One of the standard interpretations of the Superman mythology goes something like this: Clark Kent is a seeming weakling who is despised by the girl he wants. She is mean to him, but he wants her just the same. He doesn’t just want a relationship with her, he also wants her admiration. Clark has a secret self that is wonderful. By the public (and often violent) display of this secret self and its power, Clark reveals his greatness and wins the admiration that he should have had all along. He maintains his Clark Kent persona, but (Like Bill said in the Tarantino movie) lowly Clark Kent is not the truth about his place in the world. Kent is the joke he plays on a woman who both admires and despises him. It is a compelling dynamic for adolescents. It turns out that it can also be adapted for older males.
In Taken, Liam Neeson plays divorced father Bryan Mills. Mills just retired and moved closer to his ex-wife in order to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The movie is painfully adept at showing the frustration, loneliness and disappointment of a certain kind of divorced and single father. There are two Lois Lane’s in his life – his ex-wife and his daughter. There are the clashes with the ex-wife who would be at least as happy if he went and stayed away or failing that, be utterly obedient to whatever “rules” she decides upon at any given moment. He dotes on the Karaoke machine he is going to get his daughter for her seventeenth birthday (there is something especially touching about the short scene in which he wraps the present.) Bryan takes a picture of his daughter with the machine before he is utterly upstaged by her stepfather’s present of a horse. Back home alone, he puts the picture of his daughter into a scrapbook. He is pathetically giddy when his daughter invites him to lunch, only to learn that it was an ambush by daughter and ex-wife to give the girl permission to go to Paris. At one point, a friend of Bryan’s notes that she she will go off to college in a year and he will lose her. Bryan replies that he has a year to find her. But the truth, which is obvious to everyone but Bryan, is that he has permanently lost what he wants so much. He is Clark Kent: divorced middle-aged father. The rest of the movie might be a daydream, an attempt to escape the truth about his life.
Bryan’s friends come over to his apartment for steaks, wine and laughs. They talk over old times. These are the people he really invested his life into. The movie tries to tell us that it was all in the course of duty to country, but we know better. Just as Clark Kent was a stand-in for shy, frustrated adolescent boys who were not space aliens, Bryan Mills is a stand-in for men who lost their marriages and children because they overinvested elsewhere in their lives. And those men are mostly not world saving superspy assassins.
Bryan’s friends invite him to help in their job as security detail for some visiting female pop star. She treats him like nobody of course. But when a knife-wielding maniac attacks her, Bryan’s secret self emerges. He disarms the attacker and saves her life. The pop star doesn’t look at him like anonymous help anymore. She looks at him with undisguised admiration and promises to help out with his daughter’s aspirations of becoming a singer.
Then Bryan’s daughter is kidnapped by a European sex slavery ring. His secret self (which was only awaiting very unlikely danger to his loved ones) emerges again. His humbled ex-wife looks to him with desperate pleading. The man she shunned is now the center of her hopes and her world. She isn’t disappointed. Bryan uses great violence, ingenuity and cruelty to save his daughter from the large and politically well connected slavery ring. He doesn’t merely save his daughter’s life. He reconciles with her. She (and her mom) sees how great he is. He found her in every sense.
Along with being a very enjoyable thriller/action movie, Taken is a window into a certain kind of fantasy. It is a fantasy in which a lifetime of mistaken and self-indulgent choices can be redeemed by a moment (or a spree) of well directed violence. It is a fantasy that the disappointments, estrangements and regrets of the life we have made are not the truth of who we are. It is a fantasy that, by being seen in a moment of heroism, we can win the love, gratitude, and admiration we have not earned over years and decades.
We don’t see much of Bryan’s daughter working through the trauma of her ordeal. Bryan takes her to meet the pop star, and the girl is amazed. Her father’s secret self is even greater than she had imagined. All the women in Bryan’s life respect and admire him now that they have seen his real and secret self. His daughter being kidnapped, drugged and sold into sex slavery was the best thing that ever happened to him. Taken is the best and saddest Superman movie I’ve ever seen.
June 29th, 2011 | 7:56 am
I haven’t seen it Pete, but welcome aboard!
I’ll never think of Clark Kent the same, though.
June 29th, 2011 | 11:02 am
I also saw “Taken” recently. While I get the point of the review here, I have a somewhat more redeeming point to observe about the film and its metaphor.
The observation is that the reality being revealed is not so much the “superman” fantasy of the protagonist — but the reality of evil and violence that surrounds us — in our heroic ignorance. But for those who suffer to brood silently at that border with eyes ever outward, it would enter freely, presuming on our trust and desires.
