Description
For this forum, choose two discussion questions that ask you to analyze Mystic River in light of the analysis presented in “Revenge and Masculinity.”
Your responses should refer to details from the film and article, and use at least one quote.
Your responses should be at least 8 sentences.
Discussion Question 1:
It is clear that Mystic River is a film primarily about boys who become men. Yet, as Berkowitz and Cornell explain in their essay, these males types have significant relationships to daughters and wives drive them in their lives, personalities, and decisions. You may have also read about the history of representing women in cinema in the previous discussion on our OER textbook Moving Pictures.
Using the “Revenge and Masculinity” article OR the “Women in Cinema” chapter from Moving Pictures, analyze the representation of women in this film. You may focus on a specific characater or consider them together. How are women portrayed? What is their role relative to the men in the film? How does this reflect cultural norms and are there any moments that trouble these norms? How do these dynamics raise other questions and themes?
Feel free to agree, disagree, extend, push back, etc. on the ideas from the article or chapter by focusing on a primary quote.
Your response should also refer to specific details and scenes from the film.
Discussion Question 2:
As Berkowitz and Cornell explain in their essay, Mystic River is organized around different portrayals of masculinity and male types. Given the childhood trauma of sexual assault, the authors assert one of the main preoccupations of the film is the “heternormative fantasy that conflates masculinity with impenetribility” (126). Yet even if this is the overarching question, the film presents three really different men.
Using the “Revenge and Masculinity” article to build your ideas, focus on one of the main characters, Dave, Jimmy, or Sean, to analyze their presentation of masculinity. What kind of man is he? How does this reflect his background and environment? How does this character’s trajectory raise other questions and themes?
Feel free to agree, disagree, extend, push back, etc. on the ideas from the article by focusing on a primary quote.
Your response should also refer to specific details and scenes from the film.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Fordham University Press
Chapter Title: Parables of Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
Chapter Author(s): Roger Berkowitz and Drucilla Cornell
Book Title: Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity
Book Author(s): DRUCILLA CORNELL
Published by: Fordham University Press. (2009)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0d5z.10
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
Fordham University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
5
Parables of Revenge and Masculinity
in Mystic River
Roger Berkowitz and Drucilla Cornell
I
n this essay, we read Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River1 as an insightful
exploration of the seductions and dangers of revenge and the relation
of vengeance to violence and masculinity. What revenge offers in
response to trauma and loss is the fantasy of control. The ‘‘value of vindictiveness,’’ to use Karen Horney’s suggestive phrase, is that revenge
offers a ‘‘safety-valve’’ that protects a victim against the self-destructive
impulses that accompany the act of being injured or insulted.2 Confronted by a traumatic injury, all people feel a ‘‘natural propensity’’ to hit
back that, according to Horney, has its reason in the impulse to defend
one’s ideal image of oneself; failure to respond to an injury threatens to
show the injured party as either physically or psychologically incapable,
which can lead to feelings of self-hatred so extreme that they ‘‘constitute
a real danger for the individual.’’3 By externalizing harm as a result not
of one’s own weakness but of another’s wrong, the avenging victim both
restores his injured pride and steels himself from self-blame and selfdestruction.
Beyond the value of vengeance itself, Horney’s article ‘‘The Value
of Vindictiveness’’ identifies two alternatives to revenge: neurosis and
‘‘becoming more human.’’ Neurotic capitulation, either from physical
or moral incapacity to act upon vengeful impulses, leads the traumatized
The authors thank Jenny Lyn Bader, Sara Murphy, and two anonymous reviewers for
reading and providing helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. This chapter originally appeared in Law, Culture and the Humanities 1 (2005), pp. 316–32.
121
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:18
PS
PAGE 121
122 Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
victim to see himself ‘‘as a helpless jellyfish, a prey to anybody who
chooses to step on him and a prey also to his own self-contempt.’’
