Description:
<jats:p>Starting with Jacques Ranciere's analysis of 'The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics', this article analyses the role of ethics, vengeance and victimhood in Clint Eastwood's<jats:italic> Mystic River</jats:italic>. In his brief commentary on the film, Ranciere uses<jats:italic> Mystic River</jats:italic> as an illustration
of what he sees as a problematic moralistic turn in contemporary American politics and culture that conflates victims and violators and advocates for vigilante justice. Arguing that the film does indeed offer such an ethical turn, this article extends and complicates Ranciere's analysis with
theories of nostalgia, pathos and film melodrama in order to show that Eastwood's film is more ambiguous and contradictory than Ranciere allows, but that this ambivalence works to intensify rather than defuse its dubious portrait of victimhood and vengeance.</jats:p>