I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)

  The shooting occurred on the afternoon of December 22, 1984. After briefly talking to the other (now terrified) passengers and the train’s baffled conductor, Goetz exited the subway and spent the next nine days in a rental car, driving around New England and staying in various hotels under false names (always paying cash). For some reason, he returned to New York on the thirtieth, rented a different car, and proceeded to drive to Concord, New Hampshire. He turned himself in to Concord authorities the next day. Examining the video footage of his first police interview is like watching a mumblecore Mamet play: With oversize eyeglasses and the receding hair of a man who is no longer concerned with vanity, Goetz describes the subway shooting with a clinical directness that seems almost rehearsed (but not quite). “I was just whistling Dixie, okay? I was in fear. And that’s good, because that helps you think. That helps you think. But when I saw [one of the muggers’] eyes, my state of mind changed and you go through a different state of mind where reality totally, totally changes.”

  It is rare that anyone truly becomes an “overnight” celebrity, but this is one example in which that cliché is pretty much true. Goetz instantly became an international metaphor. Though it would be an overstatement to claim initial support for the shooting was universal, it was close: In the mid-eighties, New York was a simmering cesspool. It was a terrible place to live, unless you were a millionaire or a criminal (or, I suppose, an artist). There were roughly fifteen hundred metro murders every year; New York’s crime rate was 70 percent higher than the rest of the country’s. The possibility that someone would respond to a violent culture with extreme prejudice seemed problematic, but not unjust or unreasonable. Writing about the incident for New York magazine decades later, social critic/jazz writer Stanley Crouch made it seem as if absolutely no one was against the vigilante: “It may be almost impossible for someone who did not live in New York twenty years ago to understand the first few days of spiritual uplift that followed the incident that made Bernhard Goetz famous . . . The shooting brought about an enormous shift of mood. In so many telephone conversations and exchanges in bars, on street corners, in beauty parlors, in pool halls, and wherever each version of particular people met, from the too rich to the very poor, there was a collective emotion that cannot be described as anything other than jubilant.” This is possibly (perhaps probably) true. But the more people learned about the case, the more their favor drifted away from Goetz’s corner. Certainly, his own attitude made things worse for himself — at one point he told a reporter the paralyzed victim would have been better off if he’d been aborted by his mother. Strong rumors suggested that the half-Jewish Goetz had casually made racist comments at a community meeting eighteen months before the shooting. Though Goetz claimed to be confused and uncomfortable with his sudden fame, his posture suggested that he liked and craved the attention; more important, he never showed authentic remorse for anything that happened.

  By the summer of 1985, two dominant (and somewhat predictable) views on the confrontation had emerged: Right-leaning people saw the shooting as justified, while Left-leaning people felt Goetz was more of a criminal than the teens he shot. A headline in People magazine from that winter could not have been more evenhanded: HE ACTED OUT OUR ANGRIEST FANTASIES, BUT A YEAR LATER THE QUESTIONS REMAIN: IS HE A HERO OR A VILLAIN, A VICTIM OR A CRIMINAL? Those positions still (vaguely) exist today, at least among older New York residents who remember the incident firsthand. But such ethical confusion has generally eroded over time, at least within the media community. Virtually no one “debates” Goetz anymore. The two most common views are not balanced: The first is a total surprise that the event happened at all (it’s difficult for young Manhattanites to imagine a not-so-distant era when subways were dangerous). The second, more universal view is a reflexive assumption that Goetz was obviously and irrefutably wrong. Easy evidence of this can be seen in the headline from the aforementioned Crouch essay, published in 2003: THE JOY OF GOETZ: THERE WAS A MOMENT IN BULLIED-BY-THUGS, PRE-RUDY NEW YORK WHEN EVEN THIS CREEP WAS A HERO. At this point, feigned objectivity is unnecessary.

