Books and Movies That Blur the Line Between Justice and Revenge

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“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” 
–Confucius 

Getting even is a primal human desire as old as time. Nothing starts our blood boiling more than making someone pay for what they did. 

In True Grit, Charles Portis’s 1968 classic novel that was the basis for the film starring John Wayne as US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross vows to avenge her father’s murder—on her terms and the consequences be damned. 

A grief-stricken father who has always lived a moral and ethical life won’t rest until he has personally punished his son’s murderer in Andre Dubus’s short story Killings, which was made into the award-winning 2001 film In the Bedroom. 

Are these stories of revenge? Or justice? 

The fine line between justice and revenge has obsessed scholars for centuries. Law professor Thane Rosenbaum doesn’t believe the line exists at all. “It’s time for Americans to be honest about the role revenge plays in our lives. A call for justice is always a cry for revenge.”

So what stops the rest of us from putting our fantasies into action? Fear of getting caught? Reprisal for our retaliation, which science tells us creates an endless cycle of violence begetting violence so we can never achieve closure? Knowing that no one emerges unscathed? Which makes payback a real bitch. Maybe that’s why we keep returning to these timeless stories of revenge. We can dole out punishment in ways we can’t pull off in real life. Settle scores without responsibility or guilt, not to mention the catharsis we feel when the evildoers finally get their comeuppance. 

Is there anything more traumatic than being humiliated in front of your entire high school? No wonder we identify with Carrie in Stephen King’s 1974 eponymous novel when she unleashes the full force of her telekinetic fury after pig blood is dumped on her at her prom. Interestingly, King felt that the climax in Brian De Palma’s 1976 film version—with Carrie’s arm reaching out from beyond the grave—was better than his original ending.

The wrongfully imprisoned Edmond Dantes in Alexander Dumas’s 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo waits fourteen years to deliver his masterfully orchestrated retribution that will reverberate in the highest echelons of political power. Proving that justice is a dish best served ice cold. 

Is that the fundamental difference—justice is rational and revenge driven by emotion? 

Lisa Unger’s 2020 novel Confessions on the 7:45 blurs the line even more in a  multi-layered tale that subverts our expectations with a twist you don’t see coming while offering a chance for redemption as a life about to be forfeited becomes a life saved. 

Hell hath no fury…No story about revenge would be complete without those women scorned, starting with Medea in Euripides’s 1815 play of the same name, who sacrificed her own children to punish her faithless husband. 

Coming up with ingenious and diabolical ways to pay back the men in their lives—and making sure their tormentors know it—are the hallmark of (spoiler alert) the antagonists in: Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s 2012 domestic thriller that paved the way for the rest; Scott Turow’s seminal 1990 legal thriller, Presumed Innocent; and E.G. Scott’s twisty 2019 psychological suspense novel The Woman Inside.

What if you didn’t get the justice you felt you deserved? Hollywood and crime fiction are replete with characters who take the law into their own hands when the system fails them. But what if the person seeking to right a wrong is sworn to uphold the very laws she or he is breaking? Detective Harry Bosch in Michael Connelly’s long-running series is often forced to operate in the gray areas, torn between his desire for justice and the need to follow the law. 

Some characters go further to achieve their “just revenge.” Like the undercover FBI agent in the 2004 film The Punisher, who unleashes his wrath as a one-man army after his entire family is massacred.  

In Karin Slaughter’s 2001 debut novel, Blindsighted, two women get caught up in the hunt for a serial killer. One a detective vowing her own justice for her murdered sister; the other the town coroner with a secret that could expose the killer at the cost of her life.

Nicholas Marshall, the judge in the 1990’s TV series Dark Justice, becomes a vigilante by night after his family is killed in a car bomb intended for him. He targets criminals in his courtroom who get off on technicalities, warning them that “justice may be blind, but it can see in the dark.”

In my thriller First Victim, Manhattan Supreme judge Alice D. McKerrity is used to meting out justice in her courtroom. But while presiding over a murder trial, she must make a life-altering decision. Will she journey outside the law in order to exact a long-awaited revenge? 

Who among us gets to play God? Who decides the punishment to fit the crime? Even one of crime fiction’s most famous detectives struggled with these ultimate questions. In Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express—the mother of all revenge stories–the novel’s twin themes of grief and retribution connected to a tragic long-ago crime forces Hercule Poirot to question the nature of justice itself that might best be left to a higher judge. 

Alice in First Victim suffers a crisis of conscience right up until the very end. 

“Violence that shatters lives and drives people to do evil in return. 
Is that justice? Or revenge? The instinct that reduces us to our most primal impulses. Exposing us for the bloodthirsty beasts we are. Isn’t the evolution of our brains what separates us from the animal kingdom? Our ability to think. To reason. To make choices. There’s always a choice.
 And a cost.”

Whether we call it revenge, justice, or something else, these and other cautionary tales are bound to make us think twice before giving that hated enemy a taste of his or her own medicine. Fiction is a stand-in for reality, allowing us to live vicariously and experience payback from a safe distance. But the way we react when we watch someone pull that trigger reveals an awful lot about ourselves, and what any of us might do under the right circumstances or when pushed to our limits. 

The truth is, we don’t know what we are capable of. One thing you can’t predict is human behavior. Just when you think you’ve pulled off the perfect revenge, it comes up on your blind side. The part of you that you’ve been hiding from yourself. Is that what really stops us? Seeing ourselves for who we truly are? 

Which could be the most terrifying reckoning of all.

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