Becoming human, on the other hand, means abandoning his idealized
vision of his own grandeur; by disowning his prideful belief in his
uniqueness and his masterful control, the human victim becomes an
‘‘ordinary human being like everybody,’’ and thus ‘‘part of the swarming
mass of humanity he so despises.’’ The goal of Horney’s therapeutic
response to vindictiveness is to reverse the valuation of prideful vindication so that ‘‘ ‘becoming human’ will feel like the most desirable goal
toward which to strive.’’4
Horney’s tripartite understanding of the vindictive responses to traumatic injury offers a helpful frame within which to view Mystic River
(2003). In Mystic River, three men are confronted with proof of their
powerlessness; unable to prevent an injury to themselves or their loved
ones, the men respond in different ways. Their choices, human in every
way, are parables for three fundamental human responses to trauma. Dave
Boyle (Tim Robbins) is so overcome by trauma that he can only articulate a mere stuttering of his loss in speeches that remain incomprehensible
even to those closest to him. Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), on the other
hand, refuses to admit his vulnerability to trauma. In striving to overcome the forces buffeting him and in powerfully seeking to control his
life, Jimmy rebels against the finite and limited nature of his humanity.
His effort to avenge his daughter’s murder is a desperate struggle to
understand and thereby to master a universe gone mad. Sean Devine
(Kevin Bacon) neither succumbs to his traumatic experience of his wife’s
leaving him nor, however, does he deny her power over him. Rather,
Sean comes gradually to humbly accept the limitation on his power and
control that marks the humanity of his masculinity.
Together, these three responses to trauma—collapse, rebellion
through vengeance, and upright acceptance of finitude—comprise the
structuring triad of Mystic River. Whereas Dave is consumed by his neurotic response to trauma, Jimmy and Sean present two meaningful
responses to the impulse to respond to injury with revenge. Jimmy’s act
of vengeance is driven by an idealized fantasy of superhuman power and
control. Sean, however, comes to embrace the very limited nature of
humanity that Jimmy rejects. Sean’s heroism, his decision to become
more human, is a powerful counterweight to Jimmy’s more traditional
masculine heroism, one that is located in the need to stand upright as a
man who recognizes he is inevitably shaped by forces beyond his control.
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:19
PS
PAGE 122
Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River 123
Precisely because Mystic River leaves the conflict between Jimmy’s
avenging hero and Sean’s upright hero unresolved, it offers an insightful
glimpse into the psychological foundations both of vengeance and the
overcoming of vengeance. Jimmy may indeed strive to uphold an idealized image of himself as a proud and powerful person; moreover, Jimmy’s
identification as a king, one with the natural authority to rule and to
avenge that is denied to mere men, is, at least on one level, positively
figured as the natural and noble striving of man for justice. It is this
fantastic claim of kingship that Mystic River suggests can gird—if not justify—Jimmy’s act of vengeance. And yet, insofar as avengers rebel against
their human limitations, they fail in the profound calling that makes us
human: namely, the thoughtful embrace of finitude.
Mystic River and Revenge: Breaking the Mold
Mystic River, on one level, is a classic example of the genre of revenge
movies. It begins with the murder of the nineteen-year-old daughter of
Jimmy Markum. Jimmy is one of a trio of childhood friends who have
grown apart, the film’s main characters. Suspicion quickly settles upon
another of the three, Dave Boyle. The investigation is led by the third
of the childhood friends, Sean Devine, now a detective. Although Dave’s
own wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), comes to believe that he is the
murderer, Sean remains skeptical and releases him from custody. Jimmy,
distrustful of what he sees as the bureaucratic and laggard police, takes
Dave out to a secluded bank of the Mystic River, forces him to confess,
and executes him. By the final scene, Jimmy is perched on his front stoop
surrounded by the followers of his former criminal gang, his wife, and
remaining daughters; while he may still mourn the loss of his favorite girl,
the traditional scene of familial bliss suggests that Jimmy has—through his
revenge—asserted his power over the loss and chaos that threatened to
consume him. At least on one reading of the film, the violence against
Jimmy—and even the world itself—has been made right.
Or so it appears. For underneath the conventional waters, Mystic River
is a decidedly unconventional exploration of revenge as a response to
trauma. In a bold break from the norms of contemporary American moviemaking, Mystic River never resolves the conflict between Jimmy and
Sean. The movie’s strength is its incredible sympathy for each of its main
characters.
