Based on the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, this film follows a family man and paper industry devotee laid off from his job. Applying to a dwindling number of positions suitable to his expertise, he decides to kill off the men who are his competition. The decline of paper is touched on in a few moments where the paper industry men send letters or post ads in print periodicals: “if we don’t use paper, who will!” they cheer, hands clenching an envelope. But in the film, the industry’s decline is felt more at the level of the reorganization of labour, the increasing mechanization and automation of the paper factories where a sole human strolls past massive machines and anachronistically and needlessly taps his wooden stick on the cylinder of white furled up at the end of the line.   

 Only at the very end of the film, just before the credits roll, are we treated to a glorious montage of logging equipment ripping up trees, shearing them, bucking them, and spinning them around over top of the daughter’s cello. At other times, trees are considered as potential instruments for killing, are fertilized by the bodies of would-be papermakers, or are tiny bonsais harboring even tinier versions of a son. The material of the world eats itself. That we don’t have to work to transform it into something useful and better anymore is portrayed as something of a problem. That choice is the lens given to the momentum of the narrative tracks with a reconceptualization of the limits capitalism places on our freedom (see Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts). Is it ironic or a saving grace that no one’s invented an effective machine for tree planting yet?  

-MS