Hey, we’re back!
It was fun getting together with Andy and his brother Mark of the Rip, Borrow, Steal pod to talk about Death Wish (2018) to kick off this new run of 7 Levels episodes. We spent a lot of time on the superior OG though and that was necessary because it’s a much better movie.
So first, you’ve got a kick-ass listen.
Then -
Up top we’ve got the high-falutin analysis of the story - which I wrote a long time ago.
We’ve also got a bunch of words about my favorite guy in the whole movie, Stuart Margolin.
Lastly, I kick a few ideas around about the United HealthCare CEO assassination and Luigi Mangione because I think it’s an incredibly tidy inversion of Death Wish and wow, what a shocker!
Paul Kersey, one man rendered twice, reflects the fears of two Americas in a state of decay: the peeling lead paint of 1974 New York and the insulated affluence of 2018 North Shore Chicago. Each Kersey is a man caught in larger tides and his struggles within these massive forces reveal matters of scale and perspective in the 1974 film that exist only as grim mockery in 2018.
The first Kersey, fully mapped by director Michael Winner, inhabits the decaying streets of New York, his world of ordered architecture and success marred at the edges by chaos and the general teetering of the country post Watergate. A random act of violence—long recognized as a growing if impersonal trend by his fellow professionals—leaves his wife stunningly dead and his daughter broken, catatonic. Here, early on, Kersey is no hunter; just one of the herd that has seen their little pocket of ambition and success annihilated by the chaos on the other side of every door.
Fast forward to 2018, and a new Kersey emerges, molded by the safe confines of elite suburban Chicago. Eli Roth directs and recasts Kersey as a man out for a precise retribution. The violence that invades his home is not random but targeted, cleanly written into the story as if each player were a domino waiting to fall. Where Bronson’s Kersey moved toward vengeance through layers of trauma and transformation, Willis’s journey is the definition of pattern. His suburban life is reduced to rubble while ineffective police work makes him further doubt his commitment to society. Finally, his resolve to kill is established after a hack bromide from his father-in-law and a few sweaty weeks of devolving in his basement via “Guntube” versions of self-help and conservative talk propaganda.
Though he was clearly on the downside of his working career and the aphasia which caused his retirement from film and public life had no doubt begun to take a major toll, Willis flat portrayal of Kersey neatly if unintentionally mirrors so much of what has come to be understood as the “plight” of many modern men who spend a lot of time on the internet thinking about things.
Generally undisturbed in their suburban idylls these American archetypes *love* to consume massive doses of violence and propaganda. Luckily for Roth, this is a movie and an early celebratory family outing conveniently allows the valet (part of the violent North Shore break-in ring that kills his wife and puts his daughter in a coma) access to Willis’ home address. In a weirder, better take on the franchise update, we might’ve been treated to Elizabeth Shue and the daughter character growing increasingly concerned over Dad’s retreat to InfoWars and Louder with Crowder as he dissociates in the basement.
Bronson’s New York is chaotic, a city bursting at the seams and his professional Kersey is immersed in it. Willis, on the other hand and despite his primary role as a busy ER doc in urban Chicago, exists in a world far removed from disorder, his pristine suburban bubble burst by an improbable incursion of evil(tm). In a lot of very sick ways it is the fantasy of many who imagine themselves heroes in a world that has thankfully yet to materially challenge their courage. And, despite Roth dutifully killing the wife and traumatizing the daughter, the movie still absolutely REEKS as suburban terror fantasy throughout. Whether it’s the usual ick of James Dobson drenched Daddy / Daughter dynamics or Willis’ mutely watching various internet personalities teach him how to cover his bumbling tracks - it feels like the reheated Kiefer in 24 story every chud dad tells themselves of how they’d “do what needs to be done.”
Every matter of tone underscores the cinematic divergence. Winner’s direction, while steeped in the full-on racial and cultural prejudices of our era, carries the somber weight of a director grappling with the futility and intensity of revenge. Roth, instead, crafts a tale peppered with nods to the audience and the type of absurd gore and slapstick violence that turn Kersey’s plight into serial spectacle. Where Winner asks us to feel the weight of Kersey’s transformation in unsettling ways and ask questions about where this is all leading, Roth gives us a wink, a miraculous bowling ball kill and a side of brake fluid torture.
In the end, even the movies’ resolutions part ways. Bronson’s Kersey is banished from New York with a whisper of ambiguity by knowing cops and politicians who would just prefer he no longer be “their problem.” He is no hero but a man adrift, his revenge ready to be picked up through sequel after sequel where the only question is: Who deserves it today?
Willis’ Kersey finds himself wrapped in the comforting, catered embrace of modern storytelling: triumphant, justified with his actions neatly boxed in a moral framework that leaves no room for anything but legally acquired firearms, a strong interpretation of Castle Doctrine and a comically concealed AR.
Now Here’s Several Hundred Words of Praise for Stuart Margolin’s Genius Level Performance.
In the deserts of Arizona, under a sky vast and indifferent, Paul Kersey met a man named Ames Jainchill. It was not fate that brought them together but rather the relentless constraints of capitalism. In the aftermath of his wife’s murder, Kersey’s firm was in a twist over this stubborn developer Jainchill, with his easy charm and his demands for old ways. He seemed the kind of man born to the open spaces—someone who (we come to appreciate) saw in guns not violence but a freedom. To him, a gun was not just a weapon but a talisman of a better, purer life. And so, with no more thought than a man tossing seed to the wind, Jainchill handed Kersey a classic revolver.
Kersey had once vowed to never touch a gun, haunted by the hunting accident that claimed his father’s life he had maintained his principles even through a stint in the Korean war. But Jainchill, with his private gun club and comfortable confidence, unlocked something buried deep in Kersey—a proficiency, a history, a dormant part of himself. It was not a push or some blaring advertisement, but an invitation, and in accepting the revolver, Kersey crossed a line he could never retreat from. Gone was the man who decided to build.
And yet, Jainchill was no villain. His gift was one of kindness, born of admiration for a man he thought might use it to reclaim himself and his confidence from unspeakable tragedy. He had no idea that he was arming a man who would return to New York to walk its streets at night, revolver in hand, baiting the desperate and the cruel into final encounters.
Jainchill was of another America (in his own mind, at least) and it was one where the answer to chaos was control, and the final symbol of that control was the relative safety of a gun. According to him, this Nation could (and should) be summed up in the neat weekly script of hundreds of episodes of Gunsmoke - not random break-ins and assaults by tweaker Jeff Goldblum “painting mouths” and whatnot.
In the new America of 2018, there is no Ames Jainchill. Paul Kersey, as imagined by Eli Roth, does not need a mentor. He needs only a computer screen and a collection of internet tutorials. His transformation is swift, impersonal, and wholly his own. What is lost, in the absence of Jainchill, is the human connection that makes Kersey’s arc in the original Death Wish feel tragic rather than transactional. Jainchill’s presence gave Kersey’s violence context, showing the audience how easily one man’s arrogant faith in self-reliance could feed another’s descent into vigilantism.
Jainchill’s absence in the remake is a symptom of a broader shift. The gun is no longer handed down from a friend’s outstretched hand as part of a larger relationship but paid for in the anonymity of a “Guns R Us,” scavenged from the criminal underworld, or increasingly just printed on demand.
The act of re-embracing violence, so painstakingly nurtured in the 1974 film, becomes a given in 2018—a default setting for a bland man stripped of his illusions of safety. Without Jainchill, there is no reflection or reckoning with the cost to the man, Kersey, of that choice.
And then there’s Luigi…
Because of the lag between recording and publishing we were reminded of Death Wish in stunning - real world - detail.
In this real-world inversion, the faceless violence of a corporation—embodied in policies, decisions, and systemic practices of profit—becomes the inciting force, culminating in a very deliberate act of retribution against a single, identifiable figure.
In Death Wish, the violence begins with random chaos: a home invasion with no forewarning, no personal motive, and no arrests. This externalization of blame is a key feature of the original Death Wish: the inability to confront the specific perpetrators forces Kersey into an ongoing crusade against the environment he believes has failed.
By contrast, the UnitedHealthcare shooting represents a shocking inversion. The inciting force—the associated “violence” of corporate bureaucracy and claim denials—is anything but random. It is systemic, faceless, and yet deeply personal in its impacts. Policies and practices, carried out by the machine of a corporation dedicated to profit above all, ripple outward, causing financial and emotional suffering to hundreds and hundreds of individuals - by some estimates causing thousands of American deaths annually.
The shooter, in this case, bypasses the facelessness of the system and assigns responsibility directly to its most visible figurehead, the CEO. Unlike Kersey’s baited killing of random street-level criminals, this act is pointed and deeply targeted in a world where the violence begins with cruel fate but continues through an algorithm calling itself order and represented by people who take lots of money for the work of denying care.
Does the targeted nature of the CEO’s killing or the class background of alleged killer Mangione strip away the veneer of mythic heroism from the vigilante figure? Or does it, in the same twisted sense as the original film, bring to light the present failures of systemic accountability, forcing a desperate individual to impose their own justice?
The narratives we craft about violence, revenge, and control are not just funhouse reflections of our fears but blueprints for how we rationalize them. Jainchill’s revolver was meant to be a largely symbolic gift of self-reliance, but in the hands of Kersey—and, metaphorically, in the hands of a society steeped in these myths—it has become a weapon of wild-sown destruction.
Similarly, the corporate structures that create so-called faceless harm in the name of efficiency and profit provoke revolutionary questions about the lines between those experiencing this grinding, systemic violence and their level of response.
The obvious realization? Our society should be far more careful with seeds strewn about in the name of profit—the harvest may be more than we can bear.
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