Kiss Me Deadly
The following letter was sent some time in the previous century.
Dear Mr. Carson,
I’d like to recommend an addition to your list of Films on Liberty and the State on the Mises Institute site. Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 film noir, has struck me as a very ingenious commentary on the nature of the state. Warning: spoilers below.
Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, is a sleazy private detective whose specialty is obtaining evidence in divorce cases by pimping his lover/secretary, Velda, to seduce the husband. One day Hammer picks up a frantic half-dressed girl on the highway, but before he could drop her off, a bunch of thugs capture them and send them off a cliff in his car. Hammer survives and starts his own investigation, which ultimately leads him to a mysterious box.
The striking comparison is between Hammer with his petty vices and character flaws, and the state with its A-bomb or whatever it was in that box, and its propensity to murder with impunity and without remorse. Hammer, mean and dangerous fellow that he is, pales in comparison to the evil affairs of state.
I figured out that Hammer was dealing with a political matter as soon as the corpses started piling up; did you? It was just too random, too impersonal, too professional.
In a way quite a few films noir, such as The Third Man, fit in this category. What happens when “private” morality is replaced by what passes for “public” morality, i.e. the sort of things that governments do? “Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving — forever? If I said you could have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money — without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”
Sincerely,
Dmitry C.