Those within the bounds of his protection see him as sullen and back-turning — whereas his love requires that he turn his eyes from his own desires for happiness, and toward the reality of the evil outside, to protect the happiness of those he loves. The ingratitude and the incomprehension for that decision he reluctantly accepts.
The threat need not be so existential for the same result to play out in our lives: a desire to secure material well-being against the poverty at the door, against ignorance and foolishness of destructive pleasures, all of these are measures that the father seeks to protect his children from enduring or to prevent from occurrence.
In the image of the Father, he seems uncommunicative in words, unknowable, distant or even threatening. In reality the strong back, which is all we are allowed to see, as Moses saw, bears silently all our good. It is His eyes that we do not see that ward the world of negation outside our fold. Their wisdom, which made him out to be the fool, turns out to be foolishness, and his foolishness, wisdom.
After all, he relented in keeping her from straying by his own will, and tried to afford his wife and daughter a measure of freedom of their own, just without losing the essential measures of her safety. Had his wife and his daughter just accepted his prudent precautions, had they not engaged in willful deceit as he was trying to advise them as to their protection, had they not given their trust to those who had not proved worthy of it, had they not assumed that they were equal to the test of the world that awaited them, then the Father’s unquestioning — and unaccusing — sacrifice would not have been necessary.
And in the end — at the uttermost test, it was NOT the “superman” that prevailed. Throughout it was taking the gifts of Providence at great risk and readiness to accept whatever came to hand, and even dismissing close friends who proved false.
In the end it was not his own power that saved him. At the end he was equally helpless in bondage to the designs of evil as were the one he meant to protect — it was the carelessness of sloppy plumber and a weakened steam joint, and an “outpouring” of the hot breath of Providence that justified his will — in complete cooperation with it — but not his own strength alone.
On the whole I found it rather more “redeeming.”
June 29th, 2011 | 12:06 pm
G.R., all actually true in the context of the story (if only they had listend to divorced dad, if only the rich stepfather hadn’t upstaged with the horse), but I don’t think the alienated fathers that Bryan is standing in for were (as a general rule) the ones protecting us and their families in Afghanistan or lost their families because they were too busy protecting them from neighborhood or European violence. I just don’t see it as a plea that mothers and daughters (and sons!) should be more understanding of those classes of American men who are in their lives and whose “love requires that he turn his eyes from his own desires for happiness, and toward the reality of the evil outside, to protect the happiness of those he loves.” I see it as a redemptive power fantasy (put me in coach!) whose subject is a different (and more mundane) class of divorced and single fathers.
June 29th, 2011 | 12:09 pm
Though all true on the indignities that the women in his life (who did not really SEE him for what he really was) inflicted on him.
June 29th, 2011 | 4:31 pm
Liam Neeson is an interesting actor who makes intersitng choices. HIs intutions are generally dead on ( Seraphim Falls comes to mind, even if his reasoning is often quite round the bend (cringeworthy comments about Aslan as Buddha, or Mohammed)
But the real reason that I cannot agree with the “redemptive power fantasy” take is this: The orientation of a redemption fantasy would reverse the interior disruption of this life as he sees it — i.e. — restore him to the role of father, provider and husband and displace the substitute and/or punish the disloyal. As it is, things are left as they were at the end, but with a change of heart on their part.
Nothing he does is from any choice personal to himself — his character is defined in response to one knife attack in which he does what is necessary — nothing more — and not one bit less. Necessity and love drive him, not choice.
He does not drive the story — the choices of the foolish and evil do. He does not actually change in the story — they do — the foolish learn and the evil die.
His choices do not drive the story at all — only his acceptance of necessities drive the story. He killed many men but chooses only one man to kill without clear necessity, in the elevator. That man made clear that not only was he unrepentant, but unmoved from his desire to keep “doing business” even after being shot in righteous anger for his crime.
One might make a moral case for that killing being unnecessary (but to prevent alerting the target in a hot pursuit is, in fact a moral case for it). But there is no dramatic case for it, if it were a redemption fantasy.
As drama that killing was righteous because he acted in personam of every father that would come after him, but would not be remotely able to effect such an outcome. He did not kill for reasons of self. His respsone that i was always “personal” in response to the assertion it was “just business” — is all inrefence to her — she was personal to him, and simply business to the other guy.
He did not kill him to impress his daughter, who might never know about it, and as we see in the beginning, he is clearly NOT the bragging type. If it was written as redemption fantasy he would have been seen to punish the mover of the whole enterprise in front of his daughter or wife. That would be the conventional choice. But it is done in a basement elevator — just the two, alone.