This generosity of perspective is evident in Eastwood’s filming itself.
Mystic River forsakes the usual Hollywood practice of presenting the story
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:20
PS
PAGE 123
124 Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
of revenge from an omniscient point of view in sympathy with the
avenger.5 American revenge movies typically depend on the solitary male
father figure, the ‘‘John Wayne figure,’’ who, like God and the Father,
‘‘embodies the fantasy of a man who makes himself out of nothing and
who is therefore purely masculine, a hard man all through.’’6 For this
reason, revenge movies traditionally are filmed realistically from one central perspective that presents the hero’s world as simple fact.7 Instead,
Eastwood films from the perspective of the character who is central to
the resolution of the drama particular to each scene. We see Dave sink
into his nightmare world; shot in near darkness in a room without any
visible doors or windows, the scene pictures the claustrophobia of Dave’s
internal world. Sean, too, is filmed from his own perspective. When he
speaks to his wife over the phone, he is pictured through his own experience of isolation and disarray. We see Sean on the streets as a cop trying
to assert some kind of hold on the trauma that is always haunting him.
He is oftentimes filmed from the back or the side, speaking out to a
reality that continually threatens his sense of control. Finally, Jimmy, in
the scenes he dominates, is shown struggling to control himself and his
world, and Eastwood’s filming focuses on the ferocity of his struggle. In
one extraordinary scene, Eastwood shoots Jimmy’s frantic effort to break
free from the police from above, showing Jimmy’s struggle to free himself as he is nearly crucified by his own anguish.
Beyond its merely filmic qualities, Mystic River also has a plot that
separates it from traditional Hollywood revenge films. Most importantly,
the act of revenge in Mystic River gets the wrong man. When Jimmy kills
Dave, he kills an old friend, one whom life has profoundly scarred. While
Dave did enact his own vengeance by killing a pedophile he caught
raping a young boy, he did not kill Jimmy’s daughter. Dave may be
troubled and pitiable, but he is also deeply innocent.
Because Jimmy avenges his daughter against the wrong man, Mystic
River does not follow the well-worn path of revenge films that William
Ian Miller describes as the journey from ‘‘pity and fear to catharsis’’; there
is no ‘‘sense of satisfaction of having the wrong righted on the body of
the wrongdoer.’’8 In the genre of revenge films, the avenging hero must
be made not only palatable, but also noble. The avenger must be shown
to be a man or a woman of justice, even if he or she is acting beyond the
law. More precisely, it is the avenger’s claim to be doing justice beyond
the obstacles and niceties of the law that underlies his or her appeal.9 In
Mystic River, however, the usual sense of cathartic justice from an act of
revenge well taken cannot emerge because Jimmy kills an innocent man.
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:21
PS
PAGE 124
Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River 125
An act of revenge against an innocent man might be made palatable if
it were accompanied by the arrest and downfall of the errant avenger.
Such a predictable result would have fit Mystic River neatly into the genre
of anti-revenge films that portray the dangers and horrors of emotional
revenge freed from the constraints of procedural legalism. Indeed, the
undoing of a mistaken avenger might provide its own catharsis, insofar
as it reinforces our faith in the justice and wisdom of our liberal legal
system. A film in which the wrong man is killed in an act of revenge
offers up revenge as an easy target of moral outrage.
Eastwood, however, resists the temptation of facile critique. The
provocation underlying Mystic River is that Jimmy—along with Sean—is
to remain one of the film’s two sympathetic heroes, despite his errant
vengeance. Eastwood’s challenge, therefore, is to defend Jimmy’s vengeance without ceding to him the moral high ground typically accorded
to cinematic avengers.
