Vigilante Farce

At the time that Richard C. Davis was building up his light-weight body armor manufacturing company Second Chance out of the town of Central Lake, Michigan in the early '70s, the United States was still just at the very beginning of a spectacular rise in violent crime that would peak in the '90s. And despite a precipitous decline in crime overall since that peak, the resonant insecurity of that period continues to inform and inspire much of our nation's politics and cultural rhetoric, to say nothing of our production of new popular archetypes. Among the most enduring of these has been the myth of the vigilante anti-hero, satirically predicted by Peter Boyle's titular role in the John G. Avildsen-directed, Norman Wexler-scripted Joe released in the summer of 1970, but then incrementally denuded of its philosophical ambivalence by the Dirty Harry films starring Clint Eastwood, the Death Wish franchise starring Charles Bronson, and their many exploitation imitators.

Davis's own origin story could have very well been cut from the same formula as any number of these grimy tales of uniquely positioned badasses or "regular Joe's who have just had enough"; except that his story significantly predates either the vigilante movie cycle, or even successive "life-imitates-art" cranks like Bernard Goetz. Originally the owner of three pizzerias in Detroit, Michigan, Davis claims that it was on June 17, 1969 - a little over a year before the cinematic Joe would lay waste to a squat of hippies to the delight of spectators and the horror of Peter Boyle - that he decided to personally deliver an order to the same address at which one of his employees had been assaulted by a trio of thugs armed with guns and a machete. Concealing a .22 under his pizza boxes, he found himself confronted in an alley by the same men, one of them pointing an automatic pistol right in his face. His eyes fixed on the hand around the gun pointed at him, Davis saw the man's itchy fingers starting to squeeze the trigger, and burst into action. He fired his .22 six times, striking two of the men, twice each, and sustaining gun shot wounds to his thigh and temple from the third before fleeing to his car and gunning it to the hospital.

In movie land, a near-death experience like this would just be the first stage of a longer arc of righteous vengeance and social cleansing. In real-life, though, one "hero moment" is usually more than enough to encourage even the most enthusiastic vigilantes that they should resign themselves to obscurity, cynically chase their own media infamy, or, in Davis's rare case, re-direct their passions towards a more productive field. Establishing Second Chance as a family-run business that ended up becoming a major employer of the de-industrialized Central Lake, he went gung-ho on the manufacture of kevlar vests that were lighter and more concealable than the competition. But not content to merely act as a passive founder, Davis crafted his business model around the sort of vainglorious exhibitionism befitting his own personality. Decades before Johnny Knoxville got shot with a .38 for Big Brother magazine, Davis was filming himself putting on a Second Chance vest, aiming a revolver at his stomach, and firing, the context of these promotional works vacillating between an earnest passion for demonstrating the life-saving potential of his product, and a none-too-subtle sense of black comic, masochistic showmanship. Keeping tabs on the police officers whose lives had been saved by the use of his vests, he published their accounts in a rapidly growing anthology of "Lives Saved," and even brought many of them into his orbit in order to create filmed dramatizations of their experiences. Contemporaneous to the explosion of the vigilante film cycle, Second Chance ended up producing its own "underground" film franchise aimed squarely at the most visceral quarters of professional law enforcement, firearms enthusiasts, and self-defense nuts. Refusing to be apolitical, he produced an entire featurette pitting his hero cops against a ragtag group of militant Leftists. In one video from the late-'80s, he spliced in footage from Godzilla 1985, vulgarly satirizing concerns over police brutality by having a liberal journalist grill a cop who successfully gunned down the monster for "killing Godzilla in cold blood."

Even that, though, is just the granular surface of the Richard C. Davis story. As the primary subject of 2nd Chance, a new documentary by Ramin Bahrani being distributed by Showtime, he proves to be a compellingly malleable archetype unto himself of America's collective pathology over the last half-century. As a character profile of a real-life vigilante anti-hero, reformed into the self-made millionaire, what it uncovers about Davis's politics, his narcissism, and his myriad acts of deception, inevitably speaks to the revolting, but also, at times, sympathetically pathetic truth that lies behind America's cult of badass superego. It's perhaps not revelatory to imply that the violence and destruction that dominates so much of the United States's foreign policy, criminal justice, popular culture, and collective tendency, is really no more than a self-parodying mask, the logical projection and externality of the most deeply insecure imagination. Indeed, this sort of reflection (whether expressed in the form of ambivalence or outright satire) was endemic to the very movies that ended up kickstarting the vigilante film cycle. But with 2nd Chance, Bahrani gives a stunning new lease to a tired old critique, one that treats its increasingly unsympathetic protagonist with the height of compassion, all the while using the subject's own sub-genius works of outsider exploitation cinema to build up the case against him, heightening the contradiction between ideological fantasy and the unalloyed, cynical truth. The "real story" of Second Chance is all out there on the internet, but those unfamiliar with it will do well to go into Bahrani's film as blind as possible, not just because Bahrani does an excellent job of weaving the story, but also because 2nd Chance is so much more attentive to the particulars of personality and human interest, the foreshadowing details of Davis's life story that only get buried under the lead of his company's most famous criminal faux pas. To be a little less cryptic about it, the hero, of course, lives long enough to see himself become the villain, and the badass of violent fantasy turns out to be a moral coward when it comes down to the much more mundane ways in which the "security" of Americans are threatened.