Like Blumstein, he finds the whole idea that anyone who can kill in cold blood must be a psychopath as irrelevant and not useful for his analysis: "Insanity is a way of imposing a pattern on these cases and casting them aside as if their experience is not relevant to our lives. It is an easy way out. After all, we know that a man who executes someone in the justice system or in the military is not insane. Misha appreciates the moral questions of killing. In fact, I've found that part of the thrill is knowing the immorality of the act, suggesting that he is quite sane."
The Cult of the Man Who Knows Death
One of Misha's claims is that he believes in God's omnipotence, and therefore presumes that he must be doing God's will. Katz says this is typical: "A big attraction of violence is that the criminal likes to feel that he is acting like God; the thrill of possessing God's power to kill someone is a big attraction."
Reverend Dr. Hugh Montefiore, the former Bishop of Birmingham in Great Britain, puts it this way: "Misha's claims are total rubbish. He has free will. He knows the difference between morality and immorality. He is not an automaton. How does he know God has chosen him? He is simply a murderer who is either deluding himself or making a cynical claim to let himself off the hook."
Children want to grow up to be pilots, rock stars, or doctors. I ask Misha if they should want to be hit men.
"You know," Misha says curtly, "this job isn't that of a beast, okay? It's not a dirty life. No more than a doctor's or a soldier's. I get respect for this profession. Think of me like a doctor in that way even though our roles are different."
The psychological reaction of civilized culture toward a murderer is a mixture of fear and the respect that Misha mentions. We should feel more disgust toward a paid killer than we do toward a clinically ill psychopath—but we do not. "What we admire about these people, if we do admire them," Blumstein explains, "is their consummate professionalism."
We feel contempt, anger, and disgust for the maniacal madman who hysterically kills humans out of sadism, perversion, or just lunacy, and we feel equal contempt for the person who kills in anger or by accident. Yet, perversely, our society stands in awe of those who have the ability to kill while coolly in control of themselves.
I believe that the reason Misha is respected in his Muscovite twilight zone is the same reason why we honor generals and "godfathers," why we romanticize bank robbers and hit men: they are men who control death. No one is the equal of the man who knows death, uses it, and does not flinch. Look at Patton, James Bond, Bugsy Siegel, Vito Corleone…
In our culture, James Bond, who we admire breathlessly for his "00" license to kill, is really a cold-hearted murderer—one who jokes and fornicates between exotic slaughters. We find glamour in the solitary life of the assassin in such films as The Day of the Jackal.
When Britain's last executioner, Mr. Pierpont (he never used a first name, regarding it as a sign of unprofessional intimacy), died, he received an admiring obituary, pages long, in the Times of London giving nuggets of his views on all manner of day-to-day subjects including marriage and the price of beer. In other words, because Mr. Pierpont had hanged, in a long and glorious career, hundreds of criminals (and a couple of innocent mistakes as well, which incidentally converted him to opposing the death penalty), we regard him as a legitimate source of wisdom.
But more than that, the killing films—including the Death Wish, Terminator, Dirty Harry, and Bugsy and Goodfellas—glorify the hit man in his traditional place of respect. The Godfather was the subtlest of all because it balanced the homespun sentiment, love, and loyalty of the Corleone family with the their business of murder and fear. In their world, the Godfather is revered, but even he fears his ruthless hit man, the sepulchral Lucca Brazzi.
Eli A. Rubinstein, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of America's leading authorities on the relationship between violence in the media and its audience, stresses that "we do not respect these people, but I agree we do admire them. Why? Part of the reason must be that media violence is sanitized, so the audience does not see the real, horrible consequences of these murders. On the other hand is the phenomenon of desensitization—we have seen so much violence that it no longer makes much impact."
Rubinstein sees the enjoyment of violence on the screen as part of "our fascination with all aberrant behavior. After all, there are lots of people who like watching aberrant sexual activity on screen but who would never do it in real life. Again, by watching the violence of this character, we are living through the same experience vicariously and without risk or danger."
Another important idea is that the audience likes the characters of violent men played by Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger because they admire the star himself. "DeNiro or Eastwood are larger than life and the young see them as heroes even when they commit dastardly acts," says Rubinstein. "They cannot separate the star from the character."
But none of this in itself explains why movie after movie elevates the cold-blooded hit man. Rubinstein concludes by saying, "Essentially, we admire a man who commits an act, even if it is immoral, if he does it with style. We admire the success of it. These hit men are dealing in death, and there is nothing as beyond the experience of most of us as death itself."
Tags:
brandy,
dispatcher,
executioner,
fellow man,
flask,
fur hat,
hit man,
imbecile,
kind of man,
mafia,
moscow hotel room,
murder,
murderer,
philosopher,
psychopath,
Russia,
snoopers,
special forces,
strange feeling
