I recognize it's not productive, or even a sign of a good movie that I want to make Flannery O'Connor required reading before people comment on this. But whatever. The irritating thing is that I find myself wishing that McDonagh had just steered the ship away from the giant, flashing political symbols like racism and police brutality because those are the things that keep making people compare it to lightweight political movies like Crash.

It's not a political movie. Or, rather, that scope is way too small. It's about sin and grace and how, in the fallen world, they both play as horrifying, destructive violence. O'Connor's work treated violence as the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. Violence and pain isn't an instigation for personal growth beyond anger and into peace, it was transformative *in itself* because, in a rotten world, violence is grace. It's a purely unmerited gift that makes us into something new (notably, not necessarily something that looks better to observers) and destroys everything old.

The idea isn't complex but it is hard because we want to see a "beyond" to the story. Augustine's distinction between justice and mercy would be useful here too. We don't want justice because that means getting what we deserve - and that's death. We want mercy, but that's not going to be pleasant either. But when O'Connor did it, it resembled a tonally weird, grim joke. I think the pure recklessness of The Violent Bear it Away is probably best here, even if there's a real lack of 1:1 character analogues. But the title, Matthew 11's note that the kingdom of heaven HAS ALWAYS suffered violence and that the violent would bear it away warns us that looking for more is actually just looking away. You don't get to look past the child neglect, alcoholism, arson, child murder, and strongly implied child rape because that's the world we inherited. Instead, you get a secondary warning about "the terrible speed of mercy".