by Jay Hopler
… and after the attack he did not feel himself a hero but a coward, there was a dark suspicion in him sometimes that an SS henchman at Auschwitz had behaved more morally than he, because he had been confronted with his victims, even though he regarded them as subhuman trash, while between himself and his victims no confrontation took place, the victims weren’t even subhuman, just an unspecified something, it wasn’t very different from exterminating insects, the pilot spraying the vines from his plane couldn’t see the mosquitoes either, and no matter what you called it, bombing, destroying, liquidating, pacifying, it was abstract, mechanical, and could only be understood as a sum, probably a financial sum …
The more skilled the assassin—the more professionally honest—the closer he can get to the target. This issue was dealt with beautifully by Luc Besson in The Professional, his first American film since La Femme Nikita. The hit man, Leon (Jean Reno in a role very similar to the one he played in La Femme Nikita), against his better judgment, takes in a young girl, Matilda, (played by Natalie Portman) whose family is killed by a gang of rogue DEA agents. To his surprise she is not shocked or repulsed when she finds out what he does for a living. On the contrary, she asks him to teach her how to become an assassin so she can find the men responsible for her four-year-old brother’s death (he was the only member of the family she cared for) and right the wrong. After much argument and discussion, he agrees to teach her the theory behind the profession and goes to his middleman (Danny Aiello) to collect the rifle he used as a beginner. The middleman is surprised that such a highly skilled professional would ask for a rifle and, when questioned about it, Leon explains (with no small amount of embarrassment) that he just wants to keep in shape, that the rifle is only for practice. What follows is one of the best scenes in this, or any other movie in this genre. On a roof top in New York City, Leon explains to Matilda the exact meaning of distance and the necessary progression from amateur to professional:
The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.
In the hierarchy of murder and its practitioners, hit men are revered as artists. They (and their employers) think of the sniper, the psychopath and the passion killer as unskilled labor, their deeds as the uncouth graffiti slung roughly on an alley wall. Any coward can kill from a distance—it requires no special skill or understanding. Though murder is any form is morally reprehensible, there is something thrilling about the assassin who sneaks unnoticed through ranks of heavily-armed guards and dispatches his mark quickly, quietly, without any wasted motion or fanfare—just as there is something peculiarly pathetic and ugly about the cuckold who disengages the breaks on his wife’s car so that it will crash sometime later, miles from home. Regarding this crisis of distance and its effect on the aesthetics of the deed, Thomas De Quincey exclaimed in the first paper on his treatise, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which originally appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in February 1827, “Fie on these dealers in poison, say I: can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats…”
The second type of hit man story is the “Utopia tale.” The hit men of the “Utopia tale” are the modern take on the ideal suggested by Sir Thomas More in 1516—they represent the possibility of regimentation and efficiency without subservience. As Peter, in Book I of Utopia exclaims: “Service not servitude …” Heroes here are professionals from the start. They can be, but most likely are not, freelance operators. They are usually affiliated with a crime family or other sub-legal organization. Because the initiations are already complete, this type of story has a simpler narrative than that of the “Metamorphosis tale” and is consistent with the outline below.
(1) The killer is introduced. He is usually well-dressed, educated (not necessarily in the traditional sense), with a striking self-awareness and self-assuredness which has its basis in the deed; after all, he is the man who controls life and death. He is usually unmarried and his friends are those he works with, if he works with anyone. As with the “Metamorphosis tale,” what is happening on the periphery is of the utmost importance, but for very different reasons. Here, the contrast between the killers and what is going on around them is what provides the punch—the point being that there is a contrast. In these stories, normalcy exists in complete ignorance of the irony it provides. The sinister is run gently up against the every-day. In the “Utopia tale” there is no detectable disturbance of the atmosphere one naturally assumes accompanies the presence of those who deal in human destruction, there is nothing to suggest that all is not well with one’s small corner of the world. But this sense of rightness and security is based on the false assumption that there are no killers lurking in the peripheries of the sit-corns. Take these lines from Mark Rudman’s book-length poem Rider and note the devastating effect the last line, when the margins cozy up to the mainstream:
the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese
making the rounds, apple sauce
passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate,
children eating, heads down in silence,
communicating through eye movements,
the mother wiping her lips, the father
grinning stupidly and drooling;
the television quacking in the background,
the perfect suburban night unfolding
in bedroom and drive-in and den,
the sprinkler system ticking.
The snipers in the tower—.
