Back in January, I saw The Beekeeper at the local cinema.
The whole point of a film like The Beekeeper is not to think too much. But as usual, given I’m still thinking about aspects of it over two months later, on that front I’ve failed. Let’s explore why.
What is a Jason Statham?
Jason Statham is not a good actor. Or at least, not an actor with great versatility or dramatic range. Recently I found another Statham-fronted film attacking my eyeballs at home: Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Everything about Statham’s acting ability can be understood through the way he delivers the following line in the above film:
You’re a spineless jellyfish!
Statham emphasises the adjective, spineless. But surely, as an invertebrate, a jellyfish is by definition spineless. The adjective adds no information, and stressing it only highlights the emptiness of the qualifier. An actor with even an iota of interest or understanding of dialogue would have realised that, even without license of ad-lib - “You’re spineless. A jellyfish.” - either a flat reading, or a stress on the noun, would have made the made the stupidity of the line slightly less obvious.
But Statham isn’t employed as a good actor in the traditional sense. Instead, he’s employed as a physical presense, a looming, fulminating broad-shouldered block of hardened meat and bone; small, pillbox eyes defensively shielded behind a thick bony brow-ridge and a slightly flattened nose, inset inside a head with bald pate at the top, and square jaw at the bottom that’s permanently sprouting thick five o’clock shadow. All of which sits atop a vehicle of wide shoulders, broad chest and heavy arms which culminate in two permanently clenched fists.
So, Statham is employed as an exemplar of a violence delivery system. And the appeal for the audience is in seeing this system in action, being used to deliver violence against adversaries whom ‘we know’ should be the recipients of relentless brunt force trauma, often in terminal doses.
The Adversaries
Which brings me back to The Beekeeper. What defines a target of violence as ‘deserving’, and so the violence itself as being ‘righteous’ rather than simply unjust or criminal? And given the social and political fissures that exist in modern society, for which potential targets will there be sufficient implicit unanimity amongst the audience - of all political stripes - that the vicarious sadistic pleasure of seeing harm done to people will never be tinged or sullied by a sense of sympathy towards those on the receiving end?
For The Beekeeper, and as the title of this post suggests, the answer is nepobaby cyberscammers.
Nepobaby: Someone with unearned privilege, without obvious ability or talent, who is in a position of power simply because they were fortuitous in having rich and talented parents who give them opportunities they do not deserve, and which in a more just world more deserving people would have had instead.
Cyberscammers: Someone who cons and manipulates people into giving personal details which allow their money or assets to be stolen, often using social engineering and psychological manipulation. This frequently involves pretending to the victim to be the exact opposite of what one is, such as a bank or agency charged with protecting the victim against cyberscamming.
So, unlike with the line ‘spineless jellyfish’, both components of the descriptor of the adversary do work to tell the viewer why the characters being served up to get hurt deserve to get hurt. The nepobaby cyberscammers of The Beekeeper not just start off with undeserved wealth, but actively seek to gain yet more. And they do so in a way that creates clear and innocent victims, whom they scare and manipulate through bold-faced lies, acting by turns with sociopathic indifference and sadistic pleasure at the misfortune of their victims. They are an unmixed evil, parasites, harming others in the pursuit of sheer unquenshable greed.
Action Films as Revenge Dramas
The Beekeeper, like a great many low brow but popular films often described simply as ‘Action’, is really another example of a concealed genre. In this case, the Revenge Tragedy or Revenge Drama. This genre has existed in English literature for hundreds of years, and includes such Shakespearean masterpieces as Hamlet and Titus Andronicus.1 As Hollywood Action flicks, many of the subtleties and overt tragedy of the old lineage have been streamlined away, leaving a simple formula that, once the following event and character archetype placeholders have been filled, can be endlessly permuted and performed.
An Innocent Victim has a Great Injustice done to them by a Machiavellian Villain, leading to Irreperable Harm (usually death) being caused to the victim. A Revenger becomes aware of the Great Injustice done to the Innocent Victim, and agrees to take on a sacred duty to undertake a vengeful mission to balance the Great Injustice by doing Irreperable Harm to the Machiavellian Villain.
In the case of The Beekeeper, the Innocent Victim is the titular character’s landlady, a kindly retired woman who acts as treasurer for a charity. The Great Injustice done by the Machiavellian Villain, the Nepobaby Cyberscammer-in-chief, is that she is conned out of not just her life savings, but those of the charity too, leading to the Irreperable Harm that she takes her own life.
