When the bright sunshine of a new love fades to a dull grey of resentment, or is pierced by the hot red flash of infidelity, you are left with nothing more than a broken heart and the sense that you have wasted years of your life on someone who turned out not to be worth it. What do you do with the roiling feelings sloshing about inside you? Where do the anger, hurt and bitterness go? Your therapist might tell you to acknowledge those feelings, to sit with them and then let them go, and trust that time will take the sting out. But pop culture tells us over and over: screw that. Get even.
Revenge has been the subject of much cultural contemplation, usually taken to a satisfying extreme. Hamlet aside, in Promising Young Woman, Carey Mulligan metes out bloody justice on men she deems to be capable of abuse; the entire John Wick series is essentially about getting even with a baddie who killed Keanu Reeves’s dog. Country musicians in particular have taken to the subject with great zeal, from Carrie Underwood’s trashing of a man’s beloved car in the searing “Before He Cheats” to The Chicks’ “Tights On My Boat”, which opens with the lines, “I hope you die peacefully in your sleep/Just kidding, I hope it hurts like you hurt me,” inspired by singer Natalie Maine’s 2017 divorce. The Bible is also a hotbed of fiery vengeance, advocating for “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (although we do tend to gloss over the fact that this is in a fairly heavy section that also suggests death is the ideal punishment for many crimes, and that it follows some quite intense instructions about how to deal with your slaves).