Notice Rudman’s last line is not given any more emphasis than any of the lines that precede it—for all its power, it is their syntactic equal. There is (as yet) no intersection—though complete opposites, the suburban world and the marginal world are pacing each other, each progressing in the same direction, at the same rate, by means of an identical linear framework. The result of this parallelism, which is present in nearly all hit man stories of the “Utopia” variety, is the amplification of presence and credibility of that which is necessarily viewed by the assimilated individual as unreal. Part of the reason hit men are so fascinating is that their actions are continually substantiated by their incredible, rational proximity to our own.
Look at Hemingway’s short story, “The Killers.” After Nick warns Ole Anderson that there are two men looking to kill him, he talks to Anderson’s landlady, a woman whose stubborn normalcy remains unshaken in the face of events. Keep in mind, while this conversation is taking place, a marked man is lying on a cot upstairs waiting for two professional killers to find him.
“He’s been in his room all day,” The landlady said down-stairs. “I guess he don’t feel well. I said to him: ‘Mr. Anderson, you ought to go out and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,’ but he didn’t feel like it.”
“He doesn’t want to go out.”
“I’m sorry he don’t feel well,” the woman said. “He’s an awfully nice man …”
Likewise the dinner scene in Shelter: Mrs. Downey, a suburban housewife and mother of three hears a commotion in the den across the hall from where her family is enjoying Christmas dinner (and note that Auden in his essay specifically mentions the Christmas dinner in the country house as one of the perfect examples of a closed society—here, because of the hit man, it is allowed to maintain its state of grace.) She goes to investigate, thinking her daughter’s high school boyfriend and his business associate (both of whom have dropped by unexpectedly) might need assistance. What she’s hearing: two hit men fighting to the death in her front room.
BOOM!, Sal connects with a sharp blow to Bennie’s rib cage, and follows instantaneously with a two-handed uppercut that sends Bennie up and back flattening a Christmas present as he lands. Sal pauses to pick his cigarette back up off the carpet. Bennie crawls toward the fireplace grabbing the Yule log and swinging back with it—connecting hard with Sal’s ankle. Sal falls to his knees. Be
nnie swings again, but Sal grabs the log, using it to throw himself into a sweeping round-house. Sal’s loaded fist (loaded with a pewter figurine of the Christ Child— my aside) catches Bennie’s jaw, knocking him out cold.
MRS. DOWNEY
(through the door)
Is everything okay in there?
Sal grabs his cigarette from the floor again and limps to the door. He opens it a crack, and speaks quietly to Mrs. Downey.
SAL
He’s not taking it very well I’m afraid. Give him a minute.
Mrs. Downey nods, and Sal closes the door.
MRS. DOWNEY
(to Bobby)
What a sweet man!
Sal throws the poinsettias from a vase, and splashes the water on Bernie’s face. Grabbing him by the collar, he presses a sharp table knife to the groggy man’s neck.
Of course, it is possible for the opposite to occur—the mainstream, by some accident, entering the outskirts—but it’s rare. Those tales are most closely akin to “Metamorphosis tales” in that they feature an uninitiated other entering the foreign territory. The difference is that the other, in these cases, is able to return to the world he left—changed, to be sure, but not transformed. Of this variety, Robert Lowell’s poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” (and particularly the story behind how it came to be written) is the best example.
The Story: America entered the Second World War (officially) at 4:10 pm Eastern Standard Time on December 8, 1941—one day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Robert Lowell registered for the draft and spent the remainder of that year, as well as the whole of 1942, trying to enlist. He was repeatedly deferred (as Ian Hamilton noted in his biography of Lowell published in 1982, there was even some talk of Lowell being permanently deferred because of poor eyesight). During the summer of 1943, however, he was examined by the draft board for the seventh time and given a date on which to report for induction: September 8, 1943. Lowell spent the remainder of that summer rethinking the prospect of his, now inevitable, military service and in the first week of September he came to the decision that, since the war was essentially over and the position of the allies was no longer a defensive one, he could not serve in good conscience. He wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, along with a statement detailing his position, in which he expressed his deep regret at not being able to accept his country’s call to duty. On October 13, 1943, Robert Lowell was arraigned in New York City on the charge of draft evasion and sentenced to one year and one day to be served in the Federal Correctional Center at Danbury, Connecticut. While waiting to be transferred, he was confined at New York’s West Street Jail where he met the man who would later become the center of one of his greatest poems. The following is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Ian Hamilton with one of Lowell’s fellow inmates at West Street. It ends chapter 6 of Hamilton’s biography:
Lowell was in a cell nest to Lepke, you know, Murder Incorporated, and Lepke says to him: “I’m in for killing. What are you in for?” [And Lowell says] “Oh, I’m in for refusing to kill.” And Lepke burst out laughing. It was kind of ironic.
(2) The job is outlined. The victim is mentioned, his location, sometimes his background and, occasionally, the reason he is to be killed—though the last, it should be said, is a rarity. Look at this exchange in Bukowski’s “Hit Man” and note the necessary rupture of cause and effect:
“Can I ask you one thing?” [Ronnie, the hit man]
“Sure”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why?”
“Do you care?”
“No.”
“Then why ask?”
The fee is negotiated if it has not been already and a time is decided upon. This is the only contact the hit man has with the person who is contracting the job. His presence is distasteful to his employers—a constant reminder of their own mortality, the fact that their own lives are probably worth no more than their intended victim’s, what they are paying the killer for the contract. In a world where success and stability depend—in large part—on who you know and the safe, predictable exchange of favors, the man successful on his own (and because of his dedication and skill) is a terrific threat, an unknown quantity. One of the most interesting aspects of the professional killer is how at ease he is with his own marginalization; he has no desire to establish anything more that the briefest of working relationships with those in the center of the activity—in short, the feeling is mutual. In Thomas Perry’s novel, The Butcher’s Boy, the hit man flies to Las Vegas after the completion of the contract to await payment and recuperate from wounds sustained in an attempted mugging in Denver. He’s not in Las Vegas four hours before the powers-that-be send someone to find out exactly what he’s doing there—whether or not he’s working. But look as these lines from chapter 29:
It had never occurred to him [the hit man] to wonder where Orloff lived until he’d hired the Cruiser to watch him. He had little interest in the brokers and middlemen. He knew and accepted the fact that he wasn’t the sort of man they’d want to spend time with, even if he hadn’t been dangerous. And if Orloff had invited him there he would have been insulted. He did the work and took the money, but he would have resented any presumption that he cared who gave it to him, or took any interest in the problems and personalities that provided him with a market for his services.
(3) The murder is completed. The victim is eliminated and the killer falls back into the regularity of his life while he waits for another job. There is never any philosophical self-recrimination on the part of the hit man, there is never any moral doubt. And it should be noted that here, as in the “Metamorphosis tale,” the hit man’s code of conduct assumes the role otherwise played by organized religion—with one difference: in the “Utopia tale,” religion is more than just a regrettable absence. It is portrayed as either a nebulous waymaker to sloppiness and imprecision, or a random malevolent force, something that, quite literally in some cases (don’t forget—Sal, in Shelter, is using a pewter figurine of the Christ Child as a punching block!), dulls the senses. Look at “In the Beginning,” by Ian McEwan, an excerpt from a novel in progress (originally published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1995) which is told from the point of view of the intended victim, a man who has been targeted because of lectures he has given regarding the possible genetic basis for religious practice. Notice how he describes the hit men, just before they shoot the wrong person:
Both men wore black coats that gave them a priestly look. There was ceremony in their stillness.
It is also worth noting that “In the Beginning” is loosely based on historical fact—specifically, the controversy which erupted following the publication of the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, in the summer of 1975.
The theory behind sociobiology, that human social behavior is genetically based, encountered furious opposition, not the least of which from Wilson’s own friends and colleagues. Shortly after Sociobiology was published, a number of scientists (including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin) formed The Sociobiology Study Group, a group designed to provide a forum for their feelings of outrage. Though they, of course, never thought of hiring hit men, they did publish a letter in The New York Review of Books on November 13, 1975, which—perilously close to character assassination as it was—might have done even more damage. In that letter, they stated that Sociobiology was not only bad science but also politically dangerous, going so far as to link Wilson and his theories with racist eugenics and Nazi policies. One of the more notable results of this opposition was that—as Wilson comments in his autobiography, Naturalist—it marked perhaps “ …the only occasion in recent American history on which a scientist was physically attacked, however mildly simply for the expression of an idea.” (The episode to which Wilson is referring occurred in January 1978 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Demonstrators seized the stage just as he was about to give a speech, dumped a
bucket of ice water on his head and chanted “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) McEwan makes quick reference to the actual scandal as the story moves away from the beginning:
But anger rose against my assertion that, since religious practice was universal to all known societies, it must have a genetic base and therefore be the product of evolutionary pressure. I invoked E.O. Wilson: “Religions, like all other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.”
