Whether we like to admit it or not, there’s something in the human heart that’s drawn to darkness and chaos. You know that superhuman hearing you suddenly get when car tires screech in the distance? Or the strange glee you feel when the Joker blows up a hospital in his finest nurse’s uniform? This mischievous tendency, which Edgar Allen Poe famously referred to the “imp of the perverse,” sits just below the surface of most people’s everyday lives. Perhaps our love of violent entertainment – be it action movies, video games, death metal, or the roughly seven thousand television crime series currently on the air – can be seen as a sort of collective catharsis for societies that struggle with the question of what it means to be civilized.
For a select few people in any society, however, the imp of the perverse proves much more persuasive than the angel on our shoulder. What is bound to be this summer’s wickedly cathartic blockbuster chronicles the exploits of one such group of men. Starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, “Public Enemies” tells the story of the 1930’s most notorious American bank robbers during what later became known as the “public enemy era.” What catches our attention about this film – aside from the amazing theme song provided by Otis Taylor, or the fact that Depp seems to have pulled a Dorian Gray on his biological clock – is that it offers us a glimpse into the What If of our own psyches. Jerking the wheel violently to the left on the freeway? Yes, it really is that easy.
Even more interesting, perhaps, are the questions such stories raise about what drives people to the behavioral fringe. After all, “Public Enemies” is set during the Great Depression, which, despite what recent news may have you believe, remains far and away the worst economic downturn in American history. For a better sense of just how desperate things got, keep in mind that in 1933 (right smack in the middle of the public enemy era), over 100,000 Americans applied to immigrate to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yes, applied. Heck, even African colonial subjects in the Cameroons put on a fundraiser for impoverished US citizens – and successfully collected almost four million dollars in aid. (Picture a Cameroonian Bono leading the charge to feed starving Americans.) With this in mind, one could argue that bankrobbing is simply an extreme example of the ends to which people are driven in times of need.
But what, then, of the well-off and seemingly well-adjusted citizen who turns out to be a serial killer? Or our childhood fascination with killing bugs and insects – or even small animals? As Flannery O’Connor explores in her 1953 short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” human psychology is not particularly fond of straightforward cause-and-effect relationships. While in the process of killing three generations of an entire family, the story’s villainous antagonist (simply referred to as “The Misfit”) declares that there’s “nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.” This idea of meanness for meanness’ sake challenges the notion that people are basically good, or that the mitigating factors of life are what catalyze individuals into particular types of behavior.
Whichever the case may be, the fact remains that we are endlessly fascinated by seeing bad things happen, often to good people. Hopefully, our willingness to pay upwards of five dollars for the popcorn alone speaks to nothing more than a deeply-rooted subconscious desire to process – and eliminate – these darker tendencies.
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