"Mystic River"
Rated R
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2003

Sean Penn won an Oscar award in February 2004 for his role as a bereaved
father of a murdered 19-year-old daughter in "Mystic River." For MIM though, this movie may
at best deserve the "Labor Aristocracy Prize" for the year.
"Mystic River" should also be the official movie of the Boston Herald. 

Despite some rave reviews, "Mystic River" is just another detective/cops-and-robbers film distracting people from causes
and solutions to crime. "Mystic River" has a detective twist at the end that justifies plot tension throughout
the film, but anybody can come up with a twist like that, so we would say the public is being cheated by these
repetitive whodunnits that all have the same elements with the only
difference being the individual identity of the killer.

Based somewhat realistically on Boston-area neighborhoods, "Mystic River"
is the screen version of the Boston Herald, except that the movie 
is a dash more sophisticated and polished than the newspaper. The
Boston Herald regales its lower-middle class readers with big headlines about
crime and corruption. Likewise, "Mystic River" strings together sensational
stories of crime and corruption.

Clint Eastwood is probably thinking that he broke his back to bring a little sophistication
and integrity to this movie, so why is MIM complaining. The National Rifle Association activist
Clint Eastwood directed a realistic and horrible scene about children getting a hold of guns.
He also dramatized the Catholic Church's scandals by showing in the opening scene that
a pedophile had a church ring on before he kidnapped a boy off the street--an
action that triggered a series of terrible things decades down the line. Moreover, in "Mystic
River," there is no racism focus, because the criminals are white. In fact, in this film we see the white
lumpenproletariat merged right in with nearly respectable middle-class families. Above all,
despite 	Clint Eastwood's vigilante screen image, this movie shows how vigilantes screw up.
The typical Boston Herald audience is always foaming at the mouth
for individual action against crime--tough sentences and convictions based on shoddy evidence
being standard fare while tough analyses of the causes of crime that might hurt Amerikan
nationalist feelings are no where to be found in the feel-good for-profit media preferred by the
typical Boston Herald audience.

Let there be no doubt there is a thin veneer of sophistication to this movie despite
its selection of the usual themes--crime and the conflict between loyalty to family
and loyalty to law, with a "Romeo and Juliet" twist. Nonetheless, the film still panders to the most basic instinct
of the labor aristocracy--that crime is a matter of will-power both by criminals and 
those in law enforcement seeking to crack down on them. 

The redeeming characteristic
of the labor aristocracy is supposed to be its "hard work" ethic, the belief that
people do not grow up with entitlements--which unfortunately
comes with the converse belief that wealth must have come about from
such hard work and not a parasitic entitlement. In that same sense, the labor aristocracy
looks at crime and blames itself, the labor aristocracy--with a little
help from defective church priests. Yet this self-blame is also a reason and excuse
why the individualists of the Amerikkkan middle-classes do not analyze causes of
crime and their solutions. 

Thus, the whole ideology of crime as a will-power question
is itself a contributing factor to crime. Whether intentional or not, we see right
in "Mystic River" that a father's self-blame reaches unhealthy levels and causes crime.
That is what our Boston Herald needs to harp on but won't. If there is one thing distinctive
to Amerikkka that explains its highest or second-highest murder rate in the world, it is the
ideology of self-blame that goes with its notion of heroic individuals who raise themselves by the bootstraps.
It is people judging themselves failures by Amerikkkan standards who compensate by evermore 
extreme actions which eventually cross into crime, whether in middle-class Jimmy Markum's case
or Enron's case. That does not happen in a society with a collective sense of economic well-being
and child-rearing.

The two families involved in a feud in "Mystic River" both started in crime as thiefs. The explanation
in the movie is that such criminals do not want to work--true enough--but that is all. We do not
see in "Mystic River" that the class system itself promotes greed, parasitism and poverty and thus crime.

In a revised "Mystic River" script, we need Jimmy Markum to have an identical twin who grew up in a country
with less individualism. Jimmy Markum's twin grew up in an atheist country without
pedophile priests using God to fool people; his buddy was not a police detective with
mafia-type loyalties to him going back to childhood, but instead a factory manager
aware of the economic conditions of people in the community, someone who knew
who might have extraordinary class bitterness that might express itself as thieving. 
The factory manager made sure that any pocket of unemployment or
other economic mistakes did not last long in his neighborhood by working
with other economic authorities. The factory manager's
professional partner like the Black police character Whitey Powers likewise checked up
on the integrity of his partner's work to make sure that economic conditions were
good for all, not just a few related families. At home, Jimmy Markum's twin
did not have a wife who thought that her husband's murders
were a good thing providing for her family. Jimmy Markum's twin's wife knew that with such strong collective
child-raising structures she does not need her husband to "rule the town." She would not
be letting down her kids by failing to support a murderous husband. Quite the contrary, she would
be ensuring that her kids did not become sicko individualists themselves by not pitting her family
against the greater good of society. The only problem with our proposed alternative movie
is that thanks to a crackdown on individualism in Jimmy Markum's twin's country,
there was no pedophile crime, no feud between thieving families, no cover-up at
the police level and hence no weak womyn character (Celeste Boyle)
who wrongly betrayed her husband based on scanty evidence
that she had to carry in her mind as a heavy individual psychological burden. 
Success in stopping crime before it starts doesn't sell movie tickets.
All the excitement would be in the Jimmy Markum half of the movie script and the
producers would insist on axing the other half.

Although "Mystic River" is not very hopeful,
the reason that crime continues in the united $tates the way it does is that movies
like "Mystic River" continue to sensationalize crime as individual, psychological
matters--instead of doing something seemingly more boring, such as looking at
where crime rates are lower and other analyses that may provide answers.
It's hard to see how detective thrillers or cops-and-robbers chase movies will ever
produce anything of progressive value except by way of incidental background.
That would be OK except that the people are still suffering from violent crime
and also wrongful imprisonments; hence, we at MIM do not take a live-and-let-live
attitude toward film arts at the present time. Not only do these crime-for-entertainment
movies produce the possibility of copy-cat crimes, but also, and more importantly,
it is wrong that the public obtains more of its views and impressions of crime from
such sources than serious criminological sources. The public fed with "Mystic River"
type movies then turns around and elects worthless politicians who pander to the
average view produced by such movies.

In contrast, we at MIM do not have a
problem cracking down on movies and we do not allow our vanguard party to
chase popularity for its own sake the way bourgeois politicians do. Ever since
the leader of the Russian Revolution (1917) Lenin formulated the idea of the "vanguard
party" we have believed that political leaders have to go forward with science,
not just whatever is popular at the moment. That is why MIM does not hesitate
to put forward wildly unpopular views in the imperialist countries.

The labor aristocracy will stay stuck in its cycle of crime, desire for vengeance
and support for building more prisons in the united $tates, 
because politicians and movie directors including people who are both
like Clint Eastwood, have a very limited repertoire of metaphors open to them in discussing
crime that the Amerikan public will buy. "I didn't step into that [pedophile's] car. You did," says Jimmy Markum
to the pedophile's victim. As long as the question stays at that level of individual
responsibility and the character of schizoid persynalities that get involved, there is no real solution to crime.
But as long as movies and newspapers are for-profit, we can expect movies like "Mystic River"
and papers like the Boston Herald to dominate the public's thinking about crime. There are
more people spending more time watching cops-and-robbers TV and film by far than there are people
taking that same passion to studying criminology. Crime as entertainment ends up being
an obstacle to the realism needed to reduce the causes of crime.

Note:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/entertainmentstorydisplay.cfm?storyID=3552323&thesection=entertainment&thesubsection=film&thesecondsubsection=general