"I'll give you acts of God": God, the father, and revenge tragedy in three Billy Connelly movies.

Revenge is not an art for the forgetful. To enjoy revenge drama, you need to relish the struggle between a will to remember and a desire to forget. Four hundred years ago that tension generated revenge tragedy. (1) This essay brings the memory of that old theatrical genre to bear on three of its cinematic heirs: The Debt Collector (Anthony Neilson, 1999), The Boondock Saints (Troy Duffy, 1999), and The Man Who Sued God (Mark Joffe, 2001). I contend that these three films remember and recycle early modern conceptions of revenge in order to dramatize a contemporary thinking through of the idea of the father. (2) The question I ask is, "Why this, now?" What does revenge tragedy have to offer the contemporary cinematic father? My answer is that these films disinter elements of revenge tragedy and use them to explore potentialities of father's role in the post-backlash era. The father takes up retributive projects as remediation for having been "stiffed." (3)

All three films foreground the shortcomings, failings, and hypocrisies of the law. (4) Billy Connolly stars in all of them as a father who affronts the law in some way: through revenge, vigilantism, or the perversion of legal practice. (5) Each film links its central challenge to the law with a project for protecting or restoring the prestige of the father. The affront to the law is direct in both The Debt Collector and The Boondock Saints: the father becomes embroiled in revenge and vigilantism. In The Man Who Sued God the confrontation is more oblique: the father brings a novel and impertinent lawsuit that interrogates a fundamental premise on which the authority of state power rests, namely that the law claims to interpret God's will. These films constitute a minicycle about "retributive paternity" that forms a coda to a much larger cycle of revenge films I have described elsewhere. (6)

To demonstrate that these films constitute a cycle, we need only recall their plots. The Debt Collector is an "intensely depressive" drama, in which Connolly plays Nickie Dryden, who collects repayments for loan sharks (Paviour 90). Famous for his ruthlessness, he specializes in extracting pounds of flesh from debtors' relatives if cash is unforthcoming. Dryden, however, is not the only "debt collector" in the film. Keltie (the police officer who first arrested Dryden) emerges as a contender for the title. The narrative is concerned less with Dryden's original crimes than with what happens after he is released from an eighteen-year prison sentence. Apparently a reformed man, he becomes a fashionable artist and marries well, moving up the social ladder and becoming a stepfather. But Keltie regards Dryden's "reform" as irrelevant, because his life after prison is manifestly a reward rather than a punishment. Keltie determines to collect on a debt he regards as still underpaid, namely Dryden's "debt to society." Keltie mounts a campaign of public humiliation that escalates into a violent vendetta. Dryden loses his grip on reform and reluctantly responds in kind. Retaliatory violence escalates almost by accident, damaging both men's families. Finally, Keltie ambushes Dryden with a knife, but he loses the fight and dies. Dryden is tried for new crimes, and although he is again released, this time he has paid dearly: his stepson has died and his wife has become estranged. As Keltie warned Dryden, "All she'll see when she looks at you is fear, and pain, and loss."

In The Debt Collector, the men who turn to revenge are unseated and discredited by it, and the vengeful father emerges as "a character upon whom you'd wish all the harm in the world" (Kelly 44). Of the three movies considered here, The Debt Collector depicts revenge in the starkest, most unprepossessing fashion, and the father's recourse to it is condemned. As Richard Kelly says, "this film is not on the side of the redemptive angels" (44).

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By contrast with The Debt Collector's gritty "sociological" realism, The Boondock Saints enthusiastically restores a camp glamour to vigilantism, embedding the father who takes the law into his own hands in a stylized and surreal fantasia. Set in South Boston, the narrative focuses principally on the activities of the MacManus brothers, two vigilante "saints" who seek to purge their community of its corrupting mafia family--the Yakavettas--against whom the law is powerless. The MacManus brothers succeed in becoming a nuisance to the Yakavettas, who summon Billy Connolly's character, "II Duce," to take care of the problem. "A fuckin' monster" with a penchant for "clippin' wiseguys," Il Duce has been kept for decades in a maximum-security prison. Whenever mobsters need to assassinate one of their own, they bribe prison officials to release him briefly. He is spoken of as a mythical force, unstoppable once unleashed.

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Presented initially as mute, lowering, and barely human, he appears to be a nameless agent entirely without personal affiliations, motivations, or loyalties. (7) For most of the film, Il Duce operates as the MacManus brothers' nemesis-in-waiting, and so it comes as a shock to discover late in the narrative that he is their all-but-forgotten father. Re-united, the family escalates its assault on the Yakavettas. Their finest hour comes when they invade the courtroom to execute a mob Don. Explaining their behavior in elaborate verse, the MacManus revengers even dedicate their actions to "The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost." Interestingly, this is not marked as blasphemy: no lightning strikes down the assassins--there is not so much as a thunderclap. This time, apparently, the redemptive angels side with the vigilante father. His actions are also supported by at least half the local population, which is sampled "vox pop" style in television news footage accompanying the closing credits. In The Boondock Saints, revenge regains some of its old vindications. The revengers claim to be acting on behalf of both the people and a higher power, and nothing definitively contradicts them. Above all, this film dramatizes revenge in some of its old, daft, dark style, and with a momentum that allows audiences to ignore, momentarily, the fact that their empathy with the revengers' exuberance leads them into questionable ethical territory. The film's indebtedness to revenge tragedy is most visible in this perverse and amoral seduction of its viewers.

In the comedy that ends this cycle, The Man Who Sued God, Connolly is transported to Australia. He plays Steve Myers, a divorced father and gifted lawyer who has walked away from the law to take up lobster fishing, because, in his ex-wife's view, he has decided to drop his bundle.

After lightning destroys his fishing boat, his insurance company evades a pay-out by invoking the "act of God" clause. Myers returns to legal practice to challenge this rationalization. Deciding to sue God through His most prominent earthly representatives--the heads of major religious institutions--he turns his personal suit into a class action. But by that gesture he puts himself on the line: while he might win as a citizen he might lose as a father. Recognizing at the last minute that a public vindication could cost too much in personal terms, he withdraws his challenge to the law. The narrative supports this surrender, suggesting that the father relents with divine approval. Having taken the law into his own hands, Myers finally drops it, privileging "Love" over "Justice." That closure terminates the process of "thinking through" I describe in this article.

