Opinion: Is drunk driving worse than being a Nazi?

What’s the difference between a villain and a victim?

I recently watched the trailer for the upcoming film Shot Caller, starring Jaime Lannister (technically Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, but who has the time?). It’s the story of a normal middle-class man who joins a white supremacist gang while in prison following a fatal car accident; ostensibly, it’s a commentary on how the American prison system turns nonviolent, small-time offenders into hardcore criminals. I’m looking forward to seeing this movie, but the film’s marketing team has left me wondering something: where does society draw the line between a victim of circumstance and a victim of one’s own bad judgment?

In the trailer, we see Jaime, his wife, and a couple of friends enjoying a few laughs while Jaime drives them to a baseball game. While fist-bumping his bro, Jaime briefly takes his eyes off the road, flies through a red light, and gets into an accident. Next thing we see is the Kingslayer in a jumpsuit getting processed by a corrections officer. He tearfully tells his wife through the phone-plexiglass-thing, “I killed Tom.” (Presumably the bro he was fist-bumping.)

“It was an accident! People don’t go away for accidents!” his wife sobs.

From there, the trailer goes on to depict the eldest Lannister’s descent into a life of hardcore crime. The scenario hits the viewer hard: Damn. How fucked is the U.S. if mistakenly running a red light can get you sent to maximum security prison?

And if you are the kind of person who stops your movie ruminations with the trailer, that’s what you would be walking away with. I, however, am addicted to the Internet, and was impressed enough by the trailer that I decided to see if there were any further clips or previews of Shot Caller on YouTube. Fortunately for me, there were.

In this clip, we’re shown the full exchange between the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and his wife during their jail phone call. Jaime’s wife tells him that she’ll put up their house as collateral for Jaime’s bail. Jaime responds by telling her that he’s going to take a deal where he’ll serve two-and-a-half years instead of potentially seven years. When his wife tells him she wants to fight the charges, he hits us with this line:

“I blew a point-one-oh.”

The trailer leaves that bit of information out; it doesn’t mention alcohol or drinking, and, in fact, implies that the guy is doing hard time for running a red light. Like, dude, even in the U.S., the world’s leader in incarceration, first-time offenders don’t get years in max for a fucking traffic violation. Jaime isn’t locked up for taking his eyes off the road, Jaime’s locked up for involuntary manslaughter.

So what gives with excluding that not-insignificant bit of background from the trailer? Presumably, the logic is that it makes Jaime less sympathetic–which says something about the culture of the U.S. that drunk driving is considered a bigger stain on one’s character than joining the fucking Aryan Brotherhood.

In the trailer, Jaime murders a dude in a prison yard fight, gets covered in Nazi tattoos, and participates in a gun-running scheme on the outside–which, in totality, comes off as a far more serious violation of the social contract than drunk driving. Yes, I get that that’s the film’s central premise: people leave prison worse off than they were when they went in, and the cost of their resulting anti-social behavior ends up being worse than what their previous offense(s) amounted to. But obscuring what Jaime originally gets sent to prison for doesn’t serve that narrative. Jaime wasn’t smoking a joint in his own backyard or torrenting music. He got drunk, got behind the wheel, drove recklessly, and someone died because of his actions. He deserves to be put away, albeit not in maximum security with career murderers.

We all know why Jaime’s BAC was excluded from the trailer. We want to believe that prisoners deserve their lot in life; that being forced to join the Aryan Brotherhood to survive your sentence is part and parcel of the criminal lifestyle, and any misery or brutality of life behind bars (including rape) is what you have coming to you for the choices you made. The only way we can root for a guy in prison is if he doesn’t deserve to be there–he was framed, falsely accused, or the victim of a corrupt system. If we believe that Jaime was thrown in for a mistake anybody can make, everything he does from that point seems acceptable–righteous, even. Jaime is allowed to do what he needs to do to survive, because he isn’t here of his choosing. It’s a common trope: good men are allowed to do what they must if bad circumstances are thrust upon them. If a Vietnam draftee needs to become a war criminal in order to get home alive, so be it. If Steven Seagal needs to murder half a city to avenge his wife’s death because the police are too incompetent to catch her killer, so be it. Innocent men who betray their values out of necessity are to be pitied, even respected. But bad guys who become worse after getting locked up are just showing their true colors. Jaime’s original sin is the prism by which we’re supposed to view him. Jaime’s DUI is more important, ultimately, than anything he does after the fact. It’s existence or non-existence transforms him from victim into villain.

This standard is preposterous, of course. The prison system has deleterious effects on all who go through it, innocent or otherwise. That’s the point the film is trying to drive home. The makers of Shot Caller are in the unenviable position of trying to get Calvinistic Americans to buy into a narrative of the long-term effects of incarceration on prisoners, which means they have to make the protagonist an atypical offender: clean-cut, handsome, and, most importantly, undeserving of his sentence. Sure, audiences will get the full story after they’ve purchased their ticket, but to actually get them to the theater, they have to think they’re about to see a story about an innocent man suffering. What does it say about our culture that our empathy towards others is largely contextual? Why is it that everything Jaime does from the moment he sets foot in prison either permissible or abhorrent depending upon the specific charge he was put in for? Do we really believe that a DUI is a bigger sin than becoming a member of Nazi crime ring? Where, exactly, has society drawn that invisible line between a victim of circumstance and a victim of self?