Troubling Justice

Taking its cue from the current popularity of the revenge tale, this article investigates the cultural functions that the revenge genre fulfils as a distinct way of worldmaking. Giorgos Lanthimos' film The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) serves as an exemplary case study for this purpose due to its complex engagement with revenge templates. A brief historical sketch of the revenge genre helps delineate how Lanthimos' film carefully up-dates generic conventions in its engagement with wounded masculinity, flawed bourgeois ideals of the good life, and the alienated world of modernity. The Killing of a Sacred Deer ultimately sets itself up as an operating theater dispassionately dissecting the anatomy of storied retributive violence through grotesque defamiliarization. Far from presenting violence as a cure for social or individual malaise, Lanthimos' references to mythic and religious templates suggest that the complexity of social life and violence resists neat translation into culturally available plots. Not only is the relationship between revenge and justice troubled in the film, but the narrative transformation of violence into vengeance and justice is also critically foregrounded. The discussion of the revenge genre in the article demonstrates how cultural narratology deepens our understanding of the cultural work performed by genres over time

Aesthetics · Art · Economic Justice · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Retributive justice · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism