Lancomm Challenge: The Law & The Lawless - Vigilante Justice
For the final challenge over at tvrealm we were supposed to create a "Fandom Realm" populated with tv characters who are in opposition to one another. I chose to do one on "The Law & The Lawless", in which I set the 'law' against the 'vigilantes'. One of the things we could do was meta.
I was trolling through TV Tropes, planning on doing a meta on vigilante justice shows - Burn Notice, Person of Interest, Leverage. Kind of a random pick, but they covered the scope. Only, to my great surprise, there are hardly any tropes that deal with “vigilante”. In fact, under live TV you really only have Vigilante Man, and that only lists four shows as being “vigilante” - Dexter, The Shield, Dark Justice and Person of Interest. All the rest of the examples are individuals/villains that appeared on various shows.
I thought that was odd. After all, the definition of vigilante is fairly straightforward: : a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate); a self-appointed doer of justice. All three of my chosen shows have that, why would only Person of Interest be listed under the trope? And to be completely honest, it doesn’t actually say that the characters in Person of Interest are vigilantes or that the show is about vigilantism, it just comments that “It's significant that the mysterious Mr. Finch recruited a former CIA assassin to do his We Help the Helpless work rather than a private detective.” Huh?
The problem is, I think, TV Tropes defines vigilante in a much narrower way than the actual definition. In order to be a vigilante, TV Tropes requires murder of the suspected bad guy. In the opening the definition states “The Vigilante Man is a man who brings criminals to justice by any means necessary, even if it means killing the criminals outright”. It
It’s the reason why Reese’s history as an assassin taints the show, even though he doesn’t kill people on the show itself.
It’s really not just TV Tropes, either. I’m sure if you went around and asked people if - say Robin Hood - is a vigilante, most people would say no. Robin Hood does something that we cheer - he rights an injustice something we all want - while “vigilante” carries a negative connotation with it. A vigilante is someone who is someone who is obsessed and therefore untrustworthy. They are someone who will - inevitably - target an innocent. After all, if a system that is based on the presumption of innocence and an adversarial set up to present evidence to an impartial 12 person jury can make a mistake, you know that one person, starting from the assumption of guilt, is bound to have a few false positives.
It’s the reason why the writers of these fictions work so hard to make the bad guys so obviously bad. Look at Leverage. In Leverage the villains are all so blatantly evil that if the show were being filmed in black and white they’d all be twirling their mustaches while tying helpless women to train tracks. They do this so that the viewers don’t ever start thinking that The Leverage crew could be making a mistake or going after people who may not really “deserve” it. It places the clearly out the of realm of “vigilante”.
Only that’s what they are. Vigilantes. The “odds against you”, the “we help the helpless”, the “we provide leverage” lines? They’re wonderful; they speak to our need for justice, our desire to have some powerful ally to fight for us all the times when the world spins in its uncaring way. We have a need for justice and revenge. It’s why vigilantism is such a powerful draw - and such a dangerous road.
It says a lot about our society that we see the danger in it. The fact that, in order to have people accept vigilante justice, writers have to make those moral distinctions so glaringly obvious proves that we understand problems of such actions. Which is a positive thing, really.
I was trolling through TV Tropes, planning on doing a meta on vigilante justice shows - Burn Notice, Person of Interest, Leverage. Kind of a random pick, but they covered the scope. Only, to my great surprise, there are hardly any tropes that deal with “vigilante”. In fact, under live TV you really only have Vigilante Man, and that only lists four shows as being “vigilante” - Dexter, The Shield, Dark Justice and Person of Interest. All the rest of the examples are individuals/villains that appeared on various shows.
I thought that was odd. After all, the definition of vigilante is fairly straightforward: : a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate); a self-appointed doer of justice. All three of my chosen shows have that, why would only Person of Interest be listed under the trope? And to be completely honest, it doesn’t actually say that the characters in Person of Interest are vigilantes or that the show is about vigilantism, it just comments that “It's significant that the mysterious Mr. Finch recruited a former CIA assassin to do his We Help the Helpless work rather than a private detective.” Huh?
The problem is, I think, TV Tropes defines vigilante in a much narrower way than the actual definition. In order to be a vigilante, TV Tropes requires murder of the suspected bad guy. In the opening the definition states “The Vigilante Man is a man who brings criminals to justice by any means necessary, even if it means killing the criminals outright”. It
It’s the reason why Reese’s history as an assassin taints the show, even though he doesn’t kill people on the show itself.
It’s really not just TV Tropes, either. I’m sure if you went around and asked people if - say Robin Hood - is a vigilante, most people would say no. Robin Hood does something that we cheer - he rights an injustice something we all want - while “vigilante” carries a negative connotation with it. A vigilante is someone who is someone who is obsessed and therefore untrustworthy. They are someone who will - inevitably - target an innocent. After all, if a system that is based on the presumption of innocence and an adversarial set up to present evidence to an impartial 12 person jury can make a mistake, you know that one person, starting from the assumption of guilt, is bound to have a few false positives.
It’s the reason why the writers of these fictions work so hard to make the bad guys so obviously bad. Look at Leverage. In Leverage the villains are all so blatantly evil that if the show were being filmed in black and white they’d all be twirling their mustaches while tying helpless women to train tracks. They do this so that the viewers don’t ever start thinking that The Leverage crew could be making a mistake or going after people who may not really “deserve” it. It places the clearly out the of realm of “vigilante”.
Only that’s what they are. Vigilantes. The “odds against you”, the “we help the helpless”, the “we provide leverage” lines? They’re wonderful; they speak to our need for justice, our desire to have some powerful ally to fight for us all the times when the world spins in its uncaring way. We have a need for justice and revenge. It’s why vigilantism is such a powerful draw - and such a dangerous road.
It says a lot about our society that we see the danger in it. The fact that, in order to have people accept vigilante justice, writers have to make those moral distinctions so glaringly obvious proves that we understand problems of such actions. Which is a positive thing, really.