The Brave One is one of those films that by virtue of plot and shooting location have so many accidental connections to classic films or trends in criticism that comparisons just start piling on their reception. By now we are assured that it references Taxi Driver, is a feminist revenge fable, an artful exploitation flick, or a post-911 justice fantasy. When the dust settles, however, it is hard to distance the film from other classic revenge fantasies like Walking Tall, Death Wish, or Ms. 45, the latter film a benchmark in conscious exploitation.


Of course it is interesting to reflect on the idea that the Jodie Foster who once played an underaged hooker in Taxi Driver is now a popular editorial radio host a few blocks north. An odd bit of tradition history there. But once Foster gets the gun in her hand I am not sure this takes us anywhere further than a generic history repeating itself, this time the revenge fantasy divorced from the political and social logic ascribed to Travis Bickle. In this respect, The Brave One is precisely the sort of film we were warned against in A History of Violence, Foster’s outbursts of violence erotic flickers of power revealing themselves to the viewer as private moments of release. Perhaps a better context in which the film can be described is the still emerging “post-9/11 violence in New York” setting. This tradition probably reached an early apex at the end of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, which closes on a brutal image of self-inflicted violence, if not self-hatred. But a large part of post-9/11 New York filmmaking involves the violence of natural disaster, in which the city is leveled by giant monsters, floods, aliens (The Day After Tomorrow, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, I am Legend, etc…). Such films immediately link our residual awareness of 9/11 with reflections on life and death via Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Imagination of Disaster”:

“In the [sci-fi/apocalypse] films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.”

Here the destruction of New York becomes a way for its citizens to re-experience the awful imagination of their death and emerge from it unharmed. And such films would have us believe that we are all in some way citizens of post-9/11 New York. It seems in this case that The Brave One has far more in common with the new New York disaster film tradition than that of the 1970's revenge flick. Her character survives her initial trauma alone, survives the further disaster of revenge, and moves on with her life. The conclusion of Sontag’s essay on science fiction and disaster films perfectly describes Foster’s character arc:

“[W]e live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large ration by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors—real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic, dangerous situations which have last minute happy endings.”

There was an explosion of revenge cinema during and after the Vietnam War, the American conscience dealing with itself through Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and eventually Rambo. And at first glimpse The Brave One is well within this genre, part of a number of films that may be similarly related to our current war in Iraq (e.g., in the first Walking Tall the protagonist is a former professional wrestler, in the 2004 remake he is an Iraq veteran). But the difference between past revenge cinema and the recent post-9/11 films such as The Brave One is the way they access Sontag’s commentary on disaster and apocalypse. As revenge films, they are linked to the catastrophe of 9/11, an apocalypse of Sontagian proportions, and thus just as much about revenge as they are about the themes Sontag addresses in her essay. The central scene in 25th Hour takes place with its two main characters looking down at the World Trade Center footprint, placing the film in its shadow. Likewise, the difference between Taxi Driver and The Brave One are not the suggested feminist tones of the latter, but the different space in which it takes place. The side effect of this convergence between the revenge and disaster film in post-9/11 New York is that they are now open to Sontag’s ultimate critique of the sci-fi apocalypse, certainly true of The Brave One:

“What I am suggesting is that the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the emblem of an inadequate response.”

At least this is more true of The Brave One than it is a number of films Sontag levels with that criticism.