  There are almost no Goetz supporters in the modern age. He still has a modicum of notoriety, but his stature is unserious. When he inexplicably ran for mayor in 2001, he received only a thousand votes (about four hundred fewer than Kenny Kramer, a man exclusively known for inspiring Michael Richards’s character on the sitcom Seinfeld). Still, he never went to jail, which is really what matters: Goetz was found not guilty in the criminal trial, escaping the charge of attempted murder. In essence, the jury decided his 1984 actions on the train fell within the boundaries of self-defense as dictated by the state of New York. The statute states that responding with deadly force is acceptable if a citizen “reasonably believes that such other person is committing or attempting to commit” a serious crime against him. Eleven years after his acquittal, Goetz lost the inevitable civil trial and was supposed to pay the paralyzed victim (Darrel Cabey) $43 million. Goetz immediately filed for bankruptcy and still claims to have paid nothing. When covering the latter trial, the New York Times mentioned that the criminal jury had been predominately white, while the civil jury was predominately black and Latino. Also noted was the fact that six members of the criminal jury had themselves been crime victims.

  In the years that have passed, the (always pretty strange) Goetz has grown progressively more bizarre. He continued to live a solitary life in New York. He became a militant vegetarian and an outspoken advocate for the New York squirrel population, rescuing (and sometimes sharing his tiny apartment with) the bushy-tailed rodents. He opened a small electronics store and brazenly named it Vigilante Electronics. He granted a TV interview to former Star Trek star William Shatner. Life has gone less smoothly for the four teenagers he shot; all were eventually convicted of crimes and one of them committed suicide (that was James Ramseur, who killed himself after spending twenty-five years in prison for raping and sodomizing a pregnant woman less than two years after being shot in the subway).

  Goetz is not always hated, but he is consistently categorized as hateful. Sometimes you’ll stumble across an aging Goetz sympathizer who’ll argue that life was “different” in 1984 and that the city was truly under siege, but even those apologists feel obligated to note that Goetz is a nutcase. His main role is that of a footnote — the discomfiting face of eighties urban violence.

  So . . . Goetz is a villain. We accept this, and the passage of time will turn that consensus into concrete. If Goetz was still at large and Batman was somehow real, we’d have to assume Batman would be trying to stop him. We concede they would be adversaries. And this dissonance illustrates a central paradox of the human mind: When considering the vigilante, the way we think about fiction contradicts how we feel about reality. Which should not be unanticipated or confusing, yet somehow always is.

  Let’s jump back to Death Wish, a melodrama falling somewhere between the totally real (Goetz) and the obviously fake (Batman). Directed by British archconservative Michael Winner, the 1974 film was based on a 1972 novel of the same title written by Brian Garfield. The respective plots are similar, but their central morals are not. The book argues against the concept of vigilantism and focuses on the protagonist’s moral confusion; the movie celebrates the vigilante and makes him an anonymous hero. It was a creative evolution that (predictably) bothered Garfield. But that evolution was soon reversed by the media, since virtually every film critic who’s ever written about the celluloid version of Death Wish uses it as a means for attacking reactionary politics. At every turn, the polarity of the message was inverted: Garfield wrote a novel that was against an idea, which was misinterpreted by Winner as being for an idea, which was then received as proof of a flawed ideology. As a means for forwarding progressive ideas, Garfield’s anti-vigilante book was less successful than the angry response to the pro-vigilante movie it paradoxically inspired. In every medium and context, Death Wish makes its audience prone to disagree with whatever they think they’re being tol
d directly.

  Death Wish is a “New York movie,” which means audiences in New York get to feel interesting whenever they recognize geographical locations they typically ignore from the back of a taxi. Its visual images of the decaying city make seventies New York appear unlivable — it resembles a dirty, sci-fi dystopia slowly collapsing under the idealistic failure of the sixties. Bronson’s character Paul Kersey (whom I will refer to as “Bronson” from here on out because, really, that’s how we would refer to him in any normal conversation about the film) is an architect. In the second scene, while discussing the city’s escalating crime rate with his coworkers, he is directly referred to as “a bleeding-heart liberal.” After his wife’s murder and the unorthodox rape of his daughter (spearheaded by a nonfamous Jeff Goldblum in his first film role), Bronson finds himself more confused than despondent. The whole world seems different. He starts to notice the reality of his vulnerability. He fills one of his dress socks with twenty-dollars’ worth of quarters and nails a mugger in the face. It feels good. His architecture job requires him to travel to Tucson, described by a local as “gun country.” We subsequently learn that Bronson was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, the manifestation of his long-standing pacifism inspired by his father’s death in a deer-hunting accident. Nonetheless, his host in Arizona surreptitiously gives him a handgun as a going-away present for his return to New York; soon after, Bronson is walking through Riverside Park alone at night, waiting to be assaulted. When it finally happens, he shoots the criminal in the gut. At first, the violence sickens him: He rushes back to his apartment and pukes in the toilet. But this remorse is fleeting. A night later, he stumbles across three more criminals (this time beating a random stranger) and murders all three, shooting one mugger in the back while he flees over a fence. A few days later, he kills two more thugs on the subway, discharging bullets into their bleeding bodies as they lie prone on the floor of the train, just as Goetz would do to Darrel Cabey in 1984.

