That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

The deaths of 20 million people over a bit less than 30 years (I'm using the Great Big Book of Horrible Things' count here), vs. 400 years of systemic racism...

You want an answer on which is worse? Well, here it is. You ever watch Cape Fear? Which version, you ask?

In the 1962 version, Robert Mitchum's Max Cady is a psychopath who gets out of jail and decides to make life Hell for the man whose testimony sent him there. His method: a campaign of harassment designed to torment Sam Bowden and his family while remaining within the letter of the law as much as possible. He likens it to L'eng Tche, the ancient Chinese execution method that involves making hundreds of cuts, drawing out the condemned's pain as much as possible before finally killing him. He will make your life Hell, and if he has to break the law, he does it in such a way that he's not likely to be arrested (like, killing your dog, or raping a friend). And he won't even raise his voice when he does so.

In the 1991 version, Robert DeNiro's Max Cady is also a psychopath who decides to torment Sam Bowden and his family, often doing what he can to remain within the law, but when he's not, he's FAR more brutal: in this version, Bowden isn't just the man whose testimony put him in jail, he's Cady's former lawyer who sabotaged his own case because the crime he was accused of was that brutal (apparently, at the time, prior sexual history was admissible and could have not only lessened his sentence, but kept him out of jail entirely). And when we see his violence, he's almost like an animal. When he rapes the family friend, he also breaks her arm and bites a chunk of skin off her face.

And I know what you're asking: what the fuck does this have to do with anything? Well, which is worse: the soft-spoken sadist who will do everything he can to both fuck over you and your family and evade any prosecution, or the more animalistic sadist who has more of a chance of slipping up because of said brutality (and even has a backstory that's kinda sorta sympathetic if you kind of squint and remember "oh, right, the rape laws in the 1970s South were kinda shit and Bowden could probably have gotten him off if he followed said shitty laws")? I've seen both versions a couple times, and I legit can't answer that question.

All I can say is, if either one has you in his sights, you are fucked. And comparing a dictator who killed 20 million in 30 years, and a system that kept black people either in slavery or in a position close enough to slavery that it barely even matters that the 13th Amendment is a thing for four centuries is like trying to rank whether Mitchum's or DeNiro's Max Cadies are more evil. Except it's even worse, especially if you decide downplaying one set of crimes against humanity so you could attack the other one is a good means of attack. Maybe if we're counting a specific subtype of evil (like how Stalin had the sense to keep his brutality within the Soviet Union, but Nazi Germany hoped to conquer the world, or how Pol Pot managed to kill a third of the population of his nation in the span of three years or summat), but overall evil is kinda pointless to rank. Even as The Great Big Book of Horrible Things ranks events on their death toll in sheer numbers, it's clear that that's only part of the picture.