Another of Mr. Eastwood's proofs of his genuine American Manichaeism

Rating: 8/10 (26 December 2005)

Another masterpiece of American Manichaeism.
This movie serves as an excellent case for analysis of American absurd hunt for scapegoats.
Clint serves as a perfect representative of a society in which criminals and perverts serve as scapegoat of citizen's day-to-day frustrations and anger. Against Europe's predominant and more balanced philosophy in which crime is no more than what it us: a burden to society of difficult treatment, Clint champions a regrettable social deviation in which citizens' frustrations are satisfied through a scapegoat which, upon satisfaction, leaves him more ignorant and blinded than he was. Whether it is the Jews in the Germany in the thirties, the Armenians in the pre-WW1 Turkey, thugs in China, adulterous women in Muslim countries or criminals in present-day America: honest citizens need someone to crap on. The appalling result of this disparity is that the criminal suffers a double punishment, the second one utterly undeserved and owed to a social pathology.
In the case in point: the spectator is confronted with a revolting crime in which one's visceral crave for a scapegoat is put inside a morbid labyrinth of who-and-who's not, until the intrigue eventually satisfied to ones wishes. In the course of it, a pedophile is beaten to the pulp (to death) because he was abusing a child in a car, and a suspected pervert criminal is portrayed as obviously deserving to be the spectator's scapegoat; something which, when it occurs in real life to real people, will do doubt release such reactions, for it is obvious that if one has been sexually and brutally abused, one may probably and justifiably wish to wreak vengeance onto any pedophile; and that if one's beloved daughter is killed by a pervert, one will probably and understandably like to chop him to pieces, and it would be probably justifiable in many cases. The problem occurs when the masses are served this as bread a circuses.
This type of movie reminds me of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, in which the masses are exposed to these type of Manichaean movies where the bad guy is hunted for and ultimately bombed to death to their ultimate catharsis.