  “What are we,” Bronson’s character rhetorically asks his son-in-law, Jack, after visiting his catatonic daughter. Like the rest of the city, Jack has no idea that his wife’s father is the (now famous, yet unknown) vigilante. “What have we become? What do you call people who — when faced with a condition of fear — do nothing about it? Who just run and hide?”

  “Civilized,” counters the son-in-law.

  “No,” says Bronson.

  And that’s all he says: No. Which ends up being more effective than any aphoristic retort a more creative screenwriter might have tried. His understated, monosyllabic message is that urban crime is the unavoidable manifestation of a modern society in which being “civilized” is the default value setting. It’s not that Charles Bronson is an uncivilized person; it’s more that he believes the obligations of civility are limited to the civilized world. The uncivil receive no quarter. This, for most people, is the central debate within Death Wish: Is it acceptable to behave like a criminal in order to stop crime?

  If you loathe the sensationalism of Death Wish, the mere existence of that question troubles you. But there’s something else about this movie that’s thornier than any straightforward question over the protagonist’s actions, and it has to do with the clarity of his motives. Bronson’s pacifism is a result of his father’s death; his full-on vigilantism emerges only after his wife and daughter are assaulted. In both cases, extremist views are magically manufactured by specific personal experiences. They are not philosophies. They are visceral responses to painful, unthinkable memories. It’s not just that Bronson wouldn’t have shot any muggers if his wife and daughter had not been harmed — he would have vehemently disagreed with the very concept of anyone behaving in that manner. When he suddenly starts to shoot random stickup artists, he is not following his mind. He is following his heart (or, more accurately, the emotional part of the brain we like to pretend is living in the chest). Within the limited context of the Death Wish narrative, this emotive antilogic makes the audience like him more. If Death Wish were presented as a comic book, the assault on his family would be classified as Paul Kersey’s “origin story.” It would be the only moment from his life that really mattered. Audiences instantly relate to the idea of justified revenge, particularly in high-testosterone genres like the western or the urban thriller — it feels more human than supporting a person whose behavior is dictated by a balanced, preexisting, cognitive field theory. We support fictional characters motivated by a need to equalize injustice, regardless of how they go about it (in Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood somehow has the prophetic ability to shoot people before they commit crimes). In a movie, such a response always seems reasonable. But that doesn’t translate into nonfictional settings. Within the rarefied desert of the real, the bar for what’s reasonable is much, much higher.

  The story of Batman has been reimagined several times since his 1939 introduction, but the fundamental details have never been altered: As a little boy, Bruce Wayne witnesses the murder of his rich parents, launching his desire to stop all those who make the world unsafe for the innocent. Because he has no superpowers, was born rich, and generally seems like a pretty haunted dude, Batman completists like to dwell on the pathos of The Bat. Yet the most glaring element of this pathos — a word deriving from the Greek terms for “suffering” and “experience” — is ignored out of necessity: Batman never questions the logic of letting a childhood experience dictate his entire life.

  Here again, let’s work from the premise that Batman is real: At the age of eight, he sees his parents killed by a thug. Certainly, this kind of incident would affect his worldview. One might argue that such trauma could stunt a person’s emotional maturation and stop him from becoming a whole person. Still, we all know that Bruce Wayne is not retarded. He couldn’t succeed at his mission if he wasn’t self-aware. He has an understanding of social norms and a grasp on human psychology. He’s a troubled — but still thoughtful — figure. Yet Batman never tries to overcome this childhood event. It becomes the only meaningful moment of his entire history, and he doesn’t seem to question why this is the case. “I think the refusal to examine the insanity of what he’s doing is the whole point of Batman,” argues culture writer Alex Pappademas, paraphrasing the sentiments of Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm. “He’s a rich solipsist who can never beat up enough muggers to bring his dead parents back. But because he’s a billionaire, he can afford to keep trying forever. He’s never confronted with the futility of what he’s doing. Were he to examine and work past those motivations, you’d have no story. The guy has to stay broken.”

