The Sexy Mind Games of “Hit Man”

Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase “the banality of evil,” popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as “This Gun for Hire” (1942) and “Murder by Contract” (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil. The hired gunman in Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “The Killers”—who, when asked “What’s the idea?,” answers, “There isn’t any idea”—is a primordial counterpart to the guard in Auschwitz who told the inmate Primo Levi, “Here there is no why.” Instead of filling in these blanks, filmmakers have tended to welcome them. Thus, like the movie Nazi, the hit man has become so emptied of substance as to be, with rare exceptions, a ponderous cliché—a deadly bore.