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Taken together, these three films present a redemption narrative in which Billy Connolly-as-father works through various articulations of the relationship between the father and revenge. He begins with a knock-for-a-knock feud in The Debt Collector, works his way through more elaborately framed vigilantism in The Boondock Saints, and ends by relinquishing his challenge to the law. His three characters trace a trajectory from secular feudal brute through Old Testament patriarch to a New Testament figure of love (if not quite of forgiveness). In unpacking here some of the implications of that progression, I intend first to identify the generic and political framings that condition how these films screen revenge tragedy elements, and then show how they mobilize revenge tragedy conventions to conduct a post-backlash analysis of the father's role.

The retributive projects depicted in these three films are obscurely but powerfully shaped by dramatic inheritance from the "crypto-genre" of revenge tragedy, which was itself defined with reference to three key plays: William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy. (8) These plays articulate the relationship between the father and revenge in various ways. In the patriarchal social contract depicted in Hamlet, revenge is an absolute duty passed from father to son. The Spanish Tragedy is about a courtier, Hieronimo, whose duties comprise an obligation to administer the law. (9) However, he peremptorily abandons the law when it fails him as a father. After his son has been murdered, Hieronimo despairs of ever having the case heard, and opts for revenge. Hieronimo's heritage is detectable in the policeman who turns away from the law in The Debt Collector, and in the disaffected lawyer of The Man Who Sued God. The Revenger's Tragedy is a black comedy, in which two vengeful brothers scourge a corrupt court in the name of their father, whom it has ruined. Their Grand Guignol murders and grisly camp games (they play dress-ups with corpses) are comparable with the activities of the MacManus brothers in The Boondock Saints.

Revenge is ubiquitous as a plot device, easily mystified and dismissed as an atavistic drive, a "wild justice" beyond or before social process (Bacon, "Of Revenge" 13). But it is not staged that way in revenge tragedies. In spite of their being known as "tragedies of blood," revenge tragedies operate with a sophisticated notion of revenge. Each play is punctuated by appalling acts of violence, but these bloody acts are set in intricate political frameworks. Revenge tragedies insistently stage violence as the consequence of disorderly interactions between public and private spheres, between state and family. (10) Revenge is perceived as the only available way to address wrongs at multiple levels. It not only redresses private or familial injuries (such as Hamlet's loss of his father) but also remedies corruption in the state (such as Claudius's succeeding to the throne by assassination). The revenges prosecuted in The Revenger's Tragedy and The Spanish Tragedy function simultaneously in both private and public spheres: as family affairs and as purgatives of exploitative and corrupt political systems. In The Revenger's Tragedy, Vindice not only dedicates his bloody acts to his ruined father but also indicts the royal court for crimes that include entrenched, systemic sexual exploitation and vampiric consumption of the country's material resources. The Spanish Tragedy represents Hieronimo's revenge as an act which is partly that of a grieving father and partly that of a political scourge, a terrible cleansing of a corrupt state. Revenge in the revenge tragedies, then, is by no means a simple, primitive, or atavistic affair.

On the contrary, it is politicized so specifically that its trans-historical appeal is limited. As Wendy Griswold demonstrates, revenge tragedy has enjoyed only two cycles of theatrical production. The plays originally emerged between 1587 and 1642, and were staged in an intensely pressurized political atmosphere, in which they obliquely dramatized energies that culminated off-stage in the execution of Charles I. This production cycle ended abruptly when Puritans closed the theatres. Apart from Hamlet, revenge tragedies subsequently underwent a production hiatus of nearly 400 years, only re-appearing in English theatres in the late 1950s.

So if early-modern revenge tragedy, with its deployment of revenge as code for political discontent, is popular only in particular historic circumstances, what might account for its exhumation in the second half of the twentieth century? What energies circulating in these two different eras find common expression in this particular genre? Why would those 400-year-old dramas resonate now? We will not find the answers in state politics, because the state is no longer vulnerable to the private frailties of a royal family, which was an oft-rehearsed theme in revenge tragedy. But if we turn our attention to a different kind of family--the personal family, the forerunner of the nuclear family--the answers begin to emerge. Both eras are characterized by anxieties about the changing status of paternal power, and shifting relationships between the family and the wider world.

Lawrence Stone describes how, during the early modern era, the state developed and expanded by encroaching on rights that historically had belonged to fathers, and reconstructing the father's role in the family (69, 93-94, 109-11). According to Bowers, one of the prerogatives the state arrogated was the ancient right to seek either compensation for damages ("wergeld") or revenge (5). In the feudal era, retribution constituted an elaborate economy administered within families and between kinship groups, regulated by codes of proportionality, like the lex talionis. (11) During the early-modern era, the expanding centralized state appropriated the right to seek retribution. Ultimately, these appropriated rights became the basis of the criminal law, but the appropriation was not uncontested. The intensity of the rhetoric surrounding dueling and revenge under the Tudors and Stuarts indicates the pressure that these competing discourses continued to put on the law. When Bacon (who was a lawyer) labeled revenge "wild justice," he simultaneously recognized it as a force to be taken seriously by the early modern lawmakers, and vilified it as improper, warning that "private men" (Bacon, The Charge 8) who took up their own causes "put the law out of office" (Bacon, "Of Revenge" 13).

Tudor and Stuart rhetoric about the divine right of kings (and, by extension, their magistrates) attempted to conceal a dangerous secret: that the state had acquired the right to administer retribution not from God but from familial patriarchs. (12) Stage revengers counter the authority kings assumed as a "divine right" by claiming that patriarchs likewise enjoy providential backing. Time and again, revengers are seen to be in contact (however ambiguously) with an otherworldly scheme of justice. In addition to earthly layers of vindication (to do with personal bereavement, political treachery, fiscal exploitation, or sexual outrage), revenge tragedies offer ambiguous intimations that revenge is legitimized at some supernatural level. Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, and The Revenger's Tragedy all offer "signs"--ghosts, comets, thunderclaps, or other meteorological events--indicating that higher powers are observing the revengers' actions, although whether they condone what they witness is often debatable. On stage, of course, God could not be named, and it would have been blasphemous to allege that He approved of those who arrogated what St. Paul describes as His divine right to revenge: "Vengeance is mine [...] saith the Lord" (Romans 12:19). Revenge tragedies negotiated the Church's prohibition of revenge in various ways. In the three plays at hand, the memory of lost paternal power is asserted with truly "impious stubbornness" by the revengers, who risk damnation to do so (Shakespeare 1.2.94). Hamlet's uncertainty about whether his father's ghost has been sent to tempt him into damnation illustrates how patriarchal revenge as a feudal imperative collided with the Christian idea that to arrogate revenge is to damn oneself. But the key function of Christian inhibition in this play has to do with narrative structure: the canon against self-slaughter prevents Hamlet from opting out early. Certainly, Christian scruples do little to hold his hand against Claudius in the end. Whatever the outcome for his eternal soul, Hamlet chooses to honor his father's ghost. The Spanish Tragedy ingeniously evades the problem of the revenger's damnation by invoking a pre-Christian, Classical Roman underworld. Hieronimo's revenge is framed by two supernatural commentators: a murdered character, Andrea, sits in the wings with Revenge (one of Pluto's demi-gods), and the pair comment on how the injustice done Andrea is avenged by Hieronimo's actions. The fact that Hieronimo is oblivious to this is immaterial: what matters is that the revenging action is seen to meet a need by realigning earthly with otherworldly justice. And far from being damned, Hieronimo is finally led "where Orpheus plays / Adding sweet pleasure to eternal days" (Kyd 4.5.23-24). The Revenger's Tragedy confronts the damnation quibble head on. If a divine power is watching his antics, Vindice hardly cares. His attitude to damnation seems to be, "Bring it on!" So, Christian condemnation notwithstanding, revenge is presented as a filial obligation that out-competes all other imperatives. In the revenger's pantheon, the father consistently trumps God the Father.

