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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4903 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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But does anyone have the background in urban combat/organized crime to answer this question?

Oh no, zero , absolutely none. I do have extensive fictional viewing experience, though.

My theory is that there are two layers to being a gangster. The basic, underlying, one, the ultimate unit of crime (as well as politics, but let’s not get into that), is just one guy with a gun, who’s ready to kill, who doesn’t care about anything else. He has the power to inflict death on almost anyone, and so he’s extremely powerful. Even organized crime doesn’t have a good way of dealing with him, except numbers : there are always enough of them that they can guarantee retaliation if members are killed by the lone gunman. Small consolation for the dead mafiosi.

The other, superficial layer, is the perception of being ‘hard’, ie, close to this ideal killing machine, the basic unit of power. Gangsters who appear hardest can rip other gangsters off. As well as civilians. That’s their bread and butter, how they get, and get to keep, their money.

So, aside from stupidity, the reason they don’t snipe is because inflicting death is not their job, appearing ready to inflict death is.

I have a similar reaction to your husband to many gangster and noir films : why doesn’t the hero just murder the antagonist and bury him in the woods? It’s been established that he’s evil, your life and your family’s life is on the line, the police won’t help, so what’s the hang-up, hero ?

Civilians, because they are focused on the second layer/model, where they automatically back down against gangsters who appear hard, and because they have delegated violence to the police, have forgotten that they possess ultimate power too.

why doesn’t the hero just murder the antagonist and bury him in the woods?

I'd love to read some fiction where that is the premise. Anyone have suggestions for books where that's the case?

Jack Reacher? Joe Pickett?

There are also various books where the protagonist tracks a murderer who turns out to be the "good guy", and ends up letting them go or covering for them.

I love attempts to create accurate hitman/ruthless protagonists.

It would be great to see some guy just trying to make his way in life and bad guys screw with him. They do this with all sorts of 'ex mobster/assassin/special forces/spook' stuff, but there's too much action/drama.

I'd like to see it from the point of view of some regular seeming guy where antagonists just start disappearing after messing with him. The protagonist is very careful in a 'get them while they're sleeping at 3am with no witnesses or evidence trail' sense. They just start disappearing. No one knows why. The focus is on the gradual terror of the antagonists as they figure out something is terribly wrong. The film's scenes until the climax are mostly mundane by just implying what is happening.

Or from his POV: He’s an accountant, he’s not used to violence. He at first yields to the antagonist’s every demand, he’s terrified. Then when he realizes he has no out and his family is threatened, he doesn’t get angry and turns into the badass he was in a previous life like in those movies, he just sheepishly starts researching murder on the internet (not on his own computer, he’s not stupid). He commits murder like he would fix his own toilet: at first bumbling and disgusted, then relieved and proud of his accomplishment.

Meanwhile the bad guys assume literally anyone else murdered their accomplice. But for some reason they keep hassling him. By the fifth murder he’s become so blasé about the whole process that his cover is starting to slip (“Sure, I’ll pay you off, no problem, I love my family, I don’t want any trouble. Meet me in the middle of the forest with two large garbage bags and a shovel“).

This would be great too. Just any pro-social introvert normal guy who is just intelligent. Once there's a devastating event in his life like the murder of a loved one he just sits down on the couch for 12 hours thinking. Then there's research through a public wireless via TOR/VPN and a cheap laptop paid in cash. Then baddies start dropping.

There was a comment about gangbangers on The Wire recently. Would be cool to see something perpendicular.

Revenge is a morally fraught motivation, though. I’d like him to be completely in the clear morally: it’s both unambigous self-defense, and the bad guys are evil. The reason why a scenario like that is rare in fiction, is that society considers the use of violence, especially killing, to corrupt one’s soul. I don’t agree: just because we have delegated the killing to cops and soldiers, doesn’t mean we can remain clean. The blood they spill is on our hands too.

Society recognizes three categories: the innocent sheep, and then the violent, which are separated into two: evil wolves and somewhat good shepherd dogs (or as Team america puts it: pussies, assholes, and dicks). In all those movies you mentioned, the badass protagonists have been corrupted by their violence previously, they’re dogs in sheep’s clothing at the beginning, they are not like the viewer. I’d like the accountant to be, and to remain, a sheep. With bloody teeth.

Ironically given his status as the trope codifier for much of the noir genre, Raymond Chandler actually plays with this idea a fair bit in his own work.

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