Movie Review: Harry Brown

“Look, man, I really don’t recommend that you watch this movie…”

Twice now I’ve prefaced referring to scenes from Harry Brown with that statement, and each time it has encouraged interest in this film.

Now, I think I can recommend that you see this movie. Here’s why:

Lacordaire once said that no virtue is irresistible until it is seen as beautiful. That is why good art is art that reveals the beauty of virtue. So, too, I think it can be said that good art can also be good if it reveals the ugliness of vice. This is why horror can be a very legitimate artform, it makes evil look evil. It shows the dark side of human nature as so repellent that you feel compelled to avoid it.

Harry Brown is a horror movie.

Michael Caine plays Harry Brown, a retired Royal Marine who spends his days in one of the ugly housing estates that surround European capitals that tourists never really see. The whole environment is repulsive, Labour’s New Jerusalem on display sixty years on. The buildings are ugly, the inhabitants are vile, and violence is pervasive. Sitting in possibly the most dismal pub ever to make it onscreen, Harry’s best friend and fellow pensioner starts to reveal that something is wrong. He is being terrorized by “youths” on the estate. Insults, excrement related practical jokes and a very real physical threat to his person have started to dominate his mind. He reveals that he has obtained an old army bayonet for protection. Harry tries to convince him to get rid of it, that it’s not going to help matters.

In a way, Harry is right. Too old and feeble to use the bayonet to defend himself, Harry’s best friend is ultimately stabbed to death with it in a tunnel. Yet another onscreen crime that the police seem all too ill equipped to really handle. Harry Brown doesn’t really become a vigilante at this point, a small distinction that I think adds to the realism. Harry is not an unhinged guy. He doesn’t do the standard shlock cinema “I will avenge you!” thing. He mourns his loss, is troubled, and tries to move on.

Until late one night, a junky sticks a knife in his face, the old military training takes over and Harry kills him. It’s as if he thinks “Maybe I could make a go at this…”

Harry Brown is a horror movie, and what I just described is not nearly the grittiest or nastiest part of this film. All of the really gritty and nasty parts are, however, not sadistic, I think. They are there to be gritty and nasty. They don’t invite the viewer into some sick vicarious pleasure like a slasher film, but as a vicarious experience of depravity viewed through the eyes of honorable Harry Brown.

A strange effect of this movie is that any attempt to draw in the standard pop culture platitudes about the various kinds of lowlife villains presented really falls flat. Presented with Harry Brown’s enemies it is virtually impossible to sympathize with almost any of them. These aren’t misguided youths that can be saved by a better educational program; they are the free, conscious, and deliberate servants of evil. These are the kinds of men that the gallows was invented for.

Only really one time onscreen does the movie really attempt to undermine Harry’s vigilantism, when one of the police officers starts to offer the same tired old “cycle of violence” reasoning. Unsaid by the movie, but not by this viewer, is I know how it ends when good men don’t fight back. It ends in a pensioner being stabbed to death in a tunnel.

It is possible that I’m taking a b-movie actioner and turning it into something it’s not. That being said, it just doesn’t seem that way to me. This movie makes too many choices that separate it from the pack. For one thing, this is a revenge film where the protagonist in an emphysema ridden old man. The action seems actually pretty realistic. No firing two guns whilst flying in the air, no drawn out hand to hand combat. Either it’s over with in a flash or its chaos.

The value of this movie is not as a steady diet, or even entertainment, properly speaking. It is that this is a movie that really believes in evil. Really believes in it. The value is that it wakes you up to the idea that there really is a battle between good and evil, that it is serious, and that it can be closer to home than any of us realize.

Book Review: Demonic by Ann Coulter

Just for the record, I was reading Gustav Le Bon way before it was cool...

Demonic is the first genuinely modern conservative book that I've read that really gets it.

The populist sentiment that runs through western life, left and right, is along the lines that most people are good and decent, and, presented with the facts, will make the right choice. This general idea lies at the heart of the western love affair with democracy, why we believe in it for ourselves, why we think that a government cannot be legitimate without it. We think that democracy stands a better chance of producing a just society than any other system. Even Ann Coulter is not entirely free from this idea.

However, for the first time in a very long time, an author has chosen to show the true dark side of popular opinion. Ann Coulter has produced perhaps the first work documenting the influence of “the mob” on American life.

The general theory goes something like this; people in groups act differently than they do as individuals. In a mob, or crowd, individuals are more likely to sacrifice their individuality to the collective. Under this influence, they are prone to perform actions, or hold opinions, which they never would have done as individuals.

Following this line, whoever has the skill of inciting and moving a mob can get a large number of people to violate their own consciences and common sense in pursuit of the mob directors aims.

Ann Coulter has produced a work, which, like works before it (not only Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd, but Menace of the Herd) is well researched, insightful, and passionate without losing clarity.

It is split into four sections that detail the psychology, the historical context, the violent tendencies, and the driving forces behind the behavior of the “liberal”.

While many of these points have been made before, Ms. Coulter draws parallels with the modern liberal world that show a clear connection between historical forces of the left and today. Her final conclusion is downright shocking and compelling.

Now, as much as a love letter to the book as this post is, I still have a few niggles, nothing major.

The populist sentiment that runs through western life, left and right, is along the lines that most people are good and decent, and, presented with the facts, will make the right choice. This general idea lies at the heart of the western love affair with democracy, why we believe in it for ourselves, why we think that a government cannot be legitimate without it. We think that democracy stands a better chance of producing a just society than any other system. Even Ann Coulter is not entirely free from this idea.

Conflating democracies and republics with freedom is a very real mistake. The greatest dictators of the past 100 years did not arise in monarchies, but in republics. Even some of the most tyrannical monarchs of the past did not apply the trade of oppression with such far reaching and thorough destruction as Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollah Khomeini.

At one point in discussing the French Revolution, she states that the population had a legitimate grievance, since the clergy and the nobility did not pay taxes. When it comes to the clergy, they could say that they shouldn’t pay taxes, because, in a sense, they had no personal income. They also ran schools, poorhouses, and numerous other socially beneficial institutions.

In addition, the power to tax really is the power to destroy. The church’s freedom from taxation was a protection of its own independence. As Hilaire Belloc pointed out regarding Thomas a Becket, freedom from even civil or criminal law was motivated for centuries (I believe) by a desire to avoid being bullied by the state.

Now, regarding the nobility, as I understand it, they provided military service to the king in lieu of taxation.

Most of the few problems I have with this text are along these lines. That being said, check this book out, it really is important.