The state's appropriation of the right and power to enact retribution was largely complete before the revenge tragedians began writing: as far as the "private men" were concerned, vengeful power on the scale imagined in these plays had already become irrecoverable (assuming it was ever more than a wishful fantasy). Nonetheless, the plays mobilize "revenge" in a nostalgic manner, as dramatic shorthand, to evoke outrage at perceived encroachments on the rights of the father. Tapping the dramatic energy of a fierce sense of loss, revenge tragedies bespeak a rage at what Moira Gatens calls "masculine impotence in the face of a loss suffered but not remembered" (86). In these dramas, revenge enables the father to reassert himself by reclaiming powers he suspects or imagines he might have lost.

A shared sense of outrage at perceived erosions of the rights of fathers is what links revenge tragedies to the movies that borrow from them. Obviously, their etiologies are different in each epoch. In the early modern era the problem was seen to be caused by the state, whereas in the mid-to-late twentieth century the threat comes from feminist demands on two fronts: that the family should cease to be insulated from the operations of "justice," and that public institutions--including the law--accommodate themselves to the needs of women. The era since World War II has seen the emergence of threats to the status quo in both private and public spheres, resulting in the more-or-less permanent circulation of a sense of crisis in masculinist culture.

In the wake of second-wave feminism, revenge became associated with the renegotiation of gender roles in rape-revenge and horror movies, as Carol Clover has demonstrated. She highlights Stephen King's comments on how he associated revenge with the disorderly potential of feminism in Carrie, which he wrote in 1973: "Carrie is largely about [...] what men fear about women [...] I was fully aware of what Women's Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. The book is [...] an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality [...]" (Clover 3; King 198-99). King's candid remarks reveal how masculinist culture associates feminism and revenge in order to represent women's claims for justice as monstrous and excessive. Revenge is invoked in a defensive maneuver: what revenge tragedies and revenge movies have in common is their use of revenge to defend masculinist culture against potential threats to masculine privilege. Movies about retributive paternity reclaim revenge as a patriarchal prerogative. They take the power to render "justice" back from women and from the state, and put it where it is imagined, nostalgically, always to have belonged: in the hands of the father. Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear (1991) exemplifies how masculinist culture invokes revenge as a defensive maneuver. (13) The film's "weak" father is also a weak lawyer who deforms the law in the name of pro-feminist justice (Scorsese, 2004). (14) In return, he is justly punished by a revenger who is nothing less than a patriarchal providential scourge. Such movies find the disinterred parts of revenge tragedy useful because they not only evoke a sense of paternal bereavement but also reinstate the codification of revenge as a means of reasserting (however briefly or questionably) the authority of the man of the family. The three Connolly films conduct an extended enquiry into what might happen if the father were to resume control of revenge.

But before I turn back to these films, it is important to acknowledge yet another component of their generic heritage. Before second-wave feminism and the rape-revenge sub-genre, "male" genres like the western and the gangster film found ways to screen revenge "safely," containing its disorderly potential (Lang 5). These genres evolved their containment protocols in relation to important gestures of censorship and denial established in the 1930s, the decade that saw the development of both the Hays Production Code and Bowers's historical account of revenge tragedy. Both reject the possibility that revenge might arise endogenously from contemporary operations of the Christian state. Both deny that revenge might be precipitated by failures in the official mechanisms of justice. In their different ways, each displaces responsibility for revenge from the WASP Self to an ethnic Other.

Bowers's description of revenge tragedy is characterized by a questionable determination to see the ethnic or racial Other as the source of vengeful energies. In accounting for why revenge tragedies are set in Denmark, Spain, or Italy, Bowers distances from an idealized "English sentiment" a putatively "Italianate" tendency to premeditated revenge (30, 66). It is questionable whether Bowers was detecting early-modern sentiments in those plays, or projecting his own onto them. (15) Since he was writing in Chicago in the 1930s, he may well have been responding obkquely to the ascendancy there of the Mafia. But the assertion that really engenders skepticism is Bowers's speculation that interest in revenge was stirred up by the Scots who accompanied James I to London (17-20, 31-32). This hypothesis founders on the mismatch of dates: by Bowers's own account, The Spanish Tragedy was written between 1587 and 1590, but James did not succeed to the English throne until 1603. The play's dates coincide, however, with both the Anglo-spanish was and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, by which act Elizabeth I eliminated her closest successor. The succession was already a source of anxiety: Elizabeth was 54, and it was obvious that her childlessness would eventually expose England to a regime change (the Spanish having some legitimate claims to the throne). Mary's death added a further element of uncertainty. Marie Axton has read The Spanish Tragedy as a direct response to precisely this succession crisis. The dramatic energies circulating in revenge tragedies can be attributed more securely to English succession anxieties than to Scots barbarism. Revenge tragedies were xenophobic, but not for reasons that Bowers asserts. Early-modern Londoners' interest in revenge cannot be attributed entirely to the barbaric, unEnglish Other.

