The Monopoly of Violence (David Defresne, 2020) (Patreon)

At the risk of the sort of hyperbole that rightly gets you put in Critic Jail, I'd love to mail a copy of this film to every citizen in the United States. But then, of course, would that do a damned bit of good? Most of them wouldn't watch it, and a large percentage of it would dismiss it as fake news. To Dufresne's credit, The Monopoly of Violence never once utters the words "America" or "Trump." And while that may be a rebuke to our cultural chauvinism, it's also most likely a diagnosis of how far gone we are. Trump's America no longer even merits discussion when it comes to the sliding scale of appropriate democratic behavior. 

On the other hand, France, for all its obvious faults, is a nation that takes its commitments to freedom and justice very seriously, and The Monopoly of Violence is a complex reckoning with the fact that the 21st century increase in police mobilization in many of the neoliberal Western democracies reflects a violation of the social contract. Based on Max Weber's claim in "Politics as a Vocation" that, under normal democratic circumstances, the state must retain the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the film is a forensic examination of the recent abuses of the Parisian citizenry at the hands of the federal police force during the recent Yellow Vest demonstrations.

In a welcome deviation from the airy talking-head mode that dominates American political discourse, the subjects in Monopoly as usually responding directly to actual footage of police incidents which we too can observe. So their larger claims about political philosophy remain grounded in the dangerous developments of current events. Defresne does not identify the various speakers until the end of the film, but we can infer certain positions. Young people who are missing an eye: injured protestors. Middle-aged men and women citing Foucault and Debord: academics. Men claiming the videos "don't tell the whole story": cops.

There is an admirable horizontalizing of all these different forms of discourse. The direct experiences of the victims of violence are given ample space, and we understand both their trauma and their anger. But we also understand that they have an analysis of power just as trenchant as those inflected by critical theory. Conversely, and just as important for an American audience, the theoretical positions are taken seriously and allowed room to develop, rather than sliced-and-diced into chic postmodern nonsense. 

The Monopoly of Violence pulls no punches. Be prepared to see a man get his hand blown off, someone with a quarter-sized hole blown through their cheek by a "nonlethal" projectile, and much else. After all, if we want to discuss violence by the state, we need to confront what it is we're really talking about. However, on an intellectual level, the most jarring moment of the film involves no bloodshed whatsoever. It comes when a media analyst walks us through a clip that was shown on French TV to display the supposed violence of left-wing protestors against the police. 

A group of five motorcycle cops were separated from their flying wedge and temporarily surrounded by protestors, and they struggled to get on their bikes and drive away. While a couple of guys threw rocks at them, almost everyone else kept their distance. Once they were safely on their bikes and speeding away, the crowd advanced, shouting and chanting. "Here," the commentator remarked, "we see everyone playing their assigned role. Even now, the left is deferring to state power. No one gets hurt." That's leftist "violence." That's "both sides."