Hit Man and Modern Humans
“Do you really know yourself?” an awkward professor of psychology and philosophy asks his class in the new film Hit Man. In this case, the professor may not even know himself as well as he thinks. Played by Glen Powell, this professor (Gary) also moonlights for the police, posing as a hit man to help them catch people looking to hire contract killers. In his role, Gary tries on all kinds of disguises and makes personalities to go along with them. But does he, and can he, actually become another person? A better person? And could that other person actually kill someone?
In real life, Gary is boring. But in the role of hit man, a character he crafts anew for each suspect, he can be very interesting. Having discovered this talent, Gary discovers something else when he poses as “Ron.” Ron is not just an alleged hit man, he is a man women want to hit on. He soon ends up in a relationship with a would-be client. While living as Ron, our main character has, and also is, more fun than ever before. It is another rom-com, but because it’s directed by Richard Linklater, it also asks some serious questions between the one-liners.
Hit Man brings Freud into the script. Gary has a supercharged superego and Ron is almost all id. According to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, civilization relies on us all constantly warring with our love and death instincts to keep them in check. It makes us neurotic, but there’s little alternative because humans are social creatures and our instincts threaten to rip society apart. Should Gary become Ron? Is Ron wrong for real life? Hit Man suggests we each find a balance between Gary and Ron. We should neither completely thwart our instincts nor give them full control. When a student interprets Nietzsche’s work to suggest that “you have to live passionately and on your own terms,” Gary says “absolutely.” But he also drives a Civic.
Like the city at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, with its many layers, Hit Man operates on more than one level, taking us deeper into the question of murder and modern humans. What if our destructive instincts are not always harmful to societal harmony, but are sometimes the thing it is built on? What if, sometimes, the right thing to do is to kill? What if all our societal happiness and refined civilization is actually built on a foundation of sometimes killing people?
Murder is a real conundrum for modern humans. Officially, we are against it. All of our rules say so. We want to live in a world where it does not happen and we endeavor to make that true. Murder seems primal and basic and quite different from our environment of carpool lanes, being careful about other people’s nut allergies. and watching Masterclass videos. But genetically, we are not so different from people who drowned suspected witches, left weak infants to die of exposure, or carried out vendettas of facial scarring. Underneath the surface, 16 million men today are related to Genghis Khan… We are the same species that built the pyramids at Tenochtitlan and practiced human sacrifice there. Most of us will never be involved in a murder, but we cannot get enough of them on screens or in podcasts. Only Murders in the Building combines both.
Francisco Goya, El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (1814)
In another classroom scene, Gary asks two groups of students what to do with a hypothetical violent and dangerous person. The groups are to answer from the perspective of different human eras. The modern-day jury group decides that life without parole is best, they don’t see a need to kill the criminal. As Gary says, “how very modern of you.” But the students asked to answer as Paleolithic nomads without a legal system have decided that they need to eliminate the dangerous person for the sake of their own survival. According to Gary, recent scholarship suggests decisions like this “play a larger part in our social evolution than previously thought. This impulse to weed out these destabilizing forces is likely a dark thread in our historical DNA.” Some killings “protected social coherence and norms but also eliminated a certain kind of abusive and uncooperative person from the gene pool.”
In Gary’s case, pretending to be Ron gets real when his new girlfriend’s ex tries to hire a hit man (spoilers ahead). Ron doesn’t kill him, but the new girlfriend does. Then Gary has to decide whether or not to share this information with the police and what to do about the one cop who seems to be on to them. Could killing someone be the best way to get a happy ending for everyone? Is this how the good life happens? (This could also easily be a Woody Allen plot, comedy, or tragedy.)
Hit Man is a humorous reminder that even if we don’t have a personal story involving killing, whatever happiness we have in whatever modern society we’re in has some violence in its foundation. Through wars and conquests and executions and even industrial disasters, our environment has been shaped, in part, by eliminating some people or viewing them as expendable. Hit Man is a rom-com, but everywhere is a kind of Rome, named after Romulus who killed his brother Remus. Each of us may have a little Romulus within. Hit Man helps us laughingly consider how we can hold onto the truths about who we are underneath our civilizational veneer and, more or less, observe the HOA rules.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She has a book about World War I, Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War, and she has written for various publications, including Front Porch Republic, Comment, and Inside Higher Ed. She is editor-in-chief of Orange Blossom Ordinary.