The foreign settings of revenge tragedies were influenced by political discretion and self-censorship, rather than sensitivity to national squeamishness about revenge. Generic precepts required each play to stage a regicide or two. The habit of setting such events off-shore enabled theatre companies to avoid being charged with treason for representing violence against powerful local contemporaries. Hamlet protects itself in this respect by a double displacement: revenge is staged as occurring both far away and long ago. The Hays Code reproduces both strategies of containment. It prohibits the screening of revenge as a contemporary possibility. "Crimes Against the Law," it mandates, "shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice [:] [...] revenge in modern times shall not be justified" (Vieira 215). The "pastness" of revenge is declared a condition of its cinematic reproduction. It "may sometimes be presented," we read, "in lands and ages of less developed civilization and moral principles [...] where no law exists to cover the crime because of which revenge is committed" (Vieira 218). This is evidently what licensed the depiction of revenge in westerns, where the double containment of the frontier location and the (usually) historic setting defuses the dangerous capacity of revenge to reflect adversely on the law of the modern state. In this genre, revenge represents the "rough justice" by which Manifest Destiny pushes the law out into anarchic or "stateless" territories (Rapf 22; Clover 132). It is permissible to screen revenge in so far as it prepares the ground for colonization by the law, but on condition that the gunslinger (the revenger) is not allowed to loiter in the civilized space afterwards. He must ride out, or be expelled, or die--or all three, as is the case in Shane (George Stevens, 1953). Westerns have been seen as the heirs to revenge tragedy (Belsey 183), but they differ in one important feature: there is no "stateless" zone in revenge tragedy. Revenge and the law occupy the same confined and urban space, which is hedged about by other politicized spaces. Claudius expels Hamlet not into "stateless" territories, but into England, where Claudius's cronies can be called on to assassinate him. There is no riding out of Denmark: its politics follow you. Nor is there any expelling the revenger: he comes right back. In revenge tragedies, revenge and the law cannot escape each other. Revenge "puts the law out of office" to clear the way for the installation of a fresh regime (Fortinbras), but no-one implicated in the old, corrupt regime gets out alive.

Gangster films also screen revenge (as vendetta), but because they are usually set in modern cities, they require subtler mechanisms to "contain" it. They meet the criterion of "pastness" by treating immigrant populations as representatives of "lands [...] of less developed civilization and moral principles." Conceived of as little pockets of the past in contemporary cities, ethnic ghettos offer opportunities to screen revenge without implying that the central justice system is deficient. Social problems--of which vendettas are symptomatic--can thus be attributed wholly to immigrant cultures, whose members are imagined to operate under feudal codes of conduct instead of respecting the laws of their newly adopted state. A Sicilian will start a vendetta, non-Sicilians are given to understand, not because he gets no justice from the courts (and is therefore driven to retributive practices) but because he is a social primitive who prefers the old ways. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) plays subtly on an emergent tension between representing revenge as the "justice of the marginalized" and as the "preferred option" of the barbaric Other. When Bonasera approaches Don Corleone, it is acknowledged that the courts may have favored the WASP boys who beat his daughter, but this possible bias is not his central grievance. Rather, he comes to the Godfather because he thinks the sentence insufficiently punitive. The revenge code requires a beating (or even a death) for a beating, and that is what he really wants. He prefers the pound of flesh. The temporal, geographic, and ethnic containment strategies used in westerns and gangster films relieve the dominant WASP culture of responsibility for systemic injustices and social dysfunctionality.

Against this background, the casting of Connolly, a Scot, in three revenger roles may seem to reproduce the theatrical and cinematic convention of cordoning off revenge as uncivilized behavior encountered only in Other ethnic groups, and in communities that are geographically marginal. All three Connolly films are situated on the periphery of the former English imperial centre. The Debt Collector is set in Scotland, associated, however spuriously, with the brutality exhibited in revenge tragedies. The next two films are set in the colonies to which the English historically expelled the "ungovernable" Irish Other: The Boondock Saints is located in Irishdominated South Boston; The Man Who Sued God takes place in the former penal colony of Australia. (16) Casting Connolly as the revenger, and situating his activities in locations associated with Gaelic "ungovernability," these three films run the risk of reproducing the racist tropes that served in Bowers's analysis, as well as in westerns and in gangster films, to shield the WASP state from the implications of revenge.

But important developments have occurred since the 1930s. A new and dangerous possibility is introduced when Neilson talks about The Debt Collector as "an urban Scottish Western." (Debt Production Notes n.p.). The western was not historically an urban genre, but Neilson's elision is emblematic of the way the Connolly films allow the disorder of revenge to spill into the civilized space. Despite their marginal settings, the Connolly films significantly exceed generic provisions for the containment of revenge. They are not set in the past, and they operate neither at the frontier nor in "stateless" territories. The acts of revenge they depict take place in contemporary cities subject to the law of the state. The law, accordingly, becomes vulnerable to revenge. The Boondock Saints may well look like a gangster movie, but its ghettoization of revenge does not shield the courts. Vigilantism is presented here as both an ethmic tendency and an inevitable response to an indisputably corrupt judicial system. Because revenge is depicted as the only "justice" available to the marginalized, South Boston--contemporary, urban, governed place that it is--can be presented legitimately as one of those "places where no law exists to cover the crime because of which revenge is committed" (Vieira 218). This is profoundly subversive, as the end of the film demonstrates. The traditional separation of revenge from the law collapses when the forces of revenge penetrate and overwhelm the courthouse. As the credits roll, the implications of the mayhem created by the vigilantes are ramified through television sets all over the nation. Revenge takes place not comfortably "over there" and "way back when," but disturbingly here and now.

While the Hays Code acknowledged the unfortunate necessity of representing corruption in individual officers of the court, it prohibited depictions of the law itself as systemically insufficient: "the judiciary and the machinery of criminal law," it stipulated, "must not be presented in such a way as to undermine faith in justice" (Vieira 219). In defiance of this, and in a manner that recalls revenge tragedy, the Connolly films present the law as irremediably beset by inadequacies. The whole premise of The Man Who Sued God is the absurdity of an earthly power claiming to determine which calamities are God's acts, and which are not. In The Debt Collector, Keltie's disgust at the softness of the social-worker state leads him to abandon his career as a police officer and become a vigilante. In The Boondock Saints, we are presented with corruption at both individual and systemic levels. Simultaneously "incompetent, corrupt [...] [and] ridiculous," the policeman played by Willem Dafoe is entirely seduced by the vigilantes' killing style and by the compelling righteousness of their cause (Vieira 219). Camping it up, sometimes in unforgivably bad drag, he comes to abet their activities, including their invasion of the court. The Hays Code might have allowed for this individual aberration, but it would not have permitted the depiction of a justice system thoroughly in the thrall of the Mafia, which is what The Boondock. Saints presents.