It is to overcome this difficulty that revenge movies generally share
one premise: the avenging hero gets it right. In fact, revenge stories are
rarely whodunits. In The Searchers (1956), it is expected that Ethan
Edwards (John Wayne) will spend years tracking down and eventually
killing the Indian Chief, Scar (Henry Brandon), because we know that
Scar killed Ethan’s family as well as his true love. Similarly, we accept
that Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), thrust into the title role of The Godfather (1972), will go on a killing rampage because we understand he is
driven to it by the murder of his father. And we can understand why
Myrl Redding (John Cusack) in The Jack Bull (1999)—based on the great
Heinrich von Kleist story Michael Kohlhaas—will burn towns and sacrifice his life in order to avenge the injury that Henry Ballard (L. Q. Jones)
has done to his honor. Indeed, in nearly every Hollywood revenge
movie, the film’s omniscient viewpoint subdues the fear of unjust
revenge with the promise that the heroic avenger will get the right
man.10 Whatever ethical problems with revenge might remain, the question of the need for due process is rendered mute by the moral clarity of
the final act of justice.11
Against the facility with which Hollywood eases the justification of
vengeance, Eastwood’s Mystic River stands out as the rare film willing to
present revenge as a defensible urge and, simultaneously, as a terrifying
danger. Our aim in turning to Mystic River is neither to justify nor to
vilify revenge, but to understand why it continues to so fascinate and
seduce. To this end, Mystic River offers a nuanced canvas. Because Mystic
River so radically breaks with the tradition of killing the right man that is
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:22
PS
PAGE 125
126 Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
embedded in ‘‘revenge movies,’’ it offers an especially rich way to focus
on the question of the claim to justice in the activity of vengeance itself,
apart from its consequences. For this reason alone, Mystic River stands out
as worthy of serious attention.
Mystic River: A Revenge Tale with Three Men
The movie starts with the three boys who, after playing a street game,
decide to mark their initials into the wet cement of a nearby sidewalk.
Suddenly, a man pretending to be a police officer orders Dave into his
car for having defaced public property. Confused, the other two boys
reluctantly allow Dave to get into the car. What is done to Dave by his
kidnappers is the sort of trauma that reveals the very real vulnerability of
men to an act of penetration. Dave, therefore, experiences the shattering
of the ultimate heteronormative fantasy that conflates masculinity with
impenetrability.
Mystic River revolves around three male characters, each of whom
reacts differently to traumatic experiences of loss that challenge both their
masculinity and their power to impose order on their worlds. While
Dave is broken by his ordeal, Jimmy and Sean confront their traumas in
very different ways. Jimmy, the avenging hero, acts from the prerogative
of right. A man’s man, he is a king in his own house. The literal and
repeated identification of Jimmy as a king—as one with the natural
authority to order a world—works to justify Jimmy’s refusal to give in
to trauma as well as his decision to forcefully resist it. Sean, on the contrary, neither succumbs to trauma nor masters it. Instead, Sean—when
confronted by his wife’s challenge to his masculine control and with the
fact of Jimmy’s lawless and unjust vengeance—responds by admitting his
vulnerability and indeed identifies with Dave Boyle. In all of his actions,
Sean remains faithful—to his wife, who has left him, and to the law,
which he faithfully upholds. He is an upright man struggling to balance
his masculinity with the reality of his tragic limitations, and his willingness to accept his finitude is set against Jimmy’s rebellious insistence on
maintaining his fantasy of superhuman strength.
Dave
After Dave escapes his kidnappers, we see him only as a shadowy figure.
We see the two boys looking up at their recently escaped friend behind
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:22
PS
PAGE 126
Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River 127
a bedroom window only to have his mother quickly shut the shade, as if
to hide Dave from the world and himself. Dave, as he will say later,
survived but not as himself; as he puts it, whoever got out of that basement was not Dave Boyle.
Later in the movie, an adult version of Dave Boyle returns one night
from a neighborhood bar covered in blood with a stab wound. His story
to his wife was that he was robbed and had to defend himself against the
mugger. He is completely undone by the violent act he has undertaken,
sputtering in horror about what it felt like to hurt another human being.
We only later find out that Dave had caught a pedophile in the act of
raping a young boy and beat the perpetrator to death. Yet the closest
Dave comes to revealing this truth to his wife is through cryptic confessions telling his wife how he feels like a monster, an admission that tells
us more about how Dave feels haunted by his trauma then it does anything about his incoherent efforts to communicate to his wife what he
has done. But in a deeper sense, why was Dave unable to tell his wife
what happened that night?
