“…And For What?”

Be sure to define your boundaries in your fight for justice, or you might achieve your goals — but at what cost?

Clockwise, left to right: Kyle Rittenhouse (Kenosha shooter), Alan Swinney (paintball shooting Trump supporter), Michael Reinoehl (Antifa shooter), protest scene in Portland after Molotov cocktails thrown

I love a good story. In my entertainment choices, I tend to love large, sprawling, epic tales, full of revenge, betrayal, and mystery… especially ones that take their time. Movies are usually too short for these kinds of stories, I’m talking about either TV series, or video games. The best of both usually have relatable characters whose subtle nuances emerge, bit by bit, as their choices veer into more and more chaos and destruction. Eventually, there’s a point where it all comes cascading down in a swift cascade of reckoning. And that’s when I get one of my favorite kind of scene — the “and for what” speech.

You know the kind of scene I’m talking about. Someone, usually a supporting actor, harangues another person (usually the main character) for a series of bad decisions, and it usually involves those three words. Case in point: in the original feature film Fargo (not to be confused with the excellent TV series inspired by the film) the police officer Marge Gunderson has a conversation with a criminal named Grimsrud, and in typically understated fashion, she lists all of the carnage that he’s been involved in:

So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that…