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Bearing in mind this generic and political framework, I will now consider how cinema uses revenge tragedy to dramatize the idea of the father feeling "stiffed." At first glance, the least ornate of these films, The Debt Collector, appears to mobilize a crude kind of revenge whose momentum runs out of control. But to dehistoricize and depoliticize the film in this way is to do it a disservice. The Debt Collector dramatizes the problems that arise when men revert to feudal ways of inhabiting their modern families. After Dryden has inadvertently caused the death of Keltic's mother, Keltie rapes Dryden's wife. "You took fra' me, I took fra' you," says Keltie. "Now we're back where we started: two guys with fuck all." Keltie's unspoken assumption is that because fathers and sons "own" their kin they have the right to seek compensation in kind if anybody hurts them. Or, perhaps more specifically, that it is legitimate for men to get at each other through their relatives. Keltie's "You took fra' me, I took fra' you" was precisely the formula that underwrote the patriarchal "wergeld" economy before the early modern bureaucracy of justice asserted itself.

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As in revenge tragedies, the men in this film seek to revert to a condition of statelessness--not in the absence of the state, but in defiance of it. As mentioned above, Keltie's vendetta originates in dissatisfaction with the law. The final moments of The Debt Collector confirm that, although the state is off-screen, it is nevertheless implicated in the disorder that erupts. Dryden and Keltie struggle to knife each other under the walls of Edinburgh Castle. Inside, the Royal Military Tattoo is reaching its climax: Keltie's death-rattle is heard over the strains of "Scotland the Brave." Revenge here is not simply an atavistic drive. Socially and politically framed, it symbolizes something rotten in the state of Scotland, if only its terrible obliviousness to the brutality these two men have been able to inflict on one another.

There is another political issue at play in this film, which takes a sociological approach to revenge, using it to dramatize the difficulty of escaping class origins. Keltie's revenge is motivated as much by his personal jealousy of Dryden's success in scaling the social ladder as by civic outrage. Keltie thinks Dryden has done better than he deserves not only in terms of his criminal past, but also in terms of their shared working-class background. Here again it becomes important to examine Connolly's casting, because Dryden's life replicates Connolly's. "I've been observed as having somehow betrayed my class," Connolly remarks of critics who would prefer him to "live in a slum" and "for all [his] pals to be welders" (Hessey 13). Connolly says of Dryden that he has "a struggle [not] over what he's doing, but with how he's observed by other people." The Debt Collector's director, Neilson, says that although Dryden was "always meant to be the hub of the film," he is "also a bit of a blank [...] defined by everyone else's attitudes" (13).

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The Debt Collector thus works with revenge in the context of class warfare. (17) In this milieu, revenge protests against political marginalization and indicts systemically institutionalized injustice. Such class-revengers effect a "return of the repressed" at the level of the state. This is reminiscent of the use of revenge in revenge tragedies as a medium for staging political tensions between exploiters and exploited. There is no precise early modern equivalent of class warfare, but Vindice's campaign of punishing the courtiers who fatten at others' expense approximates it. Interestingly, class revengers do not seem to attract even equivocal supernatural support. Vindice's indifference to the approval of supernatural agents has already been remarked. There is something especially unhallowed, it seems, in taking up revenge in disputes over the distribution of material resources. This impression is intensified when it is remembered that the other "class" revenger in the canon of revenge tragedy is a Jew: Barabas of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, an anti-hero who mounts a ruthlessly anarchic assault on the Christian city. With his initial pagan status, and his entirely irredeemable conduct, he is doubly damned. This sense of there being no redemption for the class revenger applies also to Keltie and Dryden. No otherworldly power witnesses, let alone approves, the bloodletting that takes place.

Dryden and Keltie exceed their revenge tragedy antecedents' "accomplishments" in some ways, and fall short in others. In surviving revengeful action, Dryden undoubtedly comes off better than his revenge tragedy predecessors, but the revenge does nothing to restore paternal prestige. Keltie is less successful than his dramatic ancestors. He manages to ruin Dryden privately, but does not touch the institutional arrangements that abetted his rise--court leniency and class mobility. Revenge here just does not pull the place down around everyone's ears in the way it used to.

The Boondock Saints corrects all these deficiencies, restoring revenge to its former glory as a force that enjoys providential backing and earthly puissance. Adopting an over-the-top style, this film flaunts its indebtedness to revenge tragedy. This is explained by the background of its writer/director, Troy Duffy, whose education apparently consisted of "being assigned regular extracurricular book reports by his father, a Harvard graduate in English literature" (Finch n.p.). Duffy was not a Hollywood insider when he wrote the film-script (Finch n.p.). (18) He had not trained as either a screenwriter or a director (which may explain why Willem Dafoe goes a tad too far over the top). Being "not really movie-savvy" in the sense of "knowing old movies," Jim Jacks observes, Duffy was able to write scripts unlike anybody else's because "they come from great books he read" (Finch n.p.). For an action film, The Boondock Saints is unusually interested in words. The two brothers wear the watch-words "VERITAS" and "AEQUITAS" on their skins, (19) and Duffy's literary orientation is evident in both the quantity and style of the vigilantes' language, as this rhetorical set-piece from the climactic scene illustrates:

  CONNOR. Now you will receive us.
  MURPHY. We do not ask for your poor or your hungry.
  CONNOR. We do not want your tired and sick.
  MURPHY. It is your corrupt we claim.
  CONNOR. It is your evil that will be sought by us.
  MURPHY. With every breath we shall hunt them down.
  CONNOR. Each day we shall spill their blood, 'til it rains down from
  the skies.

And the duologue goes on: this is less than half of it. Densely stylized in a very Jacobean way, this language has an archaic flavor intensified by the characters' approximations of Irish accents. The MacManus family prayer is in couplets whose antique cadences evoke the translation of the Bible that James I authorized in 1611:

And shepherds we shall be,
for thee my Lord for thee.
Power hath descended forth from thy hand,
that our feet may swiftly carry out thy command.
We shall flow a river forth to thee,
and teeming with souls shall it ever be.

Having come to the brothers in a jail-cell epiphany, this prayer is not completed until they are reunited with their father, who adds the Catholic ending: "In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." So this vigilante action is doubly in the name of the father: both the MacManus's father, and God the Father.

