Dead Man’s Wire

A film that captures the economic discontents and ideological confrontations of 1970s America, albeit in ways that elide some of the dynamics at play in the real events it is based upon.

Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) escorting his hostage Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) out of his business’s premises while police watch on, in Dead Man’s Wire (Vertigo Releasing).

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Violence; Mental illness; Racism.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Dead Man’s Wire is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

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In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) walks into the Indianapolis premises of the Meridian Mortgage Company for a meeting with with the wealthy mortgage broker M.L. Hall (Al Pacino). Tony holds a simmering grudge against the company, believing it to have deliberately undermined a retail development project on land he owned, in order to foreclose the potentially lucrative site. With M.L. away on holiday, his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) greets Tony, who brandishes a shotgun at him, which he wires to Richard’s neck using a ‘dead man’s switch’, meaning it will automatically fire on him in the event it is disturbed.

Tony escorts his hostage from the premises and forces him to drive them back to Tony’s apartment, while the police, including Tony’s acquaintance Detective Michael Grable (Cary Elwes), watch on helplessly. With ambitious television reporter Linda Page (Myha’la) and her cameraman John (John Robinson) already on the scene, the event quickly develops into a local media circus. An increasingly paranoid and agitated Tony keeps a subdued Richard prisoner in his apartment, obsessed both with the righteousness of his own cause as a representative of ordinary Americans, and with television coverage of his situation.

A local police team including Chief Eugene Gallagher (Todd Gable) and Sergeant Frank Love (Mark Helms), later joined by FBI Agent Agent Patrick Mullaney (Neil Mulac), try to secure Richard’s release. Tony demands a formal apology and financial compensation from Meridian, as well as immunity for prosecution, in return for letting his hostage go. Yet with M.L. Hall entirely recalcitrant and negotiations deadlocked, Tony takes the unconventional step of speaking on air instead to his favourite local radio DJ, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), who finds himself in the unexpected position of Tony’s trusted mediator with the authorities. While a public debate rages about the justness or not of Tony’s cause and actions, tension builds over whether the situation can be resolved without Richard being seriously harmed.

Capitalism and the crises of the 1970s

Based on real events, Dead Man’s Wire evokes an America – at the outset of Jimmy Carter’s sole presidential term – between economic crises. The recession of the mid-1970s, in the wake of the oil shock and collapse of the Bretton Woods system, had ended, but unemployment and inflation remained stubbornly high. Interest rates had spiked earlier in the decade and were about to begin another upward climb, even prior to the ‘Volcker Shock’ of 1979. It was also an era in which inequality, previously long-falling, began to grow modestly, and in which the balance in employment shifted from blue to white-collar work. The longstanding global strength of US corporations began to erode in the face of foreign competition, and the financial sector underwent fluctuations that both imperilled its existing institutions and facilitated new forms of activity. It was an environment ripe for resentment and antagonism, in which if the existing order felt unjust, it also appeared fluid and malleable.¹

Meridian Mortgage Company is an apt avatar for this manifestation of American capitalism. Its city centre headquarters possess the grandeur to entrance and intimidate Tony. It embodies a financial services system that remained relatively localised (prior to the advent of interstate banking) and in this instance familial in its ownership, yet this dynastic structure nonetheless marks the divide between haves and have-nots. M.L. himself is pompous and entitled, and sees that same divide in moral terms, as reward for his endeavour and acumen, his creation of wealth that that others rely on, his reproduction economically of a business activity and biologically of a breed of person. Richard, by contrast, is less ostentatious and more conciliatory, aware of his privilege, uncomfortable with his father’s high-handedness, content with a quiet domestic life with wife Mabel (Kelly Lynch). He seems to hold out the promise of a less conflictual mode of class relations, yet also of a lifestyle beyond Tony’s reach.

The ‘dead man’s wire’ Tony assembles is a crudely metaphorical reversal of this state of affairs, a system rigged against Richard, just as the financial system he and his father profit from is rigged against Tony. In violently taking Richard hostage, he reveals financial and legal intricacies as fictions disguising a naked balance of power and transactional set of relations. By temporarily tilting that balance in his favour, Tony gets to tell Meridian what he is owed monetarily, to compel the company to change its historical narrative to match his. He gets to threaten the execution of Richard Hall, and insist upon his own innocence in the eyes of the law. All this is plays out in a mediated court of public opinion, in which Tony and his peers shape the narrative of what is right or wrong, in dialogue with radio hosts and TV news anchors who likewise try to place their finger on the popular pulse…although this too disguises another set of power relations, this one tilted towards broadcasting executives.

Tony Kiritsis and the populist tradition

Tony actively invokes an American populist tradition in Dead Man’s Wire. ‘I’m a man of the people, I know the people!’ he insists, asserting his capacity to connect with and speak for simple, ordinary Americans in their purest form. He articulates his grievance not in terms of transforming his or the broader economic situation, but as rectifying a moral injury: ‘I’m not a rich man, I’m a poor man, and that never bothered me,’ he avers. His intellectual lineage is laid out in books scattered across his kitchen table, with titles like Urban Poor, Rural Forgotten, and Silent Coup: How Deep Throat Brought Down a President.² His foiled real estate ambitions, in a Midwestern city experiencing the first pangs of deindustrialisation, speak to older ideas of citizenship in an expanding America, bound up with self-employment, property, and land. In contrast to M.L.’s dynasticism and Richard’s domesticism, Tony’s committed bachelorhood is an assertion of his masculine personal and economic autonomy.

