Review: Button Man: Get Harry Ex

Button Man: Get Harry Ex by John Wagner
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

At its core, noir is an ethical undertaking. As a generic project, it asks what guides us in the moral decisions we make. As a method, it strips away everything we’re accustomed to directing us: corruption means we can’t trust the police, the government, or our laws; theological uncertainty means we can’t trust inherited ethical teachings; and the flawed self means we can’t even draw on our own (or our protagonist’s) past decency. All that’s left is the nagging echo of the hope that we have a faint hunger for doing the right thing.

The best noir – whether that’s Hammett, Chandler, Ellroy, Woodrell, or dozens of other – shows us staggering brutality without flinching, but also finds a way to lament a fallen world. Ellroy’s characters behave in shockingly immoral ways, but his protagonists seem to sense there is a better possibility out there. They continue to kill one another, but some of the dramatic climaxes of his work come when they regret what their choices have forced them to do. They don’t undo it – they still shoot friends in the back, and they still betray innocents – but they acknowledge the possibility of decency in a world very different from the one they know.

Meanwhile, this book is noir at its worst.

On the one hand, there’s the condescending narrative structure. I don’t know how it can be a [SPOILER] since it’s telegraphed so inelegantly, but the first of these contained stories – in which ex-soldier Harry Exton is hired by a wealthy man as a participant in an illegal league where “button men” kill one another or get killed in a private sport – is framed by Exton talking with a psychiatrist about his experiences. It opens with Exton drawing a gun and asking the psychiatrist for help. Then, 80 or so pages later, surprise!, the psychiatrist turns out to be the “voice” who has hired Exton and forced him to kill others. It’s a lazy device clumsily presented.

The next two stories are only marginally better. In one, Exton sets out to collect blackmail information against his new voice. In the other, set up by the collective voices to have to fight off 13 other Button men, he finds a way to [SPOILER] fake his own death. It’s hard not to see any of this coming, and it’s even harder to feel there’s anything satisfying in such endings.

But those narrative shortcomings are almost pardonable. After all, noir is linked to pulp, and pulp is all about shuffling through familiar plots in order to refine them into efficient stories. (Think, for instance, of the dozens of comic book and film reiterations of the Batman or Spiderman origin stories; those have evolved from quick and clumsy first versions into powerful cultural myths. They aren’t surprising any longer, but they’ve become deeply satisfying as vehicles for a range of cultural anxieties and hopes.)

The real failing here is a moral one.

These stories purport to criticize the violence inherent in capitalism, with the wealthy able to hire “button men” to live or die on their behalf. As awful as we are often supposed to feel about that premise, though, the bottom line is that Exton resents it only because he isn’t really one of the wealthy. He complains about the fact that “they” will never let you quit, but, as the volume mercifully ends, he protects himself by killing the last man who knows he’s alive, murdering him in front of the man’s nephew and making a joke about it. The writing is clumsy enough that it isn’t clear the murder is necessary; the vision is corrupt enough that it doesn’t acknowledge any of the moral distance we’ve traveled.

In some ways, this is a cultural descendent of the Rambo films. It’s easy to forget, but First Blood was a powerful reckoning with the experience of Vietnam. Then the sequels lost all sight of that premise and produced an unreflective killing machine who fought and refought the war on the “gooks,” winning this time through superior American toughness and unexamined “decency.”

These stories don’t even have the virtue of such original clarity of moral inquiry. This is always something that tries to indict a spectacle that it then invites us to watch as we munch on popcorn.

This looks like noir, but it’s as far from the best of the genre as I can imagine. It echoes better works in seeming to ask how we should act in the moral vacuum of a world where money can buy life for sport. Then it encourages us to enjoy the experience without asking us to evaluate our own complicity.


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