After watching Denzel Washington’s Equalizer films, I went back to the source material—the 1980s television series that first introduced Robert McCall. 

Comparing cinema and television across four decades is never an even contest. The mediums differ; so do the political moods that shape them. Still, one absence in the films is too consequential to ignore.

Washington’s McCall is the familiar figure of contemporary action cinema: the retired CIA operative who cannot escape his past. He uses leftover intelligence contacts, tactical expertise, and surveillance know-how to resolve small-scale injustices in America’s urban margins. 

This genre reliably performs one task—it humanizes the machinery of the state. Violence becomes redemptive; intelligence work, however murky, is reframed as a moral resource waiting to be redeployed for good.

The original Equalizer series did something similar—but not quite the same. 

Its McCall, played by Edward Woodward, was less a reluctant savior and more a self-conscious service provider. He advertised openly in newspapers: “Got a problem? Odds against you? Call the Equalizer.” That line was the thesis.

In the 1980s, as neoliberalism accelerated the privatization of public life, American television filled the vacuum with freelancers for justice. 

You didn’t rely on institutions; you hired The A-Team. You didn’t call the state; you called the Ghostbusters. The Equalizer offered a similar fantasy: social justice, outsourced. 

McCall often refused payment, treating his work as penance for past sins in intelligence—but the structure remained unmistakably market-oriented. Justice was a service.

The films discard this premise. Washington’s McCall intervenes episodically, pulled into private crises by coincidence or proximity. What disappears is the unsettling question embedded in the original advertisement: Odds are against you?

Chilling similarities 

For most people today, the answer is obvious—and grim. 

Under late capitalism, ordinary people—those who sell their labor to survive—live within tightly rationed time. Our working hours are labeled “socially necessary labor.” What remains is “reproduction time”---the narrow window meant for rest and preparation for the next workday.

But even that time is no longer ours. The consumer economy has colonized it. Leisure has been monetized, attention strip-mined. We scroll compulsively, binge mindlessly, shop impulsively because exhaustion makes us predictable.

The original Equalizer understood this imbalance. The question it posed was not whether help would arrive, but who could afford to ask for it. That question, more than any action sequence, is what the modern films leave behind—and what makes the old series feel uncomfortably relevant today.

In this economy of exhaustion, ordinary people are left with almost no time to think seriously about politics or how society actually functions. Whatever civic engagement remains must be squeezed into the narrow margins of “recovery time”—the hours meant for rest. 

Politics becomes a hobby pursued after dinner, not a collective project embedded in daily life.

This distortion is even more acute in Bangladesh. There, much of what passes for civic responsibility or “good sense” comes from scattered, self-funded volunteerism—people, as the saying goes, chasing wild buffaloes while feeding themselves. 

It is public work performed at private cost, without institutional backing or material support.

And yet the forces aligned against such efforts are anything but scattered. 

They include global capital eager to absorb a fast-growing market; a neo-imperial India that often treats Bangladesh less as a neighbor than as a disposable hinterland; a domestic deep state still fantasizing about restoring the looted certainties of the Awami era; an interim government that has effectively licensed chaos; and well-funded right-wing networks, plugged into global religious movements, capable of mobilizing hundreds of people—with logistics—within hours. 

These actors possess structure, money, research capacity, and a working knowledge of culture warfare.

Against that machinery, what do ordinary citizens have? Mostly words—produced late at night on personal laptops, during slivers of time stolen back from fatigue. 

It is political expression reduced to virtuous chatter, the sound a colonized life makes when it speaks without institutional shelter.

No level-playing field 

Is this a fair contest? The question answers itself. The odds are not just uneven; they are engineered that way.

Under such conditions, despair is a rational response. Watching endless “monkey business” unfold on your newsfeed during the few hours meant for rest can feel psychologically corrosive. 

You are trying to process terabytes of political trauma with the mental equivalent of an obsolete data cable. Something is bound to overheat.

This, ultimately, is the context of the quiet depression many of us feel about Bangladesh today. I share it as an explanation—for myself and for friends navigating the same fatigue. If nothing else, naming the structure of the problem may make it easier for us to speak to one another honestly, without mistaking exhaustion for defeat.

So the inevitable question follows: What, then, is the way out?

The answer returns us to where this discussion began—with The Equalizer. Bangladesh does not need lone heroes improvising justice in their spare time. It needs an organized, funded political force capable of narrowing the vast imbalance between working people and what might be called the career politician–hooligan complex of late capitalism.

Such an entity would equip citizens with a shared political language—one that allows people, even within limited free time, to articulate demands, deliberate collectively, and move from scattered frustration to coordinated action. 

Its purpose would be to build consensus across social groups, translate that consensus into mass political engagement, and ultimately challenge the economic and political arrangements that keep most people permanently exhausted and politically marginal.

This is how the “realm of freedom,” in Marx’s sense, is expanded—by organization that converts spare time into political capacity rather than burnout.

Yet no such equalizing force exists in Bangladesh today. Instead, the political landscape is dominated by two equally disabling tendencies. 

One is the party of chaos—performative outrage, street theatrics, and what passes for politics as “monkey business.” The other is the party of detachment, a cultivated indifference that shrugs and says, not my circus, not my monkeys, even as institutions decay in plain sight.

Between spectacle and withdrawal, responsibility has become an orphan. No organized actor is stepping forward to do the unglamorous work of building a functional, livable society. 

In the absence of structure, individuals attempt to compensate on their own—writing, arguing, sloganeering, organizing informally—until exhaustion sets in.

That exhaustion is the predictable outcome of asking unorganized citizens to confront heavily organized power. Without an equalizer, the struggle does not ennoble—it merely wears people down.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst