Jack Reacher is a Problem
On Apolitical Fiction and Television
Amazon’s Reacher is the perfect adaptation of Lee Child’s novels. After two movies starring Tom Cruise, our ageless short king, someone realized that casting a 5’7” actor to play a 6’5” character did not make sense. Instead, they cast Alan Ritchson as the titular protagonist. With TRT and a 6’3” frame, Ritchson fits the role perfectly. Fans of the novel—of which I am one—were delighted to finally have Reacher represented so accurately. But this is not the only moment of the adaptation competently representing its material. The novels are formally unadventurous airport thrillers, novels you buy at an airport newsstand and read during a three hour flight. The novels sometimes touch on common tropes of political corruption but are otherwise presented as apolitical action texts. The apolitical posture is the political choice. The show matches the books in this way, too.
Reacher makes no pretensions to elevating its genre-form. In fact, this is one of its virtues. It is a simple action TV show that hits its beats competently without ever transcending the genre. The writing is rote and explanatory, the plot basically the same each season. The novels are also like this. They are neither formally challenging nor particularly complex. The syntax is often simple and direct, seeming to have been written to be adapted.
The simple inelegance of its form is the novel’s political expression. Whenever Reacher encounters a morally difficult decision the prose reduces the choice to a simple sentence or incomplete phrase. The minimalism suggests a simple clarity, a transparency of action. Reacher is just a good ol’ soldier with traditional American values that are guide his actions. His choices are ones the reader cannot help but assent to, causing us to think that we also would have done the same because at no point does the prose challenge us. The choices are simple, the decisions even more so. There is no lingering trauma nor real reckoning with the consequences of choices made. Nor is there any real confrontation with the issue that maybe, just maybe, Reacher is the problem, bringing violence wherever he goes. But again, Reacher puts himself in the situations he does because of a certain moral compass, one that is never questioned by the narrator because it trusts that that predisposition for ostensibly morally right action is shared by us.
Likewise the show makes the choices obvious. The editing and framing of shots structuring each moment of action are as blunt as the decisions made. The script presents Reacher as an exceptionally capable soldier, whose skills are ill-adapted to the current world, but nonetheless useful for stopping the various forms of evil which just seem to follow him everywhere he goes. But at no point are the institutions he participates in presented as uniquely evil or blamed for creating this hulking sociopath who continually helps when help may not even have been wanted.
Both the novels and TV series present themselves as simple dumb thrillers with no political aim. The “no politics here” posture ends up tacitly endorsing the actual actions taken by the characters in the novel and show. Both the prose and script intentionally avoid complexity to simplify everything for us thereby manufacturing our consent. Contrast this with the Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz. In Hurwitz’s series, about a former US black ops operative who is now an assassin, morality and politics are foregrounded. They are not avoided. And while the execution is often unsubtle and bludgeoning, Hurwitz does not hide behind badly executed minimalism. Instead, he seems invested in writing the occasional well-crafted sentence, trying to get the reader to question the protagonist’s actions, putting the reader in a situation where they have to engage rather than check out. And this is the joy, and problem, of Jack Reacher. By trafficking in apolitical perspective there is merely an endorsement of the status quo.