A fight can break out for any number of reasons. Once, in a grade school hallway, I watched a nerdy kid snap at his bully. The bully had spent the past year relentlessly picking at and teasing him, haunting him with a dark obsession. The nerdy boy had finally had enough; he came loose. He exploded with a desperate, keening aggression, his arms swinging wildly in front of him. He had no form at all, only energy and rage escaping violently from his body.
For some, to get into a fight means to lose control. For others, the control remains. Manhunt’s main character, James Earl Cash, despite being trapped in a sick man’s snuff film, maintains control. We feel this control, as we exact violence upon others through him.
When I finally got into a fistfight in middle school against another boy who had been shoving me during a game of pickup basketball, I was the one who lost control. We circled each other in the middle of the court, the other boys standing back, waiting at the precipice of our impending action. The other boy hung across from me, quiet, calm, intent on victory. Meanwhile, I shouted at him and tried to fill the air between us, screaming like a wounded animal. All at once, he reached across with a quick jab that connected with my nose and cut my screams short. Time rushed forward then, and the fight was suddenly over. Later, I cradled my swollen face, ashamed to my core that I had not even managed to throw a punch.
1974’s Death Wish is a film about a New York real-estate agent, Paul Kersey, who loses his mind after his wife and daughter are assaulted by a group of thugs. Played by a prune-face Charles Bronson, Kersey spends the rest of the film lashing out against imagined foes. He walks the garbage-strewn, graffiti-tagged streets of 1970s Manhattan, gunning down the poor and marginalized young men around him, justified by their apparent criminal behavior. He cannot stop, even as the state slowly rouses to curtail his chaotic rampage. He spends night after night stalking the dregs of the city, trapped by his own abjection.
In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes that “...the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject. It is experienced at the peak of its strength when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identity with something on the outside, finds the impossible within.” Kersey is driven toward this impossible space of abjection, away from his liberal morals, after his world is violently intruded upon and his meaning systems shattered.
Our abjection lives on the frontiers of our socially acceptably identities. There is a dark and terrifying universe beyond the borders of our self-ascribed limits, one in which you might find “...a hatred which smiles.”
Manhunt sits within this realm of abjection. Though Cash never smiles, he clearly revels in his violent delights. Egged on by a voice in his ear that urges him to kill and to maim, he haunts the streets of Carcer City, leaping out from the shadows to strangle, impale, and eviscerate the unlucky riff raff left scattered in his wake like mice before a boa constrictor.
The fantasy of Manhunt is in the feeling of control, of power, in spite of one’s self-evident disempowerment. Cash is powerless to save his family in Manhunt, just as Kersey in Death Wish is unable to protect his. The unaccountable forces of cruel chaos will have their unyielding way. But these men are still granted license to act, to take lives, to brutalize others. They are empowered within a narrow space of violence. Cash is tightly controlled and given orders by The Director, played with slimy flair by Brian Cox. The Director runs this “game,” and has trapped Cash within it, supplying him with human trash to eradicate, bounded within carefully crafted arenas, and immortalized by ever-present video cameras.
“I experience abjection,” Kristeva writes, “only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me.’ Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession, cause me to be.”
Prior to the final mission of Manhunt, The Director cannot be touched. Instead, he lives vicariously through Cash’s psychosexual mutilations of the freaks stuck in his playpen, the meat to be sawed through, to be taken apart piece by piece while the camera films from a few inches away.
In Death Wish, Kersey strolls through dark alleyways, affecting a casualness that belies his trembling eagerness. He finds a body who fits the description, a mugger, perhaps, or a purse snatcher, and he opens up the front of his full length overcoat and squeezes out a few precise shots from his .22, creating holes where there were none before.
In Manhunt, Cash looms from the shadows, appearing behind his befuddled prey. He grabs them, jams the cleaver in their gut, the meat hook in their chest, or wraps the garrote around their neck, twisting it around until their head flies off with a pop. The camera feed cuts back to the player’s view and we see the gore speckled floors and walls, the grisly aftermath.
It looks like control, like harnessed rage. The calculating bully squared off against the wild and unrefined victims, who expose their bellies unknowingly to the cleaver while they spout the nasty barks that justify their imminent slaughter. These are, after all, humanity’s dregs: fools, rapists, the mentally incompetent. They flail and run after you, slashing at your back. They are frightened and excited and loose and alive. But they are no match for Cash’s smiling hatred, his fatal focus.
Inside Cash’s seeming control, though, is a man who is barely holding on. Inside the bully is the frightened and alienated man. Being spotted makes the music raise and speed up. Cash scrambles away from the spotlight, his pulse banging loudly in our ears, rattling against the walls of his cage. He wants to scream, to fly apart, to combust, to be reduced to ashes. But he is possessed in totality by The Director’s abject demand. He must go back out there, to sever and dismember, to not simply maim, but execute. Even after he destroys The Director’s body, Cash cannot truly be free of his violent directives. He is cursed to keep trudging forward, extending his lethality outward, ceaselessly bludgeoning the world.
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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.