How Does Max Dembo Relate To Capitalism

Straight Time is a 1978 film starring Dustin Hoffman as Max Dembo, a former burglar who has been paroled from his sentence. After escaping from his parole officer, he returns to his life of crime. During a jewelry store robbery his partner get shot and killed by a police officer, after which Dembo decides to leave the city, Los Angeles, abandoning his new girlfriend.

The film stands as a criticism of the structure of American society, or more specifically capitalism. Dembo, a lifelong burglar who is paroled from prison fails to reintegrate back into society, and ultimately he meets tragic consequences when during a robbery his friend dies, he kills a different friend, and he abandons his girlfriend because he knew his life would not go well.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that he was later rearrested.

The criticism of capitalism lies in the highlighting of the structural biases of the American economic system.

Dembo, a burglar and petty thief since he was a young boy is excluded from American society. When he tries to reintegrate, he is arrested for a crime that he did not commit, but rather was committed by his friend. As such, the very friend that he has serves to hinder his efforts to reintegrate into American society, which serves the notion that regardless of what he does, by virtue of the friends that he has – and thus by virtue of who he is – Dembo can never reintegrate into American society. This is a flaw because Max Dembo is an American citizen, and in society being structured so that Dembo is unable to reintegrate into American society though he tries, is symptomatic of a society in which its citizens are not treated

equally.

Through Dembo’s being arrested for a crime that he did not commit, Straight Time also reveals the inadequacies of capitalism in the disingenuousness of its penal system. Dembo, who at the start of the film is released from a six-year prison sentence, will fail to reintegrate into society. And because of that, the prison sentence has failed in rehabilitating Dembo, the argument could be extended further into the notion that the prison system does not even care about rehabilitating Dembo, and expects Dembo, as a part of society’s underbelly to stay that way. When Dembo is rearrested for a crime that he did not commit, this serves as a parallel for the penal system’s disingenuousness, perhaps even an intentional metaphor for it. When Dembo, during his re-imprisonment encounters his parole officer relaxedly joking while Dembo has been wrongfully imprisoned, it is an example of the justice system’s not caring about justice for Dembo and people like Dembo.

A hallmark of capitalism is income inequality.

The nation as a whole may be more productive, and maybe even the poor people in a capitalist society are better off than a poor person in a socialist society, but the gap between a poor person and an average person will be greater in capitalist society than in socialist society. Max Dembo, as previously mentioned, is a representative of society’s underbelly, those in the United States who were given less and have less than other people in society. As such, his failures as human is as much his own failure as it is symbolic of the systematic failing of people such as Max Dembo. Dembo returns to his life of crime after he escapes from his parole officer, and for a while he is successful at it, but as is inevitable in such a high risk profession, Dembo ultimately meets tragic consequences, in the death of his

friend.

Dembo is a burglar as well as a killer. But perhaps Straight Time can stand to make the argument that had he been “one of the lucky ones” and not been born into circumstances of such little means he would not have been compelled to enter a life of crime. This line of reasoning makes its strongest argument at film’s end, when Dembo, out of a resigned realism, sends his girlfriend – who is one of the lucky ones – back to Los Angeles, knowing that failure was inevitable in his position. And as the film’s ending reveals he is recaptured, his dispassionate bid to escape his failed, and capitalism too, perhaps, has failed him.