Other Definitions
death wish (dict)
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Death Wish''Death Wish (comics) is also the title of a strip in the Tiger and Eagle comics.'' Death Wish (1974; director: Michael Winner) treats the theme of vigilantism and law and order in the context of the crime-ridden urban centers of the United States in the latter 20th century. One commentator noted that the film "encapsulates an American era — the early 1970s, when many urban Americans started to feel they couldn't walk outside without fear of being attacked." http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/d/deathwish.q.shtml Set in New York, Death Wish is an R-rated 93-minute film starring Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, an architect who stands as a sort of New Yorker Everyman when his "bleeding-heart liberal" attitude toward crime turns into revenge-driven vigilantism by attacks on his wife, Joanna (played by Hope Lange), who is murdered, and daughter, who is raped (played by Kathleen Tolan). The protagonist's punk-killing crime spree is framed to elicit audience sympathies, but the film also dramatizes the conflict between Kersey and the city police, who disapprove of his actions. Jeff Goldblum had his screen debut in Death Wish, playing one of the young thugs who assault Kersey's wife. Death Wish was released on DVD on August 13, 2002. Sequels The popularity of Death Wish spawned a number of sequels. Death Wish II (1982), originally X-rated due to its graphic rape scenes, was even more successful at the box office than the original, though critics panned it. Its plot is built around the reversion of Paul Kersey in Los Angeles (again played by Charles Bronson) to vigilantism as a response to the rape of his maid and rape and murder of his daughter. Jill Ireland plays Kersey's fiancée, who leaves him when she discovers what he has done. Death Wish 3 (1985) is held by many to be the best entry of the series. In it, Paul Kersey (again played by Bronson) returns to New York City, where the police coerce him into attacking criminals in a dangerous neighborhood as a way of exploiting his freedom from legal restraints. Death Wish 3 has the largest body-count of all the Death Wish films. Because of its over-the-top action, quotable dialogue and complete embrace of the absurd, Death Wish 3 has developed a cult following. Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) is set in Los Angeles and is considered by many to be the weakest entry of the series. This time the activities of Paul Kersey (again played by actor Charles Bronson, who was 66 years old at the time the movie was made) are financed by a wealthy individual bent upon avenging a drug-related death. In a single week, Kersey succeeds in destroying the entire drug trade of the city. Charles Bronson vowed that Death Wish 4 would be the final film in this series, but he went on to make Death Wish 5: The Face of Death (1995), in which Paul Kersey's new wife is killed. In response, he retaliates against the "fashion mafia," which also has a grip on his dead wife's daughter. Because of its creative death sequences and humor, many felt Death Wish 5 was a return to form after the lackluster Death Wish 4. Death Wish in popular culture Sigmund Freud, in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) (1920; English translation 1922), speculated on the existence of a fundamental death wish or death instinct, but this referred to an individual's own need to die, and has little to do with this series of films, which are a popular-culture version of revenge tragedy, drama in which the desire for revenge for a real or imaginary injury is the central plot element — a common theme in Elizabethan drama (COMPARE Shakespeare's Hamlet and Othello. (See also Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge ed., 1971.) The Bernie Goetz case in 1984 led Charles Bronson to speak out against the values of the character he played in Death Wish, and to disavow vigilantism. In The Simpsons, in the episode, "A Star is Burns", Homer watches a fictional sequel, Death Wish 9, which has Charles Bronson merely saying "I wish I was dead." External links Death Wish Death Wish
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