The Boondock Saints explicitly resuscitates the revenge tragedy theme of providential backing for the revenge project, but goes further in actually naming God, and representing Him as being onside. When Finch observes that "Duffy's description of the Boondock vigilantes lends them an oddly hallowed radiance," she understates the matter: the brothers are clearly marked as divinely appointed scourges. The film opens with them at Mass, seeking and receiving blessing on their vigilante enterprise from the Monsignor, who seems "finally" to have "got the point." Exceeding the revenge tragedy prototype, The Boondock Saints is unambiguous about what providence thinks of their revenging activities. "Someone up there" helps these amateurs pull off a massacre in which they are outnumbered nine to two. The preternatural killing power of II Duce reinforces the idea that the vigilantes are indeed instruments of a higher power. After analyzing a crime scene in which an impossible number of shots have been fired, an incredulous police officer comments: "So you're telling me it was one guy with six guns, and he was a senior frigging citizen?"

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Here the father is more than human, miraculously overcoming the age and frailty of a "senior frigging citizen." Backed by some transcendent force, Il Duce either sidesteps or overrules earthly impediments, including, finally, magisterial power. The film climaxes when the "The Three" (father MacManus and his two sons) take over the trial of a Mafioso. Arranging the witnesses "just so," and speaking in biblical prose, the father takes pains to make sure the meaning of the ensuing execution is clearly understood: "Never shall innocent blood be shed, yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river. The Three shall spread their blackened wings and be the vengeful striking hammer of God."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If this is the MacManus trinity's finest hour, their flattest comes immediately afterwards when, in a moment of post-massacre depression, the brothers look to their father for guidance. The question (Il Duce tells them) is not, "How far are we going to take this?" but, "Do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?" Clearly, the father's only plan is to continue the mayhem. Even more terrible is Il Duce's assumption that the only motivation his sons need is faith in their father. Again, this film exceeds revenge tragedy precedents in enabling the revengers to survive, and goes further than The Debt Collector in allowing this particular father to triumph through revenge. Although The Boondock Saints restores transcendence to the father by putting him back in contact with phallic, patriarchal power, it offers him no way in which to use that power constructively. If the upshot of the father's taking to revenge is less bleak here than in The Debt Collector, it is not necessarily positive.

Thoroughly justifying revenge throughout the body of the narrative, the film closes on an ambivalent note. As an end in itself, vigilantism leads to neither accomplishment nor closure, but merely to exhaustion. Exhausted ambivalence is exactly the mood generated by the typical ending of a revenge tragedy (Belsey 168-169; Griswold 98-99). But Duffy's film defies even the politically acerbic discretionary maneuvers by which revenge tragedy historically protected itself. At the end of most revenge tragedies, the state, purged, is in some way restored. Duffy's film defies this precedent: closure does not restore either credibility or authority to the law. At the end of The Boondock Saints, revenge is neither unambiguously endorsed nor clearly contained. The television vox pop used as a background while me credits roll reveals a community divided about the merits of vigilante action, but actively interested in the prospect, and increasingly so as the television audience grows. If a widespread interest in revenge is an indictment of institutionalized justice, justice would appear to be indicted here. The Boondock Saints' ending breaks not only with revenge tragedy precedent, but with Hollywood rules, too. It is not that ambivalent restoration of discredited institutions is unique to revenge tragedies: Lang detects certain undermining ironies in the closing gestures of some Hollywood melodramas from the 1950s--a moment when melodrama came closest to recapturing a "tragic awareness" (18,20). But acute ambivalence at closure is not compatible with Hollywood's more formulaic norms. According to Jacks, one of the reasons why Duffy is distrusted in Hollywood is that "he ignores certain things that are usual in movies," such as "clear beginnings, middles and ends" (Finch n.p.).

And there is yet another way in which Duffy's film breaks the rules, to its own cost. During the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood made revenge politically safe to handle by assiduously keeping it from assailing the public institutions of the law: the courts. (20) In permitting revenge to invade the court, Duffy breaches boundaries designed to contain revenge in the private sphere. According to Waxman, his film suffered as a result: its representation of mayhem in the public place was partly responsible for its immediate burial. The Columbine High School massacre occurred just before the film was due to be released. This misfortune, combined with Duffy's alienation of Hollywood power brokers, meant The Boondock Saints opened in only a handful of cinemas, and went straight to video. "Suddenly," writes Waxman, "Duffy found that no one would touch his movie. The much-anticipated film had become, overnight, a political leper" (9).

The Man Who Sued God plays things much safer. Father starts out sounding very like a vengeful Old Testament prophet. Frustrated with his insurance company, he froths:

I'm not leaving ...
I'm not finished with you:
I'll give you acts of God.
I'll give you locusts, boils.
I'll give you whirlwinds.
I'll give you the fucking works.
I'll drive you fucking mad!

But instead of putting the law out of office, this father avails himself of it. Returning to the legal profession he had abandoned, Myers addresses the system's inadequacies through the accepted channels for doing so, namely the courts. In doing so he relinquishes revenge as a patriarchal prerogative. Although his civil action in suing God is both novel and irreverent, it does not necessarily corrode the authority of the law.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In The Boondock Saints God authorizes the father's vengeance, but The Man Who Sued God frames the connection between God and father quite differently. This time God intervenes in the father's life in order to teach him something. Myers's ex-wife characterizes the destruction of his boat as a sign that he should grow up and act responsibly. And she may have a point: after all, lightning is a conventional theatrical device for intimating divine displeasure.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The stages in Myers's moral education are clearly marked. The narrative is divided into "chapters," each of which opens emblematically with an image of a cardinal virtue depicted in the courtroom's stained-glass windows. In sequence, we see "Prudence," "Charity," "Faith," and "Temperance." At first, Myers appears to resist the lessons he is offered, but a turning point comes when he visits a church. A shot/reverse-shot sequence suggests an unvoiced exchange between Myers and Christ Crucified. Myers subsequently tells his female partner, "If you give up your obsession I'll give up mine"--a gesture toward gender equality that involves turning away from the patriarchal past. The next stained-glass window offers "Hope," but only if Myers desists. If he continues to sue God, Myers could lose access to his daughter. He makes his key decision one morning when the heavens indicate that something is afoot: the sky is tinted red by bushfires surrounding the city and angry gusts blow grit into the faces of people waiting outside the court house. Inside, Myers relinquishes his challenge to the law, gracefully acquiescing to accept God's gift to him of Love. At the end of Myers's speech, a window depicting "Blind Justice" explodes. Lit from behind by a rose-tinted sky, a white bird sails in on a blast of wind, gliding past "Faith" to land on the bench. "It's a sign! A miracle! A winged messenger!" gasp the awe-struck clerics. "It's a fucking cockatoo!" mutters one of the lawyers, smirking deferentially when the bird seems to chastise him. Whatever its significance, cockatoo and judge exchange a long and meaningful gaze.

