Current mood:

creative

Revenge Porn
So I've been reading the novels of Dennis Lehane. If you've seen the film Gone, Baby, Gone it's based on the fourth book in a series of detective novels. I pretty much devoured all five books in the series in rapid succession. They're really good contemporary hard-boiled crime fiction.

However, I've also referred to them as "Revenge Porn" because the investigators in these books have a ruthless and relentless sense of justice. They don't stop and are willing to pay any price to see the guilty party punished. That's a critical word. Not just caught. Not just stopped. Punished.

I don't know why but I have a very strong attraction to that unrelenting pursuit of justice. It's why I enjoy Batman. It's why I enjoy Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Hell, once Goren is through with a suspect I rarely don't care if he goes to jail. Goren has already stripped him of all dignity and anything he may have loved or cared about.

Now in Lehane's novels the climaxes usually result in the villain getting killed. Death being presented as the ultimate punishment which pretty much works with the Catholic undertones the series carries. However, that has never sat well with me. There are lots of movies that end with the death of the villain and they never make me happy. Death is too good for some people.

Oddly enough, Lehane appears to agree with me. There's a great scene in the fifth book, "Prayers For Rain" where a man who has been laboring under a guilty conscience for many years says, "I guess that's how God punishes us. He lets us live." That line made me grin because, yes, exactly.

Thinking about it I sketched out some notes for a short story collection about justice, punishment and revenge. The central character would be a masked avenger type called The Angel. He'd be almost the opposite of Batman or The Shadow in appearance. He wears mostly white and speaks in soft melodic tones. However, he'd almost never appear in the stories until the very end because the stories are told from the perspective of his targets.

The stories would follow the actions of characters The Angel was punishing. We'd slowly watch their live crumble around them and only in the end, when they're driven to the breaking point would The Angel actually appear and explain WHY the person is being punished. The psuedo-mystery element would be trying to figure out what the person must be guilty of from the way they're being punished.

I doubt I'll ever write them. I'm lazy that way but they're fun to think about. I did write this exchange though:

Man (crying, clearly broken): "If what I did is so heinous why don't you just kill me?"

The Angel: "Death isn't good enough."

Man: "Do you not believe in Hell?"

The Angel: "I'm a man of God. I believe in Hell and all its torments."

Man: "Hell isn't good enough?"

The Angel: "No."

Man: "Why?"

The Angel: "Because if you're burning in Hell, I can't watch."