We are asked by this movie to believe in the reality of evil. There are good people and bad people and JC can see who is which. Disease and injury, as some sort of anti-life forces, are of the same kind as the evil in human beings like WIld Bill and Percy. And the substance of evil even becomes visible as a swarm of flies - or whatever those small black things are - when JC "takes it out".
We are so used to the idea that we human beings are the proper judges of other people, though the legal system and the court of public opinion, that it can be hard to accept this. Earlier, more religious societies thought than only God could look into men's hearts and judge them for who they are. In the movie JC has this ability, and so seeks to do good by removing evil. For him, it is not the human consequences of his actions, judged in our terms, that are important. Since we are incapable of perceiving evil directly, we are blind to the reality in which he lives. For the most part, we judge that actions removing evil are "good" in our terms too, but in the case of what happened to Percy, we are not so sure and start asking questions about whether he "deserved" it. I don't think JC would have seen it in those terms at all. Pushing the example to the limit, it would have been conceivable, although dramatically unacceptable, for Percy to have had the evil inside him without ever doing anything cruel or worthy of punishment, or at least being much less cruel than shown in the movie, and that JC would have treated him the same. [And this gap between what he can know and what we can know is the danger of a metaphysics of evil that is perceivable only by some special people - it can easily be abused, as the history of religious persecution shows us.] The treatment of WIld BIll also shows that JC was motivated only by the eradication of evil not by "punishment" as such. After all, WB is on death row. He is going to die soon by electrocution - hardly a lesser punishment than being shot by Percy. JC just couldn't stand the presence of evil, so much so that he welcomed his own death, not because he was tired of life (as Paul appears to be at the end of the movie) but because there was too much evil in the world for him to bear.
Despite our admiration for the "good men" of the story, their humanity and courage, and the burst of joy we feel at seeing an old mouse defying death, the underlying vision is very bleak. We live in a world in which evil is everywhere and we lack even JC's ability to see it clearly let alone remove it.
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