In the Crosshairs

If you were going to kill someone, who would you rather have giving you your orders?

I found myself thinking this recently when I was trying to choose between a couple of my favorite video games. What I like, for example, about the Splinter Cell series is that it’s a nice break from the endless shooting and carnage in your typical video game. You have to pace yourself… and the killing. It involves subtlety and patience and intelligence. So do the games in the Hitman series. Yet, even though the Splinter Cell series is a bit more popular than the Hitman series, I often prefer the latter’s Agent 47 to the former’s Sam Fisher.

What, you may ask, is the difference? Well, Fisher does have those cool goggles with multi-purpose visual modes, but he is a patriot working for the government. Meanwhile, Agent 47 (with the bar code tattooed on the back of his bald head) seems like a man forced into circumstances and given orders by a nebulous international organization of some sort. In the upcoming Hitman: Blood Money, the organization Agent 47 works for is knocked out of the picture and our man is on his own. Even better.

Video game reviewers will talk about graphics and sound and gameplay, but in the end we like characters we can identify with. I can enjoy playing Agent 47 more than Sam Fisher. It’s not a matter of game elements, but of story elements. And it’s a matter of ideology. Being a government operative is not an option in my imagination. Being a hitman of mysterious origins is.

There are ideological reasons why I prefer TV private detectives over TV cops – I’m not a team player in some respects and the idea of the police ‘brotherhood’ disturbs me. I like detectives who are well meaning and will occasionally break minor laws and pull cons to get to the truth. That’s why this past decade of TV has been a disappointment for me – all those cop shows. The 70’s and 80’s had The Rockford Files, Magnum P.I., Remington Steele, Moonlighting and Simon and Simon – any one of which I’d prefer to all the NYPD Blue’s, C.S.I.’s and Law and Order’s. The C.S.I. rabble are particularly repulsive to me with their unimaginative vision of crime and evil. It’s a deeply conservative world view filled with clearly identified bad guys and it shows the forces of law as ultimately infallible and self-righteous. Many of the main characters are nothing more than bullies. Yuck.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of ideology guiding my choices, but simply subject matter. Reviewers will often talk about how directors or actors or writers determine their picks, but I think many of us choose because we’re interested in what the story is about. You could have the best movie ever about drugs, for example, and I would not be interested. I’ve seen Traffic and I’ve seen Requiem For A Dream. They are both hard-hitting, insightful, thoughtful and compelling – and I couldn’t give a damn. On the other hand, I will watch the most painfully perpetrated film about baseball just because it’s about baseball.

And of course there are fans who will pick films by genre – the gross-out teenage comedy, the slasher picture, the war movie, the character-driven relationship drama. These have both subject matter and ideology working together. The horror film, for example, is often about guilt and punishment. Very Catholic, ironically. The gross-out comedy can be a way for filmgoers to vicariously rebel. But ideology is a tricky thing. Gross-out pictures can also be very regressive in that we are laughing at characters in an aggressive and superior way. To be a politically incorrect comedy is to be both radical and bigoted, often at the same time.

All this is just to say that how we watch or play things is more complex than we might ordinarily think. We are often dealing with Neo in The Matrix as a Christ figure and as the very un-Christian Nietszchian Superman. This doubling of ideologies attracts a wider audience – even if that audience is not fully conscious of the ideas underneath the surface. Inside our heads there is the little hitman taking notice of the seemingly innocuous ideas passing before us on the screen and he always has something in his crosshairs – those moments when what we see on the screen is just… dead on.