Taxonomy of the Lone Killer

Welcome, friends.

I have to admit that I’ve experienced a questionable amount of pleasure in researching for this latest episode of The Cinematologists Podcast. When I say “research”, I basically mean that every evening for the past two weeks I’ve been guiltlessly revelling in the violence, glamour and moral ambiguity of the cinema’s greatest hitmen (and women), assassins, and lone killers.

It’s the question of these pleasures - of watching such characters move silently through the modern milieu we share: restaurants, banks, hotels, airports - and of their status as avatars for the commodity fetishism we’re socialised to desire, whether it’s clothes, cars, exotic locations or, indeed, guns, that we take as the starting point.

These pleasures are aesthetic, to be sure, and a core line of our conversation explores the visual and sonic mechanisms filmmakers use to make the lone killer look impossibly cool.

But on a deeper level, there are myriad symbolic pleasures to unpack, primarily derived from the assassin’s fundamental essence as a professional arbiter of death. By “symbolic pleasures” I mean the fantasies we get to borrow and try on at a safe distance. Cinema has always trafficked in these kinds of projected desires and anxieties, that’s what genres, stars and archetypes are for. But the lone killer amplifies this function, condensing into a single figure our contradictory longing for total freedom and autonomy, yet within the familiar framework of modernist culture, politics, and economics.

We outline the dimensions of these symbolic pleasures. Total agency without negotiation or compromise, for instance. The killer embodies absolute decision-making and self-determination. In a culture of soft coercions, bureaucracy, b******t meetings, and interminable incompetence, the killer taps into a dark form of detached liberation. Although this notion is itself confounded to comic effect in Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly (2012).

The lone killer also exudes the romance of the outsider. The shadowy loner, an anti-citizen manipulating the system from the margins, carries a sense of mystery that endures, particularly in a time when sharing every aspect of our lives has become something of a default performative practice. Indeed, it’s fascinating to consider the lone killer as a symbol of alienation. They’re what a certain kind of loneliness looks like when it becomes active rather than depressive: isolation turned into method, detachment honed into