Why Does It Matter If The Death Wish Remake Is Fascist?

The first trailer for the Death Wish remake starring Bruce Willis opens with a viral video of “The Grim Reaper” vigilante executing a carjacker. A radio host declares him a folk hero. The trailer prompts a moral question: “Is he right to take the law into his own hands?” But it’s not really a debate — it’s answered amply by the rest of the trailer (and the five previous Death Wish movies starring Charles Bronson).

Willis is doing what the police can’t because their hands have been tied, we’re told. Dean Norris, playing a cop, throws his hands up in exasperation: the police just don’t have sufficient power to deter criminals with violence! While much of the trailer depicts a standard revenge plot, as Willis kills his way closer to the people who murdered his wife, soon he’s murdering street dealers and exclaiming “somebody has to do it!” Because, remember, the cops are insufficiently violent to really help people, unlike Willis with a gun.

Criticism of the Death Wish remake trailer has been swift from progressive circles, who have declared it alt-right, racist and fascist. The Death Wish remake moves the setting from NYC to Chicago precisely because it would generate additional controversy. Chicago has a problem with violence, but its actual crime rate ranks it America’s 28th most violent city with the 15th highest murder rate. The right-wing obsession with Chicago crime is specifically and definitively for reasons of racial politics.

Fascism is a broad term, typically referring to a form of right-wing, authoritarian government. Death Wish, with its essentially libertarian ethos of individual responsibility, dodges the more cult-like, ultranationalist components of fascism. Yet there are numerous other components of fascist thought on display in its trailer, including an anti-liberal (intellectually liberal, not politically liberal) concept of how justice is won; an obsession with community decline and victimhood; redemptive violence and purification of the populace through expungement of undesirables.

Death Wish is hardly alone, traces of similar sentiment can be found in many of our most popular genres, particularly superhero films like The Dark Knight. But people are right to find it a galling, extremist cash grab. In combining gun fetishism and the disgusting message that cops can’t work effectively because they’re restrained from dishing out more violence, Death Wish hopes to become a rallying point for reactionaries, “law and order” conservatives and yes, racists too (though Twitter racists are already fretting that too many of the criminals he kills will be white for reasons of political correctness).

There is no clearer signal of this than the hoodie Bruce Willis uses as a disguise, presumably chosen to remind viewers of the one worn by Trayvon Martin (costume choices for movies are discussed at length, it is extremely unlikely this was done ignorantly or by coincidence), playing on the swell of sickening defenses for street execution Martin’s murder evoked. Anyone who’s saying “it’s just a movie” or otherwise asserting that people are reading too much into this new Death Wish either sympathize with its message, or are profoundly ignorant of the current political and racial landscape in the United States.

So, the new Death Wish is fascist. Well, so what? Why does it matter?

Fascist movies probably don’t convert people to fascism, just like Rick and Morty isn’t undermining our country with socialism and Frozen isn’t, uh, cucking young boys with weakness, or something?

The real danger with Death Wish is what it does to offer ennobling myths to fascists and racists. Look to 300 for the clearest precedent for what Death Wish hopes to achieve. Its race war, eugenic purity, muscle virtue, anti-diplomacy, golden age fantasizing builds to an indisputably fascist parable.

Often it’s claimed that blockbuster action movies like 300 are apolitical, but there is no such thing as a story without ideology — if it appears apolitical, it’s an ideology that reinforces the status quo. For most, 300 is entertainment, not much more than a night at the movies (just like Death Wish will be), but those of specific political or ideological mindsets find creation myths that give color to their fantasies. Neo-Nazi and extreme right parties and movements around the world embrace 300, because it allows them to recast their piddly, resentment-fueled prejudices as a battle for civilization. And that’s what Death Wish aspires to be: a font of memes for elevating resentment, alienation and inchoate anger into noble principle.

It’s also possible Death Wish simply won’t catch on like 300, with general audiences or the extreme right-wing. Our best hope may be director Eli Roth, who makes crap movies. Death Wish turning out to be as stupid as it looks would go a long way toward assuring its uselessness as a vehicle for propaganda. The rise of a unique American fascism is dangerous and not to be minimized — particularly if you’re part of a targeted minority group — but it’s not these trolly, fashy haircut, pop-culture fetishizing, armchair brownshirts alone that nominated Trump. Check the halls of power to see who suppresses minority voters, bans immigrants, legislates against trans people and strips the poor of healthcare and you’ll see it’s that regular, old, reliable Republican wickedness. Hell, even the Democrats have more power to wage war, prop up oligarchs and dismantle public education than the doofus cosplaying as Leonidas at a rally. Men in suits, backed by corporate money, don’t need to dress up as street vigilantes or Spartan warriors to feel empowered.

Contemporary fascist movements embrace these pop culture wars because many who believe in them lack real political power. They fall back on shouted slogans and Spartan helmets. It’s meant to be threatening, but step back from the immediacy of this micro-battle over a movie trailer and the truth is exposed: powerless fascists are deeply silly people.

There’s little to be gained by fighting them when their fundamental response to political critique is “Molon Labe! Triggered!”. Mockery and dismissiveness, refusing to provide an enemy, works better to disempower fascist art. Maybe there will come a day when antifa violence is the final redoubt, but that day isn’t here yet. Right now we’re faced with a bunch of goonies thrilled that a movie trailer is pissing people off. But someday soon this Death Wish will be Netflix buried. Pass the popcorn.