On the Folktale of Cape Fear

Sorry for not posting last week. I was working on one of my books instead. I try to write no matter what every week and on weeks on which I can't find the time, I push myself to post to the blog. The fact that this has been a weekly blog recently is simultaneously depressing but also a release as an excuse to sit down to write no matter what.

This week's post comes with the warning that it posts spoilers for a recent streaming show, a 35 year old movie, a 64 year old movie, and a 69 year old book. If you want to consume all this media in a small window like I did before reading this, that's fine. I'd worry about you like my loved ones worry about me, but it's fine.

It also comes with additional trigger warnings - there is mention of pet death and sexual assault in this. If either of those are a bit much, it is mentioned just the once, but I'll understand and I'll see you next week - if I haven't written in a week.

I just finished the book, originally The Executioners, by John MacDonald, though the copy I got from the library says Cape Fear on it. I read this after watching the majority of the recent limited series, Cape Fear, produced by AppleTV+ and created by Nick Antosca. I watched all that after watching the 1962 Cape Fear film, directed by J. Lee Thompson, which I finished after watching the first episode of the Cape Fear limited series. Before all this, earlier this year, I watched the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of Cape Fear.

I'm not sure this is the way I recommend consuming all this Cape Fear.

Its funny that the copy of The Executioners I have was renamed to Cape Fear, as the word "cape" never actually appears in the book, and the titular location is nowhere to be seen either. In fact, if anyone came to the Antosca limited series after only reading the book The Executioners, they would not understand how any creator got from point A to point B - aside from the name of the Bowdens and the force of nature that is Max Cady, there are almost entirely different stories.

And I want to emphasize that this is not in any way a criticism. I love watching media evolve, and so seeing how this particular bit of media has changed in 69 years (nice) was actually a treat.

In The Executioners, Sam Bowden the most milquetoast white dude you can imagine, while being a JAG lawyer in the navy during World War II witnesses a fellow US military man, Max Cady, attempt to sexual assault a teenage girl in Australia. His report puts Cady in jail for hard labor, supposedly for life, but he only gets 13 years. When he gets out, he hunts down the Bowdens and starts his revenge, intending to kill Bowden's family slowly - "How does a man get killed six times" was a pretty damn good line and its surprising that I don't recall it or any iteration popping up in any of the versions. After terrorizing the family, poisoning their pet dog, managing to get a shot to wound one of Sam's three kids, and orchestrate a car crash that the family is able to walk away from, the Bowdens set up a trap in order to stop being so passive and turn the fight against Cady.

In the book, we barely see Cady. We meet him a few times and its a delight every time. Instead he lives in every corner, every shadow. Nothing can stop this human hurricane. Sam and his wife, Carol, have to set a trap for Cady, with the help of a police officer, in order to lure Cady somewhere where they can kill him. Sam gets a lucky shot off and Max dies off page.

Next came the '62 film, directed by J. Lee Thompson, famously with Gregory Peck as Sam Bowden and Robert Mitchum as Max Cady. While no longer being soldiers Bowden still acted as witness against Cady committing sexual assault. We see a lot more of Max, which is the correct decision to make when its cinema and you got Mitchum delightfully sneering down his nose at you. This is where the location of Cape Fear is introduced to the folklore. In the book, they spring the trap to catch Cady at their house, in this film its at their vacation house which is found at Cape Fear. Max also doesn't die in this one, Sam Bowden makes the decision "he should die in a cage."

Next we got Uncle Marty's remake in 91, with Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden and Robert DeNiro as Max Cady. This came with a big change - Bowden wasn't just a witness to a sexual assault by Cady, he was his lawyer. Bowden, even then, feared Cady and explicitly didn't do his best to keep Cady out of jail - but, quite the opposite, hid evidence that would have exonerated Cady. He made the conscious decision to send this monster to jail. We get to see Mitchum come back as the police chief that can't really do anything to help Bowden and Peck comes back as the Southern lawyer that defends Cady against Bowden's efforts to imprison Cady for "plotting." Robert DeNiro and 18yo Juliette Lewis each were nominated for an Oscar. DeNiro was also nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain but lost - but that's a whole other post waiting to be written.

In the two previous incarnations, Cady was simply a force of nature to be feared. In this, it was introduced that Cady is alluring because of how dangerous he is. He attempts to seduce Dani, Sam's daughter (which is where Juliette Lewis picked up the Oscar nom). This Max Cady is also covered with tattoos and has a twisted translation of religion. With the Mitchum connection, I feel a line between this Max Cady and Mitchum's Harry Powell from Night of the Hunter (1955) - but that's also a whole other post waiting to be written. In this, Cady sinks into the swamps of Cape Fear in the midst of a dramatic fight, presumably to die - but no "dying in a cage" for this Cady.

