Poetic Justice - Examples in Television and Film

Examples in Television and Film

• The Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons feature repeated instances of poetic justice, as Wile E. Coyote always sets traps for Road Runner, only to end up in the traps themselves.
• Poetic justice is referred to in The Simpsons episode "Boy Scoutz N the Hood." When Bart returns home from a Junior Campers meeting Homer asks "How was jerk practice, boy? Did they teach you how to sing to trees and build crappy furniture out of useless wooden logs?" The chair that Homer is sitting on then breaks and he declares "D'oh! Stupid poetic justice."
• In the film Batman Returns, The Penguin informs his traitorous cohort Max Shreck, that he will be killed in a pool of the toxic byproducts from his "clean" textile plant. The Penguin goes on to wonder if this is tragic irony or poetic justice.
• Disney films, most specifically animated films, often use poetic justice as an ending device (examples include The Lion King, Aladdin, and The Great Mouse Detective, among many others), with the hero being rewarded, and the villain being punished in ironic and, occasionally, fatal ways.
• In the film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, as well as in the short story and the musical, the titular character, Sweeney Todd, kills his customers with a razor blade. In a twist of the story, at the end, having assassinated the Judge and the Beadle, Todd is killed by Toby, a boy he kept with Mrs. Lovett, with his own razor blade, while Mrs. Lovett, who bakes the dead customers into meat pies, is thrown into her own oven to bake to death by Todd.
• In the film Back to the Future 2, when Marty McFly is on the roof top of Biff's Casino & Hotel, Biff issues a nod to poetic justice before admitting to killing Marty's father, George Mcfly, with the same gun he intends to kill Marty with.
• Some caper films end with poetic justice, when a criminal gang's takings of a well planned heist are lost in a manner that is usually not quite their own fault, in complete opposition to the perfect execution of the crime itself. A striking example are the last minutes of Mélodie en sous-sol or the original versions of Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job.
• In the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, several characters find poetic justice. This is most noticeable in the episode "The Southern Raiders", in which a Fire Nation soldier who killed Katara and Sokka's mother lives with his own mother in retirement, who is angry and constantly berating and talking down to him. The man killed Katara's mother, believing she was the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe, when she really lied to protect Katara.
• In the film Cruel Intentions, Kathryn, who has been holding up an image of purity, innocence, and popularity while actually being manipulative, deceitful, and two-faced, is exposed at the end of the film due to the diary of her stepbrother Sebastian, who had just recently died.
• In the film The Killing, after a very carefully planned, and at first successful robbery, a series of unexpected side events (an unfaithful and greedy wife, a too weak suitcase...) ends up with most of the gang killed, the money scattered by the wind at the airport, causing the mastermind to be arrested just when he was about to flee the country.
• In The X-Files episode "Darkness Falls," Mulder theorizes that a group of missing loggers are victims of attacks by extinct insects released from dormancy when the loggers cut down a 700 year-old tree. An environmental activist named Doug Spinney, who previously exposed the cut-down tree as one deliberately marked to be protected, then remarks, "That would be rather poetic justice, don't you think? Unleashing the very thing that would end up killing them?"
• In a scene in The Birdcage, it is revealed that a senator who co-founded a morality-obsessed coalition has been found dead with an underage prostitute.