When Laws Fail, What Do You Have?

The Beekeeper

I was disappointed to see that this year’s Academy Awards nominations failed to recognize the best movie of the year in even a single category.

I’m talking about The Beekeeper.

If you don’t know The Beekeeper, you should because it’s the best move of 2024 that I saw, which is not a lot of movies, but I can’t imagine any movie truly being better. It stars Jason Statham in his signature mode of taciturn killing (and also maiming) machine fueled by a barely concealed simmering rage. Here’s the trailer:

The plot is straightforward. Statham is a retired “Beekeeper,” a secret solider tasked with solving problems in ways that require working outside the boundaries of the law. He has retired to literally be a beekeeper on some remote land owned by Phylicia Rashad, a former schoolteacher who, among other things, has treasurer responsibilities over a charity for children.

Phylicia Rashad is scammed into giving remote access over to her computer, which allows the thieves (working from a call center with dozens of people seeking to run similar scams) access to the charity account which they drain of a couple million dollars. In shame, she takes her own life. Jason Statham comes out of retirement to make all of those who are complicit in this death pay, a quest which takes him to the highest reaches of the U.S. government.

While there’s a lot of hurdles along the way, there’s little doubt The Beekeeper will succeed. Jeremy Irons, playing a former director of the CIA, who is now a security consultant to the bad guys, gathers a bunch of tough customers in a room to brief them on their mission to stop The Beekeeper and says, “He's not like you. You're tier one operators, former SEAL Team Six, Delta Force. You are, in other words ... pussies. If you were in the same room, he would kill you.”

The movie is action packed, campy, strangely stocked with highly regarded actors (Minnie Driver and Josh Hutcherson also have roles), and totally awesome. I’ve watched it twice and will probably watch it again now that I’m writing this.

The ethos of the film is summed up in a line from Statham’s character: “You have laws for these things until they fail. Then you have me.”

I’ve been thinking about The Beekeeper because this week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed a new novel, The Mailman, which also features a solo vigilante working outside the boundaries of the law to protect the vulnerable from the wicked. Unlike The Beekeeper, which is perfect, The Mailman has some flaws, mostly tied to the challenge of establishing a new character while also unfurling a thriller plot, but I still recommend it for readers who enjoy books like the Reacher novels, which I also love.

Why do I love these things? Why am I especially drawn to these stories now?

The Mailman by Andrew Welsh-Huggins and the Reacher novels feature characters created in the spirit of the knight-errant, a classic figure who has been separated from their place of origin, but still hold to chivalric ideas around justice. Reacher literally wanders the country without possessions, often by bus, buying thrift store clothes that he discards along the way. It’s amazing how many terrible people and dangerous criminals he comes across without seeming to try. It makes you think the world is a truly depraved place.

Mercury Carter, the mailman of The Mailman, is actually a former mail inspector who now works as a private courier. In the novel, he’s tasked with delivering a package to a woman who is a lawyer, and stumbles upon a home invasion where the woman and her husband are lashed to chairs in their living room being interrogated by some obvious bad guys. Mercury’s personal code dictates that the delivery must be made and these guys are standing the way, so they have to go, no matter what it takes. (And it takes a lot.)

The Beekeeper is retired from the dispensing justice game, but it’s clear there’s no rust on his skills and he jumps in the moment he’s needed by “the hive.”

While I often enjoy ambiguity and complexity in my narrative experiences (both in film and books), I also have a longstanding love of stories featuring a single character who, without a doubt, is going to just kick ass, dispatching the wicked to their richly deserved, miserable fates.

While these narratives all involve lots of peril, there’s also no doubt that justice will indeed by served. Jason Statham’s Beekeeper starts by finding the call center that bilked his neighbor lady, walks past security, and precedes to firebomb the building after making all the people present pledge that the will stop robbing old people of their life savings. The degree of punishment is meted out according to the degree of responsibility. Minions are given a chance to repent. Bystanders are spared, unless they get in the way, in which case Statham may be forced to temporarily disable you.

But if you are knowingly complicit, you’re in trouble. At one point, Statham enacts a very elaborate death for one of the relatively low-level, yet fully informed henchmen involving a pickup truck, long high-tensile cable, and a drawbridge.

I like to think I’m an empathetic person. For instance, I could never watch America’s Funniest Home Videos because seeing some poor sucker rack his nuts on a stair rail when trying a skateboard trick only makes me wince, not laugh. I take no pleasure in the suffering of others.

Unless they deserve it, I guess.

Seeing Statham (or Reacher or Mercury Carter) visit pain and death on the “bad guys” in these narratives gives me great pleasure. These acts are presented as justice, and I experience that framing inside the narratives as correct, and these characters as correctives in a world where, if not for them, justice would be denied.

A significant part of the pleasure of these narratives is knowing that the real world does not work this way. In the real world, justice is often not served, and unlike The Beekeeper, when the laws fail, we don’t have anyone who shows up to set things right.

What do we have?

This week we had Bishop Mariann Budde presiding over a service at the National Cathedral in Washington directly challenging President Trump and Vice President Vance who were present:

"Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.