That takes us to the recent limited series by Antosca with Amy Addams as Anna Bowden and Javier Bardem as Max Cady. In this, Bowden was once again Cady's lawyer - but now her husband, Tom Bowden, played with the perfect dad flare that Patrick Wilson is known for, was the lawyer for the prosecution. Anna and Tom fell in love during the trial and together conspired to put Cady in jail. The irony now is that, as Cady is released, Anna Bowden's career has shifted and she is now a lawyer that specifically works to exonerate wrongfully jailed convicts - possibly to exorcise any guilt she had for caging Cady. The show has much more space to build out an elaborate trap of manipulation by Cady to slowly disintegrate the Bowden family and is done in a way that anyone that doesn't know how much of a singular monster Max is would doubt that he's actually the instigator (I was doubting it for a bit!). We also explore more of Max's life than in any other material, and even bring Juliette Lewis to be a half-sister of Max's. At the end, the Bowdens have a showdown and once again decide that Cady "should die in a cage."

Four separate pieces of media that have evolved the same struggle over the years. Reading the MacDonald story, I could see a lot of Stephen King in the prose and ideas. The very idea of "this is a normal family whose life gets upended in unintentional ways by an uncontrollable force because of some deed in the past" is a King story prompt. The story, however, has the theme of "some people are just black elements that are here to disrupt society." Yes, the color "black" as the disruptive element comes from MacDonald - not me.

The book and 91 film both take place in North Carolina and the 62 film and limited series take place in Georgia. This is a Southern Gothic story where all the players are undeniably white. The book is interesting as it has two worlds it presents - the world Bowden walks and the world that Cady walks. Bowden is an upstanding lawyer. Cady is an ex-con who got out for rape. Bowden's world is one of PTA meetings, yacht clubs, and lawn parties. Cady's world is one of whores, illegal betting on horse races, and smoke filled bars. In the book - this is by design. The cops know of the dark underside and maintain it carefully. They don't let it get out of hand, but they maintain this status quo. We watch as Bowden quickly uses every connection he can to shove Cady into that status quo - he asks cops to arrest him and roust him out. When Cady reveals he's unroustable, he hires a private investigator to tail him and eventually hire local thugs to try to put him in the hospital. This is all present in the Ur-text without any comment. Because Bowden is a good person - it's Cady who is the bad element.

In the book we know nothing of Cady except his unstoppable vengeance against Bowden. In the '62 film, we learn that he had a family he lost because of being in jail. We learn that jail took this bad man and made him a monster - that he would rather tear down the world and himself then be thrown back into a cage. So when Bowden makes the final decision that Cady "should die in a cage," we are once again seeing that Bowden is trying to impose his privilege over Cady to control him.

The '91 film furthers this - it was Bowden's efforts that put Cady into jail into the first place. Once again, Cady who was a dark hunk of bad coal when he went into jail, was spat out hardened as a diamond of pure evil.

In the limited series, it is heavily emphasized that the Bowdens - now the team of Tom and Anna - are privileged individuals and how much they try to use that privilege to put Cady back in jail. And when that won't work, Anna has the gall to profit off of him, on camera for a documentary series being made on Cady. This show goes the extra effort to show that Cady, as an underprivileged, must be managed. When he acts cowed - then he must be exploited. The speed at which this change is made is remarkable. Even as Anna is telling everyone "you can't trust Max," she is also happy to take money on his behalf.

The Cape Fear limited series does a good job of having a framing device of the family having a BBQ scene that feels almost beat-for-beat the same. Like with the original book, Cady was just a "black stain" on their perfect lives, that are allowed to go on. They've handled him, they've made the decision "he should die in a cage."

I don't want to make it sound like I think Max Cady is a good guy that should be defended. He's not. Cady is truly a singular monster. The range of Cady runs from him being a broken and pitiful creature, but already an entity of malice before refined to pure evil from jail (the limited series) to an irredeemable and malevolent force of nature before he even stepped foot inside jail (the book). However, Cady's ire against the Bowdens ranges from sheer circumstancial (the book) to completely of their own doing (the limited series).

But the seeds of privilege using the System as a cudgel to keep folks in place and the rage of injustice Cady feels are there in the book and run in the thoroughfare of all these incarnations. In each instance, Bowden's first response is to have police run him out of town. And after that fails does Bowden turns to trying to buy off Cady's rage. In the book, Cady works around the System and seems immune to it, a Hill person that spurns civilization, only in the military in the first place because it was that or jail. As the world grows - so does the System. Taking each carnation of Cady as one learning from the past, its Bardem's Cady that seems to be the most manipulative: knowing how to use deepfake, where security cameras are, how to smuggle devices into jail.

For the nearly seventy years of media, jail is constantly seen as this horrible, terrible machine that turns bad men into monsters. That does not change. The System does not want it to change. It is a cage which Cady must die in because he will not bend to the System. And once he's been banished back to the black hole where this black monster belongs, the nice, white Bowdens can get back to hot dogs and hamburgers.

I don't know if MacDonald would be comfortable with this translation of the text. He does like so much to make the Bowdens seem nice and just victims. I'm also unclear if Thompson would agree with this translation. However, I'd put money down that Uncle Marty and Nick Actosca would agree with me that this has been there all along, and that they just helped push the text to be a little more obvious.