In his famous 1964 article for Harper’s Magazine, historian Richard Hofstadter described this type of worldview as a ‘paranoid style’ of thought that spanned both American political history and the ideological spectrum:

In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Yet the question with Tony Kiritsis (both the character, and the real human he was based upon) is indeed whether he is clinically insane. The very desperation of his decision to take Richard hostage, and his subsequent flights between rage and friendliness and between coercion and hospitality, his consistently kinetic presence, render him beguiling and unnerving. Richard’s availability as a potential alternative point of identification likewise troubles the connection between protagonist and audience. We question the reliability of Tony’s account of his mistreatment, of his motivations, of his intentions.

This leads to a further, related question, about the justifiability or not of political violence, if that is indeed what this kidnapping consists of. It is one that resonates in the present, as with the subsequent iconising of Louis Mangione in some quarters after his alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in 2024. In Dead Man’s Wire, Tony aspires to a folkloric hero status: it is how he explains his actions in his own interjections into the media debate about the hostage-taking, and it is how it is framed in much of the popular commentary it provokes. And yet as the film also makes clear from both the excited, stylised manner in which Tony wields firearms, and from his television-watching habits, he too is playing a part based on mediatised images of such heroes. Ultimately, the persistent frustration of Tony’s desire to be acknowledged as a wronged man and as a champion of the people is a comment on this state of postmodernity, in which the promise of unmediated and authentic communication repeatedly proves illusory.

Ethnicity, race, and the colour of revolution

Upon learning prior to going to see Dead Man’s Wire that the film was based upon an actual incident, a kidnapping perpetrated by someone called Tony Kiritsis, I realised that this man must have been a Greek-American; you do not get a surname like that by sending off vouchers cut out from the backs of packets of feta. A search online revealed the real Tony to look like what might be stereotyped as a fairly recognisable genre of Greek man: short, stocky, tanned.³ Now, whereas Dacre Montgomery in the film looks like a rather yassified version of the real Richard Hall, Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård, who puts in a hugely arresting performance as Tony, is nonetheless physically a polar opposite of the man he played: tall, angular, fair-skinned.

John H. Blair’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1977 photograph of Tony Kiritsis holding a shotgun to Richard Hall’s head (UPI).

I returned from watching the film puzzling over this choice. The real Tony Kiritsis was born in Indianapolis to Greek immigrants, raised in the Greek Orthodox faith, with Greek as his first language; he had worked for his father’s ice cream and trailer park businesses prior to his own real estate development venture. Why was all that, beyond his name, completely eschewed from his portrayal in Dead Man’s Wire?

And the obvious reason for de-ethnicising him in this way is because the mantle he claims in the film is the populist one of an authentic, heartland America, whether that be the rural south and west of the country that was the bastion of Populist Party support in the late nineteenth century, or the Midwest’s deindustrialising ‘Rust Belt’ in the late twentieth. This tradition is is heavily white-coded, even explicitly nativist, in the popular imagination: a vision of a pure folk set against parasitical, external or geographically unrooted forces, encapsulated by M.L. Hall (played, of course, by an Italian-American actor) vacationing in Florida when Tony arrives to settle his grudge. Dead Man’s Wire far from straightforwardly embraces this tradition, but it does broadly accept this framing in de-hyphenating its antihero.

However, the film also codes revolution and its aesthetic as Black. Fred Heckman, the local radio newsman who fielded Tony Kiritsis’s calls, becomes Fred Temple in Dead Man’s Wire: a Black DJ who plays jazz, funk, and soul, interspersed with his own stream-of-consciousness monologues. Tony dances awkwardly but unabashedly in his apartment to the music Fred plays, comically drawing attention to his whiteness and signalling his adjacency to Black radical chic, which provides an avenue of cultural expression for and mode of periodising his personal rebellion.⁴ He sees Fred as his ideal interlocutor, as an equivalent ‘man of the people’; their relationship in the film evokes the longstanding trope of a Black male character as discerning, therapeutic presence in the life of a troubled white one.⁵ Dead Man’s Wire knowingly stylises and metonymizes race in telling its story of inequality, violence, and the contested pursuit of justice, but in doing so detaches them as meaningful component of that history.

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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:

1. See Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. Volume 3: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) for an overview of these various trends.

2. I spent far too much time poring over Archive.org, WorldCat.org, and the British Library catalogue trying to find out more about the books on Tony’s table, and I am not sure they are actually real books at all for the most part. The closest approximation to Silent Coup: How Deep Throat Brought Down a President I could find, for example, was Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, first published in 1991.

3. Takes one to know one.

4. It put me rather in mind of contemporary white punk and post-punk artists’ borrowing from Black musical forms and their radical potentials for their own ends, as discussed by Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert in their ongoing miniseries on post-punk for their Love is the Message podcast.

5. See, for example, Heather J. Hicks, ‘Hoodoo Economics: White Men’s Work and Black Men’s Magic in Contemporary American Film’, Camera Obscura, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2003), pp. 27–55.