Mediaculture

Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.—Romans 12:19

The depiction of vengeance (“punishment inflicted in retaliation for an injury or offense,” according to Webster’s) permeates our media—movies, TV, books, video games, music—and challenges our Christian faith.

Jesus taught his disciples to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39) and endured shameful torture and death without retaliating against his enemies. The Bible teaches throughout (the above verse is quoting Deuteronomy 32:35) that God is to take vengeance; we are not.

Yet our culture not only opposes this stance but ridicules it. Anyone who turns the other cheek is a wimp. Even some Christian authors say this.

Mennonites in particular emphasize nonretaliation. Practicing this is hard enough. Being surrounded by messages that we should retaliate makes it even harder.

TV cop shows (police procedurals) proliferate so fast it’s impossible to keep up. How many CSI shows are there by now?

Many of the best-selling books are whodunits, crime novels. And true-crime books are almost as popular.

Then there are movies, which draw us into their action even more, through sight and sound on a large screen.

All these stories introduce us to characters who experience some injustice. Other characters act to try to find out who did the evil deed and bring some kind of justice. Soon we’re not only lamenting the injustice but rooting for those trying to bring justice. And justice means punishment. Soon we’re caught up in the story and—inwardly, at least—wanting that evil perpetrator punished.

Where does this powerful impulse come from? Partly from a desire for things to be made right, which is a good impulse. Part of what draws me to read murder mysteries, for example, is that they bring some order to the world, since (usually) the crime is solved.

Our daily lives are often less certain (problems are not always solved) but also less violent. There just aren’t enough murders to fill all those storylines on TV. They don’t reflect reality.

Consider some movies from the past several months. Star Trek sets up a villain out to destroy a planet because his own planet was destroyed. The young Kirk then takes vengeance on this man who killed his father for taking vengeance on those who destroyed his planet.

This circularity of vengeance is played out all over the world and throughout history. It is part of the insidious evil of vengeance that Jesus sought to end.

District 9 (reviewed below), another sci-fi film, takes us in a different direction. Instead of seeking vengeance on aliens who kill humans, we end up rooting for the mistreated aliens and against the human mercenaries trying to kill them.

Then there’s Quentin Tarantino, whose film Inglourious Basterds, which I haven’t seen, has a group of Jews killing Nazis during World War II. All of Tarantino’s films, ingenious in their references to other films, deal with vengeance and depict it graphically.

Fortunately there are exceptions. While Up, an animated feature for children and adults, contains elements of vengeance, it is dominated by other themes, such as the loss of dreams, grieving, growing up, caring for others.

Another excellent film is The Hurt Locker, which is set during the Iraq War but is not about vengeance so much as the psychological effects of war on soldiers. Specifically it shows the addiction to battle that some soldiers experience. The film follows a squad that defuses bombs. One soldier is drawn to this dangerous activity, having defused more than 800 devices, and can’t give it up.

Perhaps vengeance is a drug of sorts, one we imbibe regularly through the media. Resisting its influence is a huge task.