Trump and Vance reacted with disgust. Champion of free speech Donald Trump later demanded an apology for being forced to listen to Budde’s message. Bishop Budde has been subject to death threats since news of her sermon and Trump’s reaction has been publicized. One Georgia congressman said she should be deported.

I confine my enjoyment of violent retribution to fictional narratives, but also could you imagine Bishop Mariann Budde first delivering these lines, and when seeing Trump and Vance smirk at her message of tolerance, having her then pull a rocket launcher from beneath her vestments sighting down the scope and saying, in her best Jason Stratham deadpan something like:

The Lord is my shepherd, now say hello to my little friend!

The fantasy is sort of delicious, but the reason it is delicious, is because it is a fantasy. In reality, a violent response to Trump’s program for the country would be far more helpful to his ends than it would be an act of dispensing justice. The strongman needs no excuse to try to assume power, but violence gives the strongman’s actions a rationale that may be persuasive to more people. This is why Trump and his backers have taken such pains to paint immigrants as criminals, while the January 6th insurrection was a “day of love.”

As I pledged to myself in an earlier newsletter, I am staying informed without lapsing into hypervigilance, but the spray of hate and attacks on decency that have marked the opening days of the 2nd Trump presidency are stunning. Of course, that’s part of the point, to leave us stunned as he grabs for power he does not and should not have.

Bishop Budde made a moral plea for mercy, and I think we know how little that is going to matter to Trump and Vance and the others who surround them, but when the cruelty inevitably specifically touches the lives of more people, perhaps a tide will turn. Perhaps.

We also, for the time being, have the law. A federal judge in Seattle issued a restraining order against Trump’s declaration ending birthright citizenship, a right which is literally enumerated in the 14th Amendment and has been upheld by courts for more than a century. Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee spoke from the bench, issuing his order.

I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say where were the judges, where were the lawyers?

Judge Coughenour interrupted the Justice Department lawyer who was defending Trump’s order, asking if he considered it constitutional. The Justice Department lawyer answered in the affirmative. Judge Coughenour replied, “Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the Bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”

I think we should mark this moment. As Jason Statham says in The Beekeeper, we have laws for these things. There is not a legal expert in the country who isn’t tied directly into the Trump Administration who thinks that Donald Trump has the power to end birthright citizenship. Mark Joseph Stern, writing at Slate, insists that there’s no chance the Supreme Court would accept Trump’s argument.

I hope he’s right, but if not, it’ll be clear we no longer have the law.

Does anyone know how to get ahold of Jason Statham?

Links

Once again, here is my review of The Mailman in the Chicago Tribune.

At Inside Higher Ed this week I explained why ChatGPT became progressively less useful to me while I worked on More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. In order to render ideas of my own, I needed the ideas of others for fuel, not the probabilities of a large language model.

At my Engaged Education newsletter I tried to explain how even work that ChatGPT can simulate may be worth doing as long as we concentrate in the friction of the learning experience.

As someone who avoids writing negative reviews because I choose to only write about books I enjoyed, I appreciated this newsletter from Michael Patrick Brady “7 Reasons I Panned Your Book.”

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced its finalists for all of its awards. Special congrats to Belt publisher Anne Trubek and author Zito Madu for the nomination in autobiography for The Minotaur at Calle Lanza.

Legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer has died. I’m pretty sure my acquaintance with his work was first made through this book.

Via my friends McSweeney's Internet Tendency “It’s About Time Our Government Finally Reflects The Real America - an Airport Terminal at 10 A.M. on a Weekday” by Kimberly Harrington.

Recommendations

1. The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry
2. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
3. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
4. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
5. Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

Rebecca W. - Eugene, OR

For Rebecca, I’m recommending a novel of personal crisis that I found strangely soothing to see the way someone else is navigating the uncertainty of her own life: Wayward by Dana Spiotta.

1. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
2. Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O'Nan
3. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
4. Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt
5. How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas

Catherine D. - Grayslake, IL (On behalf of the Lakeside Readers Book Club)

I always get a little extra anxious about recommendations for book clubs. For single readers, if you disappoint them, it’s just one person. For book clubs, it’s a whole group! Also, for a book club pick you want to make sure to pick something that holds up to group discussion.

This is not a novel for everyone, but hopefully that makes for good fodder, The Book of Goose by Yiyun Lee.

Okay, folks, we’re getting to crunch time for pre-ordering More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. I’m now pleased to report that Mother Biblioracle has read the book and she liked it! (It is dedicated to her, so that’s nice.) Maybe more importantly, she said that she thinks its accessible to readers of all stripes.

What are you waiting for? Pre-order this puppy already!

If you use the code MORETHAN15 to order direct through the publisher below, you can get 15% off. They also have links to all the other places you can order books online.

If you order now, the book will show up on or even before the February 4 publication date.

I haven’t seen too many Oscar contenders this year, so I’m woefully ignorant about what’s worthy. What have you seen that’s worth the audience’s time?

Thanks, as always, for reading, and even though we don’t have beekeepers in the real world, perhaps the hive can work on taking care of each other.

Until next time,

JW
The Biblioracle