individual stripped of conscience and he brings into relief the thin line between daily existence and a controlled chaos. Observing the hitman in a story, we get to take a step over that line for a bit.
My favorite hitman character was Martin Blank (John Cusack) in Grosse Pointe Blank. I fell in love with that movie during my quarterlife crisis, that period of unearned world weariness in the mid to late twenties where one settles into adulthood. Martin Blank was the perfect anti-hero for me at that time. Clad in black, he had issues with his parents and felt above and removed from the normal lives of his classmates and peers. He was the perfect embodiment of my “no one really gets me” attitude.
The other thing that I like about the hitman is that he’s got skills. He is hired to do a job and he does that job effectively because he is experienced and competent. The hitman is essentially a really great freelancer and I respect that.
There are problems with the hitman character (as there are with any archetype). The main one being what I’ll call the Rambo factor. The hitman is always damn near indestructible and much smarter than his adversaries.
The other problem is that we never see how the hitman comes to be. How did he acquire this skill? How did he learn to heal himself with a kit that he just happens to carry with him? When getting good at something, one often encounters failure, did the hitman ever fail? Fail to kill someone? Get horribly injured? We only see the hitman now, in his prime.
The final problem with the hitman is that, well, he is a murderer who often uses guns. American culture reveres the individual and also the cowboy. I believe that the cowboy myth is at the root of our gun violence or, at the very least, the perseverance of the “good guy with a gun” nonsense the keeps us from real change.
But I’ll step down from my soapbox and just say that whatever the faults of this type of character I’ll always be a sucker for it. I watched the first episode of Barry and I plan to watch the rest. And if you haven’t seen Fargo the television show, I highly recommend it.