In the Hollywoodised retelling, the Revenger is a strange kind of Hero, and so aspects of Campbell’s Monomyth may be involved. The sacred duty is much like the Call to Adventure, and as with the Call to Adventure the Revenger may initially reject or resist this call (“I don’t do that anymore”). But ultimately they do perform their sacred duty, bringing justice to the world by balancing harm with harm.
The Revenger differs from the Hero in at least two ways, however. Firstly they are pre-transformed, already equipped with both the scars and the abilities gifted them by previous adventures. The Revenger may even have been a Hero in the past, an ex-Hero, someone past their prime, now looking into desolate oblivion and mediocrity. And that brings us to the second main point of difference: The Revenger acts not for their own betterment, not to improve themself, but with ultimately altruistic purpose, even if in so doing they sacrifice themself. In The Beekeeper this idea is captured by the phrase “protect the hive”, delivered with Statham’s usual gruff hamminess.
So, if this is the basic structure of the modern Revenge Drama, let’s consider some variations in firstly the Innocent Victim placeholder, and then in the Machiavellian Villain placeholder.
Gender and The Innocent Victim
Both historically and contemporaneously, both the roles of Innocent Victim and Revenger have been highly gendered: the Innocent Victim is usually female, and the Revenger usually male. This has given rise to a tired literary trope, coined by Gail Simone in 1999 as the Women in Refrigerators trope. In stories that use this trope, the violent death of a woman occurs early on in the first act, and this forms the motivation for a male character to become a Revenger for the rest of the story.
When the Innocent Victim and Revenger placeholders are filled in along these gendered lines, it generates some genuinely moot debates about the extent to which such stories are sexist, and if so to which sex. By moot, I mean this in the legal sense: a debate in which the facts on both sides appear similarly strong, and so which side wins is likely to depend primarily on the presentational and rhetorical qualities brought by both the counsel for the prosecution or counsel for the defence.
The argument for why the trope is sexist against women is that it sidelines women into mere plot devices used to tell stories about men going on adventures. The women are expendable in these stories; the men are indispensible. As long as the hero survives their adventure, they could always get a new girlfriend or wife, but the woman killed can never get her life back (though may occasionally appear as an apparition reminding the Hero of his need to ‘finish the job’ at times of despair and exhaustion). Additionally, the telling of these stories may relish, or appear to relish, in describing exactly how the victim was tormented and tortured to death in sadistic detail. Finally, the reader or viewer may get the impression that the innocent female victim is not always selected by the storyteller at random, but perhaps because she has exhibited certain qualities, such as trying to act with independence and agency, which the storyteller believes should be reserved for the male lead.
By contrast, the argument for why the trope is sexist against men seems to be that both men and women alike consider, all else being equal, men to be worth less than women. So, the death of a male friend or relative of a male protagonist would be understood to be less of an incentive to become a Revenger than the death of a female lover, friend or relative. This argument builds on what’s known as the Male Expendability Hypothesis which, according to Wikipedia, is “the idea that the lives of human males are of less concern to a population than those of human females because they are less necessary for population replacement.” This argument helps not just explain why the Innocent Victim in these stories are female, but also why the Revenger in these stories are male: it is the male Revenger who is willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the populace because he, and society at large, implicitly understands that he is worth less to society than the woman who has already died.
As mentioned, I consider this argument genuinely moot, by which I don’t mean such discussions aren’t useful to have, but do mean it can’t be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties. It’s also likely to be the case that, for various specific examples, both arguments are correct. The Revenge Drama can be both sexist against woman, because it considers women’s stories to be less narratively interesting and important, and also sexist against men, because it implicitly condones and promotes the myth of Male Expendability in society at large.
What does seem to have come about from this debate, however, are at least some attempts to apply the Innocent Victim placeholder in slightly less cliched ways. Famously, for example, the Innocent Victim that lights John’s Wick is his dead pet dog, not his wife or girlfriend.
In The Beekeeper, there is a slight adaptation of the trope. As The Revenger’s landlord, the Innocent Victim is in no way financially dependent on him, and their relationship is strictly platonic (and in Statham’s case thankfully laconic too). And it’s the Innocent Victim’s daughter, a police officer, who reminds the Revenger of his sacred duty. In general, however, The Beekeeper’s filling in of the Innocent Victim placeholder is not particularly original, and largely follows the gendered conventions as described above.
The Villain of a Thousand Faces
No. What I found interesting about The Beekeeper is its choice of Machiavellian Villain. Why Nepobaby Cyberscammers? From a narrative perspective, this choice seems to complicate things unnecessarily. As Nepobaby, the main villains are painted as so lacking in cunning and competence they should make for an effortlessly easy adversary. Instead, it’s the Nepobaby’s (symbolic) Father and (literal) Mother 2 figures who provide the necessary strategising and challenge required for the revenge fantasy to be feature length.
So again, why Nepobaby Cyberscammers? This is where, for me, it gets interesting. My guess is that, if The Beekeeper came out early 2024, it was probably first conceived and pitched in early to mid 2021.3 This means the core story, including the choice of Machiavellian Villain, must have absorbed some of the dominant societal concerns at the time. And this was a time when both trust in politicians and the government was low, and when - due to ever more people working remotely - the ease with which cyberscammers could pretend to be people’s bosses, banks, or other institutions, was much increased. With so much commerce and business taking place remotely, and so many people using their own computers and set-ups, rather than working in offices whose access strictly controlled by security and IT departments, there was probably never a better time for cyberscammers to ply their trade.
And that got me thinking about something broader still about the genre, and why it might be worth paying attention to who the Machiavellian Villains they include, and how they change over time. My modest proposal is broadly as follows:
In Revenger’s Dramas, the variation over time in Machiavellian Villain placeholder tends to be much greater than the variation in Revenger. Additionally, the choice of Machiavellian Villain will tend to be reflective of concerns shared implicitly by either majority, or sizeable minority, of the general population.
So, that’s my modest proposal. Revenger’s Dramas are, potentially, societal litmus tests, showing changing trends in the dominant concerns that people in a society have at different points in time. And if The Beekeeper, and its commercial success, is anything to go by, it seems street gangs, yuppies, drug dealers and Russians are now out of the Revenger’s crosshair; and corrupt politicians, deep state bureaucrats, nepobabies and cyberscammers are in.
Coda: Yes, Revenge Dramas are ‘problematic’
In the description above I’ve tried to discuss the modern Hollywood Action film as a streamlined descendent of a long lineage of Revenge Tragedies, which includes such literary classics as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, in this description I’ve aimed not to offer any judgement about whether I consider the popularity of the genre to be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing from any moral or ethical perspective. Instead, I’ve aimed to discuss the genre more in terms of the mechanics of storytelling.
A general standpoint I hold is that popular, mainstream stories - low-brow, ‘trashy’ popcorn flicks, and so on - should generally be considered more important to engage with and understand than stories that tend to appeal only to limited and niche audiences. This is because popular stories can only be popular if they are somehow able to speak to and resonate with widely held beliefs and ways of thinking about the world. It’s Hollywood, not Arthouse, that tends to provide the window into more people’s inner worlds. And if a Hollywood genre really does seem to be a continuation of the telling of stories that have been told continuously for hundreds or thousands of years, and that somehow keeps getting independently reinvented across disparate communities across the world, then perhaps they help us glimpse something not just about ourselves now, but at that elusive and contestable quality known as human nature.
And for the Action flick, the origins don’t just start with Shakespeare. Of course, he didn’t get his ideas from nowhere. Before there was Hamlet, there was Amleth, the story of a Viking prince avenging his father’s murder, which preexisted Hamlet as a written text for at least two centuries, and as part of the oral tradition for perhaps hundreds more.
The story of Amleth was adapted into the 2022 film The Northman, a bold, bloody, self-serious film with a Hollywood budget but Arthouse sensibilities and appeal. In The Northman, revenge is taken not just against the direct party that wronged him, but against his family and friends too. Amleth has no qualms about collective punishment, and if I remember correctly kills women and children affiliated with the nominal villain simply to psychologically harm him. No target is off limit, and no act considered too cruel for this primordial Revenger.
To conscious modern sensibilities, “an eye for an eye” is considered a barbaric call to violence. But stories like Amleth suggest that, at one time, it may instead have been a call for restraint, a counsel against blinding not just the individual who wronged you, but their family too, and maybe just anyone who looks, speaks or dresses in any way similar to them. When violence against an individual is considered justified, just a couple of steps beyond is the justification for violence against ever expanding circles of groups that contain the individual at their centre: their direct family, their close friends, their tribe, their clan, their creed and their race. Step too deeply into the psychological appeal of the modern Action flick and you find untethered barbarism and genocide.
Footnotes
To clarify: The Beekeeper is not a masterpiece.↩︎
Another intriguing choice that follows from selecting Nepobaby Cyberscammers as the main antagonist is the choice of parental occupation. For The Beekeeper the parents are in politics and government. And the mother figure is imbued with political attributes of both Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton, leading to a Rorcharch-like political composite. Republicans will look at this character and think, “Yup, that’s Hilary”, whereas Democrats will look at the same character and think, “That’s The Donald in a Dress”, and both types of viewer will assume it’s the other guy being weakly satirised.↩︎
I just checked. According to the Wikipedia article it was first announced in August 2021.↩︎