A Film Canon

Fury documents a transformation in urban subjectivity, from the reasonable, sympathetic family man, to the paranoid, antisocial individualist. This is effected by an explication of the American government as so many lynch mobs (or gangsters); or, alternatively, of a porosity between established and lynch justice encompassing various political, commercial, psychopathological and, ultimately, media-inflected interests, as if the most basic motivation for attempting to hang and burn innocent protagonist Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) were a dearth of entertainment. Hence Wilson's outrage at the extent to which the newsreel footage of the event contributes to its logic - "a crowd can get a kick out of watching a man burn to death!" - as well as Lang's attempt to re-imbue such documentation with its objective, forensic potential, as evinced in his elaboration of the courtroom drama, and, more radically, to reorient entertainment to an extent that is tantamount to subversion. The latter finds most striking expression in the virtual absence of Wilson from the second half of the film, as he engineers things so as to bring the culprits to a trial predicated on his supposed death; or, more accurately, the deflection of subjectivity into style, as Wilson's vengeful, poetic embodiment of the terror that he has perceived at the heart of American 'democracy' transforms him into yet another of Lang's disembodied masterminds, albeit without the convenient appellation of 'villain' that could be applied to those of German origin. Although the action is, at this point, restricted to Wilson's bedroom and the courtroom, the former absorbs the surrounding urban nightscape and then gathers that around the latter, as if to present a failed attempt to reify the amorphous infrastructures precluding justice. Despite the contrived resolution, this paranoia even encompasses Wilson's wife, whose insistence that he 'move on' just aligns her with these infrastructures, based, as it is, on an insidiously false distinction between real and attempted murder. In this light, her penultimate confession, that she would have preferred Wilson to be merely killed, rather than (stylistically) resurrected, has wider implications, suggesting that not even love can redeem him from the nation he has chosen to embody.