Here we are returned to the wordlessness and unspeakability related
to traumatic events. Dave feels like a monster before his own vengeful
act, an act that takes him back to the traumatic scene where he acts out,
but is unable to come to terms with, what he did and what happened to
him. The act is unplanned on the deepest level. Dave is horrified by the
nightmare scene that he is once again returned to, even if now as the
perpetrator. In the deepest sense, the nightmare that was his life in the
basement of his kidnappers completely takes him over as he beats the
pedophile to death. But this death cannot bring peace; it only brings the
nightmare fully to life again. As Dave tries to express his sense of being a
character in an ugly alternate universe, his wife tragically comes to identify him along these lines and suspects him to be the murderer of the
daughter of his childhood friend Jimmy. The more he tries to speak from
his understanding of his reality, the more he takes his nightmare to be a
reality. He is desperately trying to explain how he has been ensnared by
the original trauma. There are no words to describe the subterranean
world Dave Boyle remains trapped in; his incapacity to express himself
only furthers his identification with a monster with no means to represent himself. Of course, when Jimmy falsely accuses Dave at gunpoint
and demands an explanation for his recent strangeness, Dave is unable to
communicate the truth: he murdered the pedophile and not the daughter
of his childhood friend.
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:23
PS
PAGE 127
128 Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
Jimmy
Jimmy was one of the three boys who were at the scene of the initial
kidnapping; he grew up to be the leader of a neighborhood gang and
was briefly imprisoned. Jimmy had a partner in crime named Ray Harris,
whose sons are important to this story. While in prison, Jimmy learns
that he was betrayed by Ray. Jimmy kills Ray for his transgression. However, Jimmy does not leave the tragedy behind him, because he continues
to support Ray’s two children: Brendan (Tom Guiry) and Silent Ray
(Spencer Treat Clark), Brendan’s supposedly mute younger brother. We
meet Jimmy as a struggling adult trying to leave the criminal world
behind and make it in a small legitimate business. His daughter Katie
(Emmy Rossum) falls in love with Brendan, but Jimmy will not allow
the relationship to go forward because Brendan is the son of the man he
murdered. Katie and Brendan decide to run off to get married, but she
is murdered the night before their escape. Jimmy is drawn to the murder
scene as he exits from the church where another of his daughters is taking
her First Communion. The haunting image of him being restrained by a
gaggle of Boston police as he screams to Sean and to heaven, ‘‘Is that my
daughter in there?’’ is among the most harrowing portrayals of emotional
despair ever on the silver screen. And yet as overwrought as Jimmy is
over the loss of his daughter, he quickly pulls himself together. His old
gang members Nick and Kevin Savage (Adam Nelson and Robert Wahlberg) show up, and Jimmy immediately starts giving orders.
In the next scene, Jimmy is sitting with his wife, Annabeth (Laura
Linney), and talking with Sean and Sean’s partner, Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne). Jimmy asks Sean: ‘‘Did you ever think about how just
one little choice can change your whole life? I heard Hitler’s mother
wanted to abort him. At the last minute she changed her mind. See what
I mean.’’ Jimmy continues:
What if you or I had gotten into that car instead of David
Boyle? . . . If I had gotten into that car that day, my life would’ve
been a different thing. My first wife, Marina, Katie’s mother, she
was a beautiful woman, regal, Latin women are and she knew it.
You had to have balls just to go near her and I did. Eighteen years
old. Two of us. She was carrying Katie. Here’s the thing, Sean. If
I’d have gotten into the car that day, I’d have been a basket case
and I never would’ve had the juice to go near her. Katie never
would have been born, and she never would have been murdered,
you know.
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:24
PS
PAGE 128
Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River 129
Even as Jimmy considers whether it would have been better had Katie
never been born, we learn something about the mettle of his character.