  In fiction, we tend to isolate and amplify one aspect of a man’s life into his entire subconscious. Batman experienced a singular, personal trauma that made him want to protect the rest of society for the remainder of his life. The same thing happens to Bronson in Death Wish — the link between his familial trauma and his subsequent vigilantism is seen as an acceptable narrative extension; what outraged critics is not that Bronson’s character killed criminals, but that he grew to enjoy it (and continued to do so throughout four less-nuanced sequels). In the unreal world, a vigilante is heroic. And that’s because he is motivated by only one thing. Event A creates behavior B. We perceive and connect those two acts in a vacuum, and that makes them philosophically equal (even if the depth of the vigilantism far exceeds the initial wrong).

  Bernhard Goetz was a hero as long as no one knew anything about him. During the week he remained at large, he was consumed by the public as a fictional, binary character: an attacked man who attacked back. Was it unusual that he happened to be riding the subway with a gun? Well, yes. But the fact that he had to use it proved that it was necessary. Did it seem curious that he shot people who didn’t have guns? Perhaps. But how was he to know they didn’t at least have knives (or, as was later erroneously reported, sharpened screwdrivers)? There was nothing else known about this person, so his motives could be attributed only to whatever might have occurred on that
train (a confrontation any normal person would envision as terrifying, and that a less than normal person might imagine as a deeply satisfying fantasy). Within a limited reality, Goetz wins by forfeit. Vigilantism’s profound contradiction is that every socially aware person agrees that it cannot be allowed to exist, even though huge swaths of society would improve if it sometimes did. As long as Goetz remained a nameless, faceless “concept,” those two incongruous realities were in equilibrium.

  But then Goetz became real. He was not merely a problem of democracy; he was a thin man in a leather jacket without remorse. And from the moment that transformation happened, people started to turn on him.

  They could just tell he was weird.

  That, I realize, is an oversimplification (and maybe even a cheap shot). It wasn’t like the world saw Goetz’s angular face and instantly decided to hate him; comedian Joan Rivers even sent him a telegram and offered to pay his bail. The fact that he wasn’t handsome didn’t help his cause, but that wasn’t what marginalized him; he theoretically could have used it to his public advantage, had he portrayed himself as an altruistic nerd. He had a traumatic encounter to balance his aggression — in 1981, Goetz was injured when three teenagers mugged him in the subway — and a scarred personal history that could have justified his twisted intensity (when he was twelve, Goetz’s father pleaded guilty to molestation charges). Had Bernhard Goetz somehow managed to limit the public’s understanding of his life to those two particulars, it’s possible he would have remained a folk hero forever. What he should have said to the world is this: “I know how it feels to be scared and I know how it feels to be hurt, and I didn’t want anyone else to have those feelings just because they went out in public.” If he could have contained the public understanding of his persona — if he could have painted the subway shooting and his own personal trauma as a one-to-one relationship, and if he’d convincingly insisted it was done for the benefit of random strangers — he likely would have become a superhero. “Civilized” society would still have expressed abstract distaste for the vigilante theory, but it could have embraced the lone vigilante who risked his own life for the lives of others (just as we do with Batman). But here’s the thing: Batman is cool. And more important, Batman is fake. He can’t be investigated by reporters. Nobody from the New York Times is going to find out that Batman once referenced “niggers and spics” at a community-watch meeting. Batman can’t naïvely agree to talk with a journalist and carelessly outline his personal politics, only to see his words reduced and recast as empathy-free arrogance. Because he is unreal, Batman controls the Batman Message. He lives in a finite unreality. Goetz faced (and partially created) the opposite circumstance. Every forthcoming detail about his life — even the positive ones — made his actions on the subway seem too personal. And people hate that. What people appreciate are scenarios in which someone’s individual experience becomes universal. When that transference goes the other way — when something wholly universal (like the fear of crime) comes across as highly personalized (as it did for Goetz) — the ultimate takeaway is revulsion. It seems pathetic and unreasonable. It seems like the behavior of a person who wants attention at any cost.