Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Existentialist Gangsters

The protagonists of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Massacre at Paris are obvious fictional models for their close contemporary, Gerolamo Vano. A more anachronistic prototype is the twentieth-century existentialist gangster, hero of films like Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1954), Jean-Paul Melville's The Red Circle (1970), and more recently Michael Mann’s Heat (1995).[1] These films depict a world in which women are deeply threatening to male moral autonomy, and relationships between men are the only real source of value and meaning. Moreover, that meaning resides in restraint and control, in what you refuse to say or reveal, but instead communicate indirectly through the subtext of a gesture or phrase. It is no accident that each of the three films I just mentioned has at its core a long, virtually silent sequence depicting highly concentrated, co-ordinated (and criminal) actions carried out by groups of men. Conspiracy is their version of intimacy.

According to Jerry Palmer, the thriller lionises

a personality that is isolated and competitive and who wins because he is better adapted to the world than anyone else. This superiority is incarnated in acts that are deliberately and explicitly deviant, and yet justified. The individuality, the personal worth of the hero is presented as inseparable from the performance of actions that in any other circumstances would be reprehensible.[2]

Palmer is writing from a Marxist perspective, perhaps with films like Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) in mind. The heist movies referred to above work differently. Although they too assume a conflict between individual and society, they, like Vano and game theorists, are deeply fatalistic. The individual always loses. The protagonist’s idiosyncratic morality is pointless and ultimately self-destructive, or even self-sacrificial.

There are very obvious ways in which Vano is not an ‘existential gangster’. He is certainly deadpan, but hardly reticent, and his reports entirely lack the focus and momentum of a modern thriller. It is not an accident that we know little of his inner life, and Vano's silence on such matters does not constitute a refusal - or rather a renunciation, and therefore a choice - in the way that the studied blankness of Alain Delon in The Red Circle does.

To use such an anachronistic frame of reference is therefore a calculated risk. It balances possibilities for greater insight against possibilities for misunderstanding. It both stimulates the imagination and offers false solutions. But, if used deliberately and self-consciously, it does not suppress difference. Rather, it invites comparison.



I LOST, ANYWAY.

[1] Robert Warshow, ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’, 1948, sets out some of the genre rules and assumptions.
[2] Quoted in Tony Barley, Taking Sides: the fiction of John le Carré, 1986, p. 7.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Rationality

The modern, secular notion of rationality assumes that decisions are taken by autonomous individuals on the basis of calculation of interest, and ‘interest’ is usually interpreted in reductive, materialist terms. A person’s goal will always be to maximise profit, while success is only possible at the expense of competitors. If you win, this means somebody else has to lose. This zero-sum version of rationality lies behind game theory. It describes a world based on the idea of free choices, but it is also deeply fatalistic. As a player, you make a choice to see the world in a certain way – that is, to accept a given set of rules – and this creates the conditions that lead to your downfall. It is the Prisoner’s Dilemma writ large.[1] Once you have divided the world into winners and losers, you know that eventually, no matter how many times you win, one day you are going to lose.

Is this how Gerolamo Vano thought? It is true that many people in seventeenth-century Venice did not make choices on this basis. Even when they tried to ‘maximise profit’, they did so in ways that did not fit the modern notion of rationality at all. For example, many Venetians prayed to the saints and used magic to achieve their goals. (It is worth pointing out here that any notion of rationality is based on specific assumptions about causation. For example, prayer is rational if you believe that God controls the universe and may intervene in it. Whether or not this prior belief is also rational is, of course, a separate question.)

My defence to the charge of anachronism on this point is that I am following Vano’s lead. It is Vano who eliminates religion. It is Vano who reduces people to isolated individuals, rendered vulnerable by their failure to understand the real, hidden motivations of others. It is Vano who suppresses any hint of a moral critique or a broader political theory.

[1] The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ describes a situation typical in game theory, of which there are numerous variants. In its classic form, two prisoners involved in the same crime are awaiting trial. They are isolated and unable to communicate with each other. There is not enough evidence to convict either of them without a confession. If neither man co-operates, both will be released. If one man co-operates, then he will be pardoned in exchange for the conviction of the other. If both men co-operate, then both will be convicted, but they will receive reduced sentences. Hence the Prisoner’s Dilemma is: Should he co-operate? His calculation of the risks involved in not doing so depends on how much he trusts his associate.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The First Chapter

Pistols! Treason! Murder! begins as follows:  

Gerolamo Vano died in mid-air, on a gallows, between the columns at the entrance to Piazza San Marco in Venice, the site of public executions under the Venetian republic. .... The place where Vano died is now an empty piece of sky, but if you stand between the columns and reach up—as high as you can—your fingertips might brush the spot where his kicking feet once passed, marking out an irregular spiral. Its limits were set by the arc of the rope from which he dangled, and its central, zero point was reached only when his body stopped moving. 

What glory is there in a common good, That hangs for every peasant to achieve? That like I best that flies beyond my reach.  

The final three lines are a quotation from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris, which was published in an unauthorised, pirated copy in 1593, the year of Marlowe’s murder. Throughout Pistols! Treason! Murder!, many similar fragments of literary dialogue are intercut with the narration (as above), or with quotations from Vano’s surveillance reports. 

Marlowe, Shakespeare and their contemporaries were also, of course, contemporaries of Gerolamo Vano, which might be reason enough to juxtapose their words, even if there were not striking similarities in tone and theme between the two kinds of source, as yesterday’s discussion of The Revenger’s Tragedy suggests. But I chose this particular quotation because it alludes to Tantalus, who was condemned by the gods to reach towards a goal that will always remain outside his grasp. It may also bring to mind the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden, whose fruit is attainable, but only at great cost. 

Juxtaposing this layered image with that of Vano’s corpse on the gallows is not entirely original: the same idea underlies the famous protest song, Strange Fruit. But is it Vano speaking here, overreaching himself fatally in his quest for power? Or are these words spoken by the narrator (also, perhaps, overreaching himself), to whom Vano is the elusive object of historical knowledge? The dual attribution – the words ‘belong’ both to Vano and to the narrator – also suggests a possible comparison between Vano’s relationship to early seventeenth-century political culture and my own relationship to early twenty-first century academic culture. Vano is not only my subject: he is my hero, my exemplar – and my warning. 

It is also fitting that the first interpolated piece of dialogue in Pistols! Treason! Murder! (not counting the book’s title, which comes from The Revenger’s Tragedy, as I explained yesterday) is a quotation, not only from a play by Christopher Marlowe – who is compared directly with Vano in chapter 2 – but also from a play that only survives in a pirated copy, probably transcribed from scribbled notes taken by a member of the audience during a performance. As with the doubtful authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy, the play text of The Massacre at Paris itself embodies the kind of garbled transmission and epistemological confusion that also characterise Vano’s surveillance reports. Indeed, the lines quoted here are virtually the only surviving fragment that rises above the level of clumsy doggerel. 

One might reasonably ask whether it is realistic to expect the average reader to be aware of these multiple allusions, but this is the wrong question. It is a principle of good writing - and not only writing: design and illustration also - that it communicates its point directly and emphatically to the casual reader, but that it also rewards sustained attention with additional layers of meaning. In choosing quotations to intercut with my narrative, the rule was that they had to be explicable to anyone who knew nothing of their source, but that they also had to offer additional nuances to anyone who cared to check their original context (which is always referenced in the notes at the back of the book). 

Thanks to Dan Hallett, who created the illustration above especially for this post.