What: Abduction Narratives Part One Genre Conflict

Among other things, Holiday is an abduction narrative.  Generally, the worst that can happen in these stories is death.  But this plot is informed by the Helen myth where rape is the limit of the threat because Anne is to be sold -- pure object commodification -- thus the goods need to have not suffered too greatly in transit.

Her journey is a dark, challenging one that spirals down into a hallucinogenic nightmare, then winds back out into Reality with real consequences -- an adolescent Alice through the looking glass in all its brutal adult horror.

The abduction of women as an opportunity to create a bit of entertainment is creepy, as in perverse creepy.  Yet the "loss of a loved one" revenge plot has always been a crowd fave.  Liam, Bronson, all those guys have made millions doing those stories -- all the way back to the Greeks.  The only way the modern genre works, however, is if the audience knows who was good and who was evil -- at heart -- by the end of the film (the Greeks were much more ambiguous about this distinction).  These stories reinforce the idea that revenge leads to justice.  I assert revenge only leads to death and chaos.

Good, honest, self-righteous justice is served when Liam murders 47 people to get to the bad guy's inner liar in order to save his daughter from being sold into the sex trade (well, a rather tarted-up version, I'd say -- I don't know for certain, but I think the reality is much uglier, much more like what we created in Holiday).  But the truth is all those "bad guys" Liam killed where just people.  Perhaps they were all hired by an evil mastermind because they were generally incompetent with firearms (or so it would seem), but in any case, they were people with families, moms, dads.  But their murder is justified, yes?

Culturally, this is dangerous.  Any injustice perceived is then righteous cause for revenge to the death.  We love these stories and I even enjoy a good revenge tale now and then as a guilty pleasure, but they validate acts of unspeakable violence by assurances of easily defined good and evil characters.