What Beef and Thomas Kyd have in common
Revenge fantasies offer us an outlet for our very human desire to get even
For this month’s edition of The Revealer, my quarterly column is about revenge fantasies. I had a lot of fun writing this one particularly because it was an excuse to watch Beef on Netflix, which has stirred up a fair share of controversy but is also one of the best portrayals of revenge and a non-linear path to something like forgiveness that I’ve ever seen.
One weirdly unexpected side effect of spending a year writing a book about the limits of forgiveness and surviving a pandemic is that I’ve also developed a late in life tolerance for horror films, which I previously couldn’t stomach, and lots of horror movies are also stories of revenge. In fact, I finally saw Midsommar this year and found it so compelling in its depiction of revenge I watched it twice in a row. So in this column, I also went back to the inspiration for many horror and revenge films, Renaissance and Jacobean revenge plays. If you’ve never seen Julie Taymor’s film of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, it’s worth tracking down, because most Shakespeare festivals won’t even touch that play due to it being so very gruesome. But it’s just one of many depictions of revenge that allow us an outlet for our rage when we’re wronged, which is how revenge fantasies should work.
Here’s a snippet below, and you can read the whole thing at this link.
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, or, every woman’s revenge fantasy when she’s giving a paper at a conference and a man says, “I don’t have a question so much as an observation” and then drones on and on and on… sorry, what were we talking about?
Driving can be dangerous, and driving can be rage-inducing. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you may allow your imagination to run wild, possibly to violent places. That’s the premise of the new Netflix series Beef, which spirals from a driver honking and giving the finger into an incident of road rage so severe it becomes an operatic tale of revenge.
Beef creator Lee Sung Jin told Forbes that the series was inspired by his own road rage episode, when he started to follow a driver who cursed at him. But Lee quickly changed his mind and drove off, unlike Beef character Danny, played by Stephen Yeun. Danny’s fragile mental health snaps after Ali Wong’s Amy pisses him off in a parking lot, inciting a car chase and bitter fallout, unfolding over ten episodes that depict elaborate and violent paths of revenge that few of us will ever follow.
Beef has sucked in so many viewers because it allows us to live out the fantasy that we can extract justice from our enemies and maybe even get away with it. Like many other revenge stories, Beef has a religious subplot that delves into the complex ties between race and religion in Los Angeles’s Korean Christian communities. If revenge is the opposite of religious teachings about forgiveness, it’s also something we’re culturally and socially discouraged from pursuing. What revenge movies and TV shows do is to provide an outlet for our desire to get even or settle the score with people who’ve done us harm. The longing for revenge is deeply human, but we constantly suppress it so that our lives don’t turn into chaos. Because religion so often focuses on revenge as a moral wrong, revenge stories also give us a guilt-free way to imagine what our own acts of revenge might be like. While we might not escalate our own revenge fantasies to the scale that Beef does, movies and shows that depict someone getting even can provide a socially acceptable way for us to imagine our own acts of revenge.