Dave was destroyed by his kidnapping and molestation. Jimmy, however,
escaped. And for Jimmy, this is no mere accident. Even when they were
young, it was Jimmy who was the leader of their gang. And as a man,
Jimmy remains a leader, both of his criminal gang and, more recently, of
his community. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that Jimmy refers to
his first wife as regal. She was a queen, and, by implication, Jimmy is a
king.
It is precisely Jimmy’s claim of royal prerogative that is the lynchpin
of Eastwood’s attempt to give meaning to Jimmy’s wrongful execution
of Dave. The movie’s penultimate scene opens with Jimmy silhouetted
in front of his bedroom window. He is naked from the waist up, and we
see, for the first time, the tattooed cross that fills his back. Religion,
however, plays an ambiguous role in Mystic River. There is the suggestion
from his ring that one of the men who abducted Dave in the opening
scene was a bishop. Jimmy, a practicing Catholic, attends his daughter’s
First Communion. Given that Jimmy has just learned that he has taken
revenge on an innocent man, and on his former friend, it might be
thought that the cross on his back signifies the burden that Jimmy must
bear. Indeed, as he hears his wife step lightly into the room behind him,
Jimmy confesses: ‘‘I killed Dave. I killed him and I threw him in the
Mystic. But I killed the wrong man. That’s what I’ve done. And I can’t
undo it.’’ But the scene of Catholic repentance that this opening promises quickly veers in an altogether different and more secular direction.
In response to Jimmy’s confession of sin and powerlessness, Annabeth
responds by cooing, ‘‘Shhhhh, Jimmy, shhhhh.’’ She will hear nothing
of his confession, weakness, and doubt. Instead, as the devoted wife, she
offers a speech of belief and power. Annabeth believes in Jimmy, in his
goodness, his strength, and his nobility. As she comes up and embraces
him from behind, she strokes him, caressing his ego, and whispers into
his ear. She says:
I wanna feel your heart. Last night when I put the girls to bed I
told them how big your heart was. I told them how much you
loved Katie, because you created her, and sometimes your love for
her was so big it felt like your heart was going to explode. . . . I
told them their daddy loved them that much too. And he had four
hearts. And they were all filled up and aching with love for them
and they would never have to worry. And that their daddy would
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:24
PS
PAGE 129
130 Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
do whatever he had to for those he loved. And that is never wrong.
That could never be wrong. No matter what their daddy had to
do. And those girls fell asleep in peace.
There is a vision of wifehood here that is explicitly contrasted with the
other two wives in the movie. Whereas Celeste, Dave’s wife, becomes
convinced that Dave killed Katie and rats on him to Jimmy, and Laura,
Sean’s wife, demands equal standing in her marriage—so much so that
she leaves pregnant (a traditionally vulnerable position)—it is Annabeth
who plays the dutiful and adoring wife. She knows that a man’s job is to
protect his women, and Jimmy is a master at protection. He has four
hearts, one for each of his girls, and he will do whatever it takes to make
sure that they are safe. And when that is not possible, he will seek to
make those who hurt them pay. That is his job. Annabeth’s role is to
keep her husband standing erect.
This familial fantasy of a wife who supports her husband and of a man
possessed of a love so strong that it will require and justify any violence
is at the core of Mystic River’s exploration of revenge. From this perspective, revenge is not merely a paternal right; it is a duty of love and obligation. Just as Sethe’s love for her children in Beloved redeemed even her
tragic killing of her children, so here are we asked to understand, if not
forgive, Jimmy’s transgression borne out of a love too strong to be harnessed within legal bounds. Similarly, one of the authors of this essay grew
up with a father who repeated, throughout her adolescence, that if anyone ever harmed his children, he would seek them out and tear them
apart. Recently, prompted by a viewing of Mystic River, he reiterated that
he would have truly acted on his promise to kill someone who had
harmed his children. We tell this story because children are not the only
ones who may be terrorized and thrilled by such a fantasy of paternal
love; as adults, movies like Mystic River enable us to, at the very least,
understand Annabeth’s boast that her children fell asleep in peace. The
fascination with Eastwood’s movies is, in part, an attraction to characters
like Jimmy, who has a heart so big that he will make the world safe.
