The Punisher: Guns and Moral Clarity
In my recent review of Netflix’s Cobra Kai, I lamented the third season seemed confused about its opinion of violence and whether there are or are not predictable consequences for it. I then recalled another Netflix show, one without even a hint of confusion on its moral stance — The Punisher.
Season one was released in 2017 and in the first week of its release, its moral message, specifically regarding violence and the role of firearms, was noticed by reviewers of all types. However, after seeing it, I found many of the popular reviews of the show baffling. They all seemed to have a similar spin: The Punisher was good, but it missed the opportunity to “make a statement” about guns. These assessments do not hold water.
Message 1: Villains are people, but still need to be stopped
Most of the angry reviewers focused on Lewis Walcott (played by Australian actor Daniel Webber), a war veteran badly afflicted with PTSD. After shooting at his father when awakened from a nightmare, Lewis digs a foxhole in the backyard and lives in it. In February. In New York.
Everyone tries to help Lewis: his father, who is also a veteran and loves his son, and Curtis, who runs the Veteran’s group. But it gets bad for Lewis. Real bad. And the same people who patted him on the back and thanked him for his service are the same ones to point their fingers at him and call him a terrorist… while doing nothing to stop him. He was a young man in tremendous pain. But he was dangerous and had to be stopped by a man equally armed and equally trained.
Message 2: The People in Charge are the Biggest Monsters of All
The show states clearly on multiple occasions: Guns hurt the people who use them. Those invisible scars are happily ignored by the people who give the orders, the ones who make the policies, and the ones who so condescendingly speak about “those people” who have the nerve to own guns, all while paying underlings to do violence on their behalf.
We saw that theme repeated in several episodes with quotes like, “I point, you shoot,” and “Men like me do the planning; men like you do the dirty work.” We saw it in the actions of an anti-gun Congressmen who waxed philosophic about violence begetting violence, sneering down his nose at a security contractor for using guns as part of his profession… and then hiring that same man to protect him, and fire those guns if necessary.
Finally, we saw that theme at a Veteran’s support group, where one man used the trauma of his fellow veterans to promote his own political agenda. This man was himself a veteran, but he served the way I did… at a desk.
He lied and claimed to have been in battle, to carry the psychological and physical scars of doing violence to others, using those fictional scars as justification for his angry rhetoric… rhetoric that seeped into Lewis’s mind and gave him a mission — something he had been missing since coming home from combat.
Message 3: The Truth ain’t Pretty. But it Must be Told
Frank tells us that it is the silence that comes after the gunfire that can be most frightening of all, and we see how true that can be. We also see the effects of violence that continue long after the guns fall silent and the terrible cost of humans treating other humans as tools.
That lesson seems to have been lost on the New York-based content writers who watched this show hoping for some insight into the Las Vegas shooter, or the California shooter, or any of the other ones that are coming in ever-faster succession. They were so intent on searching for their own narrative, they missed the one that was in front of their faces.
So yeah, The Punisher had plenty to say about guns. It just wasn’t what you wanted to hear.