His daughter actually only sees him kill two men — one who had shot him, and the other with a knife to her throat. As far as she knows that was all he did, and he is maimed, bloody and near dead of exhaustion from doing it.
However grateful, she does not see him as the Superman — only the omniscient audience (stand-ins for God?) could see the measure he actually poured out.
He makes only two really obvious choices of his own in the story, and they are the same choices. He chooses a gift for his daughter, one for the birthday party and then later asks for a gift for his daughter from the pop-singer.
In fact he choose three gifts — the third one is the long part in the middle between asking for the second one, and delivering it at the end, It is the gift of himself — just as he is.
June 29th, 2011 | 4:59 pm
G.R. I would say that it is a redemptive power fantasy because the use of violence (and the PERCEPTION of the use of violence – even if his daughter did not see him kill more than a few of the more than a dozen he does kill, she gets the idea) lets him have the kind of relationship he had not built earlier in her life and was failing at building later within everyday life. It was the display of his secret self that gets him the admiration he isn’t able to get in what most of us would recognize as normal interactions.
Once the action starts, he is of course noble, self-sacrificing, endlessly competent, etc. That’s the fantasy, as is the payoff of his elevated status
June 29th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
It occurs to me, and I may have to watch it again to confirm, that she was even still dazed on the drugs when he shot the sheikh — so she may not have even been aware of ANY of the killing in any coherent sense. Certainly not coherent enough to have much climactic recognition/appreciation effect for a “redemption fantasy.”
Relief was the main climactic emotion as he finally got her back, and lingering uncertainty at the end, for the better and left hopefully, but not certainly, and definitely not some fantasy reversal of his fortunes. It just as possible that the daughter’s drug-induced haze measn she will recall little and yet go off and return to her old ways, along with her mother.
In true redemption fantasies (“Die Hard” comes to mind) the climactic emotion is just a vicious joy at winning destruction of the deserving rival and the promised reward of restoration (which usually we never see, so as not to cloud the fantasy with the reality).
You could have cut out the whole movie from her getting on the airplane to showing up at the singer’s house at the end and the only question would be “How’d did he break his arm?”
“Taken” tweaks that formula too much to fit, he has no real rival and achieves no lasting redemption, and that’s why I liked it …
June 29th, 2011 | 5:50 pm
Welcome Pete. This was a good post.
I had almost forgotten about Taken, or at least I had nearly forgotten the details about the Neeson character’s estrangement from his ex-wife and daughter until your wrote about them. I must have repressed the painful scene where the step-father bought the daughter a horse! What a humiliation.
Now you have perhaps explained why my memory is so vague–I can only remember being thrilled at Neeson’s “bad-assery” in the last 2/3 of the movie. In fact, I remember remarking to a friend at the time that I had never seen a Neeson movie where he had been so tough, violent, expertly rogue and all this with such a singleness of purpose. We didn’t discuss the ex-wife details. Neeson as expert killer, spy and assassin seemed a great improvement over the simpering widower he played in Love Actually.
I forgot all of this because the fantasy of the film seduced me from its basis in another reality.
It would be intriguing to see in what ways the latter parts of the film–the action/thriller/violent parts–deliberately juxtapose themselves as fantasy when compared to the impotently depressing circumstances of the earlier parts. Not that the whole thing is a dream per se, I don’t think that is there. But perhaps an embellished adventure story.
In this way, perhaps I am typical of the audience that was “Taken” by the fantasy of the story!
June 29th, 2011 | 5:50 pm
G.R., I would say that the main emotions at the end of the movie (and we see this in both the airport and the scene with the pop singer) is the Bryan getting his due recognition from wife and daughter (and stepfather to a lesser extent. The redemption comes from the revelation of his secret self and the reulting elevation of his status. You don’t necessarily need a villain personified (though I tend to like that and the big old fight scene.) Stopping a helicopter crash will do. The reversal of his fortunes in relation to his daughter were complete and were far more emphasized than whatever emotional damage she might have suffered in her ordeal.
Die Hard is another (great, great) violent divorced dad movie. There are some real gender identity issues there. You have a tough, proud, working-class guy in a dangerous job who has been left behind by a much wealthier soon-to-be-ex-wife and the resulting resentments. I think that movie (an urban western as I believe critics have mentioned elsewhere) makes a sustained argument about the need for rough and semicivilized men the cowboy metaphor is emphasized) to protect middle-class democratic society. And John McClane, whatever indignities he suffered early in the movie, was not nearly the very sad relationship failure that Bryan was (and really Bryan was quite recognizable from mundane life.)
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