I was surfing the web a few days ago when I stumbled upon a news article about the newest version of the Call of Duty video game. Apparently, the latest release, called Call of Duty: Ghost, sold a billion dollars worth of copies in its first day of release. Whether this is true or not, the sheer enormity of the figure caused me to ask a question that has been troubling me for some time: Why do we have a such a deep fascination with hired killers?
I have a ten-year-old son, and so I have a steady exposure to the world of video games. I don’t let my son play the more violent of these (which are, of course, the most popular). But I am nonetheless familiar with titles like Assassin’s Creed, Hitman, and Call of Duty. As comic books were to my generation, video games are the mythology of today’s youth. And one common thread among all these games is that they center around professional killers. While kids of bygone days might have fantasized about being cowboys, superheroes, and even G-men, today’s boys dream of being killing machines.
It’s a brave new world.
It’s not just kids, of course. Lots of movies for grown-ups (if such a distinction can even be made any more) are written around assassins of one type or another. The protagonist of the Bourne Trilogy is an ex-hitman, as is the “hero” of The Quiet American, and countless other films. Movies about professional killers are almost their own genre. Not surprisingly, the best examples come from the seventies. Michael Caine gives one of his finest performances as the icy mafia button-man in Mike Hodge’s, Get Carter. And Max von Sydow is quietly brilliant as the refined, Zen-like exterminator Joubert in Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor.
For my money, the supreme example of the genre is Michael Winner’s 1972 thriller The Mechanic, in which an aging hitman named Arthur (Charles Bronson) is so emotionally cold that even his favorite hooker is scared of him. Arthur’s one attempt to at human connection comes when he decides to take on a apprentice, a young wanna-be killer named Steve (Jan Michael Vincent), whom Arthur trains in the art of murdering people discreetly. As Arthur explains to Steve early in the movie, being a world-class killer means “playing by your own set of rules.” In other words, the morality of “normal” people doesn’t apply.
This is the secret to our obsession with such characters, I think. There is a kind of Nietzschean aloofness to them, an almost spiritual quality in their detachment from any political cause, or from either side of the moral equation. As Joubert says, “There is no need to choose this side [or that side] or any side.”
For such men, the only real faith lies is in their own precision, in the technical achievement of a clean job.
Or, as Anthony Hopkins once said of his signature role, Hannibal Lector, these are men so tightly in control of their own emotions that have “flipped over into insanity.” In short, characters like Arthur and Joubert represent a kind of existential anti-hero of the most macabre variety. In a brutal, violent world, the only real integrity available to the thinking man comes from the freedom of choosing who to kill (and being good at it).
It is no accident that the entry of this cynical vision our collection unconscious coincided so strongly with the 1970s. The psychological traumas of Vietnam, Kent State, and Watergate all contributed to our general sense of a Godless universe, a perception that first took root in the film noir masterpieces to emerge from Hollywood after the Second World War. But it was Vietnam that really changed the psychic landscape of film. To a generation that had seen so many of its youth die in the jungles of Asia merely to enrich the stakeholders of the war industry, heroes of yesteryear like Superman and even James Bond seemed oddly quaint, and even a bit sappy. The only believable protagonists were stone cold killers.
But even this was not enough. In the 1980s, under the callous regime of Ronald Reagan, assassins took on an even darker edge (if that were possible). Instead of amoral hitmen like Arthur, we got true killing machines like The Terminator (1984) and Victor in La Femme Nikita (1990). In these films, the killers were no longer even human, but rather androids in either the literal sense (the Terminator) or the figurative (Victor).
What began as a commentary on the amorality of post-Vietnam world became just another fetishism. Our previous fascination with the technical grace of hitmen became an erotic obsession with pure violence. The killers got meaner, and the guns got bigger.
At some point, our heroes became Terminators.
The great mythologist Joseph Campbell commented on this (if only obliquely) in his famous interviews with Bill Moyers. When Moyers asked Campbell to name some artifacts of modern technology had taken on a mythological significance for modern people, the first example he gave were airplanes. The second was guns. “Weapons, of course,” Campbell said. “Every movie that I have seen on the airplane as I traveled…shows people with revolvers. There is the Lord Death, carrying his weapon. Different instruments take over the roles that earlier instruments now no longer serve.”
And so, by the 1990s, the ego-less shadow men of the 1970s had had transmogrified into death gods reminiscent of the Hindu pantheon.
Here is where video games enter the picture. Video games allow the viewer to participate actively in the drama of violence, and it’s no surprise that the most popular titles have to do with assassins of one sort or another. The most obvious example, of course, is Assassin’s Creed. This a truly amazing-looking game, based on artwork by the great French-Canadian illustrator Nicolas Bouvier (whose nom de pixel is Sparth). I’ve never played Assassin’s Creed, but it looks like a masterpiece of art direction and narrative imagination. My point is not that such games are “wrong” in a moralist sense. Rather, I am frightened by what their popularity says about us as a culture.
Not too frightened, of course. I don’t believe any of the central characters of these games are actually “evil” in the traditional meaning of the word. They are not sadistic. Most of them just want to survive, and this basic impulse toward violence as a means of self-preservation resonates deeply with the American psyche. We are a nation of outcasts, obviously, and much of American history is the story of people who live on the hinterland of civilization. 
Indeed, the original “post-apocalyptic” action movies were the cowboy Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s. Instead of zombie hordes, the homesteaders in John Ford’s The Searchers do battle with psychopathic Commanche Indians, most of whom would like nothing better than to slice the scalps off of the invading white folk (if not, actually, to eat their brains).
The only real danger that I see with games like Hitman and Assassin’s Creed lies in their almost unrelenting nihilism. In a world where hitmen are the only heroes, where is the hope for a better future? How are the kids today of going to have any faith in the world if all they see is Joubert?
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