Vengeance borne of love, in other words, comes to buttress a rhetorical
demand for safety that trumps all competing conceptions of justice.12
Love alone, however, cannot authorize Jimmy’s revenge. If love were
the only ground for Jimmy’s killing, it might work to justify his taking
revenge against Katie’s killers; but, Jimmy made a mistake, one that, as
he understands, he cannot undo. While an act of violence in the name
of love might suffice when the outcome is considered correct, Jimmy’s
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:25
PS
PAGE 130
Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River 131
love for Katie does not explain Mystic River’s at least grudging acceptance
of Jimmy’s vengeance.
Eastwood refuses to condemn Jimmy for mistakenly killing Dave.
Instead of abandoning the avenger who gets it wrong, Mystic River takes
seriously the claim that the rightness of revenge, insofar as it is just, is
independent of whether the outcome is correct. By dramatically presenting the deep psychic appeal of Jimmy’s willingness to act whatever the
consequences, Mystic River necessarily forces open the question of
revenge in a radical way. Beyond the question of a successful outcome, it
asks: what is the original source of the ancient and seemingly irrepressible
recognition of the justice of revenge?
While it is possible to make a legal argument defending Jimmy based
on mens rea, that argument would only provide Jimmy with an excuse;
the strong claim that Annabeth makes in the movie is that Jimmy acted
justly.13 Whether or not Jimmy’s revenge was correct, legal, or justifiable,
it is Annabeth who makes the claim that it was right. And in spite of the
ambivalence of the film’s final scene, which we will discuss below, it is
impossible to read the respect and honor accorded to Jimmy out of Mystic
River. Instead, we believe it is important to take seriously the way in
which Eastwood’s film grapples with what is perhaps the cinema’s most
subtle and powerful defense of vengeance.
Within Mystic River, the claim of rightful vengeance can only be
grounded in the right of the one who takes it. It is a claim of natural
right that attaches to the person of the actor. And here is where Mystic
River offers its ultimate defense of Jimmy’s revenge. His act is not a mere
emotional reaction; rather, it must be seen as the act of a loving king. As
Annabeth says,
I told the girls: Your daddy’s a king, and a king knows what to do
and does it, even when it’s hard. And their daddy will do anything
he has to for those he loves. And that’s all that matters. Because
everyone is weak, Jimmy, everyone but us. We’ll never be weak.
And you? You could rule this town. [They begin to have sex.] And
after, Jimmy. Let’s take the girls down to the parade. Katie would’ve liked that. [Cut to parade.]
Here Jimmy is figured as a king, and his murder of Dave is sanctified as
a kingly act grounded in love. In order to understand one of the many
viewpoints about revenge present in Mystic River, the ideas of noble rule
and royal prerogative must be further explored.
This content downloaded from 132.174.253.149 on Sat, 16 Dec 2023 22:44:46 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
…………….. 17276$
$CH5
03-26-09 11:53:26
PS
PAGE 131
132 Revenge and Masculinity in Mystic River
To say that revenge is a right of kings sounds strange at a time when
all privileges, including revenge, are seen as the equal right of all people.
But it may be, as Goethe once wrote of Hamlet, that some people are
not equal to the task of revenge.14 Indeed, the very thought that any
mere mortal would assume the right of vengeance flies in the face of the
entirety of Judeo-Christian morality: ‘‘ ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the
Lord.’’15 And there is something about revenge that, as Shai Lavi argues,
exceeds any attempt at human justification.16 God’s divine right of
revenge, his destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, is just
even though—and in fact precisely because—it is not justifiable according to any utilitarian or ethical calculus. Similarly, in every act of mortal
revenge, there is a partial claim that one acts justly above and beyond
any need for rational justification. Revenge, in other words, partakes in
the hubristic claim to act like a god.17
Given the intimate connection between revenge and divinity, it
should not be surprising that kings would come to be accorded the right
of taking vengeance.18 The great German historian of kingship, Percy
Ernst Schramm, spent a lifetime exploring the way in which the institution of kingship relies upon an
