I Lost My Ability to Joke About the South, ‘Vengeance’ Gave Me Hope It’s Not Gone for Good
In a Post Roe reality with frequent power outages and a commitment to the 2nd Amendment that enables school shootings, Texans have begun to seem more like potential refugees than people happily roping calves with their own ideas on independence. Vengeance lets Texas tell its side of the story - without overlooking its flaws.
The movie follows East Coast media luminary, Ben Manalowitz, as he gets gets roped (pun intended) into attending the funeral of Abilene Shaw, a woman he hooked up with and stored in his phone under “Texas.” Ben starts recording, believing that Abilene’s family, and their theory that her death wasn’t an accident, is his ticket to podcasting fame.
Ty Shaw, Abilene’s older brother and instantly endearing amalgamation of southern stereotypes gives Ben directions to the fictional Texas town “You know Abilene? Well Abilene is 3 hours from Dallas. We’re 5 hours from Abilene.”
As someone who spent 2 months in a town that could be found with almost the same directions, Vengeance felt like watching my life on replay. Ben gets his rental Prius blown up for cheering for the wrong football team, I had a rock thrown at my VW Beetle for having California plates. Suffice to say, the prejudices and condescensions BJ Novak’s character held for Texans were also my own.
It’s difficult to think of Texas as a place in crisis, with victims of politics in addition to perpetrators. It’s easy to think of Texans and other southerners that suffer from the same abundance of confidence in their problematic way of life as stupid and therefore deserving of the injustices their culture promotes.
Ashton Kutcher’s slightly overwritten role as a brilliant billionaire with a belt buckle music producer says it best when he tells Ben, “The problem isn’t that these people aren’t smart, the problem is that they are.”
The best parts of Vengeance are the parts that help you understand that the people in the film have complex feelings about where they live, and while they have unconditional love for Texas, it’s not built on a lack of awareness. Ty tells Ben “It’s the most wretched place I’ve ever been and I’d never leave.”
It’s hard to blame people for feeling this way about home. The characters in the film criticize Shindler’s List for being “the most depressing Liam Neeson film” but Ben didn’t know that Texas lost at the Alamo. The balance this film strikes between two types of ignorance gives the comedy in the film a middle ground. The result is the first film I’ve seen this year where there where audible laughs in the theater throughout the entire movie. Those laughs are important. I wrote off Texas and everyone in it the minute I got on the plane back to New York in Dallas, but just like Whataburger, Texans and their vision of American will always be “right there.” So we might as well find a way to work with it.
Vengeance often loses focus while trying to rant about too many subjects, it also indulges Ben’s character too much to be believable, with an ending that places him as the hero in a way that feels closer to commentary than reality. While it’s not a perfect film, it is an enjoyable one, and it might even might make you think twice about cutting off your Southern relatives.
