There was so much promise in jazz and the new kinds of painting and fiction and poetry, but it all came to remarkably little in the end because of its neo-mania and the need to shock. Now, even shock has become boring and ritualized, as the latest controversy centering on the Brooklyn museum shows. Return to top . The trouble is that the villain is as much over the top in his way as the hero was in his. Murders and explosions are all very well in their way, but they have to be put into some kind of moral context.
Realism demands it.
Graceland represents the most dismaying tendency among many in Hollywood today, which is almost completely to ignore moral context. In fact, it would be difficult to overstate the moral anarchy represented by this picture. One reason why Costner's villain, who is called Murphy, is absurdly excessive in his villainy is so that the other villains will look good by contrast. But there are only villains here, unless you count the two federal marshals who are given almost nothing to do but make wisecracks and follow the villains around with pins on a map. He doesn't kill quite so many people as Murphy and seems to take less delight in killing, so I guess you could say that the filmmakers appeal to a certain rudimentary moral sense in their audience.