After an adjournment, the judge returns to render "Justice" (to verify this, the "Blind Justice" window is seen again, miraculously restored). Having withdrawn his case, Myers cannot win. But the verdict is not exactly what the insurance companies had hoped to hear. Their "acts of God" clause is found to be "oppressive and exploitative, offensive to reason and religion, and almost certainly wrong in law." The judge thus restores the credibility of the law as an institution that does not collude with those who seek to abuse it. Not only are insurance companies damned for using "God as a giant, all-purpose lying mechanism," the churches also "will have to consider their position." Onlookers are confused. "Did we win?" asks one of a group of men seen carrying away a large wooden crucifix. "I don't know," another answers. In the aftermath of their "Pyrrhic victory," fighting breaks out at a corrupt convocation of clerics, insurance representatives, and lawyers. Publicly vindicated, Myers emerges from the court to a rapturous response, and stands under a banner which declares that "Steve is our Saviour"--an image framed by the bodies, cameras, and microphones of the waiting press throng.

In a maneuver that uncannily resembles the closure of The Boondock Saints, the courtroom action results immediately in a flurry of international TV reporters discussing its implications. This time, however, the force to be reckoned with is not vigilantism but "Love."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the private sphere Myers is well rewarded for relinquishing retributive action: he finds new love, and the family fortunes are restored. The positive tone at the end of The Man Who Sued God contrasts with the bleak closure of The Debt Collector and the ambivalent exhaustion with which The Boondock Saints concludes. The Man Who Sued God uncouples fatherhood from retributive action: the father no longer needs to assert himself in the old way because he has evolved beyond vengeance. The fathers played by Connolly in this trilogy accordingly trace a trajectory from thug through scourge to savior. The connection between fatherhood and revenge likewise evolves from the reflex-action of vindictiveness in The Debt Collector through moralistic vigilantism in The Boondock Saints to The Man Who Sued God, a film that relinquishes retributive action in favor of a New Testament model of fatherhood.

But the sensitive, new-age Dad does not relinquish the most questionable assumption of all: that God underwrites the prestige of the father. In the wake of The Debt Collector, which scrupulously avoids transcendence in its materialist explanations of the men's retributive violence. The Boondock Saints and The Man Who Sued God work hard to restore a sense of divinity to the father. They re-mystify paternal power by mobilizing constitutive tropes of revenge tragedy, including the idea of providential involvement in a retributive project. In the process, they disinter one of the most ancient mechanisms for rationalizing and dramatizing patriarchal authority. In appropriating revenge tragedy, the Connolly trilogy appeals to a nostalgic idea that, somehow, paternal power is above and beyond historical or political circumstances, a perennial absolute that is not negotiable. (21) The God-backed fathers in these films resuscitate patriarchy's self-serving assumption of "unaccountable transcendence," an assumption that feminists have been critiquing for decades (Simon 6). I find this fascinating, not least because of the sheer boldness with which these movies resuscitate such a thoroughly archaic idea, just as much an intellectual "woolly mammoth" as the repudiated acts-of-God clause itself.

Speaking of fossils, why am I still harping on about 400-year-old tragedies? Why this, now? Many critics have declared tragedy dead, but as Sontag points out, such declarations should be interrogated. They are never merely "exercises in literary analysis," but also "exercises in cultural diagnostics." Indeed, she declares, "the burial of a literary form is a moral act" (132). If burying an old genre is a moral act, so is exhuming one, and it should not go unexamined. I have attempted precisely such an examination here, interrogating the meaning, in terms of gender politics, of the partial disinterment of revenge tragedy. Whether tragedy is dead or not, revenge tragedy is not entirely forgotten: filmmakers are availing themselves of its memory, and without regard for the niceties of interpretation that critical veneration of the term "tragedy" would require. We may not agree with Neilson that The Debt Collector is "an old-school classically motivated tragedy [...]" (Debt Production Notes n.p.), but we must attend to this representation. If filmmakers are still reworking revenge tragedy, film critics cannot afford to ignore it, but there is a risk that we may.

This risk emerges from two important acts by which film studies carved out its disciplinary identity. First, film scholars asserted the primacy of image over word in cinema by programmatically excluding literary criticism. Then, (following on from Brooks) Elsaesser, Williams, Gledhill et al. convincingly demonstrated the primacy of melodrama as the operative mode of Hollywood cinema. They have exhaustively made the case that melodrama must be dealt with as melodrama, and not as a "fallen form," a kind of "tragedy manque." They have thoroughly explained why melodrama's emphasis on silence, on somatic expression, is to be honored for what it is, and not to be misunderstood as inferior to the verbal orientation of theatrical tragedy. I am entirely in sympathy with both of those maneuvers. But they could easily turn into reflex exclusions, the kind of "acts of self-definition" that Sontag identifies as potentially "self-entombing," if they render film scholars reluctant to conduct investigations like this one, which shows that insights about cinematic politics and generic evolution can emerge from examining how filmmakers working in the melodramatic mode occasionally snatch body-parts from the corpus of tragedy. To paraphrase Lang, film scholars may reject tragedy, but they should not leave it completely behind (14).

Now that film studies has established itself, it is secure enough to return to questions that might once have been rejected as smacking of the old obsessions of literary criticism: questions that interrogate how films in the melodramatic mode reference other theatrical genres, even though, and sometimes because, they are loquacious. The necessity of asking these questions has always been obvious in studies of films identified as literary adaptations, but the potential for studying subtler appropriations, like the ones identified here, may have been under-explored. Sarah Kozloff's book, Overhearing Film Dialogue, represents an effort to reintegrate word with image in cinema studies. In contributing to the momentum of this development, I have demonstrated how relevant a garrulous old theatrical genre can be to studies of contemporary cinema. It is timely to reconsider the role of the word in cinema now, with filmmakers remobilizing theatrical speech in films that otherwise are organized around spectacle, and destined for popular audiences: Duffy has the MacManus brothers spout verse; Scorsese gives his Max Cady eloquent and terrifying speeches; and the Wachowski Brothers attempt all kinds of ambitious verbal feats in V for Vendetta (2005), albeit with less success than in The Matrix (1999).

