Whereas in the other Thompson films, Bronson is directly involved in the expression of righteous, vigilante styled action in the name of Patriarchal authority, here he is a figure very much on the sidelines of that authority. Rather than be directly affected, he is slowly pulled into an intrigue which need not concern him directly. The intrigue, albeit an absurd plot level conspiracy, represents Patriarchal greed gone wild, so much so that it is willing to exploit religious tensions to serve its own financial agenda. Once again Patriarchy is in turmoil, but the figure who can chastise it here, Bronson as a reporter and thus agent of the truth, is not a representative of it. Thus, Bronson here does not participate in the violence, the film casting him as a kind of commentator on it – a regulator. Thus, Thompson offers here an antidote to the crisis of vigilantism and moral relativism he sees in a crumbling Patriarchal order in the other Bronson films. Here, order and justice can be maintained by those outside the primary operations of patriarchal authority but with the responsibility to hold it into account. The way to do this is not by violent righteous action but by exposure of the means of corruption – the exposure of those who would take the law into their own hands to serve their own greed. In that, Messenger of Death is an answer to the questions concerning patriarchal authority and violence posed in so many Bronson films.
There are two contrasting Patriarchal rationales in Messenger of Death: one is the world of business enterprise and the second is the world of religious belief. Both are revealed to be inherently absurd and immorally corrupt as if any Patriarchal order is liable to be in conflict with itself. Whilst for Thompson, this has led to the reactionary collapse of male authority into perversion; here he finds some hope in the Bronson figure as an outsider. Responsibility thus amounts to the need to patrol and regulate the operations of Patriarchal authority to prevent it collapsing in on itself and violently destroying itself. In previous films, Bronson was a direct participant in this Patriarchal collapse, but here Thompson and company place him outside it and through that device achieve a thematic and stylistic distance which allows them to thus expose the folly, greed and madness they see provoking corruption and reactionary moral fervor. Whilst never a full deconstruction of the Bronson / Thompson oeuvre, Messenger of Death is a direct comment on it, examining the same dilemmas from the position of some remove. Making much of the cultural contrast between Patriarchal systems, Thompson poses an almost irreconcilable gulf in contemporary society between authority and justice through which only the lone, peripheral figure can maintain perspective and arrive at some truth to put this authority into accountability for its actions. read more