Living in the Machine: Notes from a Falsely Convicted Chicago Surgeon
“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.” — Carl Jung
The Fugitive (1993) is about the struggle of the individual — actually, one individual, a Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) — to defy a society whose trusted institutions have not merely failed to deliver him justice following the murder of his wife, but have wrongly convicted him in the true killer’s place. The sausage-fingered detectives of Chicago Police Department giddily charge him with the gruesome crime, overlooking all evidence of a second culprit in the house that night, and claiming Kimble murdered his wife for the large insurance payout. Because, why else would a preternaturally intelligent and revered vascular surgeon, already steeped in wealth and status, commit such a needless and poorly executed crime? No one stops to question this spurious motive. This is a theme going forward, as the systemic failures only compound from there — a judge and jury readily convict and sentence him to death upon this circumstantial evidence. But with his first bit of luck yet, Kimble escapes when his prisoner transport bus is thrown into turmoil by an outburst of violence and the vehicle is subsequently plastered from the side by a freight train at full-speed.
Miraculously unharmed (make that twice-lucky), Kimble escapes down the river into the night. CPD are left twirling their mustaches as the good doctor goes on the run to find the one-armed man who killed his wife, and to unravel the conspiracy that has taken everything from him.
Unfortunately for Kimble, where the comically inept CPD left off, the ruthlessly efficient and unfeeling United States Marshal’s Office takes over. Directed by their cyborg-cowboy leader, Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), the Marshals are tasked with bringing to justice a convict who killed his wife and escaped custody. While the audience enjoys the benefit of flashbacks revealing the true killer, the Marshals forge onward in the dark, their sole aim to return Kimble to captivity. Is this justice, the viewer wonders, or some facile version of it? This dynamic is epitomized by the following exchange:
KIMBLE: “I didn’t kill my wife!”
GERARD: “I don’t care!”
Yet in tailing Kimble on his quest for justice, the Marshals begin to bounce off of many details that coincide with Kimble’s discredited court testimony. The Marshals are nonplussed at the appearance of a one-armed man (Kimble swore that an unknown, one-armed man killed his wife) who no one could find during the trial but turns out to be very real, and has private security ties to the large pharmaceutical corporation Devlin-McGregor, whose recent drug trial was torpedoed by Kimble on the grounds that its use carried a risk for severe liver damage. For any competent, driven detective, the facts are there. Gerard and the Marshals are now at the precipice of something big, with the opportunity to nab the true culprits — those up high in corporate America who directed the one-armed man in his crimes — and to uncover the larger crimes that those men were concealing by getting Kimble put away. With a little luck, they can even deliver a wrongly convicted man from the waking hell that his life has become.
However, concerned more with seeing Kimble behind bars and awaiting execution, they ignore every clue and do all they can to foil his quest for justice. This cat-and-mouse game continues for a while until Gerard, with the evidence waving its proverbial arms and screaming in his face, finally puts it all together just in time for Kimble’s confrontation with the true menace, his villainous former friend and hospital colleague Dr. Charles Nichols, in front of all of his esteemed former colleagues at the Hilton. It’s only during this showdown that Gerard submits to the evidence, shouting to Kimble that he finally avers his innocence. A tussle ensues between the doctors, and Kimble incapacitates Nichols with a lead pipe — saving Gerard’s life in the process. The Marshal survives to give Kimble an ice pack in the squad car to soothe his bruised and bloody knuckles.
KIMBLE: “I thought you didn’t care.”
GERARD: “I don’t… don’t tell anyone.”
And his heart grew three sizes that day.
Gerard, somehow in the laughing mood, doesn’t seem to fully recognize in this moment how close he was to completely blowing it. He doesn’t seem to realize, or maybe just doesn’t care, that everything he has done in his pursuit of Kimble these past months has been directly contrary to the actual agent of justice and rightness, Kimble, and that he himself, a law enforcement agent, has been serving the sinister ends of Big Pharma this entire time. He does however toss away the handcuffs (and with them, his old notions of “justice,” perhaps?) There are several times in the film where he nearly realizes this, as in the instance where he remarks of Devlin-MacGregor’s $7.5 billion yearly profit that the company is “a monster.” You’re halfway there, chief.
At any rate, the movie ends there. We aren’t around long enough to see Jones’ character meaningfully engage with these facts, or his misguided pursuit of Kimble, so we are left to conjecture. My theory is that he went back to the farm.
The Fugitive is a wildly entertaining picture of American life, equal parts dystopian and colorful, peopled by well-intentioned folks striving to fulfill some small, usually dehumanizing function and being casually stepped upon along the way — especially in the case of the gawky transit cop who is shot to death by the one-armed man, our memory of whom is summarily discarded along with the actor’s remaining screen time. Meanwhile, true justice in life can be attained only by the extraordinary — the best minds society has to offer.
The film dances around genre pitfalls with the same deftness with which Kimble evades his would-be captors, and it is truly a renewed pleasure upon each viewing to watch the dogged Ford exist as a cog separate from the machine, working tirelessly to be just to others, and himself, in a world that champions the words while forgetting their true meaning.
I guess my final point would be, it shouldn’t require a medical degree from the University of Chicago to exonerate yourself of your wife’s murder, or something like that. Five stars out of five. Never switch the samples.
