IMPERIALISM OF ALL COLORS AND SHADES

DENZEL WASHINGTON — THE EQUALIZER 2014 — THE EQUALIZER 2 2018 — THE EQUALIZER 3 2023–2023

The actor is good, and he is black, which is very important in this context. The context is urban crime and violence, with no real effort from the police to do anything. The only change from one film to the next is the type of crime, otherwise, it is always the same pattern. Crime — Passive Police — Robert McCall Tekes Over. This pattern is extremely dangerous for any audience. It justifies the passivity of the police who cannot do anything because criminals today are stopping nowhere and have no limits, hence they have a tremendous future. Then the second line is simple: private citizens must be concerned and if they are they have to take over and just plain get rid of these criminals. If we were in a Western film, a spaghetti western if you want, the criminals would be white and that would be a family affair, and as such other white people could take it into their own hands. Or the criminals would be Indians, and then in the good old Western racist tradition: Kill them all and do not ask questions, especially when they a(re all dead.

But here the popular vigilante is black and that creates a feeling of justice in the black audience and a feeling of fear in the white audience. In both directions, these films have it all wrong. They create a problem more than they solve one, not even cathartically, because it is cathartic to no white audience that lives with the fear of a black upheaval, and it is cathartic to no black audience that probably feels encouraged to become firmer, stronger, more aggressive by these black people who try to impose their rule and justice onto the whole society. It goes even further when the criminals themselves are black. Imagine a white audience: “Black criminals are everywhere, and the police do nothing. Let them shoot them dead on the spot, and what’s more the vigilante is a black man, then what do whites do here?”

That’s exactly why some people in the world start believing the West has been defeated or at best is being defeated because inside the Western countries…