To anybody exploring how the memory of tragedy pressures melodramatic film, revenge tragedy offers a promising line of enquiry, not least on account of its equivocal position between tragedy and melodrama. The fact that Heilman's test-case for distinguishing tragedy from melodrama happens to be a revenge tragedy--John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi--indicates that this grotesque and hybrid genre is a component of the prehistory of contemporary film melodrama (61-73), and an under-examined one at that. Revenge tragedy is equally important as a precursor to Gothic, which is arguably the source of all detective genres as well as of the speculative elements that allow horror and science fiction to play so freely with gender. (22) Revenge tragedy, exhumed and anatomized by film scholars, may prove to be a missing theatrical link between tragedy and melodrama, the kind of ancestral monster whose half-suspected presence can sometimes explain cinematic throwbacks and otherwise troublesome, unaccountable specters. The critical urge to assert tidy generic categorization ("this is tragedy: that is not") may blind us to the messiness of what films actually do. A pre-cinematic genre appropriated by a moviemaker may well go unremarked if the product is not labeled explicitly, with the result that both the cultural and ideological effects of its appropriation go unexamined. Reintegrating the lessons of literary criticism with those of film criticism will allow us to acknowledge this presence, light it, describe it, and subject its spectral workings to a historically well informed and relentlessly metacritical gaze. Melodrama is a promiscuous mode (in a good way). To keep up with it, film criticism needs to be equally open, even if that means reopening old questions about old genres.

Author's Note

I wish to thank Ken Ruthven for his extraordinarily generous contribution to the preparation of this article.

Notes

(1) For a comprehensive description of the genre see Bowers.

(2) What I am talking about is not wholesale adaptations of individual plays, such as Kenneth Branagh's of Hamlet, but the ways in which some films evoke the generic characteristics of revenge tragedy. Nor am I arguing that any particular revenge tragedy should be exhumed in its entirety. This is partly because films mobilize only truncated forms of the genre, and partly because the tragic never quite "fits" the melodramatic mode in which most cinematic traditions operate. See McEntee, "Household Justice."

(3) I am referring, of course, to Susan Faludi's analyses of masculinist opposition to feminism in Backlash (1992) and of "the betrayal of the American man" in Stiffed (1999).

(4) I use the lower-case "1" here to dissociate the "law of the state" from the "Law of the Father" encountered in Kristevan or Lacanian analysis. Both The Boondock Saints and The Man Who Sued God protest specifically against separating the law of the state from the Law of the Father, and seek to realign earthly law with some other and superior Law.

(5) Some readers have commented on the cognitive dissonance of Connolly, best known in his comedic persona, playing revenger--or performing any dramatic role at all, really. I am not in a position to comment directly on the industrial, artistic, or political considerations that might have gone into his casting in these parts, but I do have three comments to make in response to these readers registering surprise. The first is that the shock is not so acute when one considers Connolly's roles in Her Majesty Mrs. Brown (John Madden, 1997) and Gentlemen's Relish (Douglas Mackinnon, 2001), both of which required a certain quietism and gravitas. Further, Connolly has appeared in a cinematic adaptation (albeit reputedly dire) of a Jacobean tragedy: Middleton's Changeling (Marcus Thompson, 1998). The second thing to say is that the dramatic energy that drives the revenger persona is often akin to the barely sublimated rage that drives the comic. The perilous proximity of horror and laughter are clearly seen, for example, in Vindice of The Revenger's Tragedy. This phenomenon is discussed by Brooke in Horrid Laughter. The third point, and this is developed in the text of the article, is that Connolly's background as a working class Scot may, in fact be primary consideration in his casting as revenger.

(6) See McEntee, "Household" and "The Way."

(7) Benito Mussolini's self-aggrandizing title is evoked ironically, in so far as it nicknames a killer whose raison d'etre is his hostility to Italian-Americans involved in organized crime. Perhaps the reference is to Mussolini's history as a turn-coat.

(8) The authorship of this play is disputed: it is frequently attributed to Thomas Middleton. I make no claim for either author, but reproduce here the attribution used in the edition I cite. For a discussion see Engle's introduction and Bevington's notes to The Revenger's Tragedy in Bevington et al. 1297-1302, esp. note 2 on 1302.

(9) For a brief discussion of Hieronimo's magisterial role as Knight Marshall, see Bevington's notes to The Spanish Tragedy in Bevington et al. 8-9, esp. note 5 on 9.

(10) While the conception of "private" and "public" as separate spheres is modern (see Callaghan, Axton), Stone suggests that early-modern changes to the relationship between familial interiority and the external world paved the way for it (69, 93-94, 109-11).

(11) For lex talionis (or the "law of retaliation") see Bowers 4. In the course of interrogating Christian representations of the Mosaic Law, Jacoby observes that "an eye for an eye" is a deeply misunderstood and misrepresented quotation. It was originally meant to prescribe moderation in revenge and compensation claims by forbidding penalties greater than the original crime. See Jacoby 79-80.

(12) See discussions of the Mirror for Magistrates and related texts in Jacoby 96-99 and Campbell 281, 290-93.

(13) Scorsese's Cape Fear reworks J. Lee Thompson's 1962 original in ways that indicate it has absorbed revenge tragedy influences, probably via a Canadian film called Criminal Law (Martin Campbell, 1988). See McEntee, "Household" 242-301.

(14) This, the television documentary, not the book by the same name.

(15) I am not suggesting that any of us is immune from reading historic plays through the lens of contemporary concerns.

(16) "Ungovernable" is the favorite epithet of those who would construct Gaelic resistance to English authority as anarchic vigilantism.

(17) Both Elley and Martin point out parallels between The Debt Collector and Cape Fear in depicting class warfare.

(18) The documentary Overnight (Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith, 2003) records the waxing and waning fortunes of Troy Duffy. Picked up in an unlikely working-class experiment by Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, Duffy alienated his powerful patron so much that The Boondock Saints was all but buried on release. The film nevertheless accumulated a cult following. A projected sequel--to be called either Boondock II: All Saints Day or Boondock II: The Second Coming--was discussed for several years. In May 2007, however, there was still no sign of its imminent appearance.

(19) These somewhat pretentious inscriptions recall the words etched so memorably on Max Cady's back in Scorsese's Cape Fear. "Truth" and "Justice."

(20) See McEntee, "Household Justice" and "The Way." Even in Cape Fear, Scorsese retains the notion that corruption manifests itself not in the institution of law but in individual officers of its courts. His combatants withdraw decorously to the "stateless" territory of Cape Fear in order to have their showdown.

(21) See Charnes 3.

(22) See Clemens on "precedents for 'Gothic' fear" and Cox on "English Gothic Theatre."

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Joy McEntee

The University of Adelaide, Australia