Johnny 99 — Bruce Springsteen
#365Songs: December 11th
“Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.” ― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
An objectively attractive Ivy League graduate from a prominent, wealthy family premeditates the murder of a capitalistic overlord in Midtown and walks away a sub-cultural hero.
What feels like a television drama is real life, and yet remarkably, it’s not surprising in any way.
So how did we get here?
Dexter Morgan was a blood splatter analyst for the Miami PD who moonlit as a serial killer. Walter White was a high school chemistry teacher who established a meth empire after a cancer diagnosis. Tony Soprano took time out of his busy life as a violent mob boss to explore childhood trauma and mommy issues in therapy. Over the past 25 years, pop culture has heroized objectively terrible humans. We’ve celebrated their worst moments, cheered their most violent crimes, and rooted for their ultimate redemptions.
What, exactly, does this say about us?
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month
Ralph went out lookin’ for a job but he couldn’t find none
He came home too drunk from mixin’ Tanqueray and wine
He got a gun, shot a night clerk, now they call him Johnny 99
The Sopranos triggered a cultural shift in how we process and contemplate morality, asking us to consider this central character vulnerable enough to explore his inner world. We watched him tour colleges with his kids, fall to the ground with debilitating panic attacks, and then moments later proceed to smash a man’s skull against a car door.
The same with Dexter, who justified his murders by reminding us that he only soothed his voracious appetite by carving up folks far worse than himself. Rather than rooting for his arrest, we awaited his next grand murder. And just because Walter White was a loving husband and father, we gave him a pass even as he addicted half of Albuquerque to the most lethal street drug on the planet.
The art of heroizing antagonists is not new, but it does seem something has shifted in us. When I was growing up, the media and loud-mouth politicians were quick to blame video games when a kid shot up a school — and, if you’ve ever played Grand Theft Auto, you do see how quickly you’re desensitized to the violence, all empathy gone when you run over an old lady walking across your path. Now, thanks to social media, the conspiracy rumor mill blurs even the most clear truths.
In all of these shows, and more often than not even in the video games we’ve played, we’re led to believe that perhaps violence is not so bad when the victim is also evil. But as a result, our appetites for the anti-hero protagonist have grown insatiable. If we’re not listening to the endless sea of true crime podcasts, we’re binging Netflix shows like “Making a Murderer” and “Tiger King,” blurring more lines between victim and perpetrator, justice and revenge. Joe Exotic stole the early pandemic days, despite being a remarkably terrible human, sparking an era of memes and Halloween costumes, all while ushering in an era for hundreds of series far worse.
Down in the part of town where when you hit a red light you don’t stop
Johnny’s wavin’ his gun around and threatenin’ to blow his top
When an off-duty cop snuck up on him from behind
Out in front of the Club Tip Top they slapped the cuffs on Johnny 99
Well the city supplied a public defender but the judge was Mean John Brown
He came into the courtroom and stared poor Johnny down
Well the evidence is clear, gonna let the sentence, son, fit the crime
Prison for ninety-eight and a year and we’ll call it even Johnny 99
And that gets me to the point: it’s no wonder that we’ve expanded our entertainment empathy into a real-world moral fog. In Silicon Valley, we’ve celebrated the most vitriolic, narcissistic founders as if they’re modern day Jesus Christs, a canonization process that has left us bowing to the altar of shitty fathers and even worse bosses. Steve Jobs was known to park in handicapped spots, berate employees in public, and even deny paternity for a daughter for whom he later named a computer. And don’t get me started on Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
It’s no wonder we landed on President Donald J. Trump pt. 2, a lifelong criminal grifter who was transformed from universal joke to the most powerful and dangerous Fascist the world has seen in 75 years. Like Walter White, he positioned himself as an outsider forced to break the rules to fight a corrupt system. His famous line “I alone can fix it” echoes Walter’s “I’m the one who knocks” — both statements of power from men who view themselves as reluctant warriors forced into fighting dirty by circumstances beyond their control. His supporters, like the viewers of these antihero shows, have learned to process his most controversial actions through this lens of necessary evil for a perceived greater good.
Y’all, we’re the problem.
Fistfight broke out in the courtroom, they had to drag Johnny’s girl away
His mama stood up and shouted, “Judge don’t take my boy this way”
Well, son, you got any statement you’d like to make
Before the bailiff comes to forever take you away?
Now judge, judge I got debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and takin’ my house away
Now I ain’t sayin’ that make me an innocent man
But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand
Listen, our world has grown more and more complex even as information available to us has become less reliable, more viral. Our distrust in public institutions is at an all-time high at the same time that those who have rigged the system in their own favor get to make all the rules. We’ve no choice but to operate in grey areas, question authority, challenge the status quo.
Perhaps our favorite anti-hero shows of the past 25 years didn’t just create our tendency to side with questionable characters, it predicted and reflected the direction we were already headed.
But there’s an inherent danger to the elegant, well-crafted parallels of scripted anti-heros and real world power players. Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions were meticulously written to reveal his buried humanity; Walter White’s transformation reminded us of the costs of moral compromise. But real life isn’t so clean, and when you hand the keys to the most out of control person in the room there are no writers there to reverse course.
Trump’s story isn’t about redemption, it’s about revenge. Rather than convict the Jan 6th insurrectionists, he’ll try to imprison the committee who sought justice. Our fictional heroes were always just meant to warn us about nefarious characters lurking on the fringes of our culture, waiting to seize power. They were meant to warn us that yes, they too are human, but that doesn’t make them any less evil.
It seems we’ve failed to process that part of the story.
Now judge, judge I got debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and takin’ my house away
Now I ain’t sayin’ that make me an innocent man
But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand
Well, your honor, I do believe I’d be better off dead
And if you can take a man’s life for the thoughts that’s in his head
Then won’t you sit back in that chair and think it over just one more time
And let ’em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line (woo)
~
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