Vengeance is satisfying. At least, most traditional revenge tales believe that. Their plots forward a simple premise: punishment of past crimes makes damaged characters whole and, in turn, gives the audience a sense of closure.
True to its name, payback is a motif of resolution. Avengers “get even” by settling accounts—financial and moral, personal and social—and recovering lost currency. Sometimes that currency is monetary; other times it is symbolic (like eyes) or abstract (like honor). Regardless of what they collect, though, vengeful characters balance a metaphorical ledger. Their retaliations correct a deficit in their life while nullifying someone else’s ill-gotten surplus. Broadly speaking, the revenge genre obeys the logic of symmetry . And that balancing act is frequently bloody. As Margaret Atwood reminds us, revenge narratives often result in violence because “death pays all debts ” (Atwood 2008, 119). Not all villains end up six feet under, but the grave guarantees that an enemy will do no further harm. More importantly, when stories give all parties what they deserve they provide a fleeting glimpse of a fair world. By definition then, successful revenge plots end in satisfaction.
Recently, though, these genre rules have started to falter. In the stories America tells, revenge has evolved from violent satisfaction into inexhaustible desire.
Consider The Human Stain (2001), Philip Roth ’s mockery of craven racial politics , political correctness, and puritanism. Roth treats these diverse themes as symptoms of a single American pathology: shame of the flesh. With the Clinton impeachment as backdrop, the narrative fixates on “the contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are” (Roth 2001, 37). The novel presents the nation as a corpus for clinical study, and critics rightly dissect it. Body fascination, however, tends to distract from a parallel diagnosis of the American psyche. Though a fear of the human form troubles the novel, The Human Stain suggests that the country’s truly dangerous afflictions are its emerging vengeful fantasies. In particular, Roth’s characters trade an old longing for retributive fairness for a new wrath endemic to the modern USA .
The novel psychologizes two men who indulge in distinct revenge fantasies. Roth’s central character, Coleman Silk, is a classics professor at fictitious Athena College. Late in his career, Coleman is forced to resign from his post after calling two perpetually absent, black students “spooks.” His phrasing describes the missing students’ ghostly qualities, but in the narrative’s 1998 context such terminology plays poorly and the school ousts Coleman for racism. The narrative then jumps back in time to 1944, detailing how Coleman, who identifies as Jewish in the novel’s present but is actually African-American, began hiding his racial selfhood. Ostensibly, the revelation of Coleman’s race earns a laugh at academia’s raw identity politics . An institution of higher learning is so sensitive to political correctness yet insensitive to linguistic nuance that it charges a black professor with denigrating his own race (ha!). But Roth thickens the irony. When the narrative returns to the present, the disgraced Coleman divulges to his writer friend Nathan Zuckerman that he has been having an affair with a custodian at the university, Faunia Farley, several decades his junior. Faunia is both illiterate and poor. To Zuckerman at least, the secret romance looks bad: a powerful man takes sexual advantage of a less powerful woman. Coleman genuinely loves Faunia, and she him, but the need to hide their affair is but another “indignation,” like the “spooks incident,” that he must suffer (Roth 2001, 63). These affronts to Coleman’s character induce “a form of madness … [that] can corrode and warp a man who believes himself to have been grievously wronged”:
He knew from the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of Prometheus the many horrors that can ensue when the highest degree of indignation is achieved and, in the name of justice , retribution is exacted and a cycle of retaliation begins again. (Roth 2001, 63)
Ever the classics scholar, Coleman channels “the whole of Attic tragedy and Greek epic poetry” to remind himself of vengeance ’s collateral damage. Still, he models his rage on literary figures and casts himself, victim of contemporary injustice, among history ’s great avengers. In this sense, Coleman evinces American culture ’s continuity with Western civilization: our national stories extend an ancient vengeful tradition rather than deviate from it.
Opposite Coleman in both the novel’s plot and its representation of vengeance is Lester Farley, a Vietnam veteran and Faunia’s ex-husband. While Coleman restrains his anger by invoking tragedy ’s cautionary tales, Farley is unbridled fury. Decades after the war , he still struggles adjusting to civilian life: “One day he’s door gunning in Vietnam, seeing choppers explode, in midair seeing his buddies explode, down so low he smells skin cooking … and the next day he’s back in the Berkshires. And now he really doesn’t belong” (Roth 2001, 65–66). Farley blames the government for transforming him into an instrument of violence . He also reserves special contempt for Faunia. Years earlier, she checked her then-husband into rehab, made off with their kids, and was absent when the children died in a home accident. Farley interprets the destruction of his family as “payback for what he did in Vietnam” (Roth 2001, 67). When he learns that Faunia is romantically involved with Coleman, Farley begins a plot to murder the professor. Roth renders Farley as a berserker, a person of heightened aggression. Farley’s interiority spills forth in long, unbroken paragraphs lashed by torrents of consciousness. But within the character’s agitated ramblings lurks a surprising version of vengeful need. From his first narrated moments, Farley understands himself as a national by-product (“a trained killer thanks to the government of the United States ”), an avenger conditioned into existence yet also historically improbable: “They wish he never came back. He is their worst nightmare. He was not supposed to come back” (Roth 2001, 69–70). In this light, Roth exposes Farley as the return of the repressed. The country’s forgotten imperial mission comes home in the form of an unwelcome and jaded warrior. But the more fascinating valence to Farley is the character’s interpretation of the world as a vengeful contest without limit. As he puts it in one especially venomous rant: “Payback . There was no end to it” (Roth 2001, 71).
Farley embodies Coleman’s worry about boundless violence . Where the scholar restrains his rage for fear of it slipping beyond control, the war veteran sees enemies everywhere and applies his fury indiscriminately. In these figures, Roth captures two iterations of vengeance dueling in the American imagination, each articulating a dangerous longing. Coleman understands revenge as an act of symmetry . He must collect only what is owed him. Taking anything more breaks the rules of payback that enforce fairness and protect against excessive violence . Classic literature teaches these lessons. Farley, in contrast, is unprincipled violence incarnate. His wrath lacks measure and follows no code . He ushers into America a new vengeful desire that is impossible to satisfy. Overwhelmed by bloodlust, he is the avenger addicted to revenge .
Retaliation addicts have begun showing up all over American culture, but especially in movies. In John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), an assassin comes out of retirement for a second time to slaughter scores of killers who have done him wrong. Pausing amid the bullets and bloodletting, John Wick mutters into the camera—and toward the audience in a gesture of self-awareness—“you wanted me back, I’m back.” The line riffs on the surprise popularity of the first film and the public clamoring for a sequel. It also engages moviegoer amusement in watching to see if Wick tops his body count this time around (he does) or ever misses a shot (he does not). This particular scene takes place in a hall of mirrors, signaling rather inelegantly the movie’s funhouse examination of itself and the revenge genre. Reflexive acknowledgment of a culture fascinated by vengeance is savvy but also familiar. Plenty of revenge movies understand their own genre popularity. A more enlightening meta-moment occurs when the antagonist of John Wick 2 assesses its protagonist. The villain Santino D’Antonio remarks to Wick: “You think you’re Old Testament ? … I think you’re addicted to it. To the vengeance .” D’Antonio’s characterization of Wick is interesting because it p...