Death is a Terrible Thing

By Spencer Knight

When a murder happens in real life, a show or a move, I think the murderer believes he/she is “a man” for killing that person. It makes him/her feel big or in control. An example of a murder in a movie is the scene in The Longest Yard, where Caretaker (Chris Rock) is killed by an inmate named Unger. He was killed when Paul Crew’s (Adam Sander) radio blows up in his face from a bomb Unger put in it when he turned the knob on the radio to change the song. That murder shows the viewer that inmate Unger is a bad person. There are five reasons that made inmate Unger the person he was.

The first reason is inmate Unger’s hatred towards the cons, especially Paul Crew. In the essay from Rereading America, the author says that violence is one of the four main attitudes of masculinity. Throughout the whole movie, Unger showed violence towards everyone except for Warden Heisen and the guards. About ¾ through the movie he shows major violence when the guards tell him to kill Paul Crew, but instead he kills Caretaker. He does this by putting something inside Crew’s radio that made the radio blow up when a knob was turned or a button was touched or pushed. I think Caretaker shouldn’t have touched the radio in the first place, but he didn’t know it was dangerous. I think that he should have just gone back out of the cell after he put the picture in Crew’s cell which aggravated Crew. That tragic death to the cons never would have happened if Caretaker just left. Unger also stole secret football plays from the Mean Machine football team and took them to the guards.

The second reason Unger kills is because he thinks men must have anger and toughness. In Rereading America, there is another four attitudes of masculinity and it is aggression. He cared more for the guards then he did for the prisoners. Most of his anger came when he saw the anger in the guards because Crew and the other prisoners were making them mad because the Mean Machine kept getting better players than the players that were on the guards’ team. Unger thinks he got most of his toughness when he killed Caretaker. He attempted to kill Crew only because of his anger and hatred towards him from what he saw with the guards. Unger probably planned the meeting with the guards to kill Crew.

Another reason is the guard’s hatred and arrogance towards the cons, mostly to Crew. Their anger and hatred towards Crew and the other prisoners was the main reason that they met with Unger to come up with a plan to kill Crew, but they kill Caretaker instead. The warden wanted Crew to throw the tune up game for his second time in his football career. Warden Heisen said that if he didn’t throw the tune up game that he would pin the murder of Caretaker on him. That was because the warden hated Crew, just like how Unger and the guards hated him.

In conclusion, some men are represented as violent, angry, tough, and arrogant because that is what their father was like raising them and from seeing other people being like that. I don’t think a person that isn’t tough enough would kill/murder someone unless they were drove to kill someone or if someone said, I will pay you to kill so and so. People in the United States of America shouldn’t kill, because they are taking away an innocent life and that ruins the person’s family.